The real anti-Facebook is good old email
wired.com
wired.com
Wish there was a better archive than the bits saved at archive.org.
And banking.
A huge 'value add' which has caught on is being able to send real-life money with no transaction fees to other people.
And treated in novel ways - 'lucky money' to send friends in your friend circles, paying for a taxi, utility bills, seeing a movie, train and plane tickets, etc.
1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons
2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home
My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing what I've been up to lately. It's been a huge win for me for a few reasons:
1: Everyone uses email, so I can reach with friends and family who don't use Facebook. I think my grandmother is my biggest newsletter fan, and is always encouraging me to publish more frequently.
2: I'd rather share a well-written email (with lots of links to my self-hosted photo gallery), than a series of short status updates that may or may not be read by people I want to keep in touch with. Also, a lot of the information I share in the newsletter I wouldn't share on Facebook. Not because it's super private or anything, but I'm not going to post a status update that basically says "My living situation is pretty good right now. I'm renting a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and my commute is fantastic!"
3: I never really enjoyed checking Facebook, but I did it out of habit/addiction. Quitting cold turkey has made me a happier person.
The feedback I have gotten has been overwhelmingly positive. I got a number of really good responses to the newsletter in which friends and family provided similar updates. It even inspired a friend of mine to write his own newsletter. These responses were great, and much better than any information I would have gleaned from Facebook.
The biggest downside is that people still try to contact me via Facebook. For the most part, it hasn't been a problem, except for the time I missed an invitation for a week-long hiking trip in Glacier National Park. I should probably cancel my Facebook account, but I'm not ready to do that yet.
Edit: I should add I don't use TinyLetter. I instead send out a mass email via gmail. It has worked well so far, but I don't have a good way of adding subscribers except via word-of-mouth. Maybe I should investigate TinyLetter.
Since everyone has a gmail account (at least my target audience) and hardly have any activity on G+, I created a G+ community with just the right people and post updates there. These updates automatically send notifications via email to the community members.
The way content is organized and presented in a community is much better than email IMO. Of course everything can be translated to email - comments can be reply with text and likes/+1s can be reply with +1 - but looking back, it is a much better user experience to do this in a community/group rather than email.
Most of the people I met this summer didn't have an American phone number so Facebook (or Whatsapp) was the only way to communicate with them.
Really depends on the setting. Quite a few people I know would be more comfortable sharing a mail address than their Facebook info, even if we ignore the percentage that doesn't even have Facebook.
(For quick messaging contacts the fragmentation of messengers is really annoying. I don't want 4-6 different messengers on my phone just to be prepared to communicate with everybody. It's really time for a push back to federation or at least proper multi-protocol clients)
This is part of what's backwards about Facebook. Sometimes I've had a 5-15min conversation with someone at a bar and they're like, "Do you have Facebook?", and I'm like, "Give me your phone", and I will search for myself and send myself a friend request.
If I exchanged phone numbers or e-mail addresses with this person, it would be really odd IMO to ask the sort of questions to which answers are offered to me by facebook, and by its' algorithm, but _less_ odd to personally contact them IMO. So I'm kind of a wierd voyeur in basically a handful of strangers' lives and fairly rarely actually ever again meet up and do things with various people that seem to be a lot of fun to talk to when I meet them.
I've had a lot of interesting friendship circumstances arise, but also just spend a lot of time wondering who the fuck most of the people are, even on the new facebook. Even the people I decided to carry over, I don't know, it's a semi-random distribution based on how Facebook was already filtering my feed, I think. People I like, but I dunno.
It feels like Facebook has more influence over who I think about than I do at times, and I wonder if it isn't influenced by what relationships tell them things they can advertise based on or something.
It's great if you have something specific you want to follow up on, otherwise it just gets filed away. Or can be used to give Facebook/Twitter/whatever else information the next day if you want to (after thinking about it). Mail addresses can be more anonymous and easier to dispose in that way, if you have clearly separated ones.
I don't understand why this would be. Would you explain why -for your cohort- this is true?
But, while we're here:
> Facebook is just a question of typing their name...
Many folks in my peer group used an (often oddly-spelled) nym when they created their Facebook account long, long ago. (Also, many folks in my peer group abandoned their FB account long ago, but that's another matter entirely. ;) )
> ...and another thirty [seconds] waiting for you to send them an email to confirm.
