The Fall of Facebook

Facebook has won this round of the Internet.

Steadily, grindingly, it continues to take an ever greater share of our time and attention online. More than 800 million people use the site on an average day. Individuals are dependent on it to keep up not just with their friends but with their families. When a research company looked at how people use their phones, it found that they spend more time on Facebook than they do browsing the entire rest of the Web.

Digital-media companies have grown reliant on Facebook's powerful distribution capabilities. They are piglets at the sow, squealing amongst their siblings for sustenance, by which I mean readers.

Think about how this weakens the basic idea of a publication. The media bundles known as magazines and newspapers were built around letting advertisers reach an audience. But now virtually all of the audiences are in the same place, and media entities and advertisers alike know how to target them: they go to Facebook, select some options from a drop-down menu-18-to-24-year-old men in Maryland who are college-football fans-and their ads materialize in the feeds of that demographic.

A decade after Facebook emerged from the Ivy League dorms in which it started, it is the most powerful information gatekeeper the world has ever known. It is only slightly hyperbolic to say that Facebook is like all the broadcast-television networks put together. But instead of programming executives choosing what Americans see, programmers are. And while, once upon a time, everyone with a TV and an antenna could see 'what was on,' Facebook news feeds are personalized, so no one outside the company actually knows what anyone else is seeing. This opacity would have been impossible to imagine in previous eras.

It is true that a slightly older technology company, Google, also plays a major role in what Americans read on the Internet. Google is an information utility, designed to get people to what they want to know. And when Google was the dominant distribution force on the Web, that fact was reflected in the kinds of content media companies produced-fact-filled, keyword-stuffed posts that Google's software seemed to prefer.

Facebook is different, though. It measures what is 'engaging'-what you (and people you resemble, according to its databases) like, comment on, and share. Then it shows you more things related to that. Like a joke about pizza? You'll get an article about do-it-yourself brick ovens-and a Domino's ad. Facebook is constantly showing you more of what it thinks you want to see and click on and read.

This has been the company's greatest strength. Facebook has built a self-perpetuating optimization machine. It's as if every time you turned on the TV, your cable box ranked every episode of every show just for you. Or when you went to a bar, only the people you'd been hanging out with regularly showed up.

Adding to the sense of Facebook's inexorability, any time another company seems to threaten its position in a key domain, Facebook simply buys the business. Take Instagram, which offered a mobile-optimized photo-sharing experience Facebook couldn't match. So Facebook bought it, for $715 million. Then it scooped up WhatsApp, which had garnered hundreds of millions of users with a simple, solid messaging application. That cost Facebook $21.8 billion.

It's all enough to make you wonder whether Facebook, unlike AOL or MySpace, really might be forever-or at least as forever as anything American capitalism is capable of producing.

And yet, significantly, people haven't let go of their unease about Facebook's core idea. 'In three years of research and talking to hundreds of people and everyday users, I don't think I heard anyone say once, 'I love Facebook,' ' says Clive Thompson, the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Like a New Urbanist dream neighborhood where every lamppost and shrub seems unnervingly designed to please you, there's a soullessness about the place. The software's primary attributes-its omniscience, its solicitousness-all too easily provoke claustrophobia.

Given the collective unease with Facebook, could the Internet population launch a sort of immune response against the network? Understanding the threat represented by centralizing all of your online identity in one place doesn't require sophisticated analysis or ethical contemplation. It's simple stuff: What if Facebook changes something? What if the privacy settings shift (again)? What if you get locked out of your account?

And so, naturally enough, users are spreading themselves around, maintaining Facebook as their social spine, but investing in and loving a wide variety of other social apps. None of them seems likely to supplant Facebook on its own, but taken together, they form a pretty decent network of networks, a dispersed alternative to Facebook life.

This is not a niche phenomenon. Snapchat has more than 100 million monthly users. Line boasts that more than half a billion people message their friends through its service. Pinterest has about 60 million monthly users. Vine has more than 40 million registered users. The list goes on and on.