It's starting to look like the beginning of the end. Signs are appearing, here and there, that suggest the dominance of Facebook in the public imagination and the widespread obsession in popular culture with all things Facebook may by waning, oddly enough, even before it launches its initial public offering later this spring. A recent New York Times story about a new social website called Pinterest suggests some reasons why.

Pinterest's express goal is similar to Facebook's but with a twist. Pinterest intends to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting." It declares itself a "virtual pinboard," which allows users to place pictures of objects they like and organize them. Others can view them and copy them for their own uses. Interest categories include food and recipes, wedding planning, garden styles, and just about anything else you can think of. Piniterest at once both leverages Facebook and has certain advantages over the Facebook model. It uses a "tie-in" with Facebook, so that each time a user signs up, the Pinterest website automatically "follows" all of that users Facebook friends who are also members of Pinterest, sending them email notifications of the new enrollee.

The new website also distinguishes itself from Facebook by expressly discouraging self-promotion: "If there is a photo or porject you're proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion."  Take that, Facebook! Pinterest also may have a market advantage over Facebook. The site attracts a certain type of person, one who likes to collect or curate or scrapbook. The members tend to be hobbyists and as such they tend to be avid. One investor characterizes them as "voracious" in their use of the website. Ironically it tends to encourage true sharing in a way Facebook does not.  As Susan Etlinger, a technology analyst and consult describes the difference: "Facebook used to be about connecting with your friends, but now it's do focused on the individual, with curating your timeline and how you present yourself to the world. " Facebook isn't structured to bring together communities of interest.

Furthermore, because Pinterest members tend to be both collectors and people who shop online, they represent an active group of purchasers with vast market potential down the road. Like so many start-ups Pinterest has to date relied on private investors and venture capital so far--to the tune of $40M. But eventually they'll have to figure out how they're going to make money and many investors believe their member base could represent a real gold mine.
 
Other news out of the South by Southwest technology conference in the past few days indicates that start-ups are distancing themselves from Facebook as they see the social networking giant becoming more profit-oriented. They worry that the rich data Facebook currently provides to its users could become accessible only at a price in the future. Although they for the most part continue to have Facebook as part of their model, more and more start-ups are making sure they build their own apps in ways that allow them to be independent of Facebook. As one entrepreneur puts it, Facebook is "our greatest opportunity and our greatest risk." For more see "Start-Ups Resist Facebook's Pull" in last Wednesday's edition of The Wall Street Journal.

I'm not going to declare this a full-fledged trend yet but it seems to be starting to be acceptable to question the merits of Facebook. Just this week the New York Times reported that some people are opting out. And Daniel Gulati blogged on the Harvard Business Review site the Facebook is actually making people "miserable."  Based on previous comments on his blog and research he did with young business entrepreneurs for a recent book entitled Passion & Purpose, Gulati  finds that there are three ways that Facebook is adversely affecting personal and working lives these days:
 (1) It creates constant comparison and competition. Because Facebook tends to promote, if you will, self-promotion, people find themselves comparing their own lives and achievements to the top 1% of their friends'.
(2) Time becomes fragmented. This is of course a problem with our digital mobile lives in general but Gulati observes that because one can log onto Facebook from multiple devices, people tend to switch back and forth a lot, resulting in the multitasking that lowers productivity and decreases in people's ability to focus on a single task for a sufficient period of time. 
(3) Ironically Facebook usurps real-life interchanges—face-to-face meetings and phones calls—thereby negatively affecting close relationships.
Gulati thinks that quitting Facebook isn't a realistic choice, but many others, both in his comments, and those in Jenna Wortham's article in the New York Times, disagree. Growth figures for Facebook in the US may support this view. The growth rate for the year ending October 2011 was 10% for the US, down from 56% the previous year. Some of this may reflect reaching a saturation point but it will be interesting to see how the numbers look in the spring as the company approaches its public offering. The perennial problem at Facebook, according to Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner, is keeping the millions of users they already have and making sure they are actively participating in the site. “They are likely more worried about the novelty factor wearing off,” observes Mr. Valdes.

