I swear Facebook is slowly turning into Lotus Notes. It's got the the little messenger panel on the right. It's got the clunky mail client, it's got the calendar and you can invite people to a meeting/party. You have to use it because everyone else uses it and everyone else uses it because it's been around for years.
It's not fun or simple to use any more and you have to be on your guard about what you share and who might see it.
It's not really surprising that teenagers aren't into it.
The transformation won't be complete until they make it so F5 clears your credentials and logs you out of Facebook.
That was always my favorite Lotus Notes feature. Nothing like trying to refresh your email in a hurry when someone has just sent you something and having to enter your stupid credentials again.
Could not disagree more. As someone who has been on facebook since 2005, I'm using it more every year than I've ever used before. I think the facebook product is extremely well thought out. For example, I make extensive use of the post-level privacy features which allows me to post items that I don't want certain people to see.
I'm reminded of what JWZ said to someone working on groupware around the time that Facebook was started:
>So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
This. Got too many friends of my parents on Facebook and then one of them started talking about things I had shared (or friends had shared, I don't know) to my mother, which upset her. So rather than censor myself all the time, I took a good hard look at what value Facebook produced for me, realized it's just a waste of time, and deleted it. Don't miss it all.
It's not lotus notes until they seriously screw up the ui. It's actually almost inconceivable that facebook's ui could become that screwed up, regardless of how much you despise facebook.
My company still uses Lotus Notes for email. Is this common? I've talked to an IBM employee who vehemently defended it as a great piece of enterprise software. As did the IT folks in my company. Conceivably folks trying to keep in touch with old friends and relatives will use Facebook no matter what. Just like companies using Lotus Notes because it's too expensive to change.
I'm not a FB fan, nor have I developed Notes apps in a good 8+ years, but Facebook might be like notes in another way: Both seem to do what they do, in their time, better than anything else out there.
When I saw Notes being mentioned, flashbacks of LotusScript, NotesSQL and came, especially it's non-relational DB (nosql a decade earlier than the rage it became later).
Notes incredibly clunky mail and document system did a few things well before anything else -- great two way replication of data for online and offline work. Domino took Notes apps and rendered them for the web, allowing complex web apps to be built in a time where there was little like it.
I didn't hesitate to leave Notes, but it wasn't for lack of respect, it was just one of the half dozen or so stacks I worked in at the time. Every line of code we write will be crap in 5 years. Every stack we use will be crap in 5 years. Everything's new, but everything's the same too.
You can't be serious. Facebook is used daily by hundreds of millions of people. The interface is heavily data driven and widely understood.
What's clunky about the "mail client"? And compared to it's supposed competitor - Snapchat? Really? I doubt you've actually used Lotus Notes. And perhaps you have some suggestion on how they could improve the messaging interface, but I doubt you could point out anything terribly clunky.
98% of people I know use facebook and are not confused by the interface nor do they complain about the interface. Personally I find it very well designed. Almost everything I need to do is easy to find and features are discoverable. The only significant confusion I have sometimes is around user list management.
> I swear Facebook is slowly turning into Lotus Notes.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Things like electrical power, indoor plumbing, etc., used to be viewed as very sexy new innovations and are now "boring", yet they have been massively successful.
I think FB is struggling to provide a platform for others to build on that doesn't turn into a spam inbox. "Lotus Notes" represents the pendulum swinging away from the 30 farmville viral invites per day that was the recent past.
Am I the only person over 30 that uses Facebook, doesn't think it sucks, and doesn't think it is dying? In fact, for my purposes, I think it is a great experience.
Let me explain.
I am quite involved in the automotive community. In the last year or two it seems like almost every manufacturer, tuning shop, engineering shop etc. has set up a GOOD Facebook page and starting posting tons of cool and relevant stuff every day. News, project updates, pictures of upcoming work, event info and pictures...
I feel as if life could not be better right now for the person that wants to get plugged in to the automotive scene.
Log in to Facebook, find the page for your favorite manufacturer or shop and like it, add all your car buddies as friends, ignore/unfollow the shit you don't like, get invited to some private groups by your friends, etc.
I don't know, seems like for me there are quite a lot of people using Facebook that actually like how it works and what it enables.
No, you're not. The reason is that Facebook doesn't suck, almost everyone uses it, it isn't dying, and it is a great user experience.
