It's now been over two months since the announcement of the Facebook IPO, after which some kind of press backlash was inevitable. But now that they just bought Instagram last week, things have gone even more negative in the press, with one prominent piece even declaring that the time has come "to get past Facebook and invent a new future."

That quote comes from the headline of a piece published Wednesday by The Atlantic in which senior editor Alexis Madrigal takes aim not only at Facebook but at the entire tech world for their failure of imagination over the past few years. All we have to show for ourselves lately are some addictive mobile games, photo apps, and a bunch of Facebooky clones? "Where are the people thinking big? What I see is people filling ever-smaller niches in this 'ecosystem' or that 'ecosystem.'"

And here's a piece on Forbes' tech blog today in which they go after Facebook for the fact that they no longer have a "privacy policy" but rather a "data use policy," and that they snidely have suggested that they're better than "other internet companies" because they "propose" changes to their policies and open up to the "community" for feedback before putting them into effect.

Then right in town at Mission Local, they ask "Are Facebook's Hip Days Over?" They went around chatting with locals in the Mission to get their opinions of Facebook these days, and guess what?! It's not all the rage anymore. One observant lady notes, "Some people continue to post the same things all the time, which makes the whole thing very repetitive."

Anyway. We sure would love to stop writing about Facebook sometime soon! But all of our friends are still on it every other hour, and we kind of are too, so...

[Atlantic]
[Forbes]
[Mission Local]