Is Facebook a “distruptive” company?

Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder of Facebook.com punching above his weight?

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder of Facebook.com has declared that “the most disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers”, this according to reports from Valleywag.com who were sent an tip from an anonymous source (so take this post with a pinch of salt) that Zuckerberg had sent this note in an email to Facebook employees relating to recent design changes to the Facebook Homepage.

There are 175 million active users, 3 Billion Minutes spent on Facebook EVERY day, and over 35 translations of the site. These are just some of the many facts presented on the Official Facebook Statistics page, yet for all those office employees, students and academics using Facebook the majority of them have not fully “appreciated” the recent design change in the slightest, in fact it may be worth noting that the most active Facebook group petioning against this change as of this blog post being written had 1,718.366 members.

So, what exactly does Zuckerberg believe is good about the “disruptive” change of Facebook, does he see the fact that Facebook are categorically lagging behind the competition as maybe a threat, and the word “disruptive” covers up Zuckerberg’s fear of having a real problem on his hands, on the other hand I do appreciate 100% that Facebook has cornered the social networking market and has provided some great solutions to problems other social networks didn’t dare, such as Applications!

It just appears to me that Zuckerberg feels he is missing out on the fun of realtime updates such as those in Twitter, and Likes in Friendfeed, I think we see a much less distruptive Facebook taking a more Microsoft like approach, it’s not necessarily to suggest that Facebook.com will become a flop overnight, there is still a lot of weight behind it’s application store which Facebook recently announced it would now allow app developers to  “let users initiate Facebook Chat conversations in applications on Facebook”, this side of Facebook of course looks set to explode during 2009 with the recent TweetDeck/Facebook Connect merger.

Nick O’Neill of SocialTimes.com and AllFacebook.com said in a recent email interview with me that “”Facebook is innovating the way we share.  While many of the new features mimic some of the existing functionality within Twitter, other features take Twitter’s functionality to another level.  Through the sharing of different forms of media and integrating it into a continuous stream of information from within our social graph, there is always interesting content for users to digest.”"

Mark Zuckerberg, it is just a personal mention to you, no offence intended, users just aren’t appreciating your style right now and really want you to keep developing Facebook in more interesting and challenging style rather then trying to step up and deliver a model which is already well defined and conquered by Twitter and Friendfeed, there is no need to mimic or misplace your innovation hat momentarily and simply copy the idea, I believe in the great talent you possess alongside the rest of the Facebook development team, you have all defined and set a precedent for an entire generation which is highly commendable, but just because you have a gazillion users doesn’t mean you stop trying!

Leave your thoughts below on how you think Facebook can start being more innovative?

About Josh Chandler

Josh Chandler is an freelance blogger and journalist living in the UK  who writes about Web startups, social media and entrepreneurs. He started writing a personal blog back in April 2008 at joshchandlerblog.blogspot.com , often rehashing old news and creating the dreaded “echo chamber”.

In July 2008 when he was the first to break the news on the popular microblogging site Twitter purchasing the real time Twitter search engine formely known as Summize.com, he was able to garner mention all across the blogosphere from Gigaom.com to ReadWriteWeb.com and since then has been asked to write articles for blogs such as TheNextWeb.com

If you wish to get in contact with Josh then email him at:

josh@joshchandlerblog.com