Facebook, blogs and an audit trail

I saw the other day that there are 35m people in the UK with a Facebook account. A more interesting statistic, which was conspicuously missing from the article, would be the number of these accounts owned by people who have died in the last year? I appreciate that Facebook accounts tend to be concentrated in the young and dying in the old but I would estimate that the number of such accounts will be increasing by between 100,000 and 200,000 every year. I must be very distressing for the parents of a deceased teenager or the husband or wife of somebody who dies in their 20s or 30s to be unable to access the account should they want or need to in the event of a sudden death.

There is also a problem that long-term users of Facebook are just starting to discover. Many people have aspects of their life that they were happy to share with the world when they were young but that they very much would not want to share with their children or second wife. It is usually possible to delete material directly under your control but it can be a very different and very difficult situation when you have posted to another person’s account. Anybody who uses an on-line resource like Facebook or Live Journal as an electronic diary is running the risk of comments or thoughts they wrote 5 or 10 years previously coming back to bite them.

Just this week I was reading a blog that E+E have discovered. The author is a university student who had a very difficult time as a foster child. I think the young lady has revealed far too much about her past but more worrying is the very serious allegations she has made about some named and some easily identified third-parties. If you are going to describe the house, identify the small town and reveal the first names and the jobs of alleged abusive foster parents you are leaving yourself in a very vulnerable position.

You read it here first!

In the last few months I have noticed a steady decrease in the number of my Facebook friends who post regularly to the site: with a regular poster defined as one who posts at least once a week or four times within any 30 day period. There has also been a sharp increase in the number of posts made by my friends that don’t generate any comments.

I was wondering if these two trends are linked? Are people not posting so often because they get discouraged by the lack of interest shown in what they write? Are the people who only posted updates that generated no reader interest walking away from Facebook in large numbers? It seems to me that it is only a very small step from deciding to stop posting to Facebook to not bothering to visit the site at all.

You only need to look at the number of blogs that have been launched with a wild burst of enthusiasm only to die within a matter of days. Most of these dead blogs are “comment free zones”. Giving an author some feedback is a way of encouraging them to keep writing.

What is happening is starting to remind me of the way that Google Groups went from being a useful resource to a place almost entirely inhabited by Chinese con-artists, peddlers of pornography and get-rich-quick marketing related posts.

If I extrapolate these Facebook trends into the future – even using an optimistic straight line prediction rather than the more probable exponential decay – it means that the current stock-market valuation of Facebook is as insane as past valuations of Friends Reunited. You have been warned!