Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
insidefacebook.com
insidefacebook.com
Most people find this scenario a bit socially uncomfortable and clam right up.
Facebook's growth has created this scenario for a lot of people. The basic currency of Facebook (voyeurism) relies upon a loose security model that prevents a person from walling off his/her 5-10 closest friends and using FB for the bulk of their online socializing. Eavesdropping is essential to the business model. The problem is, thusfar most FB users are not really aware just how intricately engineered this voyeurism is and how publicly their lives are being broadcast.
Facebook's entire premise is that people LIKE being heard/seen and LIKE seeing/hearing others, in their social graph.
What is really needed is multiple distinct social graphs per user with distinct walls between them, done elegantly... this isn't an easy problem to solve.
There was a really nice presentation from a Googler (who subsequently moved to Facebook) which described this problem eloquently... but I can't seem to find the link.
It's interesting to consider the threshold for the sort of social discomfort I described above. In my case it hit around 2/3 of my current friend count.
My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example.
As more people move to avoid the noise, they'll find solace in mini-communities, and I think that's the way forward. Not just one service, but hundreds.
Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.
1. go to http://arclanguage.org/install
2. download, untar arc3.tar
3. see news.arc (hn source)
What do you imagine they would do otherwise? More to the point, what's the business case for doing what you describe? They could require FGroups to self-categorize in order to narrow and aid their advertising sales, but that's not foolproof and lots of groups would just as soon choose "Other."
Facebook private groups
https://www.facebook.com/groups
are working quite well among my circle of friends to provide a focused view of one or another niche community that forms a natural subset of my friends. There is a particular Facebook secret group that I visit absolutely every time I'm on Facebook, which is several times a day. That's a practical place for me to ask focused informational questions, and also a place where I can share a lot of camaraderie with dear friends who have had similar--and yet very diverse--life experiences. Because of the stronger filtering abilities of Facebook, I can indeed see how it could supplant many niche sites. (Thus far, HN gets the second share of my attention after Facebook, among all websites, and it will be interesting to see what the consensus here is about the overall community experience in the next year or so.)
Since none of the groups I joined have the same level of activity I'm used to on specialized forums for those subjects, I never bother to check up on them - which of course lends itself to a vicious circle of inactivity.
If you look at the Like button, and their other endeavors, I don't think Facebook's ambitions are limited to just getting visits and clicks. They want to become a utility as indispensable as HTTP.
And Facebook are really smart. Keep in mind that if there is a drop, they've probably known about it for months and months, and we're just finding out it about now indirectly.
That said, I hope they don't succeed and a distributed system does succeed.
I'm really hoping for decentalized peer to peer communities that are elastically created from locally computed interest profiles. Not a distributed facebook per se, but more like a user-centroid HN that aggregates similar people and interests... that would really make my academic life soar.
In the end, I don't think Facebook would fight for the long tail of user demographics. What they have is quite profitable enough. Why expend 90% more effort to convince all of the tinfoil hat wearers to join?
Now that everyone has been socially obligated to friend their Mom, maybe it's time to attack Facebook with .edu specific sites again? What other natural community boundaries would make sense to target with exclusive sites?
Here's why: the Internet is extremely diverse as it is and overall makes for a bad user experience where people have to cognitively deal with many different (and disagreeing) interfaces, rules, quirks, web addresses, and so on. At the beginning this heterogeneity was seen as an advantage because the amount of easily accessible information was unparalleled. However, in the past few years it seems like most successful platforms (be it YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Amazon, Wikipedia, iOS, etc.) have done well because there was a consistent and one-stop shop experience throughout.
There is still tons of room on many different verticals to improve and disruption to occur, but I wouldn't expect things to come full circle.
But I think as more and more CMSs start introducing semantic information in their HTML, we'll start to have more client side features that work across all such websites, and eventually we'll go full circle and reinvent USENET, but now with a dozen layers of abstraction to support it.
While Wikipedia is cool, it still doesn't beat the enthusiast's homepage.
And Facebook has never had the personality of GeoCities.
In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Those businesses have shorter shelf lives.
On the other hand, Google/Microsoft are in the productivity/time saving business and they have more durable advantages since they don't have to keep coming up ways to make people stick around. People stick around and use their service, because people save time.
Watch out for Twitter to do to Facebook what, Facebook did to Myspace and what Myspace did to Friendster.
Twitter on the other hand may not exactly be like a TV show as much as TV channel with each mega Twitter star (e.g. Charlie Sheen) a TV show within that channel.
Same here. Most of my friends who have something interesting to say will contact me via IM/e-mail or I'll read it via Twitter.
So I'm left with a lot of status updates that... really don't resonate (except from a handful of key people).