They way I've seen this handled is to either show the person how you spelt the email address, or have them wait for the "new email" notification to confirm that you did, indeed spell the address correctly.
Yet another way is to hand your conversation partner a business card.
[0] Doing so would be really, really strange for anyone who wasn't in sales [1] (and even then, it would be a little strange).
[1] Or, I guess, one of the founders of a tiny startup.
You already have your phone out, and they probably have to take theirs out to confirm, so it doesn't add anything that doesn't already exist. But this application of QR Codes saves typing in a good way.
And if you want their info vs giving them yours, then they also have to know how to get their address displayed as a code.
Technically no problem, in practice I wouldn't expect it to work.
It's sort of like receiving a letter vs. reading something on a pubic notice board. The former is yours, the latter is in public space.
This is different than many other 'communication protocols' out there such as Facebook Posts, Twitter Posts, Slack comments, Shared Docs etc. which all have the notion of an 'owner' who can retract permissions, modify, delete etc. after 'send'. The email analogy would be the sender reaching into your inbox and deleting or modifying your email (ugh!). This is fundamentally what gives email the feel that there is no favored owner. Conversely, every recipient can feel that the email is theirs.
We're launching an email-like service, (https://tmail21.com) in the next couple of weeks. Our premise is to preserve the best aspects of email while fixing or improving on the worst.
We think one of the best aspects of email is the aforementioned 'democratic' (i.e. no favored owner) characteristic.
To: facebook#post#friends@localhost
Subject:
Body:
Hey this is a post to Facebook, from email!
But that said, I think I'm similar to most people in not being easily able to jump to newsletter type activity. The thing is, if I were to do that, it would still be me relating to N other people rather than, say, all those N other people also relating to each other. That might make things even better for me but I don't see how that's an improvement over Facebook.
Facebook has given me a relationship of sorts with 30-40 people who I previously hadn't interacted with for 10 or even twenty years and lets me barely keep up relations with a number of others. That includes people I'd lost contact with BEFORE the Internet even began.
Most people who aren't on Facebook aren't starting newsletters, they're just isolated - maybe one of their friends sends them a newsletter. I would see one in ten people with a newsletter for all ten as not a desirable replacement to eight in ten people having a way to directly relate to each other.
And certainly electronic media produces all sorts of problems for things-like-community, especially face to face community but that's a bigger issue than Facebook in particular.
Why not? (Genuine question: why would you not share such a thing on fb, but share it with a large group via email?)
> The biggest downside is that people still try to contact me via Facebook.
While they've gotten worse, fb email notifications aren't all that terrible, especially if you don't participate in discussions on popular fb pages (ie: you only get mail about event invites, new messages).
Nice to hear you've been able to stay connected via email. I'd probably've set up a "private" mailman list, especially now thar mailman3 has a half-decent archive/web interface.
Bit strange to hear you complain about signup though... can't people just send you an email? I'd think word-of-mouth/email would be an improvement over fb in your use-case?
Also interesting to hear how different sub-networks on fb can be. Both in terms of "everyone uses email (sadly, not in my circles - at least for non-work stuff), and wrt what you/others share.
The problem with Facebook is that its a monopoly, and closed. What if it were open, such that I can send a friend request from G+ to Facebook. Just like I can easily send an email from yahoo email id to gmail.
This openness, if incorporated, can solve the monopoly problem as well. Plus we don't have to complain of Facebook's AI/ML screwing/controlling our inbox feeds.
All my (various social network) friends' statuses come to my hosted social network (G+/Facebook, or my home built) and my host controls the feed, with its own proprietary rules.
Everybody will be happy. Even Facebook, as there is no more bashing of it. I guess Facebook can and should take the lead towards openness. It will be a brave move, if it happens. But they will earn a lot of respect.
when someone does this right- the technology will be indistinguishable from Facebook for the typical user.
I'm not convinced that anyone apart from readers of Hacker News and Reddit wants to move off Facebook.
Discussions about the problems of FB on HN remind me of 2000s-era Slashdot discussions of why Linux is better than Windows and is poised to takeover the desktop: A popular subject for a tiny, passionate minority that has little relevance relative to the huge number of everyday users out there.
(BTW, I'm not a big FB user and am sympathetic to discussions of its problems, but I'm also aware that apart from a small number of nerds no one cares.)
