by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Facebook (Meta) has a problem. In fact, it has a specific problem, one you might call the Blockbuster Conundrum. How do you innovate when you have a vested interest in pretty much keeping things exactly the way they are? With Blockbuster, they struggled to the advent of streaming. Meanwhile, Facebook (Meta) is having a real problem with how the audience they want — tweeners — have moved on to various other networks including Tik-Tok.
So, in a panic, Meta is scrambling to turn not just Instagram into a Tik-Tok copycat, but Facebook itself. This is potentially a recipe for disaster. We’re talking potentially a MySpace death spiral.
All of this leads to the idea of what might come next?
Well, given how much money Facebook has, I think it’s safe to say that whatever happens, Meta can just buy itself out of the situation eventually. That’s why they’re trying to be cool and call themselves “Meta.” But there is a real risk that the gap between the MySpace-like death of Facebook and the real birth of the metaverse might be so long that we live in a “post Facebook” era for a little while.
What that look like?
Well, in a sense, we’re already in that era because only the Olds still use Facebook and that’s because of a combination of entropy and the fact that Facebook serves the same social purpose as the phone book to Olds.
So, in a sense, while Facebook is very unhappy about losing all that sweet, sweet tweener eyeball traffic and disposable money, they’re doing just fine and will probably continue to do so.