Agreed. If I was only facebook friends with the 10 people I really am interested in, I'd hardly notice the difference. I don't want to go through and remove all the loose friends I met in college one-by-one, though.
Twitter is much more relevant to me; I'm only following around 50 people, all of which I deliberately chose.
And of course the highest volume people are the most boring. All my friends seem to have about the same volume of inanity, funny stuff, somewhat interesting comments, worthwhile content, and vital life updates to share. They just vary in what their sharing threshold is. If I could tune out everything below "worthwhile content" then Facebook would be great. I'd also only need to look at it once a day for two minutes to keep up with everybody. Alas, there is no "setLogLevel" method on my Facebook feed.
On some level I can understand the concept of "keep your friends up-to-date with your life". But not using these definitions of "friends" and "life".
Game updates are annoying, but they aren't much better than anything else anybody posts, ever.
The problem with websites like Reddit is that they suffer from the so called black swans. A good post can garner karma in the thousands, but a bad one will only have a negative one or two. So, reposting is a great strategy especially when new content is so hard to come by.
Some of the same relatives are friends on Facebook, and it is much more pleasant experience, because they are nominal "friends", but are in a high privacy group, so we don't have much opportunity to interact.
It's a fairly painful process, and considering how much visibility Twitter has of each twitter client, their automatic anti-spam process should actually be much more effective than it currently is.
I use my twitter feed for stuff which is too boring or offensive to inflict upon my entire facebook friends list.
Then there's the typical drama on any social network, the annoyances with closed systems (we're happy with email and caldav, thanks, anything can use them!), and the endless, endless spam on the news feed. I always hid the feed with my user CSS file, and stayed on top of it, but she'd get roped back in when it occasionally broke. Being social is addictive, and she's more social than I am.
I guess different social circles are different and it probably varies by age group as well.
I find your comments interesting because it is so completely different than my social world.
I should also add that I don't find it addictive at all.
I don't find it particularly addicting either, but to each their own. I'd be willing to bet there are at least as many FB addicts as WOW addicts, though.
As to my CSS {display:none;}, though, I ended up distributing it to a large portion of my friends. The overall consensus was (and likely is, though this is mostly before the ability to categorize things) that the feed is:
A) too addicting, because it pulls you back in when you could be doing something else. There's always something interesting going on when you have a lot of connections, and you can't remove connections or risk offending people (though that's largely fixed now). Its mere presence is a threat to being productive, which ends up leaving you feeling like you wasted your day.
and B) utterly crammed with irrelevant information (app this, lame-quote-status-update that, drinking-photos those), so the bits you actually wish to keep up on get lost in the sea or pushed off the end of the world (page 2). I recognize this is a largely un-solvable problem, as everyone is different, but the tool-set simply isn't there to even manage it efficiently.
So it ends up being the zeitgeist of things you're not involved in and you either want to be in on or you want to just shut up. With the occasional relevant flotsam that keeps you checking it through all the failing times.
Last I saw, things had improved somewhat, with the most important step being lists of friends. But I've been out of it for a couple years now, so some of the gripes may not be overly relevant.
That being said, I think the folks working on feed ranking have done quite a lot of awesome stuff over the last couple years (most of which shouldn't require any explicit work on your part other than using the site) - I'd be curious what you thought if your account was still around and you gave it another shot for a few weeks.
Wait, isn't that TV in forward?
http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/linkedin-trumps-f...
Apparently helping get you sucked in to Farmville is not as valuable to people as helping you get a job and stay connected with what is happening with old co-workers. Go figure.
So it's a social network and I think it is more pure and valuable than the Facebook graph since on LinkedIn you only want a thousand connections if you're an HR person, not because you need friends for Zynga games, so most people on LinkedIn have between 10-200 connections representing old colleagues.
It can do this because people care about where/what their friends and colleagues are working.
On Twitter, I can search the entire world for people who have the same interests as me, read their thoughts and correspond with them.
So basically I left Facebook because I really wanted to connect with people on an intellectual level. Turns out, I don't know anyone who I can correspond with in that manner.
By left, I mean I deleted the account, whatever that means in FB land.
Some people don't mind this, but I for one don't want Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site knowing who my friend are or what I'm sharing with them. It's simply none of their business.
The only hope I see for a truly privacy-respecting social network is a distributed, peer-to-peer network. That way you'd be communicating only with those you know, at least in principle.
But even there there are major problems, such as the need for information to travel over untrusted hops to get to its destination. Encryption can help with some of it, but would still be subject to traffic analysis. Maybe a social network could be created over TOR. I don't know.
Still experimental though.
It is probably more likely that people are tired of Facebook, and aren't using it as much.
