For Facebook, it was the best of weeks, it was the worst of weeks -- but mostly the worst.
The American Customer Satisfaction Index came out this week, and for Facebook the news was pretty bad. Among the top social networks surveyed, Facebook came in dead last with a satisfaction score of only 61 percent. That's down from 66 percent last year (when it was also dead last). It's even lower than what MySpace scored in 2010, the last time the ACSI measured that old chesnut.
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Who else scored 61 or lower for customer satisfaction? Comcast, Charter Communications, and a handful of Northeastern power companies that got knocked around by Hurricane Sandy -- not exactly the A-list company Zuckerberg et al. would want to keep. Facebook even scored one point worse than the Snidely Whiplash of American financial institutions, Bank of America.
Meanwhile, the winner in social media was Google+, which nailed a 78 in its first outing in the ACSI survey, tying it with the ever-popular Wikipedia. Last month, Facebook's hated rival announced it had passed the 500-million-member mark -- though that's mostly due to the fact if you use virtually any Google service these days, you have to create a G+ account. If Facebook is the China of social networks, Google+ is India and gaining fast.
Another survey, from Posterous co-founder Gary Tan, has even worse news. His online poll of more than 1,000 users claims that more than 60 percent of teenagers and 57 percent of young adults say they prefer Tumblr over Facebook. If I were the young Zuckerberg, this survey would worry me most of all. When you've lost the youth vote -- and you haven't even cracked 30 yourself -- that can't be good.
Still Facebook can take solace in the fact it's probably still more popular than the U.S. Congress. In a Public Policy Polling survey released this week, Congress ranked below root canals, traffic jams, the NFL replacement referees, colonoscopies, head lice, the band Nickelback, cockroaches, and Donald Trump. But PPP did not do a direct comparison between our elected representatives and the world's biggest social network, so who knows what it might have found.