Linux did take over Windows. You realize Android is Linux, right? That's 80% of the mobile market right here https://twitter.com/BIIntelligence/status/605748823709859840... And now Microsoft is building Android apps. So that tiny, passionate minority was right ;-)
In the end, all the volunteers and paid programmers combined working on Linux couldn't displace Windows as king. And all kinds of companies working together got Android to 80% of the market with Apple getting 50% of market's profit. I wouldn't be bragging in either of those two niches. Cloud, on the other hand? Slam dunk.
They succeeded at getting stuff built, used and so on. Doing it all volunteers, for the right reasons, displacing proprietary, and so on? Total failures. Only zealots pretend otherwise.
It's why I push paid, open-source models (eg dual-licensing) with charter or contract protections to try to get best of both worlds. Both corporate and FOSS propaganda keep telling developers that it's gotta be paid/closed or free/open when many successful projects did paid/open. A profit incentive tied to respecting users freedoms, esp allowing fixes/extensions, could be a powerful motivator in getting OSS all over the place. Even Microsoft might buy into that for Windows eventually if they could ensure similar profit and tie-in to their ecosystem.
92% has been reported recently
http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-share-of-smartphone-indus...
It did change search statistics but not in way anybody welcomed: all statistical analyses (including the building of the completion corpus itself) became more complicated as you now want to separate the signal of "how many people wanted to search this" from the semi-noise of "how many people chose this from the 5 suggestions at the moment they glanced at the screen". Google "Instant" triggering automatic searches for some completions muddled stuff even more... Nobody would go through that just "to hide" something.
I don't think the parent meant to imply it's a bad idea; only that Diaspora kind of sucked all the oxygen out of the "social networks done right" room, and now if you want to float an alternative you have to contend with a lot more skepticism than you would have before.
I've said it before, I'm pretty sure it would work if it was built on top of WordPress. I'm sure this idea is in the back of Matt Mullenweg's mind somewhere. Gravatar has profiles now, but where is that going...?
Well, I shouldn't say it failed. I don't know. A few years ago I was out somewhere, can't remember the conversation, but this guy was telling me the Diaspora community is still growing and people are actually using it.
Two of them were:
* Their federation protocol was (still is?) very poorly documented. This made alternate implementations difficult.
* A user cannot move his data from one Diaspora server to another. (This might have changed in the last six to twelve months, but I doubt it.) This sort of moots the benefit of decentralization; what good is it if I can pick from any one of a sea of hosts, but must stick with that host for the rest of forever, even if they turn evil?
Take a scrub to your Facebook friends list and you can get a more powerful TinyLetter.
Practically speaking you'd never un-friend people unless they personally bother you. This is why I hardly check my Facebook timeline. All I use is Messenger which is pretty useful to keep in touch with people you want to.
So, the real anti Facebook is Facebook itself with a fresh start.
In case you want to give it hints, it has nice features like "close friends" (which will pin their posts to the top of your timeline) and unfollowing (for those people you don't want to unfriend but also don't want to see in your timeline).
Facebook actually makes it easy to avoid uninteresting posts with a small amount of effort.
I've started unfriending people the moment they start posting baby photos. My friends list is shrinking fast!
The only people who don't get unfriended are the people I actually like or the people who never post.
You can in theory, however in practice I've found it to be very cumbersome. I spent some time in 2011 trying to sort my Facebook 'friends' into groups - people I know from work, from tech meetups, and so on. It was too much work and the groups were too coarse. Facebook's graph search was promising, and I'd love to occasionally share a link (say) my policy-wonk friends will like, but there was no way to pair up graph search and status updates, e.g. share a link with "my friends who like technology policy". And of course, graph search is gone now.
I think Facebook's thinking is that you should just post an update and they'll figure out who'll be most interested in it. But the problem with that is there's no way to know who exactly is reading your status updates.
I did actually start a new Facebook account for a lot of these reasons, because it was difficult to scrub the old account and it felt rude to unfriend people, but there were a lot of people I didn't feel very connected to or interested in, or that they probably were interested in me.
I still don't like how they subtly influence who I am thinking of / in contact with / whatever. The algorithm is creepy.
Of course, it cannot be too frequent. Family members and friends who send out mass updates too often end up being ignored, just like frequent Facebook updates. And that is because it is one-way communication. It is missing the core piece of asking how the recipients of the email have been, and engaging in a one-on-one conversation, even if just a brief one via email. (Posting a note at the end saying, "Please reply to tell me how you are doing." does not count.)
