I stopped two years ago. As far as I am aware I'm not missing much.
I did have a lot of old friends on FB, but I didn't stay in contact with them in real life. I was just lazily snooping on their lives, without giving anything in return.
To be completely honest, I don't have space or time for them in my real life. It isn't because I didn't like them anymore, it was simply that I didn't have the time or energy to stay in proper contact. I had also moved away.
I had the realisation that some people are supposed to drift apart. The people who are important to you will remain in contact with, and it doesn't need Facebook spying on that friendship to enable it to keep functioning.
I also stopped using Facebook, shortly before the revelations of massive surveillance. At that time I was convinced I shouldn't be in the arms of companies, stopped using many services and started self-hosting stuff. People didn't understand me.
Then, Edward Snowden revealed that the possible abstract threats I wanted to avoid can in fact become real. We are fortunate to have received this information. People still didn't understand me.
In the beginning of my time without the services I clearly felt that something was missing, but it wasn't hard to withstand, for the idealistic flame burning within me.
After some time my interest for the services faded away, like an addiction you successfully cured. Now, I'm not even thinking about using them anymore.
Many don't understand me even now, and I'm not holding my breath, anymore.
It doesn't take a lot of effort to maintain contact with people that are important in our life today. The relationships that are important to us need to be nurtured, not followed. Facebook has created this (inadvertent) anti-social follow use case, and I think a lot of people have fallen into it.
I stopped at about the same time as you, but I actually returned a couple of months ago. Without friending anyone. And the reason? I use Facebook as a very simple way to get news about really minor things of importance to me:
+ my climbing gym has some new routes!
+ a new video by K.I.Z, yeah!
+ oh, demonstration against some Nazis demonstrating in my neighbourhood, should definitely go there
+ Someone's looking for a climbing partner next weekend, finally heading out to the rocks again!
So likes have become a poor-man's subscription to an RSS feed and groups have become an easy to follow replacement of forums. The key in these cases is the newsfeed, which is okay for having an overview of important stuff (and without friends is not crowded with inane stuff).
I repeatedly have idle thoughts about a startup idea, combining Facebook with github's business model: Any entity such as users, companies, organizations get a page where they can post arbitrary stuff like on their current facebook profile. Users can subscribe and get an overview on their newsfeed. So far, just like Facebook but without the social crap. Financing is not done through targeted ads but by requiring companies to pay for the service - something like 500 subscribers are free, 1000 - 10 $/months etc. Quite rough around the edges, the idea, but I personally would like such a service. Anyone interested in working on that with me?
I have trouble leaving Facebook because for better or worse it is how many of my friends and acquaintances communicate. I ended up finding a nice compromise: I installed an extension which hides all the content on news feed but still allows FB chat. When I couple this extension with ublock, the only thing I see when I go to Facebook is the chat interface, which is perfect for how I use the service.
Facebook is not cool anymore but Facebook is more useful than ever was and will probably remain so for a long time: they managed to get almost all available users (directly or by aqquisitions) and changing the status quo would be really difficult (not even Google was able to do it..). Facebook is the userbase.
I still use FB because everybody is there, if I need to talk to someone or arrange an event, I can send them a message without knowing their actual email or phone. I'm not interested in knowing that a friend I meet once a year went to the restaurant (I can easily block it) but I am interested in being able to contact him if I need to. Facebook is great for that.
Yeah I slowed down heavily around 2 years ago. The original value prop of connecting me with my friends is all but gone from the platform. It reminds me of AIM which started off as a great chat program, but AOL added too many features and ads. The original reason why I wanted to use AIM was peppered with so much bloated software cruft on it, that it became to frustrating to use. 12 years later, I'm at the same point with Facebook.
The only reason I still have it is because I have friends overseas and it's the best way to keep in touch with them if I need to get a hold of them; otherwise I don't need it.
For me Facebook works best as a calendar. Nearly everyone I know has a Fb account (one they check every day, at that), so it makes planning group trips/parties/events easier than trying to sync large groups of people across platforms and devices. It allows me to update my event details without having to worry that one of my friends won't get they update because they synced an out of date .ics file or added the event to their work calendar by mistake.
This is a thing I think people start to realize about the digital era. We can have it all, more friend, more memories, more data... but nature likes to recycle, evolutionary pressure to keep things people working together together while the rest rearrange.
Agreed – I stopped because there were too many posts I didn't really care about. I've found that if there's anything significant, someone will mention it to you anyway.
Key quote: MySpace is well on the way to becoming what economists call a "natural monopoly". Users have invested so much social capital in putting up data about themselves it is not worth their changing sites, especially since every new user that MySpace attracts adds to its value as a network of interacting people.
Facebook has something MySpace never achieved and something that could easily set it's place firmly where it's at, given they don't make any major changes to mess it up: The Geriatric Crowd.
