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I woke up this morning and did what I have been doing for the last years, I checked my phone. After looking at how good I am performing on Clash of Clans, yes that game is terrific, I checked my Facebook’s newsfeed and something wasn’t working properly, so I moved to the desktop version and I noticed that I suddenly was following every single group I was in. Although the notifications were off, dozens of messages from random groups were populating my feed.
After a few hours the newsfeed went off, it was not showing the first four elements and struggling to load the others. What I started doing, before realising that it was a world wide problem and I wasn’t the only one, was unfollowing some groups and leaving most of them. It took me 20 minutes before cleaning the amount of data that I have accumulated in the last six years.
Although Facebook’s newsfeed malfunctions should be breaking news, since it’s affecting billions of people at the same time, that’s not the point. As soon as I saw my newsfeed full of crap, I start deleting it, because I felt offended and embarrassed. It seemed someone had got into my house without letting me know. By keeping in mind that this is a “smart home” that knows what to show and not, it didn’t make sense at first and even though, I knew it was a technical problem, my instinct was to get rid of the people I didn’t invite to my house.
Facebook has completely changed the way we live. It has become part of our lives, from the moment we wake up to when we go to bed. Why? Because it keeps us connected to the people we wouldn’t be able to reach. I think the reason is similar to what Google is today. We are not even able to think an internet without Google, which sometimes is often referred as the “internet”, how can we imagine the internet without Facebook?
The truth is that Facebook and Google share something that no other service on the internet, including Twitter or Snapchat, have. Their usage has reached so many people that words such as “type Great Preneurs on the Internet” and “send me a message” already refer to a service. There is no need to say “make a search through Google” or “send me a message over Facebook”, because we already imply them.
From an anthropological and urban dictionary level, this is simply remarkable. When we question the future of Facebook or Google, we should always wonder if people could adapt to a world without them, before analysing any fallacies in their business model or in advertising. Although something might not work out in the future, they have already conquered the minds of billions of people and they are trying to reach those who don’t have internet access.
A world without checking notifications in the morning doesn’t and won’t exist in the next thirty or forty years. The only things that are going to change are the ways to read those notifications, it could be a smart glass, a smart wall or even our own kitchen table. Notifications are expanding their roots in our smart phone experience and that’s why those who have the best notification system are the ones who lead the market.
We are just in 2014 and we already can’t imagine a world without Facebook, Google, Notifications and a smart phone. What are we going to add to the list in 2024? No one knows, but there is already someone who’s building it.