What you are describing is what the vast majority of Facebook users feel. However, that's not very interesting, nor does it get read when you put it in a headline.
I'm over 40 and quite like Facebook. Everyone I know is on there from my boss to my grandmother, and I hear that in mind when I post. It's the main channel with which I discover what my family are up to, since I have emigrated. That said I can see why young people would hate it.
While I want them to be true, the claims that Facebook is dying don't seem to be supported by data.
Facebook's recent engagement report (also posted on HN) showed that the percentage of users 25-31 has grown by 32%. The percentage of people 35-51 grew by 41%. And the percentage of those over 55 grew by 88%.
What other commenters probably mean to say is that Facebook is dying among teenagers. Even so, the website still has over 13 million teen users. And the users in the older groups are arguably more valuable from a financial standpoint because they have direct access to more disposable income.
Maybe you're skeptical of the report because Facebook helped generate it. Okay, I can understand that. But even if the numbers have been inflated to benefit Facebook's platform, I think you'll be hard-pressed to find any legitimate, large-scale study that doesn't show significant growth in the 25+ demographic.
Uncool? I think so, and a relatively small demographic of young people agrees with me. Dying? Definitely not.
The problem is that their potential base of new users is rapidly diminishing, while they've seemingly started burning the younger end. They may very well be a very long way from irrelevance, but teens grow up. If the teens who are now starting to turn away from Facebook keep disliking it also when it becomes socially possible for them to totally ignore it, and younger kids does not take it up as much, then that will have ripple effects also amongst older users (e.g. my mother uses Facebook mostly to keep up with pictures of grandchildren and the like).
And these things can turn very quickly. I remember more social networks that used to be cool than I care for (anyone remember sixdegrees.com from 1997?)
Why should it be cool? Why can't it just be useful?
There are many, many uncool people in the world, or people who couldn't care less what is cool, and who just want to keep in touch with some mates, or find out when the next meeting of their local cycling club is, or find out what was played on the most recent podcast they listened to, or, or, or, a hundred other uses.
The truth is, it's fun for journalists and, well, the rest of us, to point out that Facebook isn't cool. Maybe you don't find it fun, and maybe some others do.
It's the same reason "hipsters" feel pride for finding the latest band cool before anybody else does - it's just some vague social currency. By pointing out that something which was once cool is no longer cool, you are distancing yourself from it and gaining some of that currency, thus making yourself cooler. So, that's why it should be cool. To help it's users be cool.
I'm not saying this is in any way a useful point of view to take, or that it in any way affects how useful Facebook is, but I'm fairly sure that this is what is going on. Plain old-fashioned shallow trend-setting and trend-following. Playground economics.
>> Facebook is so uncool even the president of the United States knows it.
I'm trying to parse the actual meaning of this editorialized headline (the actual headline is "What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Cafe").
Does this equate the President of the United States to being one of the least clued-in/laggard Internet users? Otherwise what does "even the President of the US" mean?
To be fair to the headline, that line is a direct quote from the article. It also seems to be the section most relevant to HN. I feel like a post that only contained the text under the 'Failure' subheading, with a little intro would have made it to the top of HN as well.
As for what "even the President of the US" means, to me there's this image of big organizations (governments included) the world over being clunky and clueless when it comes to social media and the internet, not being able to innovate or adapt new methods of interaction, or even understand what the public is doing, and just generally being one or two steps behind the young internet savvy crowd.
It may not be true, especially for individuals within the organization, but it's still certainly the expectation these days.
This is actually a great milestone. It is hard to build a sustainable billion dollar business on "being cool" because any minute society might decide you're no longer cool and move on to the next shiny object. Just ask myspace.
Facebook isn't a billion dollar business because it is the new shiny object on the block. it is used because it delivers good old value of helping you stay in touch with your friends.
>>Facebook isn't a billion dollar business because it is the new shiny object on the block. it is used because it delivers good old value of helping you stay in touch with your friends.
Not much of a defensible competitive advantage imo.
I case of such companies like Facebook there is no point to say that they are dead. In fact there are 2 Facebooks: Facebook as a company and FACEBOOK as a presence in modern culture. The second is much more important, then the first one. For many people FACEBOOK is the way they act on the web and communicate with others. Even if Facebook is not growing any more (or even shrinking) it still the only medium that has a digital picture of relations between 1 billion people and that makes is something more then just a company. Of course if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age you have a lot of things that you wish to keep in secret. But still Facebook is one of first app we install on a new mobile device.
