Suppose you're in a room with 5 close friends having a conversation. You're comfortable, animated, energetic, outgoing. In the midst of this engrossing conversation 400 other acquaintances silently enter the room. Suddenly you notice them and realize they can all hear every word you're saying.
Most people find this scenario a bit socially uncomfortable and clam right up.
Facebook's growth has created this scenario for a lot of people. The basic currency of Facebook (voyeurism) relies upon a loose security model that prevents a person from walling off his/her 5-10 closest friends and using FB for the bulk of their online socializing. Eavesdropping is essential to the business model. The problem is, thusfar most FB users are not really aware just how intricately engineered this voyeurism is and how publicly their lives are being broadcast.
You can wall off groups of people within Facebook, but the effort required to do this is beyond the motivation level that I'd expect most Facebook users (myself included) to have. Like privacy, making Facebook more tolerable to use is an opt-in thing, requiring proactive measures by the user.
I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point.
My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example.
As more people move to avoid the noise, they'll find solace in mini-communities, and I think that's the way forward. Not just one service, but hundreds.
Strangely enough, could it be time to attack Facebook the same way they attacked MySpace? Facebook bootstrapped a user base by initially restricting to people with harvard.edu email, which made them more comfortable sharing. Then they expanded to other universities, but only allowed visibility to people within the same .edu.
Now that everyone has been socially obligated to friend their Mom, maybe it's time to attack Facebook with .edu specific sites again? What other natural community boundaries would make sense to target with exclusive sites?
While I find the idea of many micro-communities compelling, I don't think that this is the direction things are going.
Here's why: the Internet is extremely diverse as it is and overall makes for a bad user experience where people have to cognitively deal with many different (and disagreeing) interfaces, rules, quirks, web addresses, and so on. At the beginning this heterogeneity was seen as an advantage because the amount of easily accessible information was unparalleled. However, in the past few years it seems like most successful platforms (be it YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Amazon, Wikipedia, iOS, etc.) have done well because there was a consistent and one-stop shop experience throughout.
There is still tons of room on many different verticals to improve and disruption to occur, but I wouldn't expect things to come full circle.
I'm in a mini community of about 10. We all know each other. We communicate through email. I've gotten more out of that than I ever got out of Facebook, and some of the people in my mini group were part of my network in Facebook.
Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.
Technically speaking it takes to much "gardening" to run HN-like site. There are millions of niche forums there already. But it's the platform and the interface that makes HN different. I don't know if there is a technical expertise to similarly run other communities there.
Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.
I have long believed that Facebook/MySpace is like a TV show. Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends.
In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Those businesses have shorter shelf lives.
On the other hand, Google/Microsoft are in the productivity/time saving business and they have more durable advantages since they don't have to keep coming up ways to make people stick around. People stick around and use their service, because people save time.
Watch out for Twitter to do to Facebook what, Facebook did to Myspace and what Myspace did to Friendster.
Twitter on the other hand may not exactly be like a TV show as much as TV channel with each mega Twitter star (e.g. Charlie Sheen) a TV show within that channel.
Same here. I'm getting more and more bored with it. What was most interesting about Facebook for me was learning about certain people. This guy I work with likes cheesy movies, goes out to Irish bars with his wife, and likes to tweet quotes from whatever movie he's watching when he's drunk. Learning that was interesting. Seeing the same pattern every day is horribly boring. Same thing with most of my high-volume friends. A close high school friend's wife, whom I haven't had a chance to get to know in person, loves mariachi music, can't write a coherent sentence to save her life, goes to la pulga (the flea market) every weekend, enjoys drama with her coworkers, and is constantly sharing coupon deals. Fascinating to know, boring as shit to see every day.
And of course the highest volume people are the most boring. All my friends seem to have about the same volume of inanity, funny stuff, somewhat interesting comments, worthwhile content, and vital life updates to share. They just vary in what their sharing threshold is. If I could tune out everything below "worthwhile content" then Facebook would be great. I'd also only need to look at it once a day for two minutes to keep up with everybody. Alas, there is no "setLogLevel" method on my Facebook feed.