The thing about Facebook though, is A) The interface requires lots of care and feeding to stay clean and appealing - Facebook has stayed nice through it small number of very talented engineers. B) Facebook's economics and its supply of topnotch talent has been leverage from its constant growth and its quality as the thing that's happening.
If it instead is faced with a slow decrease in users and a feeling that it's "jumped the shark(tm)", it will have a lot of trouble keeping its economics, its talent and thus the quality of the interface. So I imagine that FB could fall apart in some medium-scale time frame. Oddly enough, I think the end of Facebook wouldn't be good news for those plots "alternatives" to it.
I actually hope Facebook IPOs soon, might postpone some problems...
The iPhone app is worse. You can't even see your own lists at this point, and clicking on youtube links doesn't just play the video, it opens an embedded browser that gleefully suggests that you try adding youtube to your Home screen.
The iPad optimized site is so useless for reading anything a friend links to that I don't even bother clicking anymore, I just wait until I am at a PC.
The message viewer makes it impossible to quickly mark as-read or delete the vast numbers of messages that I never open because the popup notification on my phone contained enough information to never need to open the full message.
The reason that facebook is still going strong is not good user interface or experience, it is that it is incredibly sticky. They managed to become the new email for a lot of people, and that utility is enough to force a lot of people to grind their teeth and ignore the horrible parts.
The problem is that a lot of people have turned number of friends into a high score, but when your friends list is 500 people you barely know, it seems like you are basically using Facebook for the wrong thing.
It might be just me, but isn't this the main use of FB, i.e. stalking? Of course I want to know when my friends have changed their profile pictures, how else would I assess their happiness and fulfillment in life if not by looking at their latest photos?
That being said, I remember the first time I discovered that. For the longest time, I just assumed it would remove only the post.
Odd.
While switching costs are low with search, the ability to offer a better product is difficult. Momentum gives you little advantage in search. For example, Bing is not marginally better positioned with 14% market share vs when it had 9%.
Social networks are almost the polar opposite. It's hard to get any traction at all in social because switching costs are high. But if Facebook sees a competitor get 5% of its user base and then a few months later have 10% they should be scared to death. It probably means Facebook is already dead and just don't know it yet.
Whether i'm right or wrong, only time will tell. On the subject of de-throning facebook, that will be hard. Though it is do-able but for the moment, let's not kid ourselves, Facebook will remain the beast and king of Social media for while.
They are just to big and efficiently run to go down like myspace.
- What shortcomings in current approaches it is addressing
- What technical approaches are being used
- Why these are better than what we currently have
It would be great to have some description of how the distributed part of the system will actually work.
With 687 million users if each user spent 15 minutes switching to an alternative it would take a combined time investment of about 20,000 years for Facebook to disappear.
Of course they don't have to lose all their users to become irrelevant..
If Facebook's growth stopped today and they began to lose users at a rate of about 90,000 per day it would take 10 years to lose 50% of their users.
There's a class of kids out there who are 12 right now; by the time they're 16 or 18 are you sure they're going to want Facebook accounts? According to researcher danah boyd, these kids will probably have created and disposed of many different social networking accounts by that time.
There's always churn. Even as FB was growing, a part of those new users were always churning out. Each user makes their own decisions about staying in the system, they are not a sentient whole except as far as media or changes to the system might affect larger groups at once.
I imagine your tendency to leave the system to be some sort of a graph. Maybe you are 30% likely to leave and never ever come back after your first day on Facebook. After using it for a week, maybe that gets reduced to 20%. After a month, maybe you are even more unlikely to leave. If they had for example 1 million people joining per day, then 300k would be quitting per day. If the next day all of USA had been tapped out and only 200k people joined, that would look like a sudden -100k turn to decline, even though the trend was same as always.
What happens now will depend on what that churn graph looks like. Maybe it's sticky enough that they'll be able to keep a big part of the users they got and over time make it even stickier to keep even more. There will be improvements to get those users to be more active on the site. Even if there was no more user growth in the USA, there could be growth in the amount of time and money the existing userbase spends on the site.
Another graph that would be relevant would be the likelihood of people who have been exposed to facebook through their friends, media saturation and advertising, yet still haven't joined, to be tempted to join later. In other words - facebook has already saturated the internet world's radar, and people who haven't joined already are completely aware of its existance, function, and benefits, and still not joining. Those will be very expensive users to get, so IMO retention should be their major focus. I stayed through the "6-month updates-full-of-farmville problem", because they fixed it, they barely kept me through the "1-and-1/2-year privacy panic" after backing off on some portion of their stridency (and profitability per user), and they lost me completely, along with a number of other people I know, after the "2-year bored-to-shit-with-people-I-went-to-HS-with-telling-me-where-they-went-to-lunch-and-what-they-think-of-Obama lull" which I'm not sure they can do anything about.
