Markets

How Facebook's "Mom Problem" Might Trigger Its Downfall

By Jim Edwards

Updated on: October 19, 2011 / 11:33 AM EDT / MoneyWatch

We're all familiar with Facebook's "mom problem": The social network was once a cool place for you and your friends to hang out and share photographs. And then your mom turned up, posting embarrassing Wall messages and forcing you to keep it clean. Coolness can be a bankable quality. Lose it, and you can lose your entire business model (just ask MySpace).

Now there are some scary new numbers on the phenom, per web advertising analyst eMarketer:

There are about 23 million U.S. moms on Facebook.
That's well over two-thirds of all moms in the country -- and it doesn't count the ones with grown children.
Overall, just 57.1 percent of all internet users are on Facebook.
68.9 percent of all moms on the internet are Facebook moms.
87 percent of all social networking moms are Facebook moms.

Facebook is approaching adulthood, the time in its life when it matures and stops growing because the total number of people who want to be a part of it is maxed out. From that point, Facebook stops being a hot new media property and becomes an old-fashioned business, beset by old-fashioned problems such as how to generate new revenue from a stagnant user base, and how to keep customers interested in a product they're already over-familiar with. That's why Facebook is suddenly falling over itself for advertisers.

Now comes Google+, with its Circles. At first, Google+ looks like a pale imitation of Facebook. In fact, it performs almost identically to Facebook from a visual eye-tracking point of view. And internally, some Google programmers admit it is a pale imitation of Facebook.

But the distinguishing feature of Circles is that it's suddenly a whole lot easier to segregate mom, dad, aunts and uncles into their own sanitized Circle, where they won't get to see what you're posting to your Friends, Acquaintances, or Partners in Crime. (And, of course, mom doesn't yet know that Google+ exists, so there's that, too.) Google+ keeps all your "friends" in one place but gives you a lot more control over who gets to see what.

Certainly, Facebook Groups does the same thing, but it isn't the main focus of Facebook the way Circles is at Google+. And besides, your mom is already on Facebook -- she's not completely stupid.

Whether Google can turn this advantage into the quality that kills off Facebook (the way Facebook executed MySpace) is the key goal for Google+, and the key challenge for Facebook.

Related:

Image by Jerkass Clothing.