If I'm not mistaken, this is the first time in history that anyone in the tech industry captured this crowd in a major way. Those in my family over 70, on both sides, can barely make a phone call on a cell phone and don't even really know what texting is... but they sure know how to use Facebook. That's how they see their grandbabbies, of course they know how.
MySpace made many mistakes, the worst of which is that they would do absolutely anything to increase short term revenue regardless of the effect on the experience. The result was a messy, user-hostile product that was bleeding users to anything that offered a better social experience.
Zuckerberg is smarter than that. Facebook may (probably will, at some point) lose its dominance, but it won't be a repeat of the MySpace debacle. Perhaps people will gradually realize that "Facebooking" is not the same as real socializing, it's a low-effort, low-value pseudo-social entertainment activity.
I don't think that article is necessarily wrong. You can have natural monopolies that switch companies, but still remain monopolies (look at Apple's early 80s success that was completely squashed by DOS/Windows). Everyone migrated to Facebook and ditched myspace. It doesn't really compete with anyone now. Facebook seemed to have learned from myspace's mistakes and have been successful for a decade now. I think a shift to another social media platform is just not in the cards, at least for the forseeable future.
True, but one thing I've noticed with Facebook is that it was the first big social network that saw widespread adoption across almost all segments of (at least US) society.
I don't doubt that it will eventually go the way of AOL and MySpace but there are some key things keeping it in use. With early ISPs like AOL, there was nothing really stopping you from moving to another provider that offered something better. Combined with the move toward broadband, any AOL-exclusive features just weren't enough to keep people around for the most part and you could still access the rest of the web, email, etc. regardless of your provider.
With Facebook, you need to use their service in order to interact with people on it. I can't just use Google+ because I like the interface and mobile app better than Facebook. No matter how much I prefer another service, they aren't based on any common protocol like email so I need to use Facebook to interact with people who use it.
And with MySpace, the audience was mostly younger people. Sure, some of us had parents or employers that maintained a profile but Facebook was the first big social network that got your mom, your grandma, your boss, your doctor, your old college professor, and all the neighbors on your block to sign up. The under-30 crowd will switch services for something newer and better but the critical mass of Facebook users is hard to get around.
Coming back to Google+, I really am one of the (few apparently) people who think it's a much better alternative to Facebook. Chat is better. Levels of sharing work better and are easier to manage. The interface is smoother. There aren't game and app requests. The mobile app is better. Photo sharing is better. Basically on a technical level, it's better all around.
But when it came out and I started using it, the thing I quickly came to realize was that even if my techie friends also were trying it out, the vast majority of non-enthusiasts found the idea of setting up a profile to be annoying and not worth their time. They already had a Facebook after all. To use G+ you would either need to maintain two profiles on two services or decide to only talk to the 10% of your contacts who took the time to set up this new thing.
In the end, it never really made a dent outside of niche uses (Photography, Ingress players, etc) and has largely become the butt of jokes. Another failed challenger undone by lack of interoperability and the momentum of a large incumbent.
If there were some way to choose your platform and still communicate with the same people (a la email) then Facebook would have some sort of competition but there's no way in hell they would open themselves up to that sort of competition. And currently, there aren't any must-have features compelling enough to make people either maintain multiple profiles or just uproot en masse.
I hate Facebook, but I don't plan to stop using it anytime soon. Well - I don't hate everything about it, but I hate everything they're trying to do, so I agree with this article. But "hate"ing a company is odd, so I guess I really mean "I want to have nothing to do with".
I'll switch when there's a dominating replacement. All I want, for the rest of my life, is:
- a way to see updates from friends and acquaintances and people I've fallen out of contact with, and post mine for them.
- a way to search for and 'add' people I meet.
- a way to chat with those people (including in groups)
- all of those things, without social baggage that constrains it to 'only teenagers' or 'only colleagues and classmates' etc.
- and in a network that contains most people I meet, or doesn't have social baggage that prevents most people from being willing to join it.
To me it's an enriched version of what I get by having lots of contacts in my phone or email address book: exactly a list of people, plus the additional fact that I feel physically near them in some sense (and I think this is a concrete emotional thing. My family and friends don't feel too far away when I get to see snippets of their life streamed into mine).
Everything else - groups, events, pokes, company pages, apps, games, friend suggestions, wall posts, public about-me sections, places, reviews, ads, etc... I don't care about any of it. Maybe something that trims off all this fat would be innocuous enough to actually find adoption. I could see it living in some peer-to-peer structure too, but it has to still be absolutely trivial for anyone to join.
I've been on various social media for about 30 years, starting with dial-up BBSes and Usenet (when small enough you could read _every_ message posted).
