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Comment by sfphotoarts | Hacker News Reader

From the article Lars says that facebook has changed the world. I don't see this being the case. So a lot of people like to see what their friends are doing and play games that challenge the average sheep's IQ, but what does facebook do that is world changing? Aside from keeping an enormous number people 'busy' for hours a day that might otherwise have been spent studying, working or actually doing things? I am skeptical about facebook's benefit to the world as anything more that entertainment du jour. Maybe Lars was just interested in giving wave another try under the facebook brand instead. It certainly might make more sense in a social connectivity company. I'm not arguing that facebook isn't very popular, just with point that it's world changing. Regardless, I wish him all the best in his new job.

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I'm "friends" with people on facebook that would have (or already had) slipped out of my life otherwise. This summer I spent the weekend at my college roommate's house. I hadn't talked to him in nearly 10 years and without facebook I likely never would have again. That seems like a big deal.

I don't want to make assumptions about your specific use of Facebook, but how many possible connections have "you" (a typical FB user) missed because of time spent on Facebook instead of doing other stuff?

I won't deny that Facebook can make certain connections easier - of course it can, that's what it's designed to do. But how large is the net positive effect?

Think about the difference search engines can make to finding information. Without the web and search engines, how can you find information on a topic? You have to go to a local library - hit or miss on what information you'll find, especially for something obscure, or find some magazines or a book on the topic, or maybe find an expert who's willing to explain it to you.

Think of the difference social networks can make for keeping in touch with people. Without social networks, you have to remember to send them an email to see what's up, maybe pick up the phone now and then and give someone a call, meet up at a pub now and then, send a card for Christmas.

Now, to me both are incredibly convenient services, but by FAR only one can be described as world-changing.

You're conflating search engines with all human knowledge contained on the Internet, even though there are many search engines and many alternate ways of finding information on the Internet (not to mention how much of the best information isn't on the Internet).

Then from the other side you equate a social network to a phone call or email, completely ignoring the astonishing fact that Facebook has signed up a double-digit percentage of the entire world population in a single social network. Or how common it is on Facebook to find people you may never have seen again otherwise. Or the fact that you can maintain passive contact with networks an order of magnitude greater than what is possible via traditional social channels.

And I say this as someone who doesn't particularly value any of that. I log into Facebook maybe twice a month, and I don't particularly admire their mission. However when it comes to your closing statement, I'm in agreement, except with the inverse proposition.

>You're conflating search engines with all human knowledge contained on the Internet, even though there are many search engines and many alternate ways of finding information on the Internet (not to mention how much of the best information isn't on the Internet).

I am, because all the information on the Internet is useless if you can't find it.

>completely ignoring the astonishing fact that Facebook has signed up a double-digit percentage of the entire world population in a single social network.

Everyone in the world IS a single social network, barring several small isolated tribes here and there. The phone network is a single social network. Email is a single social network. Facebook formalizes and makes access to this network easier, but to a lesser extent than Google makes access to the world's information easier.

>the fact that you can maintain passive contact with networks an order of magnitude greater than what is possible via traditional social channels.

That is a fair point, and I'm certainly not denying that Facebook is useful, but I stand by my assertion. If you could somehow quantify and compare the difference made to society by search engines vs. social networks, search engines have a far larger impact.

Let me put it another way: Google is to the printing press as Facebook is to ???

Yes, Google is nothing without the rest of the Internet, but so is Facebook, so I'm content to run with that comparison even if it's not perfect.

"but how many possible connections have "you" (a typical FB user) missed because of time spent on Facebook instead of doing other stuff?"

Uh, "zero"? Maybe some people compulsively stare at Facebook for hours at a time and decide against going out tonight to click "refresh" instead, and I suppose there's always a marginal effect, but most people just stuff Facebook in their downtime or other extra time, from what I can see. Obsessives will obsess anyhow so even that's probably not a problem.

And then of course you stack this up against the real connections renewed that would have expired and your argument is just not credible.

In fact, Facebook if anything encourages you to go out tonight, or to do something interesting with your life rather than just sitting on Facebook, because you see your friends going out and doing interesting things and then posting pictures or talking about it on Facebook. (Assuming, of course, that you have interesting friends.)

I ask because I honestly don't know. I have friends who fall under both usage scenarios, but these are just anecdotes and/or extremes. I haven't seen any actual data on the effects of Facebook, either positive or negative.