This is a problem inherent in any form of social media. Unfortunately, it's not easily fixed. You need to find a way to strike a balance between rewarding content creation and punishing spam, and the line in thin.
Apparently helping get you sucked in to Farmville is not as valuable to people as helping you get a job and stay connected with what is happening with old co-workers. Go figure.
I'm not sure you could call LinkedIn a social network. It can be nice to find out about an old friend, but most of it is pure business. So I'm not surprised about the survey.
Twitter for me. One of the things I wanted out of Facebook is to talk to people I knew regarding various topics. I found out that most people just play Farmville, post happy birthday notes and pictures of their kids. While catching up with old flames was fun, the interest is gone.
On Twitter, I can search the entire world for people who have the same interests as me, read their thoughts and correspond with them.
So basically I left Facebook because I really wanted to connect with people on an intellectual level. Turns out, I don't know anyone who I can correspond with in that manner.
By left, I mean I deleted the account, whatever that means in FB land.
Does anyone have any good guesses as to what the "next" Facebook will be? I mean, in my experience, it basically went Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook. While Facebook is certainly in the drivers seat to a much greater extent than MySpace was five or six years ago, history indicates they'll eventually be knocked off their throne. However, I haven't seen or heard of any serious newcomers in that space. I've personally seen enthusiasm for Facebook diminishing over the past year or two, but will Facebook be end up being the ultimate "social network"? Is that basically settled?
My sense is that Facebook is really well made, and isn't going anywhere (i.e., Facebook is to social networking what Google is to search). I could see LinkedIn getting destroyed, though. They fill a very real need, but don't seem to do it very well. This is all very qualitative, but I never feel like I have a pleasant experience on LinkedIn.
Although I do not want to come across as being biased (due to me working on a multi-live social concept), however I do believe Live interaction both on mobile devices or web app is where the next legion of 'Social networking' is headed.
Whether i'm right or wrong, only time will tell. On the subject of de-throning facebook, that will be hard. Though it is do-able but for the moment, let's not kid ourselves, Facebook will remain the beast and king of Social media for while.
They are just to big and efficiently run to go down like myspace.
"With" from Path. I think Path is not going to get critical mass. "With" or a copy of it, however, is going to be big. The service essentially lets you say who you are with in the moment by snapping a picture. It's like checking in Time with a picture.
I think it's settled for the next decade or so at least.
With 687 million users if each user spent 15 minutes switching to an alternative it would take a combined time investment of about 20,000 years for Facebook to disappear.
Of course they don't have to lose all their users to become irrelevant..
If Facebook's growth stopped today and they began to lose users at a rate of about 90,000 per day it would take 10 years to lose 50% of their users.
I don't think this is just Facebook, perhaps the so-called social media jumped the shark. I think it jumped the shark a year ago for both Twitter and Facebook (CNN, Ashton Kutcher contest) but the numbers are starting to catch up now. Also don't discount the Linkedin IPO where some would argue the social media was exposed.
It could be that the churn just exceeded new users for the first time because most possible users in USA have been reached already. Some decline is inevitable if everyone is already using your product.
There's always churn. Even as FB was growing, a part of those new users were always churning out. Each user makes their own decisions about staying in the system, they are not a sentient whole except as far as media or changes to the system might affect larger groups at once.
I imagine your tendency to leave the system to be some sort of a graph. Maybe you are 30% likely to leave and never ever come back after your first day on Facebook. After using it for a week, maybe that gets reduced to 20%. After a month, maybe you are even more unlikely to leave. If they had for example 1 million people joining per day, then 300k would be quitting per day. If the next day all of USA had been tapped out and only 200k people joined, that would look like a sudden -100k turn to decline, even though the trend was same as always.