Time and again, I've seen sites appear, grow, become definitively dominant, taper off, and largely disappear (never quite dying outright but gone from "everyone's on it!" to "who? what?"). High-profile lifespan is vaguely around 7 years. I've no question Facebook will do the same, already peaked and declining as the article notes, suffering from too many people, too much content, and not enough signal to retain users against the oppressive & discouraging noise. "Oh, but FB is different! Everyone is on it, even my grandmother!" many will declare; yes, and odds are your grandmother can tell of her days when CompuServe and AOL were the place to be (to the point of AOL having so much money they bought Time-Warner because they didn't know what else to do with all that cash), yet here she is on Facebook because that's what her grandkids use, but she's thinking of moving on more to Twitter/Instagram/whatever because those kids just don't post much on FB anymore.
I don't disagree, but the definition of "everybody" has gotten bigger and that counts too.
AOL may have been the place to be in the 90s, but it was still a sharp subset of my friends and acquaintances that were there, vs. the almost complete set on Facebook. And USENET/dialup/etc were even more selective. It's only been very recently (relatively speaking) that a majority of people were online at all, never mind aligned on a particular site.
I think you probably should compare more to something like AOL Instant Messenger, which had much closer to a 1:1 usage ratio of online computer users to software users (at least in the US market). The only real reason they went away was because social networks like Facebook are much more cross-connected and oriented towards group communication. The tagging features are huge, for example, since they potentially engage a lot of people at once. Ditto resharing, etc.
So the IM paradigm in general got consumed by larger social media--it wasn't a problem with AOLIM itself. But that sort of obsolescence is a vulnerability of a system that only does one thing. Facebook would probably mutate in the same situation, not die off.
The other factor is smartphones: a much larger number of people are online all the time now. If MySpace had their rise in the smartphone era, I'm sure they would have been much harder to displace. The fact that Facebook's opening their doors to the general public corresponded roughly with the release of the iPhone and subsequent rise of the smartphone was a huge bump for them.
Upshot is that a vastly larger percentage of a vastly larger number of customers are aligned on Facebook compared to older social media, and Facebook itself, as a platform, is relatively resilient to the changing needs of the customer. In an industry where both the customer acquisition and customer retention metric is "how many of your friends use it," I think Facebook will prove to be much harder to displace.
There were also a ton of oil companies before Standard Oil completely dominated the industry. They were the only player in town for a very long time. And their post-monopoly breakup offspring still are (Exxon is still the biggest).
Don't know if this will be popular here, but... I like Facebook. I like seeing people's pictures and updates. I like serendipitous moments where someone announces they're in town and I get a chance to see people I haven't seen in years. I like keeping track of social events with it. I like reading a lot of their articles. I like the conversations I get in (even some of the arguments). I think it complements and enhances my social life. I try not to let it replace it.
Sure, some of the acquaintances are obnoxious on FB. The mechanisms for focusing on what I like vs what I don't seem to work well enough.
I don't like the surveillance. I try to minimize it in a number of ways. I'm sure my measures have limited effectiveness and I'm leaking details about my whereabouts, reading habits, and other preferences anyway. If FB was the only place I was doing that -- if I wouldn't have to essentially give up mobile/internet communications to truly solve that problem -- I might think harder about whether the value I get out of FB was something I could trade for privacy.
I really should flesh out my "why you can't have a good distributed social network" post some time.
What does FB provide that you don't get with a combination of email/USENET/blogs/chat? Branding, janitors, and indexing.
Branding is useful because these things are so scale-driven that you want to be on the one that everyone else is using. It's easier for the uninvolved to figure this out if it's the one with huge advertising billboards.
Janitors are a necessity. Some are human, some automatic. People want spam to be fought, and they want abuse to be removed.
Between those two is the "nudging" of people into how to use Facebook. Why should you post life updates? Because it's the "done thing".
Indexing is useful because it enables you to find people you want to get in contact with using their human-recognisable name. (Facebook occasionally undermines this by refusing to accept names that people are known by)
Both of these are ongoing effort that has to be paid for if it is to scale and be done properly. Hence all the underhand cash-extraction processes.
> Why should you post life updates? Because it's the "done thing".
No - it's because you've done something you think your friends would be interested in and it's a lot easier to take a photo and click 'post to Facebook' than to write to 30 people.
That's really the fundamental function of Facebook and any successor will probably succeed by doing it better in some way. eg. Snapchat enabling you to send naughty pics without them being archived on the web for the rest of your life and so on.
Also we have to consider that "regular" Internet users (who are probably not HN readers!) just want to communicate with their friends, share pictures and jokes, find news, etc. They want a simple user experience that's just easy to use.
THAT user experience (UX) has been the main issue I've seen with attempts at a distributed social network (such as Diaspora).
I don't really get the first point about scale and brand, because the examples you give like email are built on open protocols, so it's the protocol itself that is the brand. I don't need a particular brand of email client to send emails to someone.
> Both of these are ongoing effort that has to be paid for if it is to scale and be done properly.
Have a look at bittorrent. Scale is not a problem. Money isn't either. Perhaps we should have a distributed social network based on it, or a similar technology.
I read facebooks terms and conditions before I created my account (you can guess, I am over 50). After that, I never thought about joining. Tried to discourage our kids, too (no success - they are under 50 ;o).
