And it’s nothing to do with valuation.
Last week I was timelined. This is happening to a lot of my friends just now. And nobody seems to like it. To my mind it makes Facebook look like MySpace and we all know how successful that was.
So Facebook has 900 million customers and it has just pissed off a large number of them. If my friends are anything to go by it may be the majority of them. They could have run the new and old in parallel, only forcing the new to timeline. It could have incentivised people to move, maybe find out why people didn’t want to change. Instead it just pressed ahead regardless.
Any company who treates its customers like that is never going to be that successful. Facebook is now a platform most people tolerate the things they dislike because all their friends are there and the pain of moving is too much. But noone seems to like it any more. And so when it comes to ‘monetising’ customers noone is going to want to support it.