Graph Search Wasn’t the Most Important News Regarding Facebook Inc (FB)

As the MarketWatch article discusses, numerous users actually made a New Year’s resolution to spend less time on social media including deleting Facebook accounts. As with all of the monetization plans of Facebook, the investment community always overlooks the number fact. All social networks eventually die whether a virtual network such as MySpace or a real world network of high school or college friends.

Stock performance

The stock performance since the day after the IPO has remarkably hit the flat line on Monday. Investors in the IPO or that bought on the first day of trading haven’t faired very well though. The stock that originally hit $45 remains considerably below those levels at below $30.

Conclusion

Remarkably, the analyst community and media outlets continue to fight over whether Facebook deserves the vast $64 billion valuation while ignoring the potential for social network to face the typical demise.

The SocialBakers data should be worth following as it suggests the network peaked in October. The desire for the company to finally monetize the massive network of users is only likely to push the average user away from the service. Do you really want that creepy friend from high school searching all of your likes or photos?

It doesn’t appear that Google or Yelp have anything to fear. Google will remain the place to search for actual business related functions. Likewise, Yelp collects data from users that voluntarily share in hopes of helping the community as a whole. Not to mention, the vast majority of Facebook users have a limited set of friends to even search for data. What are the odds a user even has a friend they respect that have an opinion on a particular location for a restaurant? And how would Facebook ever monetize your friends opinion?

In the end, Facebook will never be able to monetize users that don’t exist in the future. A future that must be bright to justify a $64 billion valuation.

The article Graph Search Wasn’t the Most Important News Regarding Facebook originally appeared on Fool.com.

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