I am impressed this got upvoted. A couple of years ago, telling everybody I am not on facebook and have never been for such uncool reasons, would have drowned like a lead-duck.
I have never used facebook and never will. The only real reason is because I have no interest in the type of community it promotes. The communities on facebook usually seem like a popularity contest.
I've recently stopped using reddit for the same reason and I'm now using HN as my main/only source of social media.
Reddit is a gold mine for niche stuff. Don't stop using it for r/funny, r/politics, r/whatever. Those are shitholes. The small subreddits is what Reddit all about for me nowadays. The big subreddits are breeding grounds for young Redditors and to fend off those we don't want in smaller subreddits.
Yes, we've passed Peak Facebook, but that's just because it has been distilled and pornographized to the point of desensitization. Pure capitalism at its finest.
What will set the trend for the future is our understanding of how digital slavery works. We can be entering one of the darkest eras of modern history, or one of the most liberating. The choice is up to us, human beings, whether we sell ourselves to whoever is better at manipulating our emotions and thoughts, or whether we choose the free and open path that liberates us from digital tyranny.
You remind me of digital tools that are just coming into existence. Distributed autonomous corporations could organize most of the digital communication functions that the social media bubble is currently exploring. So, ethereum, Turing complete blockchains, oracles and decentralized decision making. Consensus over conceit.
Like with peak oil you've got to distinguish the US peak (which happened about 1970 though there may be second higher one coming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory#/media/File...)
and a global peak - not yet for oil.
Facebook's probably peaked in the USA but has a lot of growth ahead globally.
I stopped using facebook in 2013 when I quit my part time job as a fitness instructor. The studio I worked for used it extensively to communicate with clients and post daily workouts and nutrition tips so after a month of holding out (had already deleted my account once in 2010) I signed back up (which was a hassle enough as it was, they already knew I had used that email and asked if I wanted to reactivate my old account even though I had explicitly deleted it).
It was useful but I pretty much only used it in my role as a fitness coach and when I quit that job I deleted all posts, photos and details, changed my primary email to nonsense and changed my password to something I would never remember before going through the two-week "cool-off" period they force on you to delete your account.
I help run an open studios event in Massachusetts. We in the last couple years have recently started using more social media.
Facebook has been useful for us. It drives a lot of traffic to our site and presumably some of those people come to our event (we made an official facebook event so that we don't have a bunch of unofficial ones).
Oddly its a difficult way to communicate with members and build community. Facebook also requires payment to guarantee showing up in feeds now, for a non-profit its not worth it. A fair number of our younger and older artists just aren't on it (myself included). We're finding email is the best way to communicate whats going on with our members.
Facebook works best if Everyone is on it. Once fewer people aren't on it becomes less useful. I think thats its staying power currently. Its actually amazing that it runs at its scale. Myspace was popular, but it didn't have the nearly the volume of users as facebook (plus facebook is better at sharing photos, seemingly its reason for existing). If your not on it and your friends use it as an organizing tool, it can be a little isolating (Don't be that guy/gal who they have to go out of the way to invite to things...), but with more people not on it email seems to be returning as an organizing tool.
FriendsReunited was /the/ social network [amongst a certain demographic at least] in the UK before anyone knew the term social network. They established a massive userbase including paid for users but Facebook came along and destroyed them, particularly because FR did the paid for communications like LinkedIn do.
I'm sorry but this article reads like a narcissistic wet dream. The author continues to quote himself and even misquotes himself several times (look up "facebook has tried tried to remedy" and "facebook has tried to repair"). The rest of the article slams Facebook for its success and tries to say users don't want to use Facebook. I personally love what Facebook developers are doing in terms of React and Jest. In terms of Facebook's core product, I use it for easy social login and have unfollowed anyone who posts things I don't agree with so my "feed" is pretty well curated. Myspace sank because a better product came out. When someone comes out and does Social better than Facebook, Facebook will fall but until then: if you don't like it, good news, you don't have to use it.
>Facebook is an insanely rich company to the tune of $192 billion as of September 2014
That's not exactly being rich, those aren't billions that Facebook can go spend in the same way as Apple can spend their cash reserves. The $192 billions is the evaluation of Facebook, not the money Facebook has available to spend.
Profits are what makes companies rich, not that Facebook is doing to badly in that department.
I used to actively post on facebook a lot through college and a bit later (joined when I started college, the year before facebook opened itself up to non-college accounts). For the last 2-3 years its been an idle account. Used to make several updates a week, now I make 2-3 updates a year. I removed the app a long time ago from my phone because of privacy reasons.
I've noticed I get bombarded with far more notifications as an inactive user than I was when I was active. I get emailed notifications far more frequently when I used to never have them emailed.
A friend posted on your wall? Notification.
Someone liked a post on your wall? Notification.
A friend is having a birthday? Notification.
A friend's birthday is coming up? Notification.
Invited to an event? Event coming up? Event tonight? Notification.
