How to Take Down Facebook -- Hint: It Ain't Twitter.
500hats.typepad.com
500hats.typepad.com
If a social network has all these complexities, how will it grow? If FB had all these complexities, it would never grow so big. Now that it is big, it can experiment with groups, although even that is a second attempt because lists didn't work. People hate settings. FB is like an online version of a bar. People just want to hang out.
The intimate alternative he is imagining is email. People already use it and it works fine.
Before Facebook came along, was anyone writing blog posts about how nice it will be if a website let me share photos of my last holiday with my random old school buddies who I haven't spoken to in 20 years?
These things are quite random. So, in as far as something will take down Facebook, it will simply be something which is equally or more viral and fun. It does not matter what its specific form or function will be. Intimacy is not essential.
Stack Overflow has a search feature and it works fine. But wouldn't it be cool if someone aggregated results from different programming websites? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1854731)
Check out Union Square Venture's blogpost from May: http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2010/05/stackoverflow.php. In addition to describing their investment, the post describes problems in the space. If you had never heard of Stack Overflow and you only read about the problems in that post, would you say the solution was too complex?
I think it's pretty much like dating sites. Before you solve the chicken-and-egg problem, it's meaningless to talk about how you add value. And the proposed value-add here (intimacy) makes the chicken-and-egg problem even more difficult (a dating site only for Mac lovers, anyone?).
Edited for clarity
Feels like a case of "people misuse software, blame software".
Even if you are in the whitelist, I still can select what you see: I have a list of people from work, close friends, people who speak a particular language and so on. Everytime I post something to my wall I can decide to which lists it's visible and to which it's not. It takes a little to set up but after that it's easy to manage.
I'm curious about things that you'd not want someone you profess to trust and call a friend to see, but are willing to put on a website which is outside your control which has a history of changing privacy settings with no warning and has shown few signs of interest in personal confidentiality.
Specifically, we agree on the fact that many friends=problem. Dave doesn't really suggest a solution to that problem - I think it's something which can be solved technically. Dave also brings out a great argument as to why privacy matters to facebook, which I hadn't spotted before.
The problem is in the name "friend". Most of our facebook-friends are actually just contacts. Only a subset of those contacts are your real friends. So, the problem is with the name of the concept, not the concept itself.
It would be pretty useful if facebook expanded on the concept of labeling contacts and thus making contact subgroups. Yes, putting friends in groups is already possible, but I feel it is highly underpowered. It should rank a lot higher in the whole user experience and the facebook core itself (separate walls, photos, easier management, easier viewing, easier control).
I think facebook should automatically and invisibly group your friends for you - in fact they already do filter out some of your uninteresting contacts automatically, but I feel there's more work to be done on that area.
It could be just enough for people to use the service and have to clean up a dozen or less of their 300 friends which have been mis-categorized, instead of individually placing the 300 friends in a group.
This kind of thing probably already exists in facebook's internal labs, they're just waiting for their users to become ready for this kind of feature.
[1] - http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/facebook-employee-clai...
I believe he's right - when you've hit Twitter, the only way to go is to swing right back to intimacy - to meaningful, private digital connections. The whole essay is well worth a read.
Edit: Also, isn't the things that McClure is arguing for essentially what http://www.frid.ge/ is doing?
The newsfeed-ranking algorithm, privacy controls, friend lists, and latest groups incarnation are all simply hacks to try to shoehorn it's flawed social schema into what we actually experience in the real world.
Facebook is a direct map of your real-life social circle, to the internet. It's just a way of taking your friends in real life and interacting with them more easily (much easier than emailing everyone, for example.) Of course, lots of people don't really use Facebook that way, but that's the behavior that is encouraged, and most people more-or-less follow that pattern.
In that case, I don't think having 500 friends is that big a problem. Sure, for most people, 300 of those friends will be people you aren't very close with, but so what? Other than the news feed, it shouldn't matter to you who these people are, except in terms of privacy. And you know what? With matters of privacy, I think the world is moving towards Robert Scoble's view - just assume everything is public anyway.
By the way, the number 5,000 is a great number: it doesn't really matter what the number is, as long as there is a ceiling, it's pretty clear that you're not supposed to add anyone and everyone. On the other hand, 5,000 is large enough that most users won't realistically hit it.
http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...
It could be simplified to its core. Picture New Twitter now but even simpler, and flipped horizontally. Post/item on the left side, and then banter on the right. Maybe one of the crew posts a jacket they're thinking of buying, or the result of a game, or a new movie trailer. Chit-chat fills the right hand side until people lose interest and move on to other posts.