What happens now will depend on what that churn graph looks like. Maybe it's sticky enough that they'll be able to keep a big part of the users they got and over time make it even stickier to keep even more. There will be improvements to get those users to be more active on the site. Even if there was no more user growth in the USA, there could be growth in the amount of time and money the existing userbase spends on the site.
That this is true is a bit of a tautology. Assuming the graph is monotonically decreasing sounds unlikely to me, though; I think there's likely to be multiple peaks - like the proverbial "7-year itch" for marriages.
Another graph that would be relevant would be the likelihood of people who have been exposed to facebook through their friends, media saturation and advertising, yet still haven't joined, to be tempted to join later. In other words - facebook has already saturated the internet world's radar, and people who haven't joined already are completely aware of its existance, function, and benefits, and still not joining. Those will be very expensive users to get, so IMO retention should be their major focus. I stayed through the "6-month updates-full-of-farmville problem", because they fixed it, they barely kept me through the "1-and-1/2-year privacy panic" after backing off on some portion of their stridency (and profitability per user), and they lost me completely, along with a number of other people I know, after the "2-year bored-to-shit-with-people-I-went-to-HS-with-telling-me-where-they-went-to-lunch-and-what-they-think-of-Obama lull" which I'm not sure they can do anything about.
If a large cohort of similarly aged users hit some peak that facebook is unable or unwilling to iron out at the same time, and there's no supply of cheap "Wow, there's a place on the internet where I can keep track of all of my college buddies!" users to replace them, there could be a precipitous fall.
I see their numbers. How can I trust them? Mostly I see a lot of stuff trying to sell to you their service but I don't see how they actually collect their data.
I felt this was bound to happen. Too many "friends", too much spam, and it became too "mainstream", which means the early adopters would want to move on to something else.
If there actually was "something else" right now, a paradigm shifting social network, the decay of Facebook would've been even faster, but unfortunately there isn't much to replace it right now, but I think there will be by the end of the year.
I'm still not sure why FB has not figured out an easy way to segment and categorize friends. FB puts me in the same room with my mom, coworkers, school buddies, and nephews. Awkward.
It allows you to group/categorize your friends, and set privacy for each group for most actions. If you wanted to hide everything from your mom, you could. If you need to share an update with your nephews, but not your school friends that's easy.
Perhaps having separate Walls for different groups is the next step.
As any other social site ever created it seems to be following the same path.
Each month what I'm seeing on my landing page is getting less relevant and more annoying (even without growing my friend base too much and having around 20 friends, I cannot imagine what happens to those over 100). Most of that spam is generated by few active friends, while the rest does pretty much nothing.
Most of communication that I see taking place is very very meaningless, somebody posts a video: "lol", "haha", "nice one", that's pretty much it.
For me it's a socially filtered spam [funny stuff?] site.
If some site can encourage people to have meaningful communication again it will take on Facebook, no doubt.
Get 3 of my important friends on the site and I'm sold. Then Facebook just becomes a big contact list. And at that point I'm not sure where it goes. It might be a contact-list site for a long long time.
Facebook might not die as a website, but competitors will definitely takeaway a lot of value from it. And so far I don't see it becoming much more than a contact-list.
And keep in mind that the less engaged the users are the less ad revenue there will be. I have no doubt that as we're speaking right now users are less and less engaged with the site. Growth is still fast so the revenue is rising, but once that stops it will crumble.
The will have to get more aggressive with ads or people will simply stop to notice them at all. Or perhaps start selling more of the user data. At this point there's not much you can do.
Also the growth they see outside of the western world might be very much junk. I'm in Poland, Facebook craze is already old news here yet I get english ads?
It's great that AT&T has high speed internet for 20$, but I'm sorry, I cannot purchase that here.
Everybody knows ad revenue is tricky. Facebook is no different.