I hadn't talked to him in nearly 10 years and without facebook I likely never would have again.

What does this tell you about the real strength of this friendship? I don't mean to pick on you; I hear this argument a lot and I don't understand it. A really good friendship would have found a way to stay alive over 10 years with or without Facebook.

They probably moved to different cities, and your argument could be made for any of the technologies that held friends together before Facebook. If they were really friends they would have stayed friends without the crutch of the telephone, letters, smoke signals or other communication technologies. Are pen pals not really friends because they use a certain messaging technology to stay together?

"A really good friendship would have found a way to stay alive over 10 years with or without Facebook."

That's true, and I certainly have friends that I intend to stay in touch with for many years to come, Facebook or no. Relationships fall into concentric circles though; there's acquaintances on the outside that only care about slightly, and there's lifelong friends near the centre. Somewhere in between are people that you would certainly talk to if you ever ran into them at random, but wouldn't make much of an effort to stay in touch otherwise.

Facebook is ideal for these kind of relationships, because the semi-public nature of wall posts keeps things casual (letters and emails feel very intimate, and it can be strange sending a long "hey, what's up?" message to someone you don't know that well). There's also the fact that you can see their recent activities and photographs, giving you an easy conversational opener ("I saw you visited x/did y/know z, how was it?"). I think it was quite carefully designed to afford such interaction styles.

Setting aside your personal judgments on how other people spend their time, do you actually not think that facebook has had a large impact on how (primarily younger) people socialize, understand each other, and think about their relationships?

As a primarily younger person (18), it hasn't changed anything. It hasn't made me "hang out" with anyone I don't hang out with regularly ect.

I mean, I recently left my home town to go to a new school and when I wanted to say good bye to my friends who I don't normally talk to- I wrote on their walls, but I also called them-

So you were 12 when Facebook was started and had Facebook your entire high school life? It seems a bit hard to be subjective then since you haven't known any different.

That's a valid point; nevertheless, I have plenty of (some very close) friends that do not have Facebook- or recently acquired it so that they may see photos of themselves, so I can easily speak about their lives, but I do not know if that counts (does it?) because they grew up around people who have facebooks.

But in the end, you are right, I'm not quite subjective because of the way I grew up.

I think you both mean "objective", not "subjective".

It's hard to realize the value of Facebook when you don't yet have friends all over the country (or the world).

I don't think so, I'm 20, and I remember when I was 12 or so I had friends that spent hours talking with each other on the phone at night, now I'm pretty sure they spend it on Facebook chatting. I'm not convinced there's been any fundamental change, just shifting some deck chairs.

So then why isn't Facebook as notable as laying the first landlines across the US? Sure it's not the first time people have been communicating in this way, but by your argument Facebook is implementing the way that the current generation communicates with each other. Now there certainly are nuances to the situation; there are parts about communicating through Facebook that are richer [1] and also scarier [2] than the telephone. But if your claim is that Facebook has taken place of the telephone for certain types of communication, I fail to see how that isn't changing the world.

[1] Sending various forms of media to each other, having a historical record of communication, etc.

[2] Privacy controls, control over your data, etc.

When I was 20 (in 1995), social networking was done through telnet...sitting in the computer lab until the sun come up chatting away with strangers at other universities. I still keep in contact with a few of the people I met that way, but not through Facebook. I still don't even have an account!

I was just gonna say... back in myyy day, when I was 12, in 1990, we socialized by dialing into BBSes and spamming Usenet via asynchronous relay. Clearly the GP runs in social circles heavily involved in some sort of ancient technology cult; "tele-phone"?

The real difference is that they aren't going to keep the same phones numbers forever. With FB, and whatever eventually replaces it, they have a shot at keeping in touch all their lives.

It is the best contact and "address" book I've ever had

Have you ever seen people/group of friends in the bar or at other social occasion, taking out their phones and start fiddling with Facebook for hours? I've seen many. On the upside, i think it does help people connecting with their friends. As much as it does, it's a site where you see your friends' photos, that's about it!

For better or worse, they do change the world.

I communicate with my high-school friends more often than the days of ICQ, MSN, and Friendster joined together.

Keep in mind that me and my friends have passed university and are working and have our own life. Oh, by the way, we live in different continents of the world.