I do not see any comparison between Fb and Microsoft or Fb and Apple. Facebook do not produce any goods etc. It just mapping relations and other features of people into digital data.
>Of course if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age you have a lot of things that you wish to keep in secret.
Someone on here the other day made a comment about the whole teenager thing and it was a pretty good one. It was to the affect of: teenagers don't need to be on Facebook yet because they still see all their friends and social circles, that becomes more difficult to manage you as move away for college. So perhaps that's when they may turn to Facebook when they need a more centralized way to do chat, pictures, statuses, etc.
The "Facebook is uncool and dying" story trend is getting so old. It's not dying. The only metric that anyone ever cites is that young teens aren't signing up as often anymore, but they don't mention that user growth on Facebook is still strong, or that most of those young teens will sign up once they hit an age where its utility for them is higher (so an age where they don't interact with 90% of their social circle every day). They are still rolling out really cool new features (Graph search, user-specific trending topics). They are way ahead of the game in mobile (already moving to having multiple specialized apps for different functionalities that deeplink to each other, rather than a single app that tries to pack all of the desktop functionality into it).
Facebook is not dead, dying, or sick. It's in fantastic shape.
Even Zuckerberg doesn't care if Facebook is 'uncool':
“Maybe electricity was cool when it first came out, but pretty quickly people stopped talking about it because it’s not the new thing, the real question you want to track at that point is are fewer people turning on their lights because it’s less cool?”
But Facebook is not electricity. At best they're a type of light source. The alternative is to Facebook is not living in the dark, but switching to another type of light bulb. It might take some time before something comes along you like well enough (heavens knows finding a LED bulb I don't hate have taken a few attempts, as the 10 different makes of LED bulbs presently in my living room proves), but the change from one type of electrical bulb to another is a whole lot less problematic than going back to candles.
The threshold is far lower.
For starters, the population in general is vastly more internet savvy. And contenders for all or part of their space is shooting up all over the place. And parts of their audience wants to be different and stand out from their parents or others.
That strikes me as hybris. Facebook is not some kind of radical new discovery, it's not even a radical new invention. That's like pretending Elvis Presley or The Beatles invented music because they had a huge market share.
The question's been asked "can a company die without an obvious challenger?" Yes, it can.
A company, platform, or technology can "die" in the sense that it loses the initiative, and more importantly, the ability to drive an industry and/or conversation, even though it hasn't yet died.
Apple was "dead" through most of the 1990s. It simply didn't matter, outside of the graphics and design areas, and for a very small cadre of fervent fans. The turnaround shocked me.
IBM very nearly died in the early 1990s, as its place as the center of the business computing world was shaken by anti-trust actions, Microsoft, and the upsurge in Unix vendors. The company's never fully regained its former footing, though it did recover largely.
Microsoft has been in the process of dying for most of the past decade. A highly symbolic moment for me was when The Economist newspaper ran a cover showing the leaders in tech: Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Microsoft wasn't even mentioned (it reminds me of an earlier revealing moment when the CEO of Visa International named the company's biggest rivals: MasterCard, AmEx, and Microsoft -- I guess it didn't pay to Discover...).
Sun Microsystems was fingered for the walking dead as Linux became ascendant, with its acquisition by Oracle (a panic response of both companies, coming at least five years too late to do either any good) coming long after it was obvious the company had not only staggered but was mortally wounded.
One thing to realize is that a fading icon is often not replaced by a direct competitor, but by one which addresses short
Facebook has dominated Silicon Valley for the past 5 years, stealing initiative from Google (who seems to be somewhat winning it back). Part of the situation is that "traditional" social networking is becoming passe, in part because it's become too Byzantine, and too intrusive. Social networks -- real social networks, not the online instantiations of them -- work best when the groups are relatively small, Dunbar's number is respected, and there's a level of insularity around any given group. TheFacebook at Harvard had those features. Facebook, Inc., 1 billion served, doesn't, and cannot. Another secret is that one of the secret sauces of social is photo sharing (still hard if you don't have your own dedicated server), and that services are sprouting up to offer this (Imgur, Snapchat, etc.), which is essentially disrupting the former Social glue much the way Craigslist gutted classified newspaper advertising in the late 1990s.
