Facebook Down – LinkedIn Up!

This week, Buzz Networker posted an article on Facebook’s traffic going (by 10%) down and LinkedIn’s going up (by 400%!).  Several years ago I wrote an article on a website regarding Facebook’s changes.  It was so epic, one of the founders of CollegeHumor.com even responded.  I have since forgotten what, exactly, it was I said… but it went something like this – there is a fine line between “enough” and “too much,” regarding changes in websites and businesses.  When I posted the article, Facebook was introducing feature after feature – it was incredibly overwhelming!  However, people took the bait!

It’s only sad to see Facebook’s minor decline is possibly due to the fact that they set themselves up for failure.  How did they do this?  Well, let’s think about it…

Over the past several years, people have seen and expected changes and features being added.  Suddenly, when ideas run dry, people lose interest.  I think when people started installing applications on their pages, everything began shifting downhill.  The site now relies on the creativity of the users – and when you put every programmer in a room and tell them to organize something… what do you get?   You get 12 different font styles, comments in 20 different languages, messy scripting, neat scripting, and an incredibly high air conditioning bill – yeah, you know you were thinking the same thing.

Peoples’ profiles are chaos.  You can’t pull any relevant piece of information off of anyone’s profile because it is often so cluttered with crap that the information you were looking for ends up being segmented twelve times throughout the page.

I could continue, but I just want to say move out Facebook, LinkedIn is packing more heat.