Let me add one carveout: for those who work at startups that write facebook apps, that time is NOT counted.
The friends that I really care about require no electronic mediums for meaningful interaction. If I didnt hear from them for a year, it would only take 60 seconds to get back into the comfort zone.
Technology is no substitute for heart. : )
I'm on facebook everyday, but for no more than 5 minutes total.
There's really no need to be on facebook all the time to get the major benefits (messaging, event invites). The iPhone app alerts you when anything happens that involves you so I don't see the need to waste any time browsing the site.
When I'm out, I just rely on my phone vibrating when I've got a notification.
I don't see how people can spend hours everyday on it.
It started with old friends from high school, which was sort of nice, but obviously if I'd have really wanted to keep up with these people, I would have made more of an effort to do so.
But now it's the only way that the majority of my friends communicate. None of them use email anymore, almost none of them have blogs, or websites.
I can totally understand why nerds find Facebook's popularity confounding (as they were already doing all of the things that it facilitates in a more customizable fashion without the lockin of one company), but for every single normal person I know, it's the de-facto way they use the internet.
In my case, we still mostly contact via phone calls, resorting to text messages for less urgent messages and email for longer and more persistent messages
I never had much luck getting most of them using email. When we all left high school, I made the futile attempt to set up an IRC channel for them to use and spent months talking them through it. This was back in 97, so our other options were limited.
Thankfully, AIM came on the scene, and that became the way that the majority of us stayed in touch.
I have no idea why email never clicked for any of my friends, but it's been true of everyone I've met as an adult. It could just be that they associate email with "work", and therefore never took to the medium.
I'm not, however, saddened by the fact that they've all standardized on Facebook. I'm actually glad that they've all picked one thing and use it. If it'd been something else, that would have been fine too, but Facebook is ridiculously well-suited to everyone I know, so I'm not surprised it's become so popular.
As for me, since most of my non-tech friends are on facebook anyway I have to keep my presence there to keep in touch. I have to admit, facebook is a pretty effective way of keeping in touch. I know I can call/email or meet in person - which I do for my inner circle of close friends. But the fact of the matter is a lot of my friends live abroad and international calls are expensive. Also, we seldom feel the need to make a call or send an email unless there is something specific we want to talk about (but that could be just me). OTOH, placing a small comment on Facebook seems a lot more effortless. The other party can also not feel compelled to answer. And there are a lot of friends I have on facebook who I don't want to lose contact with but don't want to have a day to day relationship with either (i.e. saying hi or meeting up once in a while - but not hanging out every weekend or constantly IM-ing every day).
Another thing is, apart from facebook chat, all interactions on facebook are semi-live at best. I can post a comment and the reply does not have to instant. This is good, especially if the other party lives in a very different time zone.
I am also on G+, but unfortunately most of my non-tech friends find it rather confusing, empty or just ignore it altogether. Which is a shame because liked it from the start.
The one that has really gotten my goat is when you tag a photo with your friend on it. Even if you have privacy set so that only your friends can view your photos, if you tag your friend in one of your photos, ALL OF THEIR FRIENDS CAN NOW SEE IT.
You can't change this setting. It's called something like "Friend of friends can see tagged photos." You have no control over this, and the only one who can change this is your friend that you tagged.
This is now forcing me to never tag any of my friends, because I don't want strangers seeing my photos. It means effectively that I've lost control of my privacy on my photos, and that's something that is enough to drive me away from Facebook permanently.
Anyways, I'm not excusing their policy, but I expect they'll fix it whenever it is technically possible to do so.
You have one permissions set - my permissions on my photos. And another permissions set - my friends' visibility sets on their tagging. The display set is the interaction between these two sets, which any database developer should be trivially able to calculate.
I don't for one minute dispute that the scaling issues for calculating these interactions for 750m users are significant, but the core task definitely isn't.
Most, if not all the people I know, have long restricted their profile to a minimum visibility level for non-fiends and non real friends.
At the moment I do not see the privacy problem as big as it used to be 12 months ago.
So I know I use facebook precisely once per month.
I wonder, do you have numbers on what percentage of your real friends are tripped up by this (wishing happy birthday on a fake day)?
For some reason my Nexus One comes pre-installed with Facebook and it can't be uninstalled without rooting (which for laziness sake I don't want to do). I don't have a Facebook account. The Facebook app periodically tries to authenticate and obviously can't. Instead of gracefully giving up (or allowing me to uninstall) it brings a Facebook login page to the foreground.
So every day, two to three times a day, I have to exit out of Facebook which has given itself focus. To me this defines the Facebook experience and their focus on quality software.
I dislike Facebook not for all their privacy concerns (which are annoying), but because I was always genuinely frustrated using the site.
Did gp get it from Google, or elsewhere? The Facebook for Android app was barely even out for most of the time the N1 was on the market, from what I remember...
Facebook app
Amazon MP3 Store app
I have the Nexus One, with the Facebook app, and can confirm that this is not supposed to happen.