I'd like to think that the constant drumbeat of surveillance state revelations we can thank heros and patriots Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glen Greenwald for are having an effect, though I think that may be giving the general public a bit too much credit. Not totally sure of that though.
You've forgotten one of the best and, in this situation, most appropriate examples of a company effectively dying without an obvious challenger: AOL.
When dial-up was the only option to get "on-line", AOL was dominant. Those discs (and later CDs) were everywhere. The problem was, even though providing a dial-up connection is what made AOL into the behemoth it had become, I'd argue the real value proposition of AOL in the mid-to-late 90s was the "walled garden" version of the internet that they had created.
So, instead of bolstering their offerings in the "walled garden" arena, they fretted over the death-grip they had on their dial-up subscribers long, long after it became apparent than DSL/Cable had won the battle for your connection. (No seriously, they still have that death-grip...have you tried canceling a free AOL trial account recently?)
AOL "died", as most oversized companies do, by failing to pivot toward an emerging market in favor of holding on to their "sure thing". Look at your other examples: IBM failed to pivot away from mainframes (their sure thing) to PCs (the emerging market). Microsoft has failed to pivot from OS/Office software to Cloud/distributed computing. Apple, eventually, did manage to pivot from graphics and design to mobile devices. Google...well, Google pivots so frequently I'm surprised they don't collectively vomit from dizziness (though, they do still have a worrying dependence on search advertising for "real" revenue).
The reason I think AOL is probably the most apt example for Facebook to consider, though, is that Facebook was the primary beneficiary of AOL's failure to capitalize on the "walled garden" internet. Now, Facebook dominates this realm, but the question is for how long? You're idea that they should pivot towards photo sharing is interesting...but I couldn't say for sure (or, if I could I'm making waaay less money than I should be).
"Social networks -- real social networks, not the online instantiations of them -- work best when the groups are relatively small, Dunbar's number is respected, and there's a level of insularity around any given group."
Agreed, and to add to your point, group identity is also a strong motivator for close-knit networks.
Forums are a good example of this. It's partly why I think communities (and the software they use) centred around a specific interest or activity will, for certain kinds of community, ultimately win over what we now call social networks.
It's the tools that are lacking: at the moment it seems far easier to set up a facebook group than work out what a community needs and provide it without technical knowledge.
(I have an interest in this area because tools for communities are what I left my job to work on: http://microco.sm).
Great that you touched on photo sharing. It's 2014 and it's still difficult to get photos from a camera to your computer to your friends. Publishing a simple web page is still deemed too difficult, discovering and managing contacts, and mass mailing them is hard.
Facebook basically stepped into the niche above. It adds instant messenging, and some automated feed organisation.
To some extent Email, IM and a little web space would suffice as well as some photo resizing tools! OSs, file managers and browsers could really help here, and if these tasks had been far easier to do in the first place Facebook wouldn't have even become what it is. Privacy and authentication for dummies is the other thing that has to be made and integrated into a solution.
With a little work Facebook could be decentralised, and having your Mum as a contact wouldn't make your social network toolset uncool.
> "I'd like to think that the constant drumbeat of surveillance state revelations we can thank heros and patriots Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glen Greenwald for are having an effect, though I think that may be giving the general public a bit too much credit. Not totally sure of that though."
I don't think that it's that. How many people do you know who have really changed their online behaviour as a response to those revelations? How many people have started consistently using GPG for e-mail and OTR for chats, have stopped using cloud services like G-Mail, Dropbox etc.? I don't think it's that many even among the tech-savvy crowd let alone the general public.
What I do think about FB is that younger people always have a tendency of trying to distinguish themselves from their elder siblings and more importantly their parents. Both of those groups are on FB which makes it less attractive for them due to the aforementioned point and the fact that they're no longer among themselves when their parents are watching their timeline.
But I have the impression that there may be second change underway in that existing users are starting to experience sharing fatigue. Unfortunately, there are no numbers yet to back this up, it's based on anecdotal evidence and my own experience. What I mean by that is that people are getting tired of constantly putting thought into what to publicly share on their profile and try to maintain the image they're trying to project.
