Has Facebook Jumped the Shark?

[Commentary] Although many believe that "bigger" is the main value to marketers, Shapiro believes that Facebook feature overkill will result in a complicated user experience that is going to work against the company over time.

Successful societies deliver more and better benefits to their members which, invariably, leads to the tax of "complexity." This tax is easily born by members until the added complexity does not add enough incremental value to compensate for the "complexity" tax due. Then, over time, the burden of complexity causes the society to implode in on itself. This was the trap that had caught Facebook in its grip. In chasing scale, they used "feature sprawl" to attract users and in doing so made the Facebook experience more and more complex, imposing a tax that ultimately would not be borne by users. Far better, in my mind, would have been for them to have anchored their growth strategy in their heritage as a trusted social network by creating more trusted interactions between members and innovating in the "trust" space within the Facebook experience.