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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Yes FB is definitely becoming less useful. For example, it used to be that if I listed my employer and set it to "friends only" then that was that. Now, if you visit my profile, it's still friends only - but if you go to my employer's public page, my name is (actually was) listed there! Same with all my previous employers, the colleges I attended, my interests, etc etc. Hometown too maybe! So I have removed all of that.

I can't help but think this will backfire for FB. Their long-term value is being deeply embedded in people's real lives. The real value of FB for me is that my friends merely need to keep their profiles up to date and I have a self-updating address book and birthday calendar. If no-one lists that then FB is merely as sticky as Twitter which is to say, not much.

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FB also seems to get less useful over time as you add more people.

Initially, when you have a few people you know really well and get on with, you can post quite freely knowing that it's unlikely to come back and bite you.

Later, as you gain a truckload of acquaintances you have to be much more measured and it winds up feeling like you're running some sort of discount PR agency.

This is an interesting departure from Metcalfe's Law [ the value of the network is proportionate to the square of the number of nodes in the network ].

Perhaps Metcalfe's Law applies up to a certain size, and then tails off thereafter.

There is a limit on the number of people that us humans can reasonably be expected to have friendships with. I have a feeling that it is substantially smaller than the number of 'friends' that facebook attracts.

For FB I suspect that the ideal would be a network with lots of nodes but few connections; I want to be able to find my friends but I don't want them to be connected to so many that they have to sanitize their posts/thoughts.

I sanitize my posts (and I post very little), and I would no matter how few connections I had. Given their history of privacy flaws, it's not what my friends see that I worry about.

Hardly a departure, the value is substantial for all those but the user.

The friendship limit you speak of has been hypothesized by an anthropologist (Robin Dunbar) as being in direct correlation to neocortex size. More recently, it's been called "the monkeysphere".

as you gain a truckload of acquaintances you have to be much more measured

One can't live like this for too long, you have to be yourself instead of a filtered, cleaned-up politically correct version of yourself.

Right, and if I'm not comfortable with doing so on facebook, then I'll go be myself elsewhere.

Twitter was never about having your personal info on display. There's the 'bio' section and that's it. Twitter is a broadcast medium where the information is the primary interest point. I think the stickyness of Twitter correlates to how interesting the tweets are of the person you're following, rather than the person itself (like facebook).

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