I personally rarely if ever share anything anymore. The two things I still do use FB for are messaging and reading about news and events from local venues like bars and clubs. The messaging component could be easily replaced by another solution like WhatsApp and I think FB knows that. This is probably why the released the standalone messenger app to be able to better compete on that front, but Snapchat is still eating FB's lunch with certain demographics. In fact, I think Zuckerberg is aware of this whole problem. He went on record yesterday saying that they plan to release more mobile standalone apps in the future thereby unbundling FB's different functionalities. In my opinion this is a move to adapt to a changing market where there is a diminished interest in having one unified platform like FB.
We're watching all FB activity and we're stumped
What social networks should the NSA target?
How can the NSA deal with the impermanence of snapchat content?
"They" being the 18-35s, prime hacker demographic, main target of surveillance.
>According to White House background, provided to me after he left, they met to discuss how to get more 18-34 year-olds to sign up for the coverage under the Affordable Care Act. (The law depends on 18-34 year-olds signing up for healthcare.)
Doesn't the law _compel_ 18-34 year-olds to sign up for health insurance?
I think this is in part due to people realizing how much data FB is keeping on them, and then selling. Educated people don't want to be a commodity. Older people are slower to learn/change, but young people are already done with FB.
FB is bloated and appeals to the lowest common denominator. They created a set of easy tools that make the internet more accessible to people that are not technologically knowledgeable. Skype and photobucket and twitter are far too complicated for someone who thinks Outlook is email and Yahoo is the internet. Once people master how to use the tools on FB many will realize that there are better alternatives, some that aren't going to track them all across the internet.
However, there is no single alternative that aggregates these tools in a better fashion.
I was just writing a proposal last night for a new social site to replace FB/g+ that is freemium subscription based with a key selling point that there is no tracking, no ads, and a high level of privacy. It would have a base set of features and that's it. No bloat. No expansion. Just sharing with friends.
It doesn't need to be a billion dollar company. Profit margins don't have to be huge. It just needs to be profitable and deliver a needed service to the niche of people that care about privacy. The rest will follow with network effects. If the tool is effective people will use it forever even without feature creep, i.e. usenet, IRC, HN
>None of this kept me from experiencing immediate, full-on, feverish anxiety.
>And then—for the first time in nearly an hour—I could work. I found that I was so accustomed to his voice, how he holds his body, his aura, that ignoring him in person is as easy as ignoring a TV. Easier, in fact. He stops being the president and starts being That Guy Who You See In Tweets, That Guy Who Gives Speeches, That Guy.
Interesting how your mind can put the president into the same bucket as leaving the news on in the background.
[+] [-] SandB0x|12 years ago|reply
It's not fun or simple to use any more and you have to be on your guard about what you share and who might see it.
It's not really surprising that teenagers aren't into it.
[+] [-] JunkDNA|12 years ago|reply
That was always my favorite Lotus Notes feature. Nothing like trying to refresh your email in a hurry when someone has just sent you something and having to enter your stupid credentials again.
[+] [-] arethuza|12 years ago|reply
Ouch - that is a bit harsh.
Like SAP, Notes was created to allow Lucifer to interact with our world [1]
1 http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/05/28/2143219/allegedly-rig...
Edit: In fairness to SAP - other large scale ERP systems are probably how other eldritch abominations seek to gain control of us.
[+] [-] zaidf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epistasis|12 years ago|reply
>So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
[+] [-] eloff|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tloewald|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dferlemann|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shas3|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j45|12 years ago|reply
When I saw Notes being mentioned, flashbacks of LotusScript, NotesSQL and came, especially it's non-relational DB (nosql a decade earlier than the rage it became later).
Notes incredibly clunky mail and document system did a few things well before anything else -- great two way replication of data for online and offline work. Domino took Notes apps and rendered them for the web, allowing complex web apps to be built in a time where there was little like it.
I didn't hesitate to leave Notes, but it wasn't for lack of respect, it was just one of the half dozen or so stacks I worked in at the time. Every line of code we write will be crap in 5 years. Every stack we use will be crap in 5 years. Everything's new, but everything's the same too.
[+] [-] crystaln|12 years ago|reply
What's clunky about the "mail client"? And compared to it's supposed competitor - Snapchat? Really? I doubt you've actually used Lotus Notes. And perhaps you have some suggestion on how they could improve the messaging interface, but I doubt you could point out anything terribly clunky.
98% of people I know use facebook and are not confused by the interface nor do they complain about the interface. Personally I find it very well designed. Almost everything I need to do is easy to find and features are discoverable. The only significant confusion I have sometimes is around user list management.