Someone with no connections in common commented on a post you've never read on a large public group that you have never contributed to? Notification.
Someone completely unrelated to you LIKED a post you've never viewed on the same large group? Notification.
Facebook gets desperate when a user starts churning, but holy crap I just do not care. The only reason I keep this account is because of close family on the network. I could divide my friends list by 40 and I don't think I'd miss any of the lost content.
All the stream ever shows is shared posts from Buzzfeed-clones. It's not interesting. It's a feed of spam with a very, very rare text post or meaningful photo.
Not soon enough. My son lost out on a job opportunity because of a photo of him published in fb when he was in grade 9. It's just a massive invasion of privacy, and for what? The "make a buck off the internet" guys hit the jackpot with that one.
I wonder if the current "depression" is merely the tech savvy market. I find that many authors make the mistake of assuming that the average Joe thinks the same way that they (and their peers) do.
In the past 2-3 months I have heard two less savvy people recite the "it's not an official relationship until it's Facebook official" social norm, which inclines me to believe that Facebook is still firmly entrenched in the way people interact with each other: even if they never visit the site it needs to be there so that they can turn their significant other into that all important profile trophy/achievement.
I had this exact conversation with some coworkers (3 of us) and all of us found out that all of us only have our profiles because our significant others demand it. We never visit the site or use the site but have to exist there because of the people around us who do use it. My S/O can't have me as a partner, my sister can't tag me in a picture etc. People are worried that if there is no "paper trail" on Facebook, other people will think that they are an imposter.
Therefore I'm not inclined to agree that the current trend is a long term trend. There are many other websites that provide exactly the same features of Facebook, if not more. Facebook is a part of culture now. It's a verb. It probably has a good few decades of life left in it.
Finally "search query frequency" is the poster child of "correlation does not imply causation." E.g. People might not be searching for Facebook because everyone already knows what it is and what the address is. It's like ranking Google's health on how often people search for Google.
What will be the next big thing in social networks? What are your thoughts?
Local neighbors network? No-interface social networks? Peer-to-peer? Anonymous social networks? Video based (YouTube/Twitch)? Messanger-only? No central news-feed?
So the bad news is that it is difficult to stop using Facebook. They let me export my data, but not birthdays of my friends list. I had to break the list down into family, friends, actual friends, then check each of their pages to update my address book. I had to disconnect the few apps that were attached which was easy for me as I avoided facebooks apps like the plague, but imagine losing all of your farm animals or whatever it is that people use the games for. Now that SMS is free and my carrier provides me a softphone for my PC and tablet for free, I have reverted to SMS (disabling iMessage is a PITA). Events I handle with my calendar app / email invites which hasn't been ideal, but since some of my friends refuse to use Facebook, it never was either.
Anyway, just some of my experience so far. At least they allow me to export my data, unlike Yelp bookmarks. I kept my usage of Facebook extremely light, but this has taken a lot of my spare time. Few people will go through this effort.
Before you start using a SaaS solution, figure out how you can stop using it.
"based this prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term".
If that's their only set of data, then I'm guessing this is equally likely to indicate that Google is losing users, or at least losing users trying to access common sites, at a pretty steep rate.
[+] [-] junto|10 years ago|reply
I did have a lot of old friends on FB, but I didn't stay in contact with them in real life. I was just lazily snooping on their lives, without giving anything in return.
To be completely honest, I don't have space or time for them in my real life. It isn't because I didn't like them anymore, it was simply that I didn't have the time or energy to stay in proper contact. I had also moved away.
I had the realisation that some people are supposed to drift apart. The people who are important to you will remain in contact with, and it doesn't need Facebook spying on that friendship to enable it to keep functioning.
[+] [-] madez|10 years ago|reply
Then, Edward Snowden revealed that the possible abstract threats I wanted to avoid can in fact become real. We are fortunate to have received this information. People still didn't understand me.
In the beginning of my time without the services I clearly felt that something was missing, but it wasn't hard to withstand, for the idealistic flame burning within me.
After some time my interest for the services faded away, like an addiction you successfully cured. Now, I'm not even thinking about using them anymore.
Many don't understand me even now, and I'm not holding my breath, anymore.
[+] [-] dade_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sveme|10 years ago|reply
+ my climbing gym has some new routes!
+ a new video by K.I.Z, yeah!
+ oh, demonstration against some Nazis demonstrating in my neighbourhood, should definitely go there
+ Someone's looking for a climbing partner next weekend, finally heading out to the rocks again!
So likes have become a poor-man's subscription to an RSS feed and groups have become an easy to follow replacement of forums. The key in these cases is the newsfeed, which is okay for having an overview of important stuff (and without friends is not crowded with inane stuff).