Nobody is going bankrupt, I'm not saying that. Facebook is here and it will stay for few more years for sure, but to compare it to google is crazy. Google can be conquered too I'm sure, but Facebook definitely makes for a far more fragile target.
Personally I'd say it will simply decay and we might not see another social site being that big in a long time to come. Facebook has half of the world on there, cool, but guess what, I am not connecting with those people and never will.
Facebook managed to get a lot of people registered in one place, but has it managed to truly connect a lot of people? Not at all.
The methodology is basically using the Facebook Ad Tool. The tool let's you target a set of users for your ads and tells you the size of that population.
The article clearly discloses the inherent issues at play.
> Going forward, we’ll be watching closely to see what longer-term trends emerge. Bugs in the Facebook advertising tool that we draw this information from, seasonal changes like college graduations, and other short-term factors, can influence numbers month to month and obscure what’s really happening.
I deleted facebook about six months ago because it was a huge stressor that added very little value to my life. I have too many subsets of friends, which makes it impossible to maintain one personality without offending someone. This just isn't how human's interact and I think it will eventually kill off facebook, unless they find some way to mitigate it.
For reference:
1) Highschool friends and family who are incredibly religious/right wing/etc
2) Friends from skiing, many of whom make a living on the mountain, who are about as vile as one can imagine
3) Friends from college or work, which consists mostly of PharmD's, MD's, and nurses.
4) Other random friends from startup stuff, partys, etc
I think humans inherently want to nurture each of their relationships, whether close or not, individually. Along with tailoring our communication to each person, we exclude large parts of our lives and minds from people that we want to be friends with. Doing that naturally and through different contexts is one thing, but having to electronically do that for each relationship is just impossible.
To quote the Disney Hipster meme, "it's too mainstream". Perhaps I have an obscure point of view, but Facebook lost it's luster for a lot of people when the older crowd started to really embrace it. It's not as cool as it once was. This is a big problem for a lot of companies, not just social media.
This. Was pretty cool at first connecting with classmates and writing messages about papers, projects, and planning stuff for the weekend. Now it's some gossipy aunt you haven't talked to in months and your seven year old niece sending a friend request.
I don't have figures to back it up, but Facebook in Belgium also feels like it's declining. Not necessary new users, that may be still even rising.
But mainly active users becoming inactive. Im daring to bet that's declining big in Belgium.
[+] [-] grandalf|15 years ago|reply
Most people find this scenario a bit socially uncomfortable and clam right up.
Facebook's growth has created this scenario for a lot of people. The basic currency of Facebook (voyeurism) relies upon a loose security model that prevents a person from walling off his/her 5-10 closest friends and using FB for the bulk of their online socializing. Eavesdropping is essential to the business model. The problem is, thusfar most FB users are not really aware just how intricately engineered this voyeurism is and how publicly their lives are being broadcast.
[+] [-] noarchy|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhangen|15 years ago|reply
My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example.
As more people move to avoid the noise, they'll find solace in mini-communities, and I think that's the way forward. Not just one service, but hundreds.
[+] [-] jimbokun|15 years ago|reply
Now that everyone has been socially obligated to friend their Mom, maybe it's time to attack Facebook with .edu specific sites again? What other natural community boundaries would make sense to target with exclusive sites?
[+] [-] danielrhodes|15 years ago|reply
Here's why: the Internet is extremely diverse as it is and overall makes for a bad user experience where people have to cognitively deal with many different (and disagreeing) interfaces, rules, quirks, web addresses, and so on. At the beginning this heterogeneity was seen as an advantage because the amount of easily accessible information was unparalleled. However, in the past few years it seems like most successful platforms (be it YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Amazon, Wikipedia, iOS, etc.) have done well because there was a consistent and one-stop shop experience throughout.
There is still tons of room on many different verticals to improve and disruption to occur, but I wouldn't expect things to come full circle.
[+] [-] sixtofour|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evgen|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pointillistic|15 years ago|reply
Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.