If a large cohort of similarly aged users hit some peak that facebook is unable or unwilling to iron out at the same time, and there's no supply of cheap "Wow, there's a place on the internet where I can keep track of all of my college buddies!" users to replace them, there could be a precipitous fall.
makes me very skeptical about their numbers
If there actually was "something else" right now, a paradigm shifting social network, the decay of Facebook would've been even faster, but unfortunately there isn't much to replace it right now, but I think there will be by the end of the year.
Perhaps having separate Walls for different groups is the next step.
FB does a terrible job at mimicking real-life social interactions. How comfortable would you feel if everyone whose number you added to your phonebook could see all your other contacts in the phone? Well FB does that. They let new friends see all friends without any relevancy guard or protections.
For me it's a socially filtered spam [funny stuff?] site.
If some site can encourage people to have meaningful communication again it will take on Facebook, no doubt. Get 3 of my important friends on the site and I'm sold. Then Facebook just becomes a big contact list. And at that point I'm not sure where it goes. It might be a contact-list site for a long long time.
Facebook might not die as a website, but competitors will definitely takeaway a lot of value from it. And so far I don't see it becoming much more than a contact-list.
And keep in mind that the less engaged the users are the less ad revenue there will be. I have no doubt that as we're speaking right now users are less and less engaged with the site. Growth is still fast so the revenue is rising, but once that stops it will crumble.
The will have to get more aggressive with ads or people will simply stop to notice them at all. Or perhaps start selling more of the user data. At this point there's not much you can do.
Also the growth they see outside of the western world might be very much junk. I'm in Poland, Facebook craze is already old news here yet I get english ads? It's great that AT&T has high speed internet for 20$, but I'm sorry, I cannot purchase that here.
Everybody knows ad revenue is tricky. Facebook is no different.
Nobody is going bankrupt, I'm not saying that. Facebook is here and it will stay for few more years for sure, but to compare it to google is crazy. Google can be conquered too I'm sure, but Facebook definitely makes for a far more fragile target.
Personally I'd say it will simply decay and we might not see another social site being that big in a long time to come. Facebook has half of the world on there, cool, but guess what, I am not connecting with those people and never will.
Facebook managed to get a lot of people registered in one place, but has it managed to truly connect a lot of people? Not at all.
The article clearly discloses the inherent issues at play.
> Going forward, we’ll be watching closely to see what longer-term trends emerge. Bugs in the Facebook advertising tool that we draw this information from, seasonal changes like college graduations, and other short-term factors, can influence numbers month to month and obscure what’s really happening.
I could see people getting bored / busy and not bothering to use it any more, but it's unbelievable that 1.5 million would delete their accounts in one month.
For reference: 1) Highschool friends and family who are incredibly religious/right wing/etc 2) Friends from skiing, many of whom make a living on the mountain, who are about as vile as one can imagine 3) Friends from college or work, which consists mostly of PharmD's, MD's, and nurses. 4) Other random friends from startup stuff, partys, etc
You know who else lost nearly 6 million users?
Yep. AOL.
I wonder what the breakdown would be for the reasons for quitting.
I'm not sure that the revenue they've begun to generate (which is reportedly sizable) is actually coming from that magical "social graph" rather than just plain old advertising (and quite spammy advertising at that), but that was the premise for huge valuations in the past.
So, facebook gets value from occasional users, and having occasional users go away does hurt them in the long run, since I guess the long bet with facebook is still the "social graph".
Regardless of that, negative growth in their most lucrative markets is a horrible sign for a company like facebook. Slow growth is one thing...but losing people by the millions? That indicates significant breakage. I don't know enough to know what kind of breakage, as I'm not really a facebook user (I login maybe once a month).
This is what I would guess. I suspect that one of Facebook's problems is that people naturally overshoot with their social network and at some point you end up with "too many" friends and logging into Facebook reveals less interesting content and more noise. I know this has certainly happened to me. 80% of the content I see upon logging in is information from people that I couldn't care less about. Facebook has encouraged this from the start by avoiding support for stratifying friends into separate groups. It's worked well for them by simplifying things, but I think they'll begin to experience some natural attrition from it as time goes by - social networks just naturally grow and grow because you very rarely "unfriend" someone. At some point it becomes burdensome to check it instead of fun and then it's all over.
I'd say 10-15% of my friends list (age 24-28) have left Facebook.
Some users just focused on websites catering to specific communities.
Some just focused most of their time on Twitter/Tumblr.
And some just realized they got by day-to-day without a social network and elected to get out of the game altogether.
People want to stay connected especially people 20 to 30 years-old and how do they do that now? Smartphones, iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices.
Facebook hasn't lost the battle it's just become obsolete.