This false schadenfreude is really silly.
[+] [-] grandalf|12 years ago|reply
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Things like electrical power, indoor plumbing, etc., used to be viewed as very sexy new innovations and are now "boring", yet they have been massively successful.
I think FB is struggling to provide a platform for others to build on that doesn't turn into a spam inbox. "Lotus Notes" represents the pendulum swinging away from the 30 farmville viral invites per day that was the recent past.
[+] [-] hrvbr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomkin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mberning|12 years ago|reply
Let me explain.
I am quite involved in the automotive community. In the last year or two it seems like almost every manufacturer, tuning shop, engineering shop etc. has set up a GOOD Facebook page and starting posting tons of cool and relevant stuff every day. News, project updates, pictures of upcoming work, event info and pictures...
I feel as if life could not be better right now for the person that wants to get plugged in to the automotive scene.
Log in to Facebook, find the page for your favorite manufacturer or shop and like it, add all your car buddies as friends, ignore/unfollow the shit you don't like, get invited to some private groups by your friends, etc.
I don't know, seems like for me there are quite a lot of people using Facebook that actually like how it works and what it enables.
[+] [-] mattdeboard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_watcher|12 years ago|reply
What you are describing is what the vast majority of Facebook users feel. However, that's not very interesting, nor does it get read when you put it in a headline.
[+] [-] tim333|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinhj|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hawkharris|12 years ago|reply
Facebook's recent engagement report (also posted on HN) showed that the percentage of users 25-31 has grown by 32%. The percentage of people 35-51 grew by 41%. And the percentage of those over 55 grew by 88%.
What other commenters probably mean to say is that Facebook is dying among teenagers. Even so, the website still has over 13 million teen users. And the users in the older groups are arguably more valuable from a financial standpoint because they have direct access to more disposable income.
Maybe you're skeptical of the report because Facebook helped generate it. Okay, I can understand that. But even if the numbers have been inflated to benefit Facebook's platform, I think you'll be hard-pressed to find any legitimate, large-scale study that doesn't show significant growth in the 25+ demographic.
Uncool? I think so, and a relatively small demographic of young people agrees with me. Dying? Definitely not.
http://istrategylabs.com/2014/01/3-million-teens-leave-faceb...
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
And these things can turn very quickly. I remember more social networks that used to be cool than I care for (anyone remember sixdegrees.com from 1997?)
[+] [-] bloat|12 years ago|reply
There are many, many uncool people in the world, or people who couldn't care less what is cool, and who just want to keep in touch with some mates, or find out when the next meeting of their local cycling club is, or find out what was played on the most recent podcast they listened to, or, or, or, a hundred other uses.
[+] [-] basicallydan|12 years ago|reply
The truth is, it's fun for journalists and, well, the rest of us, to point out that Facebook isn't cool. Maybe you don't find it fun, and maybe some others do.
It's the same reason "hipsters" feel pride for finding the latest band cool before anybody else does - it's just some vague social currency. By pointing out that something which was once cool is no longer cool, you are distancing yourself from it and gaining some of that currency, thus making yourself cooler. So, that's why it should be cool. To help it's users be cool.
I'm not saying this is in any way a useful point of view to take, or that it in any way affects how useful Facebook is, but I'm fairly sure that this is what is going on. Plain old-fashioned shallow trend-setting and trend-following. Playground economics.
[+] [-] r0h1n|12 years ago|reply
I'm trying to parse the actual meaning of this editorialized headline (the actual headline is "What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Cafe").
Does this equate the President of the United States to being one of the least clued-in/laggard Internet users? Otherwise what does "even the President of the US" mean?
[+] [-] mwill|12 years ago|reply
As for what "even the President of the US" means, to me there's this image of big organizations (governments included) the world over being clunky and clueless when it comes to social media and the internet, not being able to innovate or adapt new methods of interaction, or even understand what the public is doing, and just generally being one or two steps behind the young internet savvy crowd.
It may not be true, especially for individuals within the organization, but it's still certainly the expectation these days.
[+] [-] zaidf|12 years ago|reply
Facebook isn't a billion dollar business because it is the new shiny object on the block. it is used because it delivers good old value of helping you stay in touch with your friends.
[+] [-] wavefunction|12 years ago|reply
Not much of a defensible competitive advantage imo.