I repeatedly have idle thoughts about a startup idea, combining Facebook with github's business model: Any entity such as users, companies, organizations get a page where they can post arbitrary stuff like on their current facebook profile. Users can subscribe and get an overview on their newsfeed. So far, just like Facebook but without the social crap. Financing is not done through targeted ads but by requiring companies to pay for the service - something like 500 subscribers are free, 1000 - 10 $/months etc. Quite rough around the edges, the idea, but I personally would like such a service. Anyone interested in working on that with me?
[+] [-] Thriptic|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galfarragem|10 years ago|reply
I still use FB because everybody is there, if I need to talk to someone or arrange an event, I can send them a message without knowing their actual email or phone. I'm not interested in knowing that a friend I meet once a year went to the restaurant (I can easily block it) but I am interested in being able to contact him if I need to. Facebook is great for that.
[+] [-] joeblau|10 years ago|reply
The only reason I still have it is because I have friends overseas and it's the best way to keep in touch with them if I need to get a hold of them; otherwise I don't need it.
[+] [-] robbyking|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] heimatau|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jipha|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onewaystreet|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acheron|10 years ago|reply
"Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly?"
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.c...
Key quote: MySpace is well on the way to becoming what economists call a "natural monopoly". Users have invested so much social capital in putting up data about themselves it is not worth their changing sites, especially since every new user that MySpace attracts adds to its value as a network of interacting people.
[+] [-] mawburn|10 years ago|reply
If I'm not mistaken, this is the first time in history that anyone in the tech industry captured this crowd in a major way. Those in my family over 70, on both sides, can barely make a phone call on a cell phone and don't even really know what texting is... but they sure know how to use Facebook. That's how they see their grandbabbies, of course they know how.
[+] [-] bkeroack|10 years ago|reply
Zuckerberg is smarter than that. Facebook may (probably will, at some point) lose its dominance, but it won't be a repeat of the MySpace debacle. Perhaps people will gradually realize that "Facebooking" is not the same as real socializing, it's a low-effort, low-value pseudo-social entertainment activity.
[+] [-] drzaiusapelord|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soylentcola|10 years ago|reply
I don't doubt that it will eventually go the way of AOL and MySpace but there are some key things keeping it in use. With early ISPs like AOL, there was nothing really stopping you from moving to another provider that offered something better. Combined with the move toward broadband, any AOL-exclusive features just weren't enough to keep people around for the most part and you could still access the rest of the web, email, etc. regardless of your provider.
With Facebook, you need to use their service in order to interact with people on it. I can't just use Google+ because I like the interface and mobile app better than Facebook. No matter how much I prefer another service, they aren't based on any common protocol like email so I need to use Facebook to interact with people who use it.
And with MySpace, the audience was mostly younger people. Sure, some of us had parents or employers that maintained a profile but Facebook was the first big social network that got your mom, your grandma, your boss, your doctor, your old college professor, and all the neighbors on your block to sign up. The under-30 crowd will switch services for something newer and better but the critical mass of Facebook users is hard to get around.
Coming back to Google+, I really am one of the (few apparently) people who think it's a much better alternative to Facebook. Chat is better. Levels of sharing work better and are easier to manage. The interface is smoother. There aren't game and app requests. The mobile app is better. Photo sharing is better. Basically on a technical level, it's better all around.
But when it came out and I started using it, the thing I quickly came to realize was that even if my techie friends also were trying it out, the vast majority of non-enthusiasts found the idea of setting up a profile to be annoying and not worth their time. They already had a Facebook after all. To use G+ you would either need to maintain two profiles on two services or decide to only talk to the 10% of your contacts who took the time to set up this new thing.
In the end, it never really made a dent outside of niche uses (Photography, Ingress players, etc) and has largely become the butt of jokes. Another failed challenger undone by lack of interoperability and the momentum of a large incumbent.
If there were some way to choose your platform and still communicate with the same people (a la email) then Facebook would have some sort of competition but there's no way in hell they would open themselves up to that sort of competition. And currently, there aren't any must-have features compelling enough to make people either maintain multiple profiles or just uproot en masse.
[+] [-] jhildings|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajkjk|10 years ago|reply
I'll switch when there's a dominating replacement. All I want, for the rest of my life, is:
- a way to see updates from friends and acquaintances and people I've fallen out of contact with, and post mine for them.
- a way to search for and 'add' people I meet.
- a way to chat with those people (including in groups)
- all of those things, without social baggage that constrains it to 'only teenagers' or 'only colleagues and classmates' etc.
- and in a network that contains most people I meet, or doesn't have social baggage that prevents most people from being willing to join it.
To me it's an enriched version of what I get by having lots of contacts in my phone or email address book: exactly a list of people, plus the additional fact that I feel physically near them in some sense (and I think this is a concrete emotional thing. My family and friends don't feel too far away when I get to see snippets of their life streamed into mine).
Everything else - groups, events, pokes, company pages, apps, games, friend suggestions, wall posts, public about-me sections, places, reviews, ads, etc... I don't care about any of it. Maybe something that trims off all this fat would be innocuous enough to actually find adoption. I could see it living in some peer-to-peer structure too, but it has to still be absolutely trivial for anyone to join.
