Poke A Fork In It, 'Cause It Is Done

That's it, I'm officially on the "Facebook is screwed" bandwagon.  People have been talking about it for a while, asserting it's only a matter of time before it's going to take its place with Friendster and MySpace.  I haven't really taken much notice of their talk, since it sounded like the usual clamouring to be the first to predict the downfall of X, where 'X' is pretty much anything that's been successful. 

But now I think there's something to it.  Why?  I got a cell phone.  As many have pointed out, Facebook has a problem with mobile computing.  By the company's own admission in their IPO filing, they don't get any income from their mobile clients, since there's no advertising or games on their mobile app.  Everything they make comes from people using full computers.  There's plenty of those people, so they're making money, it's just a weird business model if you think about it.  It would be like a fast food place that charged people in the restaurant, but gave food away for free at the drive-through.

But now I've discovered another Facebook weakness on mobile: you can play all the games outside of Facebook.  Yes, you can just download apps of many of the games and play them against your friends, without logging in to Facebook itself. 

If you've been on Facebook since it first went mainstream, you'll remember that the apps used to be a wide variety of fun and original things.  But through Facebook's many redesigns and re-imaginings, the apps have been diluted down to mainly games, and those are dominated by Zynga's formula of calculatingly addictive time wasters, which help Facebook make money selling credits, not to mention the ads shown to people who keep coming back to play.

But now I've downloaded SongPop, and I'm playing against friends without logging in to Facebook.  I'm going to do the same with Scrabble, even though it insists on my joining Electronic Arts' new network called Origin.  But that just shows how easily someone else can step in and take over social gaming.

(Yes, Stargate SG-1 fans, there is a great "accepting Origin" joke to be made here, but I can't find a way to make it without confusing everyone else.  Giggle amongst yourselves.)

So that's it, we don't need Facebook for gaming, we can put humourous and inspirational pictures on Pinterest, post statuses on Twitter, and discuss things with your friends in, I don't know, real life.  Facebook stock will just keep going down, and the only people who will have made any money out of it will be the folks who made The Social Network.