Marcelo Calbucci

Not sure if you heard about this, but there is an official Quit Facebook Day happening on May 31.

Obviously, there is a website behind it and, surprisingly, this is getting quite a bit of media attention. I'm not quitting Facebook, although I've been vocal about them using slime privacy strategies.

However, this movement made me ask this question: Can I quit Facebook? In other words, how much would I lose in my personal and professional life if I just quit Facebook? Turns out, I don't lose much. I have very few pictures uploaded to Facebook. None of the data I have there matters much for me. My entire social graph can be easily re-created and already exist on Twitter, LinkedIn and my email contacts.

So, Facebook does have a retention problem in my view. Yes, they are soooo big, and growing sooo much, that any retention problem will be just a small leak in a very large bucket. Yet, it's there. Every business has a churn rate. Facebook is no different. But as they approach market saturation point, the churn starts to matter.

Once you are "it", not only you have to battle your competitors who will be pointing their guns at you, you'll have to battle yourself. It's the problem with Microsoft Office of yesteryear being the biggest competitor of Microsoft Office of today. Once you reach market domination, you actually have to speed up the rate of innovation. It's easy to do that early on, because it's easier to go from 500 to 1,000 freakin' smart engineers creating cool new stuff. But then it becomes harder to go from 1,000 to 2,000 engineers who can be creative and innovative to maintain the same pace of innovation. And it becomes near impossible to keep up the recruiting rate necessary to keep yourself on top. Your internal process changes, engineers become less productive, the company starts to fear change and the culture becomes like… Microsoft – and we used to say that about IBM in the 90s.

Quit Facebook Day is pretty important to Facebook, not because of the number of folks who'll quit, which should not be enough to see a dip on the growth chart, but because you'll give lots of folks a perspective that Facebook doesn't have that much sticky value, and they can tell their friends (using Twitter). It's not like dumping your email address, or your phone number, or burning all your pictures. Leaving Facebook and coming back, it's almost like you never left.