When May 31 rolls around, I’ll do what I do on the last day of every other month: Pay my rent and some other bills, go to work and come home. What I won’t be doing is quitting Facebook, despite the best efforts of some to turn the day into a mass rejection of the social network.
Since Facebook rolled out yet another round of changes to its privacy settings earlier this year, the platform has been the subject of fierce criticism from an especially noisy core of early tech adopters. They’ve been hammering at Facebook’s arrogance on their blogs and in interviews and some internet celebrities, like Google’s Matt Cutts and Engadget founder Peter Rojas, have left the platform altogether. Quitting has become a sort of meme in and of itself, aided by the same buzz factor that has made Facebook a global hit in the first place.
It was good PR on the part of Facebook’s antagonists to mark the calendar, but, for all the attention May 31 has received, I’m pretty certain the day will come and go without much impact to a company that, with more than 400 million users, has become one of the most important websites in the world. All anecdotal research tells me that Facebook simply has too much scale and too much utility to be turned into some digital ghost town overnight. Sometime in the past year or two, it suddenly started to feel as though everyone was there — or at least enough people from all the major stages of one’s life — were using the network, ensuring its use as a a souped-up, constantly updating personal directory, if nothing else.
This weekend, a fifty-something aunt of mine who created a Facebook account this year told me a story of connecting with a close friend she lost contact with eight years ago. The talk with my aunt, who is unapologetic about using it — heavily — despite her age, was one of four conversations over the weekend about Facebook. Not one had anything to do with privacy or with quitting.
It’s a different situation when you talk to people who are heavily invested in social media. More than 12,000 people responded to a poll on the site Mashable, basically an enthusiast site for social media. 28% said they plan to quit, while 44% are staying. These people, of course, are more plugged into things like online privacy issues and it’s likely quitting will be a considered move. For some, the decision will impact their personal image and their business. But beyond that crowd, big pockets of Facebook resistance are hard to find. I stumbled across a similar poll on a fan site for Green Day that summed up the reaction to singer Billie Joe Armstrong’s Tweet that dared people to quit the social network. I would have guessed that the folks who hang out on Green Day Authority would be highly likely to follow the lead of Billie Joe, but, alas, only 41% of the respondents said they had deactivated their accounts.
Cultural sensibilities will of course play a role in this. Americans may be joiners at heart, but, I’m pretty sure, Canadians will quit in droves. Some of the sharpest and most effective actions against Facebook have come from our neighbors to the north. In 2009, Ottawa became the first government to put pressure on Facebook to adhere to its national privacy laws. In current affairs, the organizers of Quit Facebook Day are a pair of Toronto-based developers. And an online poll by the Globe and Mail, which presumably is mainly answered by Canadians, indicated strong resistance. Answering the question of whether they planned to quit, 9% said yes, 28% they were thinking about it. Only 9% said they were staying, while 45% said they weren’t members. Despite the media attention Quit Facebook Day has received, only 2,720 have committed to the cause as of this morning.
With those kinds of numbers, it’s unlikely we’ll see much of a dent in Facebook’s numbers. Not only is the backlash not large enough, but there is still no real alternative to Facebook for folks who have become used to having their personal social web sprawling before them just a few keystrokes away. Look at the example of MySpace. One of the key factors in its decline, alongside disastrously messy page layouts, spam and other usability issues, was the existence of a replacement to suck up all its users’ time: Facebook. Right now, Facebook doesn’t have the challenge of a real competitor–or successor. Twitter might have been a good bet, but it’s turned out to be complementary, not competitive. It’s telling that the best hope for a more friendly uber-network at this point is an open-source and “privacy aware” project by a quartet of NYU students with more than $170,000 in grassroots funding from whom the Facebook-hating world has yet to see a line of code.