[+] [-] ctdonath|10 years ago|reply
Time and again, I've seen sites appear, grow, become definitively dominant, taper off, and largely disappear (never quite dying outright but gone from "everyone's on it!" to "who? what?"). High-profile lifespan is vaguely around 7 years. I've no question Facebook will do the same, already peaked and declining as the article notes, suffering from too many people, too much content, and not enough signal to retain users against the oppressive & discouraging noise. "Oh, but FB is different! Everyone is on it, even my grandmother!" many will declare; yes, and odds are your grandmother can tell of her days when CompuServe and AOL were the place to be (to the point of AOL having so much money they bought Time-Warner because they didn't know what else to do with all that cash), yet here she is on Facebook because that's what her grandkids use, but she's thinking of moving on more to Twitter/Instagram/whatever because those kids just don't post much on FB anymore.
[+] [-] geoelectric|10 years ago|reply
AOL may have been the place to be in the 90s, but it was still a sharp subset of my friends and acquaintances that were there, vs. the almost complete set on Facebook. And USENET/dialup/etc were even more selective. It's only been very recently (relatively speaking) that a majority of people were online at all, never mind aligned on a particular site.
I think you probably should compare more to something like AOL Instant Messenger, which had much closer to a 1:1 usage ratio of online computer users to software users (at least in the US market). The only real reason they went away was because social networks like Facebook are much more cross-connected and oriented towards group communication. The tagging features are huge, for example, since they potentially engage a lot of people at once. Ditto resharing, etc.
So the IM paradigm in general got consumed by larger social media--it wasn't a problem with AOLIM itself. But that sort of obsolescence is a vulnerability of a system that only does one thing. Facebook would probably mutate in the same situation, not die off.
The other factor is smartphones: a much larger number of people are online all the time now. If MySpace had their rise in the smartphone era, I'm sure they would have been much harder to displace. The fact that Facebook's opening their doors to the general public corresponded roughly with the release of the iPhone and subsequent rise of the smartphone was a huge bump for them.
Upshot is that a vastly larger percentage of a vastly larger number of customers are aligned on Facebook compared to older social media, and Facebook itself, as a platform, is relatively resilient to the changing needs of the customer. In an industry where both the customer acquisition and customer retention metric is "how many of your friends use it," I think Facebook will prove to be much harder to displace.
[+] [-] dmix|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wwweston|10 years ago|reply
Sure, some of the acquaintances are obnoxious on FB. The mechanisms for focusing on what I like vs what I don't seem to work well enough.
I don't like the surveillance. I try to minimize it in a number of ways. I'm sure my measures have limited effectiveness and I'm leaking details about my whereabouts, reading habits, and other preferences anyway. If FB was the only place I was doing that -- if I wouldn't have to essentially give up mobile/internet communications to truly solve that problem -- I might think harder about whether the value I get out of FB was something I could trade for privacy.
[+] [-] pjc50|10 years ago|reply
What does FB provide that you don't get with a combination of email/USENET/blogs/chat? Branding, janitors, and indexing.
Branding is useful because these things are so scale-driven that you want to be on the one that everyone else is using. It's easier for the uninvolved to figure this out if it's the one with huge advertising billboards.
Janitors are a necessity. Some are human, some automatic. People want spam to be fought, and they want abuse to be removed.
Between those two is the "nudging" of people into how to use Facebook. Why should you post life updates? Because it's the "done thing".
Indexing is useful because it enables you to find people you want to get in contact with using their human-recognisable name. (Facebook occasionally undermines this by refusing to accept names that people are known by)
Both of these are ongoing effort that has to be paid for if it is to scale and be done properly. Hence all the underhand cash-extraction processes.
[+] [-] tim333|10 years ago|reply
No - it's because you've done something you think your friends would be interested in and it's a lot easier to take a photo and click 'post to Facebook' than to write to 30 people.
That's really the fundamental function of Facebook and any successor will probably succeed by doing it better in some way. eg. Snapchat enabling you to send naughty pics without them being archived on the web for the rest of your life and so on.
[+] [-] danyork|10 years ago|reply
THAT user experience (UX) has been the main issue I've seen with attempts at a distributed social network (such as Diaspora).
[+] [-] adsr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danyork|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
Have a look at bittorrent. Scale is not a problem. Money isn't either. Perhaps we should have a distributed social network based on it, or a similar technology.
[+] [-] benihana|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mironathetin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mironathetin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zz_m00|10 years ago|reply
I've recently stopped using reddit for the same reason and I'm now using HN as my main/only source of social media.
[+] [-] Svenstaro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuvadam|10 years ago|reply
What will set the trend for the future is our understanding of how digital slavery works. We can be entering one of the darkest eras of modern history, or one of the most liberating. The choice is up to us, human beings, whether we sell ourselves to whoever is better at manipulating our emotions and thoughts, or whether we choose the free and open path that liberates us from digital tyranny.