[+] [-] bqpro1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TarpitCarnivore|12 years ago|reply
Someone on here the other day made a comment about the whole teenager thing and it was a pretty good one. It was to the affect of: teenagers don't need to be on Facebook yet because they still see all their friends and social circles, that becomes more difficult to manage you as move away for college. So perhaps that's when they may turn to Facebook when they need a more centralized way to do chat, pictures, statuses, etc.
[+] [-] the_watcher|12 years ago|reply
Facebook is not dead, dying, or sick. It's in fantastic shape.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|12 years ago|reply
“Maybe electricity was cool when it first came out, but pretty quickly people stopped talking about it because it’s not the new thing, the real question you want to track at that point is are fewer people turning on their lights because it’s less cool?”
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
The threshold is far lower.
For starters, the population in general is vastly more internet savvy. And contenders for all or part of their space is shooting up all over the place. And parts of their audience wants to be different and stand out from their parents or others.
[+] [-] jdimov|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PavlovsCat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck2|12 years ago|reply
Is having your own website cool again yet? Wake me up when we're there.
[+] [-] smackfu|12 years ago|reply
Yes, it's cool, but the only way to get people to visit it are to post it to Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, Reddit, etc.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
A company, platform, or technology can "die" in the sense that it loses the initiative, and more importantly, the ability to drive an industry and/or conversation, even though it hasn't yet died.
Apple was "dead" through most of the 1990s. It simply didn't matter, outside of the graphics and design areas, and for a very small cadre of fervent fans. The turnaround shocked me.
IBM very nearly died in the early 1990s, as its place as the center of the business computing world was shaken by anti-trust actions, Microsoft, and the upsurge in Unix vendors. The company's never fully regained its former footing, though it did recover largely.
Microsoft has been in the process of dying for most of the past decade. A highly symbolic moment for me was when The Economist newspaper ran a cover showing the leaders in tech: Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Microsoft wasn't even mentioned (it reminds me of an earlier revealing moment when the CEO of Visa International named the company's biggest rivals: MasterCard, AmEx, and Microsoft -- I guess it didn't pay to Discover...).
Sun Microsystems was fingered for the walking dead as Linux became ascendant, with its acquisition by Oracle (a panic response of both companies, coming at least five years too late to do either any good) coming long after it was obvious the company had not only staggered but was mortally wounded.
One thing to realize is that a fading icon is often not replaced by a direct competitor, but by one which addresses short
Facebook has dominated Silicon Valley for the past 5 years, stealing initiative from Google (who seems to be somewhat winning it back). Part of the situation is that "traditional" social networking is becoming passe, in part because it's become too Byzantine, and too intrusive. Social networks -- real social networks, not the online instantiations of them -- work best when the groups are relatively small, Dunbar's number is respected, and there's a level of insularity around any given group. TheFacebook at Harvard had those features. Facebook, Inc., 1 billion served, doesn't, and cannot. Another secret is that one of the secret sauces of social is photo sharing (still hard if you don't have your own dedicated server), and that services are sprouting up to offer this (Imgur, Snapchat, etc.), which is essentially disrupting the former Social glue much the way Craigslist gutted classified newspaper advertising in the late 1990s.
I'd like to think that the constant drumbeat of surveillance state revelations we can thank heros and patriots Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glen Greenwald for are having an effect, though I think that may be giving the general public a bit too much credit. Not totally sure of that though.
[+] [-] jballanc|12 years ago|reply
When dial-up was the only option to get "on-line", AOL was dominant. Those discs (and later CDs) were everywhere. The problem was, even though providing a dial-up connection is what made AOL into the behemoth it had become, I'd argue the real value proposition of AOL in the mid-to-late 90s was the "walled garden" version of the internet that they had created.
So, instead of bolstering their offerings in the "walled garden" arena, they fretted over the death-grip they had on their dial-up subscribers long, long after it became apparent than DSL/Cable had won the battle for your connection. (No seriously, they still have that death-grip...have you tried canceling a free AOL trial account recently?)
AOL "died", as most oversized companies do, by failing to pivot toward an emerging market in favor of holding on to their "sure thing". Look at your other examples: IBM failed to pivot away from mainframes (their sure thing) to PCs (the emerging market). Microsoft has failed to pivot from OS/Office software to Cloud/distributed computing. Apple, eventually, did manage to pivot from graphics and design to mobile devices. Google...well, Google pivots so frequently I'm surprised they don't collectively vomit from dizziness (though, they do still have a worrying dependence on search advertising for "real" revenue).
