A counterpoint...You can quit using Google, MSFT, Yahoo, and etc.
But you can't quit your friends. Social networking is a winner take all. That is why i agree with the author that Facebook would have to shoot itself in the foot first.
But you can't quit your friends. Social networking is a winner take all. That is why i agree with the author that Facebook would have to shoot itself in the foot first.
My friend, for your sake I hope you never have to fully understand what I am about to say...
But there are times when you not only will quit your friend, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband or wife, but you will have to.
You can quit your family too.
When I was twenty I had no comprehension of this, but having almost reached forty I can reel off examples. Most of which are not mine, fortunately, but some of which are so painful that they hurt even by proxy. Mental illness. Divorce. Physical abuse. Emotional abuse.
Facebook, by the way, with its ridiculously naive conception of identity and privacy, is actually a lousy platform for conducting real-world relationships. It's like trying to compose a story out of the messages written on greeting cards.
[Conducting relationships on Facebook is] like trying to compose a story out of the messages written on greeting cards.
Insightful. Hilarious. Wow.
It might have been. Deliberate, experimental misinterpretation is an important essay-writing technique.
Part of the goal of essays is to arrive at new thoughts. To get to someplace new you have to try some wrong turns.
If you can't think of anything novel, write down the obvious. Then try deliberately misinterpreting what you just wrote. It's usually painfully easy to do.
"Conducting relationships" is a multi-faceted concept in my opinion. It involves several layers of communication and Facebook is just one of those, not THE only one.
Let me give you a concrete example of how Facebook has helped me conduct a relationship that I find rather meaningful in my life. I have an American friend living in Switzerland of who I've met some good friends of his. One is a British guy who just recently moved to Dubai from Switzerland for a short term project. Had it not been for Facebook I probably wouldn't have known he moved there and thus provoked me to book a trip to see him several weeks ago. (another form communication - physical presence) He's only there for a few more months and I'm afraid any other form of communication would have been too slow.
Sorry to de-rail your original point but I always find the "Facebook haters" to be rather interesting. And to you're original point about quitting friends. I don't think he/she meant literally that you can't quit all of your friends. The point is that you will always have a social network of people in your life, whether you continually add or delete people. If you don't (and I would feel exceptionally bad for you) then you represent an extremely small percentage of the world's population.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that Facebook will stay in business, let alone stay fashionable or popular. People have a choice between eating and death, but that doesn't mean that McDonalds will stay in business until humanity is extinct. Though they obviously have quite a headstart in fast food and are doing very well.
The other interesting word in this excerpt is "a". People have "a" social network in Facebook, but they have way, way more than "a" social network in real life. We each have hundreds of overlapping social networks, some with precisely defined membership, temporal, and physical boundaries (I'm not polygamous, so my marriage social network is strictly limited to two) and some with extremely fuzzy boundaries (HN).
Facebook has gotten ahead because, though it offers one particular style of social network, it makes it so very, very easy to use that network -- and it has such a great viral loop and name recognition --- that for the moment it is tempting to pretend that all of your hundreds of real-world social nets can be collapsed into one. But the web is a big place, the future is a long time, and UX innovation can and will be copied.
Absolutely agreed. I was raising questions about the point for the absolute existence of a social network. I think what the originator of this discussion was saying is that any social network is a necessity to living (much like food and shelter). In other words there will always be a market for such a platform (as opposed to say something like selling iPods)
Also I'm interested in understanding why you think Facebook's concept of identity and privacy is naive? My identity is composed of the things I like and my privacy consists of the things that I like that I wish to share with people. Facebook gives me every opportunity to do exactly both in an extremely controlled manner.
It doesn't even have to be that dramatic. People change and drift apart. The older you get, the more extreme the examples become. I often forget the names of people I once considered friends for life.
The more they pile up, the more Facebook changes from keeping in touch to unwilling voyeurism. The FB killer will be something that deftly handles change.
However, Facebook has some things going for it that ICQ didn't. for example:
Grandmothers - Facebook started with the early adopters just like everyone else. But they slowly moved (and are still moving) down the curve, past the 'what's a browser' middle and down to the users for whom email is a big challenge. People who basically don't use computers except for occasional tasks that someone else has shown them how to do and set everything up. These people don't switch easily.
What's going to kill Facebook is something better. Less spam, better privacy, etc, but it still needs to be at least as good as Facebook to get anywhere. And that’s going to take a seriously long runway a great development team and awesome management. Look for a profitable nitch like LinkedIn that just keeps growing.
Grandmothers won't save Facebook. They'll allow Facebook to linger on like a maladapted dinosaur or the old VAX your IT department uses as shelf space. But in a post-Facebook world, just because we all keep Facebook accounts to maintain ossified relationships doesn't mean Zuck still has social relevance.
My fiancée and I are in our late 20s. We were in college when Facebook came out and arrived at the party early. We built our social networks to share the fruits of our newfound "adult" freedoms- namely pictures of inappropriate Halloween costumes and drinking games.
Now, Facebook is different. My mom is on it. My mother-in-law-to-be is on it. But because my fiancée and I are on it, our children likely won't be. It won't be a fun place to share things you don't want mom to know. Mom will be checking in and leaving embarrassing messages on your wall. I think my kids will probably find somewhere else to hang out. It will probably have a name I can't seem to remember, and I will likely embarrass them in front of their friends by pronouncing it wrong or misunderstanding its key features.
Social networks are binding, but they're highly generational. Unless Facebook can figure out how to get my future kids to think its cool, it's toast in 20 years or less.
--Edited for grammar--
Already I see awkward parent/child relationships. To the parent, they love feeling 'in touch'. To the child, it's just embarassing that their parents are hanging around on Facebook. As they move into the embarrassing photos/stories, they're either going to find a new platform or create a separate identity, or something, to conduct themselves online in private.
SMS was the killer app for teens because they could exchange messages with friends (a) cheaply and (b) without being overheard.
If I found a new social network that I thought offered something new I would start using that in parallel to facebook. Then I'd use the new one more as more people moved over, until eventually facebook just became a way of emailing my grandma.
A lot of these facebook killer conversations seem to be based on the idea that I'm only going to use one social network. I'd argue that's not true at all.
Facebook has 500+ mil users. Most of them, non techies.
Friendster actually proves my point...they shot themselves in the foot. Facebook exists because of mismanagement by Friendster.
In technology, the word never is a fool's word.
Obviously sms still has it's place (ie- want a response in the next 10 minutes rather than the next 24 hours) and nothing can replace in-person communication -- but FB is doing a damn good job of replacing my electronic communication.
You can quit facebook if there was a better way to connect to your friends.