As Reuters reported last week, a new comScore survey found that the number Facebook users in the U.S. recently declined:
Last month, Facebook attracted 158.01 million unique visitors in the United States, edging lower from 158.69 million in April and 158.93 million in March, comScore said.
Justin Wolfers jokingly suggested that we’ve reached “Peak Facebook,” a monumental event not unlike Peak Oil. To be sure, Facebook’s user growth might increase at some point in the future, particularly if it succeeds in gaining access to America’s under-13-year-olds. But one does get the impression that Facebook has reached a saturation point.
This news reminded me of Nat Torkington’s brilliant observation about “social graph gluttony,” which I can no longer find. (If you do find it, please let me know and I’ll post it post-haste.) Post-agricultural surplus, our hunter-gatherer nature has been at odds with the fact of abundance — certainly in the most affluent societies, where obesity has become a graver threat than hunger.
Similarly, as Robin Dunbar famously observed, we’ve long faced constraints on the size of our real-life social networks. His famous “Dunbar number” represented an upper bound on the number of robust relationships we could maintain at any given time. But tools like Facebook lower the costs of maintaining a larger social network. So just as we gorge ourselves on fatty foods, largely absent on the savannahs roamed by our hunter-gatherer ancestors, we moderns are gorging ourselves on these ever-larger networks of “friends.”
Now, however, early adopters may have moved on from gorging of this kind. To figure that out, of course, we’d have to know if it is primarily early adopters who’ve been abandoning Facebook.
To offer underinformed speculation, one wonders if Facebook faces the same dynamic as Craigslist: users might be turning to more specialized services that do a better job at narrower social media functions, hence Mark Zuckerberg’s unilateral decision to purchase Instagram, a start-up that may well have proven a formidable threat to one of the core functions of Facebook that accounts for so much of it’s stickiness, i.e., obsessively clicking through the photographs of friends and acquaintances. Twitter, of course, has a flourished as a vehicle for status updates, and indeed it has enabled the rise of the gourmet food truck business model, among many other things.