For my own communications, I am not on social media. I call family every week or so. Sunday afternoons are a web of phone calls between us all. For old friends, I send emails periodically, one or twice a year at least. And news gets less frequent as you age. You aren't moving, you have the same job, the kids are 6 months older, but no real news. So sometimes those emails only purpose are to ask the other person how they are doing.
So TinyLetter sounds fine for what it is. But I don't see it as a replacement for anything.
In short, automatically DELAY posting to Facebook. Let everybody know at the bottom of all content: This was published first at example.com and released to social media (Facebook) after X hours.
Make Facebook look antiquated like a newspaper. Let everyone know, Facebook is the old news. If you want our latest news, you have to sign up for the email list--you must to go to example.com for the LATEST news.
One way I'm thinking this could work with a WordPress plugin, when the publisher schedules a post, the post would be "locked" from view with a countdown timer. "This content unlocks in 6 hours. To unlock this content now, and to get our content before everyone else, sign up for our email list."
Maybe for really time-sensitive info you could have three tiers. A paid tier (instant release) and a free tier (unlocked 1 hour later) and a social media tier (unlocked 6 hours later.)
Essentially, you're taking advantage of the value of time, automatically. For example, if shampoo is on sale and you're 1 hour late, maybe the shelf is cleared out.
But you don't necessarily need a paid tier, because the publisher is a) getting more traffic to example.com, pulling traffic off Facebook and b) getting more email subscribers.
Publishers do implement this on their own, but I think it would work well as a WordPress plugin or as some kind of paid service if it was slick enough.
The idea isn't just about Facebook, but publishing anything to get more subscribers. If your posts are time-sensitive and people can get your info through social media (without delay) then you're probably losing traffic, because people are busy, lazy, whatever--they're often already on Facebook and need a reason to go somewhere else.
Paid subscriptions aren't as common, and I almost deleted that part of my comment, but people do pay for time-sensitive info. As far as the "paid tier" I was thinking out loud, in terms of building a general purpose SAS app for publishers. I haven't nailed down exactly how it would work, to delay posts to social media. Obviously it would need compelling case studies where people increased traffic and subscribers, and revenue. I can think of a couple of markets to start with, but not getting more specific than that.
Another aspect of this is the notifications. I think email notifications are good to start with because they show up on your phone, and if those notifications are customizable and targeted, that's convenient. But I think there's more you could do with notifications, so that people aren't annoyed that they have to go to your website to find the (timely) information they want. If you can do better notifications than social media (more specific, less annoying) then I think people will more likely go to your website vs. consume your content through social media which sends less-useful notifications.
What is happening, and happened years ago, is that many people stopped using Facebook messaging and went back to email. It's easier to get messages via email on smartphones than to run Facebook's app.
There is another, more benign phenomenon, where a company's PR department writes an article about the company, sends it off to a reporter, and says "Hey, we think you might be interested in publishing this (plus, we already did all the writing for you)" and then the newspaper edits it and publishes it as a regular article.
They see it as a sort of win-win situation. Reporters get an article to publish without any work, and companies get free / cheap PR.
Please specify for those of us that don't use it. There's been several apps known as 'Messenger' over the years.
Yes. At least among my social circle, it's become the go-to messaging platform.
An other difference is that one can reply to an email but not to a RSS feed. Reading the comments here it seems to me it is a key point relevant to TinyLetter versus Twittbook.
TinyLetter is a one-way communication channel. Like a blog with comments disabled. This is to me a major feature for two reasons that are actually one: spam. With comments gone you don't have to deal with spam, trolls, etc. The second reason is "social interaction spam": when feedback is enabled, people may think they have to reply, support, "like", "retweet" etc. Often the reply is void of content.
TinyLetter's key feature is that you are sending a "newsletter", making it clear that no feedback is required, which eliminates the social spam that pervades social networks.
The problem with this statement is that there is a vast difference in number of users between Ello and Google+. The latter is far from "forgotten" or "near dead." Every time I hit G+, it's teeming with activity. I can't say that about Ello, which seems to be populated by mustachioed German font designers who love custom bicycles and the music of Kraftwerk.
Now, Google+ has had its issues. It might even be going away or abandonware. And it's a blip on the radar compared to Facebook. But that's different from comparing it to Ello! The "Google+ is dead" meme is just lazy tech reportage.