[+] [-] eggie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|10 years ago|reply
Like with peak oil you've got to distinguish the US peak (which happened about 1970 though there may be second higher one coming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory#/media/File...) and a global peak - not yet for oil. Facebook's probably peaked in the USA but has a lot of growth ahead globally.
[+] [-] iamthepieman|10 years ago|reply
It was useful but I pretty much only used it in my role as a fitness coach and when I quit that job I deleted all posts, photos and details, changed my primary email to nonsense and changed my password to something I would never remember before going through the two-week "cool-off" period they force on you to delete your account.
[+] [-] acomjean|10 years ago|reply
Facebook has been useful for us. It drives a lot of traffic to our site and presumably some of those people come to our event (we made an official facebook event so that we don't have a bunch of unofficial ones).
Oddly its a difficult way to communicate with members and build community. Facebook also requires payment to guarantee showing up in feeds now, for a non-profit its not worth it. A fair number of our younger and older artists just aren't on it (myself included). We're finding email is the best way to communicate whats going on with our members.
Facebook works best if Everyone is on it. Once fewer people aren't on it becomes less useful. I think thats its staying power currently. Its actually amazing that it runs at its scale. Myspace was popular, but it didn't have the nearly the volume of users as facebook (plus facebook is better at sharing photos, seemingly its reason for existing). If your not on it and your friends use it as an organizing tool, it can be a little isolating (Don't be that guy/gal who they have to go out of the way to invite to things...), but with more people not on it email seems to be returning as an organizing tool.
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|10 years ago|reply
FriendsReunited was /the/ social network [amongst a certain demographic at least] in the UK before anyone knew the term social network. They established a massive userbase including paid for users but Facebook came along and destroyed them, particularly because FR did the paid for communications like LinkedIn do.
[+] [-] UUMMUU|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jhildings|10 years ago|reply
Isn't that a very very bad decision ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
[+] [-] mrweasel|10 years ago|reply
That's not exactly being rich, those aren't billions that Facebook can go spend in the same way as Apple can spend their cash reserves. The $192 billions is the evaluation of Facebook, not the money Facebook has available to spend.
Profits are what makes companies rich, not that Facebook is doing to badly in that department.
[+] [-] krisdol|10 years ago|reply
I've noticed I get bombarded with far more notifications as an inactive user than I was when I was active. I get emailed notifications far more frequently when I used to never have them emailed.
A friend posted on your wall? Notification. Someone liked a post on your wall? Notification. A friend is having a birthday? Notification. A friend's birthday is coming up? Notification. Invited to an event? Event coming up? Event tonight? Notification. Someone with no connections in common commented on a post you've never read on a large public group that you have never contributed to? Notification. Someone completely unrelated to you LIKED a post you've never viewed on the same large group? Notification.
Facebook gets desperate when a user starts churning, but holy crap I just do not care. The only reason I keep this account is because of close family on the network. I could divide my friends list by 40 and I don't think I'd miss any of the lost content.
All the stream ever shows is shared posts from Buzzfeed-clones. It's not interesting. It's a feed of spam with a very, very rare text post or meaningful photo.
[+] [-] oldpond|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zamalek|10 years ago|reply
In the past 2-3 months I have heard two less savvy people recite the "it's not an official relationship until it's Facebook official" social norm, which inclines me to believe that Facebook is still firmly entrenched in the way people interact with each other: even if they never visit the site it needs to be there so that they can turn their significant other into that all important profile trophy/achievement.
I had this exact conversation with some coworkers (3 of us) and all of us found out that all of us only have our profiles because our significant others demand it. We never visit the site or use the site but have to exist there because of the people around us who do use it. My S/O can't have me as a partner, my sister can't tag me in a picture etc. People are worried that if there is no "paper trail" on Facebook, other people will think that they are an imposter.
Therefore I'm not inclined to agree that the current trend is a long term trend. There are many other websites that provide exactly the same features of Facebook, if not more. Facebook is a part of culture now. It's a verb. It probably has a good few decades of life left in it.
Finally "search query frequency" is the poster child of "correlation does not imply causation." E.g. People might not be searching for Facebook because everyone already knows what it is and what the address is. It's like ranking Google's health on how often people search for Google.
[+] [-] frik|10 years ago|reply
Local neighbors network? No-interface social networks? Peer-to-peer? Anonymous social networks? Video based (YouTube/Twitch)? Messanger-only? No central news-feed?
[+] [-] dade_|10 years ago|reply
Anyway, just some of my experience so far. At least they allow me to export my data, unlike Yelp bookmarks. I kept my usage of Facebook extremely light, but this has taken a lot of my spare time. Few people will go through this effort.
Before you start using a SaaS solution, figure out how you can stop using it.
[+] [-] prof_hobart|10 years ago|reply
If that's their only set of data, then I'm guessing this is equally likely to indicate that Google is losing users, or at least losing users trying to access common sites, at a pretty steep rate.