For teenagers and early twenty-somethings, many of whom text on average one to three thousand times per month, the whole experience of texting is a conundrum: On the one hand it offers continual connections with friends; on the other hand, it leaves the texter with a poignant sense of isolation. Says one high schooler in Sherry Turkle’s new book, Alone Together, “Texting feels lonely . . . just typing by oneself all day.” And so it seems with much of 2.0 messaging—not just texting, but short-emailing, IM’ing, and Facebook as well.  Web 2.0 does have its attractions: Chiefly, it allows people to communicate without the messiness of real-time interactions. The mediation also puts a screen up. On the one side, writers can carefully construct their image, choosing when they say it and editing what they actually say and then making it all look oh-so-casual. On the other side of the screen, the receivers don’t know fully what the senders mean—there’s the lack of expression that comes with face-to-face or voice-to-voice communication. And receivers often don’t know how much attention or effort a writer has  invested in the message, whether the sender was multitasking, driving, carrying on a conversation, etc. Much of the general context of interpersonal communication is lost.

From the letter to the telegram to the telephone, we progressed in our technology toward better, more direct, and faster means of communicating with one another. But, as newer technologies intervened, starting with the answering machine, followed by voice mail and caller ID, people gained more control. At first this was simply a matter of being able to screen messages and retrieve them remotely.

But then we got email, cell phones, instant messaging, Facebook, tweets, and texting. The result is that we have many and various options for staying in ever closer touch with everybody we know, wherever they are—we don’t even have to know where they are in order to contact them. That’s the good part of the story. However there’s a whole lot more to this revolution in communication that makes interactions more complicated. Many people have re-assigned the bulk of their social lives to the digital realm. Some shun the telephone—not just their landlines but their cell lines as well. “Voice-to-voice” has become passé. “Can you hear me now?” practically irrelevant.

Testing and IM’ing have actually affected how many compose emails, so that what one communicates becomes spare, even truncated, cryptic, verging on the primitive. And the emoticons, which have become another code for roughly expressing or boldly dictating the tone a message is meant to be written in and understood, seem to be no more than a half-hearted effort to make up for the failures of the little language that is left.  

Every new major information technology looks like it could change the world and to change it for the better. For more than a century, one information technology has succeeded another in a disruptive way, overshadowing and displacing the previous dominant one with something better and faster. And as Tim Wu points out in his new book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, each of these new technologies, from the telegraph to the telephone to radio and television and beyond, has also promised to improve the lives of individuals or of society as a whole. When the telegraph seemed an interesting novelty to most, Samuel Morse was already driven by the idea that the telegraph would revolutionize communication. Theodore Vail, the driven visionary of the early AT&T, actually believed that enlightened monopoly should be the basis for the public utility of the future. Such a monopoly was necessary to make the United States the best connected nation in the world and bring the connection of voice communication into every household. For Vail, in fact, monopoly was downright patriotic. And when radio came along, it too was seen as a medium for positive social change. People believed that radio would create a virtual community, knitting together people throughout the country and eventually throughout the world.

Given this historical context, it is not really surprising that Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and the social network company’s general spirit includes a sense of large and revolutionary purpose. David Kirkpatrick, in his perceptive history of the first years of Facebook, The Facebook Effect, recounts that a driving force behind Facebook was the drive to create significant cultural change based on the belief that the world was moving toward greater and great transparency. The company embraced the radical belief that “an inevitable enveloping transparency will overtake modern life.” This transparency would promote greater social good: As Zuckerberg explains, “A more transparent world creates a better governed world and a fairer world.”

So why does each new information technology inspire this type of hope? And do subsequent developments validate that hope? Tim Wu suggests that information technologies seem to promise positive social change because they improve, and often broaden access to, communication between people. Such improvements, many people believe, will promote better understanding within the populace and provide more information for addressing social ills. However the history of communications for the past hundred years or so has not shown this to be entirely true.

As Tim Wu expertly points out, technologies that begin as open and free eventually become controlled by one or more large corporations that are bent not just on dominating the marketplace but on making large profits in the process. Thus Facebook’s motto “Don’t be lame,” like Google’s “Don’t be evil,” speaks well of initial intentions but does not anticipate the pressures of our market-driven society. In spite of good intentions both companies have been hit with mounting piles of lawsuits from organizations and political entities both in the US and abroad. While Google’s legal issues are manifold, including copyright laws, antitrust regulations, and privacy rights, Facebook has encountered primarily the privacy issue. Its development platform gave companies a way to promote their goods, but it also extends to those advertisers the right to “share” information about individual users who “like” or “recommend” their products. Thus initial goals of openness and transparency get murkier, and potentially more sinister. David Kirkpatrick points out that even when it first began, the company’s avowed intentions were aggressive and many felt arrogant: “They had the best thing in the world and they were going to dominate everyone.” One can only surmise that the current $50B valuation of the company and its much anticipated IPO will put the full pressures of the market place, quarterly earnings, and the bottom line on this still young but very large company.