So very true . I live in the US, and my close friends are distributed around the world. My parents live in Africa, my brother is currently in Europe, cousins in Israel, UK, etc, and former colleagues around the world as well. We all manage to stay in touch. Facebook wasn't the first service that allowed everyone to do that, but it's certainly done a better job of getting everyone on. Has it changed the world? Not at the level at which Google did, but it's certainly made it a lot easier to keep in touch with a broad group of people.

My girlfriend had lost contact with her mother for over 6 years and recently found each other on Facebook. They reunited a couple of weeks ago and have been communicating ever since. They are both so happy.

That's pretty world changing for her.

Why hadn't she been in touch before? I find it slightly far-fetched that she had actually tried to get in touch before, and the only way she managed was through facebook.

Maybe just the fact that it makes it so easy for people to look up other people. All you need is there name, and know what they look like. Pretty hard to do that anywhere else.

Unfortunately, lost phone numbers, non-permanent home address and the lack of a white pages made it impossible.

Seriously? Your GF needed Facebook to reunite with her mother? As stereotypical as I may sound, but she needs to get her life back and socialize beyond Facebook. It's simply absurd.

Well, if you have been completely out of someones life for long enough, calling them or meeting them at first could be awkward enough to discourage either person to put the effort into setting it up.

With Facebook you open up a very non committal link into each others lives, where you may send each other the odd message, comment on what each other is doing, without getting right back into things straight away.

I have a similar story.

I have not been in touch with my dad in the Philippines for almost 20 years. We lost contact when my mom, brother and I moved and we didn't have telephones back then.

Last year, my half-sister found my brother and me on Facebook.

It was good to learn to that my dad is still alive and got to talk to him after all these years.

That's definitely world changing... regaining touch with one's near and dear.... The specifics of your girlfriend's case apart....Losing touch with one's own mother.. for 6 years??@!#@!#, and Facebook re-uniting them?? Unless this was a forcible separation due to a natural calamity/war... (in which case my heart-felt sympathies) anything like this is really inexcusable. I really,really find that sad if the current, or future generation would be requiring Facebook/Twitter to keep in touch with one's parents. That trivializes relationships.

"So a lot of people like to see what their friends are doing and play games that challenge the average sheep's IQ, but what does facebook do that is world changing"

Basically, you just implied what Facebook has done - redefine how we build and maintain relationships. That's a huge social impact.

Now that every single damn website has "Login with Facebook Account" button, I think it's a big deal.

Now that every phone comes out with "syncing with Facebook" feature, I think it's a big deal.

Now that people actually put their credit card info and buy stuffs on Facebook (although it's small right now), I think it's a big deal.

Now that there is a single entity that keeps track of our life/relationship history, I think it's a big deal.

I mean... these are probably not a big deal for you, but many people in the tech industry think so. That is why the valuation of Facebook is so high. It has a lot of potential. It's not all about just.. attracting people to increase traffic and spamming them with ads. It's more about how the social aspect of everyone's lives have been redefined. There was letters, then phone, then emails, then now.. facebook/twitter/etc.

Plus, Lars cannot give Wave "another try" at Facebook. Google Wave is a Google's property and anything related to Wave technology will make a good reason for Google to sue Facebook -- just to worsen the relationship of the two companies. Facebook probably wanted the leader who excels are putting out great products. That's what Lars is great at.

> Google Wave is a Google's property and anything related to Wave technology will make a good reason for Google to sue Facebook

Actually, the underlying protocol is open and some of the related software has been released under an Apache license:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave_Federation_Protocol

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave#Open_source

When you look at it zoomed out, Facebook combined disparate web avenues (chat, contacts, forums, game portals, bboards, adspace) into one place and added a thick air of mass adoption. This is hardly world-changing innovation-wise but it is game-changing in making the web more usable and understandable. Facebook is a fork of the whole web (Open web vs Facebook Web). I am betting the farm that this is what internally facebook is running with. This is a powerful motivator because they can justify to themselves and to everyone in the company the act of copying>improving elements of the open web into it. This is why a Facebook email, search, OS is inevitable.

In short - my definition of Facebook. its the web in the CONTEXT of your social circle and that has changed the web biz game, it has only begun to change the world 'proper' and thats what i think excites people like Lars.

I think facebook seems to be doing more to embed themselves in the "open web" (connect, instant personalization) than they are bringing elements of the open web into facebook.

I can't help but draw some parallel to AOL/CompuServe/etc. Like Facebook, they were attempts to make the web both more accessible to the average person as well as present in very clear terms what they could do on this new "Information Superhighway".