The reason I think AOL is probably the most apt example for Facebook to consider, though, is that Facebook was the primary beneficiary of AOL's failure to capitalize on the "walled garden" internet. Now, Facebook dominates this realm, but the question is for how long? You're idea that they should pivot towards photo sharing is interesting...but I couldn't say for sure (or, if I could I'm making waaay less money than I should be).
[+] [-] motter|12 years ago|reply
Agreed, and to add to your point, group identity is also a strong motivator for close-knit networks.
Forums are a good example of this. It's partly why I think communities (and the software they use) centred around a specific interest or activity will, for certain kinds of community, ultimately win over what we now call social networks.
It's the tools that are lacking: at the moment it seems far easier to set up a facebook group than work out what a community needs and provide it without technical knowledge.
(I have an interest in this area because tools for communities are what I left my job to work on: http://microco.sm).
[+] [-] nettletea|12 years ago|reply
Facebook basically stepped into the niche above. It adds instant messenging, and some automated feed organisation.
To some extent Email, IM and a little web space would suffice as well as some photo resizing tools! OSs, file managers and browsers could really help here, and if these tasks had been far easier to do in the first place Facebook wouldn't have even become what it is. Privacy and authentication for dummies is the other thing that has to be made and integrated into a solution.
With a little work Facebook could be decentralised, and having your Mum as a contact wouldn't make your social network toolset uncool.
[+] [-] this_user|12 years ago|reply
I don't think that it's that. How many people do you know who have really changed their online behaviour as a response to those revelations? How many people have started consistently using GPG for e-mail and OTR for chats, have stopped using cloud services like G-Mail, Dropbox etc.? I don't think it's that many even among the tech-savvy crowd let alone the general public.
What I do think about FB is that younger people always have a tendency of trying to distinguish themselves from their elder siblings and more importantly their parents. Both of those groups are on FB which makes it less attractive for them due to the aforementioned point and the fact that they're no longer among themselves when their parents are watching their timeline.
But I have the impression that there may be second change underway in that existing users are starting to experience sharing fatigue. Unfortunately, there are no numbers yet to back this up, it's based on anecdotal evidence and my own experience. What I mean by that is that people are getting tired of constantly putting thought into what to publicly share on their profile and try to maintain the image they're trying to project.
I personally rarely if ever share anything anymore. The two things I still do use FB for are messaging and reading about news and events from local venues like bars and clubs. The messaging component could be easily replaced by another solution like WhatsApp and I think FB knows that. This is probably why the released the standalone messenger app to be able to better compete on that front, but Snapchat is still eating FB's lunch with certain demographics. In fact, I think Zuckerberg is aware of this whole problem. He went on record yesterday saying that they plan to release more mobile standalone apps in the future thereby unbundling FB's different functionalities. In my opinion this is a move to adapt to a changing market where there is a diminished interest in having one unified platform like FB.
[+] [-] wanda|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdfjkl|12 years ago|reply
What's with this president cult. He's just another human being.
[+] [-] vincie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] triangleman|12 years ago|reply
Doesn't the law _compel_ 18-34 year-olds to sign up for health insurance?
[+] [-] jgreen10|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] betawolf33|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canvia|12 years ago|reply
FB is bloated and appeals to the lowest common denominator. They created a set of easy tools that make the internet more accessible to people that are not technologically knowledgeable. Skype and photobucket and twitter are far too complicated for someone who thinks Outlook is email and Yahoo is the internet. Once people master how to use the tools on FB many will realize that there are better alternatives, some that aren't going to track them all across the internet.
However, there is no single alternative that aggregates these tools in a better fashion.
I was just writing a proposal last night for a new social site to replace FB/g+ that is freemium subscription based with a key selling point that there is no tracking, no ads, and a high level of privacy. It would have a base set of features and that's it. No bloat. No expansion. Just sharing with friends.
It doesn't need to be a billion dollar company. Profit margins don't have to be huge. It just needs to be profitable and deliver a needed service to the niche of people that care about privacy. The rest will follow with network effects. If the tool is effective people will use it forever even without feature creep, i.e. usenet, IRC, HN
[+] [-] KVFinn|12 years ago|reply
Interesting how your mind can put the president into the same bucket as leaving the news on in the background.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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