I’ve known Susan Verran for a couple of decades now. Actually we’re related: She’s my sister-in-law, my husband’s sister. So it was an odd thing to look on her Facebook Wall and read “Susan Verran and Cynthia Rettig are now friends.” Weren’t we friends last year? And the year before? And the year before that? Haven’t we shared family secrets, weddings, births, deaths for many years now? And all of a sudden I find it announced semi-publicly that we are “friends.” That’s how new technologies appropriate (or misappropriate) a common word and given it a new meaning. To “friend” someone on Facebook actually means to subscribe to their data and to let them look at your data, that is, the basic information and ongoing updates of what you are thinking about and doing and where you are going that many Facebook users broadcast on a regular basis.

What is this meaning of “friend”? One Washington Post executive, when he first met with Mark Zuckerberg, saw a fundamental insight that Facebook embodies. In late 2004, Chris Ma, a senior manager for investments and acquisitions at the Post, met with Zuckerberg and concluded that at bottom he was a psychologist. The Facebook founder saw that “kids have a deep-seated desire to have certain kinds of social interactions in college and what drives them is their extreme interest in their friends—what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, and where they’re going.” That is the kind of interest that Facebook serves and institutionalizes—this intense adolescent interest in what their peers are doing, who is friends with whom, who’s going to what party on Friday night. For the most part, it’s what used to be called “gossip.”

There’s a problem with encoding in software a set of behaviors favored by teenagers and early twenty-somethings who can become addictively enmeshed in the Facebook culture, visiting the site many times each day, checking up on their friends, adding in their own thoughts or reporting on their own activities, perhaps even with the odd compromising photo. The risk is one of getting stuck in the kind of behavior that most of us outgrow at some point as we aspire to more intimacy, deeper relationships, and personal growth that requires solitude as well as fellowship. And we end up with work and responsibilities that consume lots of time in our days. In short, we end up having lives. We may not end up having 738 friends and a high-tech social graph to show for it. Instead we may have a small circle of friends and family that means something. And we don’t have to “friend” anybody to have it.

Of all the contradictions and paradoxes in the short history of Facebook one of the most telling ones is how Facebook developed its business model and where founder Mark Zuckerberg was at the time. Mark Zuckerberg spent the company’s first few years focusing on adding features to the user experience and expanding the user base. He ignored those who kept pressing for a business model, a plan for how the company was going to make money. Growth first, he told everyone, and then worry about making money. Yet the every expansion of the user base and experience that he sought required more money, a conundrum Google had faced as well when the company realized that in order to expand their search capabilities.

Zuckerberg’s advisors had been pushing him to get a chief operating officer and especially one who was an expert in online advertising.  Soon thereafter Zuckerberg met Sheryl Sandberg at a party. She was then an executive at Google and she had built its highly successful self-service ad business. Within a few months Zuckerberg had hired her. In his book The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick describes Sandberg as a person of “immense experience with advertisers at Google and a deep appreciation of the importance and potential of ads on the Net.” (To read my review of Kirkpatrick’s book, which is just out in paperback, click here.) Yet he observed there was still a widespread ambivalence toward advertising at Facebook, an ambivalence fostered by Zuckerberg himself.

Within weeks Sandberg had planned a series of brainstorming meetings for Facebook management to define what business the company was going to be in and exactly how it would go about “monetizing” their user base, which is a roundabout way of answering the question: “How are we going to turn the user base into money?” These meetings took place over a series of weeks during which time Mark Zuckerberg himself wasn’t even in the country. He was taking a solo trip around the world—to Berlin, Istanbul, an ashram in India, Japan, and other locations. While it’s unclear whether this was a deliberate absence on Zuckerberg’s part, it seems obvious that he did not want to be a part of this “monetizing” process.

Yet even in his absence the management team worked under the assumption that Zuckerberg in the end would have to approve of whatever they came up with and that in order to gain his approval, the business model had to fit in with the founder’s long-term plan for Facebook. Thus, in need of money to support his long-term plans for improving the customer experience and enlarging the user base, Zuckerberg was forced to accept advertising, just as Google founders Page and Brin before him had to. In both cases, too, it was unfortunate because the youthful idealism of these founders was genuine. Yet the business cycle of Internet technologies appears inescapable. Innovation is necessarily followed by commercialization, even if going public is avoided, or at least delayed. And growth has other pitfalls, as Google’s path to success has already indicated. But more on this later.