[+] [-] abalog|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nrao123|15 years ago|reply
In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Those businesses have shorter shelf lives.
On the other hand, Google/Microsoft are in the productivity/time saving business and they have more durable advantages since they don't have to keep coming up ways to make people stick around. People stick around and use their service, because people save time.
Watch out for Twitter to do to Facebook what, Facebook did to Myspace and what Myspace did to Friendster.
Twitter on the other hand may not exactly be like a TV show as much as TV channel with each mega Twitter star (e.g. Charlie Sheen) a TV show within that channel.
[+] [-] dkarl|15 years ago|reply
And of course the highest volume people are the most boring. All my friends seem to have about the same volume of inanity, funny stuff, somewhat interesting comments, worthwhile content, and vital life updates to share. They just vary in what their sharing threshold is. If I could tune out everything below "worthwhile content" then Facebook would be great. I'd also only need to look at it once a day for two minutes to keep up with everybody. Alas, there is no "setLogLevel" method on my Facebook feed.
[+] [-] jamesteow|15 years ago|reply
Same here. Most of my friends who have something interesting to say will contact me via IM/e-mail or I'll read it via Twitter.
So I'm left with a lot of status updates that... really don't resonate (except from a handful of key people).
[+] [-] noonespecial|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcromartie|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcitme|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pagekalisedown|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] podperson|14 years ago|reply
Wait, isn't that TV in forward?
[+] [-] btilly|15 years ago|reply
http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/linkedin-trumps-f...
Apparently helping get you sucked in to Farmville is not as valuable to people as helping you get a job and stay connected with what is happening with old co-workers. Go figure.
[+] [-] tintin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheez|15 years ago|reply
On Twitter, I can search the entire world for people who have the same interests as me, read their thoughts and correspond with them.
So basically I left Facebook because I really wanted to connect with people on an intellectual level. Turns out, I don't know anyone who I can correspond with in that manner.
By left, I mean I deleted the account, whatever that means in FB land.
[+] [-] jordan0day|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sage_joch|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] politician|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelchisari|15 years ago|reply
http://opensource.appleseedproject.org
[+] [-] abalog|15 years ago|reply
Whether i'm right or wrong, only time will tell. On the subject of de-throning facebook, that will be hard. Though it is do-able but for the moment, let's not kid ourselves, Facebook will remain the beast and king of Social media for while.
They are just to big and efficiently run to go down like myspace.
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsz0|15 years ago|reply
With 687 million users if each user spent 15 minutes switching to an alternative it would take a combined time investment of about 20,000 years for Facebook to disappear.
Of course they don't have to lose all their users to become irrelevant..
If Facebook's growth stopped today and they began to lose users at a rate of about 90,000 per day it would take 10 years to lose 50% of their users.
[+] [-] pointillistic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bemmu|15 years ago|reply
There's always churn. Even as FB was growing, a part of those new users were always churning out. Each user makes their own decisions about staying in the system, they are not a sentient whole except as far as media or changes to the system might affect larger groups at once.
I imagine your tendency to leave the system to be some sort of a graph. Maybe you are 30% likely to leave and never ever come back after your first day on Facebook. After using it for a week, maybe that gets reduced to 20%. After a month, maybe you are even more unlikely to leave. If they had for example 1 million people joining per day, then 300k would be quitting per day. If the next day all of USA had been tapped out and only 200k people joined, that would look like a sudden -100k turn to decline, even though the trend was same as always.
What happens now will depend on what that churn graph looks like. Maybe it's sticky enough that they'll be able to keep a big part of the users they got and over time make it even stickier to keep even more. There will be improvements to get those users to be more active on the site. Even if there was no more user growth in the USA, there could be growth in the amount of time and money the existing userbase spends on the site.
