• Information Week's Byte, Wednesday, May 23, 2012 12:16 PM

Information Week’s Byte has landed a new columnist who starts out by biting the hand that feeds him. The columnist, magazine publishing wunderkind turned digital media neo-Luddite Bob Guccione Jr., kicks things off by kicking Facebook where it hurts – right in its relevancy. Importantly, this column was conceived and written before the recent Facebook pile-on, and from what I know about Guccione’s views on the subject, this is a column that’s been in the making for some time. (MediaPost readers may recall the piece he did in the issue of MEDIA magazine that he guest edited in which he camped out to experience the media lifestyles of an Amish community in rural Pennsylvania.) It’s not that Guccione is an actual media Luddite, it’s just that he doesn’t believe the current social media frenzy is sustainable, and why the legions of Facebook users are poised to unlike the platform.

“I think Facebook has already peaked,” Guccione writes in his new column (aptly named, "Byte Me"). “If you look away from the blinding magnesium-burning glow of the hype of how many users it has, you can see that a lot of people once obsessed with Facebook now use it less. To many it has receded to a service, useful for mass inquiries for recommendations, or learning about something you would have learned about some other way anyway, if it was important.”

Read the whole story at Information Week's Byte »