And second, I agree with you. It's not that I checked it that often in any event (if they really wanted to prevent time wasting distractions, they'd block HN ;)), and if I want to, I can always check it via my iPhone/iPad, etc...
I suppose my overall point was that, even though the no-Facebook policy is inane, it ended up with a result that for me was fairly benign, which suggests that Facebook's value in my life was fairly low.
However, one thing that Facebook is good for is coordinating groups. I'm in a class council group as well as groups for a few AP classes. Since everyone is always on Facebook, it makes setting up and coordinating things while getting feedback super easy. For example, a couple days ago, someone posted after school in the AP Stats group about getting together for a study session. A few hours later, around seven of us got together at Barnes and Nobles.
Facebook usage can be helpful to entrepreneurship in that it can make it easier to understand people outside of Silicon Valley. I have nontechnical Facebook friends from high school, college, and my local area and by following their lives on Facebook I can regularly put myself into different peoples' mindsets to think about how they use technology, what things are problems to them, how they perceive things, etc.
It is also great if you are involved in a hobby where Facebook usage is high such as dancing argentine tango in the Bay Area. All of the instructors are on Facebook, lots of dancers friend each other, and event listings and photos can be found there.
That's part of the value for me, getting small reminders that people exist outside of my urban liberal bubble, and that while I might not agree with those people on a whole host of things, I can at least respect them and their perspective.
I've got a rather stupid-large number of people sharing with me on Google+, but only one person actually shares anything. I've checked it once in the last week and still see nothing outside his stuff (and I'd rather just read his blog).
I'm not saying G+ is a failure, just that for me, it isn't compelling. I still enjoy FB and staying connected with my family through it...and it make me a metric-ass-ton of money :)
I specifically added that to make sure that people voted based on personal use. I suspect a lot of people work at startups or jobs that require use of facebook
These are half private/half professional relations, and I expect Google+ to fit a lot more than facebook, but whe're not there yet.
I never signed up for facebook. But today I'm pretty much the black sheep.
Email, telephone, webpages, those existed long before Facebook. It feels like millions of people think that they are enlighten about internet communications when then become regular Facebook users. I don't like to base my social interaction on a private closed network/service. I prefer distributed and open technologies.
This story posts on a Saturday night. Also pro-facebookers aren't likely to care so much about yet another usage poll. The ultimate poll is Facebook's site stats.
About a year ago I had to create an account for development that I use when clients require Facebook integration. I found the API to be slightly annoying to work with.
My view on social features is that they can add a lot of value to sites that have a real purpose beyond just being social: Delicious, StackOverflow, Lang-8, SoundCloud, GitHub, etc. are great.
If I've been on Facebook a lot during a given week, I know that I haven't been that productive.
If I sign on, see a bunch of notifications and realize that I haven't been on in a while, I know that I've been busy, and feel good.
Unfortunately, though, it's how just about everybody I know communicates and shares their photos.
The best thing about facebook is that we're all essentially the products being sold to the advertisers and whoever else.
But now that FB would post every site I visit to my friends, I've logged off and may just not log back on. I'm not sure I want my sister knowing my porn site visit habits, or my Tea Partier high school friends knowing just how liberal I've turned out.
There's a reason I don't just move into everybody's house when I get to know them. Zuckerberg may or may not understand that; it's difficult to say - but it's safe to say he understands where to get the next dollar. I don't think Facebook's really the place I want to be any more.
Pretty sure it does not do that.
ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)
Either way, Facebook is a soul-deadening waste of time except for a couple of people I don't see any other way. I should probably just write a tool to ensure I'm always logged out when not using it. And delete its cookie, I suppose.
Update: Ah, apparently this is just an app that has this behavior, not basic Facebook functionality - that's what I get for just scanning Winer's article and not checking the article he was talking about.
My point about the soul-deadening waste of time stands, though.
His observation is true, but complete correlation, not causation. Around the time G+ came out, I started seeing a girl who lives an hour away, so I can't see her during the week. I already had her friended on Facebook. She is not willing to move to G+ (understandable, all her friends are on Facebook). All my friends on G+, I get to see in person every day anyway. Therefore, I'm on Facebook a whole lot more.
Funny how one person can make the difference for adoption, if it's the right person.
So I spend perhaps 5 minutes on average every month, or one hour a year. But it may be multiple times a month.
Missing poll option: I've never been a member of Facebook, and will never be a member of Facebook or any other "social networking" site.
FTFY.
It's useless for any meaningful debate, and the constant copy-paste status updates from some people, which basically amount to scare-mongering/grief-porn chain-letters, annoy the hell out of me.
On a more minor note I really don't want to know this much about my acquaintances' collective browsing habits.
Now that there's a viable alternative with google+ all I have to do is scrape my photo galleries and that's a wrap.
Yes, I understand the concerns about the "sharing" of information--something which I think people don't quite understand yet--but other than that I feel like people are up in arms over nothing.
I have seen many organizational bodies, like the IFRS, use carveout as a word rather than carve-out.
Unfortunately I spent way too much time this week dealing with legal issues :/