Editing to add: I run a basketball forum which is a free-for-all. Anonymous posting, etc. And I often wonder how my experience of it would change if I just locked it down to the best 12-20 contributors - might miss a few challenging viewpoints, but there'd be no spam, griefers, brainless posts, etc. Perhaps picture the aforementioned concept as a micro-forum based around a particular niche rather than necessarily a particular group of friends?
And again (still thinking): You pick niches of interest and are randomly lumped with 12-20 others for as long as the group lasts. As with online gaming, you can privately kick out griefers or passengers. Perhaps you can only commit to 3 groups (wine, NBA, travel) to ensure you don't spread too thin. Elevator spiel is: Chatroulette + microforum + group decisions.
Human communications depend largely on context. We weren't made to blurt out every one of our feelings and observations to the community at large. Instead, we share this piece of information with this person, ask this other person for advice, listen in on these other folks when they talk about X, etc.
The is the natural way of being human -- to use a phrase from the movie, it's the social experience.
Every technical solution I've seen so far fails to include this contextual nature of communication. It's too much of a pain for folks to pick certain people for certain kinds of talk, and it's all so much a pain in the ass (compared with the old way of physically moving from one group to another)
Oddly enough, this was first noticed with TV back in the 1950s. Up until then, conversations were small and cliquish -- the natural order. TV brought in the idea of "universal" communicating in a way that radio, plays, or newspapers didn't. Suddenly everybody in the family was in the room when Lucy got pregnant, or when Opie killed the bird with the slingshot.
Of course, nobody bothered much complaining back then, because, after all, back in the 1950s what kind of radical information was going to be on TV? And nobody complained (much) when TV got into a lot more controversial issues in the last couple of decades.
But now it's not TV -- it's us. It's our lives, our pregnancies, our sorrows, etc.
I think people need the contextual nature of communication -- it makes society function. But I don't see any technology solution on the horizon that easily and naturally facilitates this. And yes, if it happens it might just be the next FB killer. But that's a big "if". Lots of folks have went down the road of trying to add context, including FB itself, and so far nobody has been successful.
Social dynamics are different for every age group. I believe people fall in to four (4) different categories, all relative to when the WWW was first publicly available.
1. Those who were already established adults and working on their careers (our parents) (25-35+)
2. Those who were still developing and learning (probably everyone here) (~5-25)
3. Those who are usually stuck in their ways, less likely to learn (our gradparents) (60+)
4. Those who were born with the internet already extremely developed (kids in high school now, etc)
* note: the ages above are at the time the WWW launched, not ages today.
--
Each of these groups were subjected to different paradigms of social connection and privacy and therefore have different concerns or interests about privacy.
Group 1: Our parents are first were interested in using the internet to research, shop, and other non-social activities. Facebook was ours for a long time until eventually everyone's parents started joining, and now they are reaping the benefits and finding old connections with old friends, but they don't face the same issues of privacy, because they didn't develop a social life through Facebook like we (Group 2) have. Although, if your parents were like mine, they had initial reservations about putting their CC info online, or being searchable online, or having websites track their behaviors, while we (Group 2) were less concerned about it.
Group 2: Our group is the most sensitive to privacy, because we're the only group that knew what it was like before and after Facebook. We were also at an extremely social point of our lives when Facebook came out, and we still are now, even more so because of the addition of Facebook to our lives. We are mixing friends with coworkers with family and acquaintances. Our social lives grew side by side with Facebook. For us, Facebook is engrained in our lives and is part of the fabric of our lives. This wasn't the case for our parents.
Group 3: Our grandparents generally had no interest in learning to use the internet (with some exceptions, of course), let alone be on Facebook. This group is out of the realm of social networking online.
Group 4: The youth. They have grown up with social networks present and a part of their lives from the beginning. And just like our parents were apprehensive about things that we (Group 2) didn't care about, this group is less sensitive to the same privacy concerns that we are. The world is more open for them, and they are less likely to care about their privacy settings beyond hiding stuff from their parents. When you are in high school, you only have one group of people you know… kids in your high school. As you get older, you start to have multiple groups of friends from different stages, you high school friends, college friends, soccer team friends, work friends, and that is when privacy became a concern for us (Group 2).
The point is, it's going to be very hard to make one blanket solution that addresses every demographic, as privacy is not as much of a problem for anyone but Group 2, us. So, this is probably what Mark Zuckerberg sees, that the world is inevitably heading towards total openness, and that privacy is dead. I tend to agree that privacy is dead, and that people's lives in the future are going to be far more open than they ever were before. Instead of resisting it and trying to create all of these blanket private social networks (which all fail), we should embrace it.
