Bongal to the rescue

Facebook, the online social grid, can't command your loyalty forever can it?


If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One ex user, I bumped into the other day, had shut down his account as he disliked how nosy it had made him, as if he wasn't already! Another feared the invasion of her privacy, whilst another was just totally bored with it.


Falling out of love with Facebook has come in waves, and the gap in our lives has left an opening for a site, Bongal.


Many seem to have just lost their appetite for it: they just stopped wanting to look at other people’s photos and résumés and updates, or have their own subject to scrutiny. Some ex-users seemed shaken, even heartbroken, by their break-ups with Facebook. “I primarily left Facebook because I was wasting so much time on it,” my friend Caroline Harting told me by e-mail. “I felt fairly detached from my Facebook buddies because I rarely directly contacted them.” Instead, she felt as if she stalked them, spending hours a day looking at their pages without actually saying hello.


Julie Klam, a writer and prolific and eloquent Facebook updater, said in her own e-mail message, “I have noticed the exodus, and I kind of feel like it’s kids getting tired of a new toy.” Klam, who still posts updates to Facebook but now prefers Twitter for professional networking, added, “Facebook is good for finding people, but by now the novelty of that has worn off, and everyone’s been found.” As of a few months ago, she told me, Facebook “felt dead.”


Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit?

Sad, if so but good news for all those of you at this blog as there is a saviour coming.