If Facebook's So Important to the Internet, Why’s the Internet Hardly Blink When Facebook Goes Down?

We were discussing whether Facebook had supplanted virtual worlds last week, so here's an important addendum to that conversation: On May 31st, Facebook went offline for a few hours, and as Stacey Higgenbotham reports on GigaOM, during that time, total Internet traffic hardly changed. Deprived of Mark Zuckerberg's social network for that stretch, people basically shrugged and turned to Twitter or other alternatives. To be sure, Facebook is still a massive and central facet of most people's Internet (it currently counts over 900 million active users), but this behavior pattern suggests that most of us only use it for light engagement, and are more than willing to instantly switch our attention to other websites and social networks, when it's not in service.

Hypothetical question:

If all the virtual worlds used by more than 200 million people somehow went offline all at once, do you think it would have a more meaningful impact on Internet traffic? Given the heavy usage, with worlds like Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft counting average online times between 7 and 9 hours per week, I tend to think so.

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Comments

[Pussycat Catnap]

I dunno.

People are more vested in their individual online video games.

If you can't access your favorite tauren for 5 hours - that's more meaningful than not being able to 'like' Justin Bieber's latest Safeway purchase.
- Or it might be. Given that most of these games suffer scheduled downtime, people shift around.

So with your question, if you could not get to that tauren, nor to your blingtard, nor to your jedi, nor whatever... none of them...

Well that's not like Facebook going down.

That would be like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Plurk, Flickr, mySpace, and so on all going down at once...
- And if all of those went down at once, I think that would have -MORE- impact than if all these MMOs (The MMUs of SL, Open Sim, and Blue Mars included) went down at once.

[Little Lost Linden]

People are still using FaceBook?

Holy Moly!!!

[elizabeth (16)]

not really. like you say people will go do something else

+

the only thing that would impact the interwebz severely is if the search engines like google, bing, yahoo, duck, etc went down all at the same time

[Rin Tae]

I am surprsied somehow ... is facebook anything else then 'light engagement'? .. is there anything there that woud allow for mmersion or keep people occupied for longer? Or is it not more like that people look there, check messeges and go to do something else before checking again and maybe writing a messege themselves.
All of it can be done with various chanells so when facebook becomes unavailable then people just switch to another.

The same will happen when enough people switch form facebook to another social network. Facebook will fall as fast as it has grown before and noone form all those people who currently populate it will look back or think twice about it.

So nothing surprising about facebook not having any impcat on traffic in internet when it goes down. Chances are it wont have any impact when it vanishes someday either.

[Wolf Baginski]

People don't bother to use Facebook now, however much the big companies think everyone does.

[Pussycat Catnap]

There was once a time when people thought Disco was -IT-.

Insert laser tag, hula hoops, the Charleston, steam power, mood rings, yahoo, mySpace, pets.com, New Wave, Wham!, Britney Spears, Palm Pilots, etc...

I am repeatedly amazed by people who get so vested in the now that they can't see 6 months ago, and don't realize that 99 years from now nobody will care about what their little fad was.