FB has enough gravity to pull most users back in. To break free, the user will need will power to ignore all their friends trying to drag them back.
of course, that's because all your pithiness is going into 140 characters or less to what amounts to almost total strangers.
facebook, where did your allure go? after the last round of privacy banter, i've kept my facebook material almost completely personality free.
Of course, in order to do that, you have to think that FB won't innovate quickly enough to sit on whoever tries. It's the classic startup v. big company challenge.
The difficulty is that this is a very deep problem, and it is "solved" only partially by a very complex, very subtle, very tricky set of societal and personal customs and behaviors. The biggest problem from a social networking service standpoint is that computers very much prefer clear, explicit data, whereas human relationships exist in varying degrees of fuzziness. Most people don't sit down and write out a complete list of everyone who they consider a friend, nor do they create a tiered set of levels of friendships or a ranked list, nor would that necessarily be helpful as such levels are often in flux as friendships change, evolve, grow, and dissolve.
This is a problem everywhere with human behavior, it's one of the reasons why google was successful, for example. Back in the day every search engine was very practical and straightforward. Searching a set of terms brought you a list of web pages that had those terms on them, ranked by whatever convenient concrete metric seemed reasonable. To improve the quality of search results people would have to manually provide cues to search engines, via meta tags for example. Google decided instead to use a more sophisticated search strategy, extracting the implicit meta data about web pages via page rank and such-like. In short, google made web search conform to human behavior, rather than trying to get human behavior to conform to the requirements of search.
I suspect the same breakthrough is waiting to happen in social networking and will have just as big an impact.
That's obviously not the case with Facebook, as seen from the controversy over their privacy settings. It's gonna be interesting watching technology drive culture at the crazy rate it is today. What a time to be alive!
If none of my friends use Google, it's still as valuable to me. If none of my friends use Facebook,...
But most of the manual features for managing friends are already in place - you can update particular lists of people through groups, events and private messages. It's really not that tricky to decide who you want to invite to that awesome house party or on the cheap trip to Vegas.
Other features, such as the "how do you know them?" and focus on work/school/city networks seem to have actually been removed due to lack of use despite offering very intuitive and automatic categorisation of friends. Facebook's trajectory towards openness probably reflects a lack of desire towards using it in a structured way. A hypothetical startup whose main strength is removing the spam in the newsfeed and adding in the features they chose to remove probably isn't going to keep Zuck awake at night. I preferred Facebook before Zynga and gratuitous "liking", but I'm not going to persuade my closest friends to move to a clone to get rid of the bloat.
FWIW I think Dave's example of friend bloat is probably more a reflection of his social circle than underlying changes in Facebook itself. He'd have had a lot more friends in 2006 if he'd been attending university, and considerably fewer now if he was working 9-5 for an unglamorous small business and nobody read his blog. The number of friends I had grew far faster in early 2006 than in any subsequent period, and people I shared fleeting conversation whilst waiting for lectures with were arguably far more tangentially connected to me than, say, my sister.
OTOH, should Facebook be "smart" about this, or should they just provide a button to hide all Farmville updates? In fact, they try to do the first, and also do the second, so I don't know why people still complain about this.
To be fair to Facebook's team, the feed does seem to have improved recently and not just because I've manually blocked Zynga apps. But with their data and talent there really shouldn't be any suggestion that a competitor starting from the ground up could better facilitate the social interaction they started off specialising in.
i get information quickly; it's fast, efficient, and effective; i don't have to sign in to anything (except for voicemails, which i very rarely check); it's pretty much with me wherever i go; it's relevantly actionable -- i get timely invites to go do stuff with people that i care about and want to do (because people with my # know what i'm interested in); i can actually talk to people, which is something i enjoyed doing a lot growing up.
For search engines: First we had specific directories (Yahoo, others), then a single search engine (Google), followed by need of vertical search engines
For social: First we had all those nice forums; then (now) Facebook; again we could go to context specific verticals (e.g. HN a hacker vertical version of FB, which has the context for hackers)
but I'm probably not the only one that didn't realize what I was doing by being "too friendly".
You're not going to tell everyone that the VC you just met with is a tool - but I bet you anything there are a handful of people you do want to tell and discuss it with.
This issue needs to be solved from both angles. An experience that encourages the sharing of content with dynamic lists of connections + an interface that organizes content based on conversations and not strictly a news feed of interactions taking place within your personal network.
Which, presumably, does not include Ron Conway or Michael Arrington.
(but strangely, I would choose them not, in diff situations...)
I don't think groups is the solution either. It is a solution but most likely not the best due to the fact that there are a million combinations of groups I can put together using my friends. Ideally these groups would not be long lasting and I could create them on the fly.
I communicate with the people I care about through all communication methods available, restricting this to one method would be a distraction.