Facebook is so last year - welcome to the hit websites of 2008
Virtual pets, video diaries and travellers' logs could be the next stars of cyberspace — For many in the dotcom world, 2007 was dominated by one story: the rise of Facebook. The success of the social networking service …
Context & Ripple Effects
By late December 2007, Facebook's dominance of the dotcom conversation was the accepted frame: a June piece asked whether the company had underestimated its own platform's success, and an October New York Times op-ed on the 'Fakebook Generation' sharpened the cultural backlash against performing your life online.
The Guardian's year-ahead piece pushes against that single-story framing, predicting — though this remains an unconfirmed editorial bet, not settled fact — that virtual pets, video diaries and travellers' logs will be 2008's hit formats. Its case leans on confirmed friction at Facebook itself: members objecting to their personal information being shared freely, enterprises fearing exposure through groups outside corporate firewalls, and even enforcement of the 5,000-friend cap.
First-order effects
- Facebook enters 2008 managing user trust rather than just growth: the December objection to free sharing of member information forces product and communications attention onto privacy controls.
- Enterprises weighing employee use of Facebook groups now have a documented governance concern, pushing corporate policy decisions about social networks onto 2008 agendas.
Second-order effects
- If niche formats like video diaries and travellers' logs draw the same leisure hours, rival social sites compete on activity depth rather than network size, pressuring MySpace-style broad profiles to add richer media features.
- Criticism of the 'stalker factor' gives smaller, purpose-built sites a differentiation pitch against the big networks' broadcast-yourself model.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward social networking fragmenting from one dominant profile graph into specialised formats, each owning a distinct behaviour rather than competing for the same generic friend list.
- Sustained enterprise unease about data leaking outside firewalls sets up a longer-term split between consumer social networks and sanctioned workplace tools.
The trend: Social networking in 2008 is shifting from a single dominant profile network toward specialised activity-based formats, with privacy friction accelerating the search for alternatives.