A lot of technical people look at the collection of services that Facebook is offering and can easily enumerate instances of prior art and thus I imagine feel somewhat dismissive of Facebook.

"Farmville? Why not just go to any of the number of flash game portals that have existed since the early 2000s?", "Messageboards? Older than dirt".

Technical people tend to forget that the average person doesn't like searching, and needs to be told what they "should be doing" (topically, that was probably part of the problem with Wave's lack of adoption - too much freedom, too different - people need to be guided). People prefer having "everything in one place" with explicit parallels (rather than absolute freedom) to what is important to them.

I would hazard to guess that to the average person, Facebook is the web. That part is kind of game changing (and arguably, not necessarily in a good way).

"Facebook: Internet for Dummies"

Yeah I would have said the same thing before Facebook had 500m users and before people spent more time on FB than on any other place on the internet.

Something is going on here, and IMO what is happening is most difficult to understand for bleeding edge techies like the people on this forum.

Actually - The Social Network may be mostly fiction but it does capture an idea about facebook that I never realized before - the idea that it's important who you know. Which is the essence of places like Harvard. And the essence of Facebook. Like many others I thought facebook was just a slightly less annoying version of MySpace or friendster, but, as it turns out, it's not, and you have got to give credit to Mark Zuckerberg to understand this from the very start.

Apart from all that, facebook is now the new Google in terms of desirability to work there. No wonder, as it's pre-IPO so you stand to make very good money once they do their IPO. Especially as an exec. You can be a me-too rich person like the Googleionnaires who didn't do anything special except get hired by Google before the IPO. I get the appeal.

Without Facebook, I would have quite a bit of trouble connecting with my friends and families around the world.

This may be the case, although, I'd argue that Facebook really doesn't do anything that makes it any easier for you to connect with your friends and family than email does. However, let's say it does, that still doesn't mean Facebook is world changing, it just means its a better mousetrap.

And email doesn't make it any easier to connect with friends and family than paper based mail does. Oh wait.. it does...

Facebook has a number of features for communication that email doesn't have:

1) Passive communication: the fact you can go and check someone's profile and see what they have been up to is very powerful

2) Default public communication. By making communication public by default it lets your other friends and family benefit from any communication you do with a 3rd party

3) No email addresses - people change email addresses a lot more than they should. The only comparable problem on Facebook is when women get married and change their lastname, but I've never seen any problems arising from this.

That really just scratches the surface of the differences.

Sometimes, doing something better really is enough to make a huge difference.

Yes, but Facebook is fungible. In the same way that MySpace and Orkut were. The only thing that's holding people on your website is other people and a bunch of dumb games. You can say whatever you want about Google, but there is not a single search engine today that is as good in all cases. That's why I'll bet my money that 10 years from now Google will be well and going strong, whereas I have no idea what will happen to Facebook.

As for Facebook:

- It helps me connect better with people I already known for long (There are a lot of people I'd have been out of touch with if not for Facebook)

- It helps me also maintain a network of 'loose connections'. These are people I don't know very well, but can now easily keep in touch with. I would otherwise have never written or phoned them.

- I get a lot of relevant content from Facebook - this includes links to articles/blogs that are relevant to me,videos that I find to be fun/useful/inspiring.

- I have had some of the most interesting debates on people's Facebook walls. Some very long ones. At times, we've decided to then take the debate offline, and have actually followed that up with a debate when we meet.

facebook for me is content discovery + keeping in touch + updating + discussing. Thats a lot, and quite simply, it is not very far from being at the center of a lot of my online activity.

You bring up good points, but you also aren't taking into account facebook's potential to change the world. What we're seeing develop is really a de anonymized private version of the Internet. They have their own substitute emailing system that in a lot of ways have eliminated spam.

You can search for pages, things, groups. I'm not sure if this is a good thing, if having this internet where you're forced to reveal your identity is a good or bad thing, but it definitely has the ability to change the world.

Facebook is the new AOL - but this time could work. If you only message friends through facebook, only share photos and video in facebook and only read blogs in facebook - then what else on the net do you need?

Google can dominate the rest of the net, but if your net only means facebook then the chocolate factory just got made irrelevent.

Now imaging facebook does a deal with a phone maker to only connect to facebook, or to only have free data to facebook then Google's ad revenue goes down

There are examples where facebook has been the catalyst for something 'world changing' - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/business/worldbusiness/08i...

When you can connect and understand the social interactions of 500 million people, you can do amazing things.

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