G+ is a good network, I hope the Facebookers will remain on Facebook and Google will find some way to open it up to outside web to integrate it with its active communities and the wide web - a prime example is the G+ blog comment system. It had potential to be the no 1, but they squandered away the opportunity by limiting it to G+ and Disqus scored there.
There's also the problem of knowing who you're contacting and when. Hiding that would probably take some kind of anonymous remailer program.
Normal people would probably just have a free email account from companies like gmail or yahoo and not use any encryption. Wouldn't services like TinyLetter then be transferring the data from Facebook to other email hosting companies? This takes care of some privacy issues but still doesn't seem to solve all of problems for private communication.
The real benefit, as the article points out, is that the empty room problem is solved. Everyone already has an email address, it's your online identity, and email addresses aren't tied to one provider like a facebook account or a twitter account. If gmail dies, TinyLetter still lives. If TinyLetter dies, there's nothing stopping someone from creating an alternative version that imports old newsletters to reconstruct everything.
Would folks consider this approach a practical replacement for RSS-like services, to reach out to a broader audience? Since most ("lay")people don't seem interested in going out of their way to subscribe to RSS feeds; seems like they'd be happy to subscribe in a manner where (more!) things will land up in their inbox.
I've been subscribing to tons of RSS feeds for business blogging recently, and while there are similarities, there's just no way I'd accept TinyLetter as a substitute for a feed. First there's the awkward idea of a gigantic email folder hierarchy to store it all. Then there are things like enclosures, a Youtube video, mp3 files, etc. Also, I've noticed that email links (view this in your browser!) tend to rot about 10x as fast and are not indexed by e.g. archive.org. So I dunno, it's just different tech.
Google+ failed because of they didn't give anyone a good reason to move away from Facebook where such networks already existed, and they insisted on lack of anonymity. The intelligent commentators are all on Twitter anyway.
But the demographic of teenagers, bored housewives and creepy middle-aged men on the internet is very large, and they are on the side 24/7. Pretty much everyone else who uses the internet uses it for work and hardly uses Facebook. But they trudge along to Facebook a bunch of other people who of course need to stay in the communication loop.
Email is not going away because no other system is a wide-spread. Slack could come close, if only they took away their silly way of logging in. It was a shame that Gmail is rooted in email. Heck, if Gmail changed their backend to something like Dlack, 50% of internet users would be no longer using email and they wouldn't even know it. I dream of a Slack to Email gateway.
Why "social network" became synonymous of producing and reading news from the life of people?
MySpace and Orkut were not that way. I imagine other social networks from the early 2000's were not that way also.
Facebook is what you get when you have a founder that cuts and pastes myspace code to voyeristically spy on girls he can't get while holding a business card that says "I'm CEO bitch" while calling his users "dumb fucks". Worse than the next AOL 2.0.1
The past Prodigy's, Compuserves, AOLs, TheGlobes, geocities, friendsters, myspaces, facebooks have never done very well especially when compared to truly innovative companies like Google which also happens to make billions more and has billions more users.
Now when I meet someone new, and he's like add me on Facebook, I give them my email and always get that look in return.
Kidding aside, I prophesize that the next really big, impactful American political movement will not have a web page or twitter/facebook account or forums. The internet as a useful tool for outsiders is over.
Email, on the other hand, is plaintext for most of its journey and available in cleartext to dozens of shady actors (every ISP in the path, sender's provider, recipient's provider). The courts are clear that email is not considered private and not protected by law.
I'd like to see GPG+email become the new Facebook, but I'll take Facebook over email as it stands now easily.
Engagement metrics for my status updates! I knew I was missing out on something.
Pretty much every update since the beginning has steadily raised that overhead, and now it's no more efficient than email was at solving the problem.
From the article, is the problem really the technical complexity or the empty rooms? Is it privacy? Or, is there really a problem at all? Of course there is! Just like any other businesses/companies there some people that will always complain!
In the case of TinyLetter, it is NOT a replacement of Facebook. It will NOT be -- far from it. People don't use Facebook just to communicate. Some people use it to advertise, to sell, to communicate (sure), to look for old friends, to pretend to be somebody else, to boast that they are successful, to look for missing people important to them just like this:
http://gary.littlethings.com/gary-bentley-nurse/?utm_source=...
Now, can you do this in a newsletter? Don't think so...
It is simply an issue of control: Content, speed, and the Signal-to-Noise ratio. And that goes for both the Sender and the Receiver. Makes e-mail the obvious choice.
Usenet is.