[+] [-] pessimizer|14 years ago|reply
Another graph that would be relevant would be the likelihood of people who have been exposed to facebook through their friends, media saturation and advertising, yet still haven't joined, to be tempted to join later. In other words - facebook has already saturated the internet world's radar, and people who haven't joined already are completely aware of its existance, function, and benefits, and still not joining. Those will be very expensive users to get, so IMO retention should be their major focus. I stayed through the "6-month updates-full-of-farmville problem", because they fixed it, they barely kept me through the "1-and-1/2-year privacy panic" after backing off on some portion of their stridency (and profitability per user), and they lost me completely, along with a number of other people I know, after the "2-year bored-to-shit-with-people-I-went-to-HS-with-telling-me-where-they-went-to-lunch-and-what-they-think-of-Obama lull" which I'm not sure they can do anything about.
If a large cohort of similarly aged users hit some peak that facebook is unable or unwilling to iron out at the same time, and there's no supply of cheap "Wow, there's a place on the internet where I can keep track of all of my college buddies!" users to replace them, there could be a precipitous fall.
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthony_franco|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextparadigms|15 years ago|reply
If there actually was "something else" right now, a paradigm shifting social network, the decay of Facebook would've been even faster, but unfortunately there isn't much to replace it right now, but I think there will be by the end of the year.
[+] [-] abbasmehdi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ern|15 years ago|reply
Perhaps having separate Walls for different groups is the next step.
[+] [-] auganov|15 years ago|reply
For me it's a socially filtered spam [funny stuff?] site.
If some site can encourage people to have meaningful communication again it will take on Facebook, no doubt. Get 3 of my important friends on the site and I'm sold. Then Facebook just becomes a big contact list. And at that point I'm not sure where it goes. It might be a contact-list site for a long long time.
Facebook might not die as a website, but competitors will definitely takeaway a lot of value from it. And so far I don't see it becoming much more than a contact-list.
And keep in mind that the less engaged the users are the less ad revenue there will be. I have no doubt that as we're speaking right now users are less and less engaged with the site. Growth is still fast so the revenue is rising, but once that stops it will crumble.
The will have to get more aggressive with ads or people will simply stop to notice them at all. Or perhaps start selling more of the user data. At this point there's not much you can do.
Also the growth they see outside of the western world might be very much junk. I'm in Poland, Facebook craze is already old news here yet I get english ads? It's great that AT&T has high speed internet for 20$, but I'm sorry, I cannot purchase that here.
Everybody knows ad revenue is tricky. Facebook is no different.
Nobody is going bankrupt, I'm not saying that. Facebook is here and it will stay for few more years for sure, but to compare it to google is crazy. Google can be conquered too I'm sure, but Facebook definitely makes for a far more fragile target.
Personally I'd say it will simply decay and we might not see another social site being that big in a long time to come. Facebook has half of the world on there, cool, but guess what, I am not connecting with those people and never will.
Facebook managed to get a lot of people registered in one place, but has it managed to truly connect a lot of people? Not at all.
[+] [-] moultano|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teej|15 years ago|reply
The article clearly discloses the inherent issues at play.
> Going forward, we’ll be watching closely to see what longer-term trends emerge. Bugs in the Facebook advertising tool that we draw this information from, seasonal changes like college graduations, and other short-term factors, can influence numbers month to month and obscure what’s really happening.
[+] [-] threejay|14 years ago|reply
For reference: 1) Highschool friends and family who are incredibly religious/right wing/etc 2) Friends from skiing, many of whom make a living on the mountain, who are about as vile as one can imagine 3) Friends from college or work, which consists mostly of PharmD's, MD's, and nurses. 4) Other random friends from startup stuff, partys, etc
[+] [-] chriserin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigoviolet|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] int3rnaut|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jocote|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SebMortelmans|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerrya|15 years ago|reply
You know who else lost nearly 6 million users?
Yep. AOL.
[+] [-] mscarborough|15 years ago|reply
I wonder what the breakdown would be for the reasons for quitting.