Facebook Flaw That Could Be Fatal

BOSTON (MainStreet) -- It must feel pretty good to be Facebook. It has some 700 million users worldwide, out-clicks the rest of the Web, including Google(GOOG) -- Google -- and buzz has even started about using Facebook as a search engine.

But there remain skeptics. Some might point to MySpace, since in 2007 an estimated one in five Americans used the site, or even to Friendster, once 100 million-strong and now with about 1.5 million users since rebranding as a gaming site (and expunging all older user profiles and content along the way).

Facebook ailing and Friendster going strong? It could happen, experts say. Even one-time giants such as AOL and MySpace struggle now, while niche social media is growing.

What did Friendster in, aside from some internal politics, was failing to listen to user feedback, and to some that sounds like Facebook now.

While Facebook has scale and the vision of maverick CEO Mark Zuckerberg, its leadership also faces the need to innovate, add features and boost revenue lest it grow stale, bloated and underfunded, yet every change is met with overstated horror by users enraged that someone messed with "their" Facebook.

Almost every aspect of the service is scornfully picked apart -- game-related spam, privacy controls, hijacker apps and links and the stream of banal posts from "friends" about their kids' post-nasal drip, Zumba classes and all-caps rants about Obama and his ties to the Illuminati.

Facebook does not fare well in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, a national indicator of customer evaluations of goods and services among U.S. households. The index was founded at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

"In 2010, Facebook debuted with an ACSI score of 64 -- the lowest of any measured website," an analysis of the data reads. (By comparison, Wikipedia scored 78, the best showing, followed by YouTube at 74.) "This year, Facebook makes a modest gain, up 3% to 66, even though -- or perhaps because -- its user numbers have exploded, reaching almost 1 billion. But considering Facebook's low user satisfaction, its current size dominance cannot be taken for granted in the future."

Facebook's pitiful showing over the past two years puts it in the bottom 5% of all measured private-sector companies and in the same range as perennially low-scoring airlines and cable companies.