Comment by tobtoh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobtoh | Hacker News Reader

As a frequent FB user, I find it interesting watching how my FB experience is noticeably degrading now that they have IPO'ed and have to 'prove' results.

The sponsored posts that look similar to normal user 'likes/shared' posts, the 'Friend has just accepted an offer' posts when they haven't, the 'Pages you may like' ads that appear in the mobile FB app ... to me, it feels grubby, deceptive and invasive of my user experience.

I know FB has to make a profit somehow, but that's really not my problem - I can only rank a service on my user experience, and FBs is sliding downhill. It's been said by others that Google Adwords has been so successful because it captured intent and context. I also think it was successful because (for the most part) it was non-disruptive to the overall user experience on the page it was displayed. The ads were reasonably discrete and clearly defined.

FB's approach of 'disrupt' or 'trick' the user into clicking on ads seems like a throwback to interstitials, pop-ups and other dubious methods. I can't see this as being a good approach and believe this will only hurt their user base (and stock price) in the future.

I personally haven't noticed any major change that would cause me as much strife as this. The only annoying change has been the one a while back which shows my friends comments and activity on other peoples events whom I'm not friends with and don't care about. I have to unsubscribe from these activities from each friend I see doing it to clean up my feed. Other than this things are the same.

The mantra on HN anymore seems to be to love any and every startup when they are small, but as soon as they start making lots of money they suddenly can't do anything right, should open source every aspect of their company for newer and smaller sartups to use free of charge and are generally evil. See this months threads regarding Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Dropbox for more info.

> I know FB has to make a profit somehow

Facebook IS making a profit. A very nice profit in fact.

Facebook can easily be a profitable company with a $5B market cap. That'd still make it bigger than 99% of the start ups out there.

The problem is Facebook is trying to be the $100B company that they sold investors at IPO. They are not a $100B company. Not even close.

And nor will they ever be IMHO.

For a coffee chain to go from $1m to 20 they'd need to sell a lot more coffee. There might be quality or indie-ness issues but as a whole, their customers get more coffee.

Investors see a good chance of turning Facebook into a $100b company. Even if it's a poor chance (say 25%) its worth pursuing. For users, this gamble pays nothing. Facebook doesn't have to serve more users or serve them any better to make that move.

Users are not going to like it. They get the downside and none of the upside.

There's also no place else to go... Myspace? Friendster, google+?

I deleted my account a year ago but just signed up with a new account so I could test results for contract projects.

From account deletion, to clearing out my OS X and installing Lion on a new SSD, and using a fresh email for the new signup a year later, I still have my same friends showing up.

I wasn't trying to lose track of these friends, I'm just surprised that FB was able to figure that out with what I assumed was new information.

How does that even work? Maybe my old Time Machine brought long-living cookies back for Chrome?

It was just disconcerting.

I'm guessing it's from the mobile app.

If that's the case, then the Facebook app I can't delete from my Verizon Incredible has full access to read my Mail configurations.

Edit: (and then correlate the account I used to use for Facebook to my newer LLC FB account I use for testing)

Did you use it before when you were logged into Facebook? Your phone has a unique ID that it could (theoretically) read and store at the time of login on mobile. Logging in with your new account could tie the two together?

No, I did not. I deleted my facebook account a year ago, and this was a new email on a domain I created a month ago.

Edit: must have been my mobile number, though I can't remember if I went through the confirmation/security step for this one.

Maybe one of your friends innocently grassed you up regarding that new email address. Your name is the same, DOB the same. Would be a fair guess that not many circles of friends have two with the same name and DOB, so the sugestions would be easily done upon that basis perhaps.

Ask facebook as it is somewhat concerning though I'd imagine.

It's the email addresses. When you friends share their email contact list with Facebook, Facebook the list to find connections between people and suggest friends you might know. It's VERY intrusive especially when you have 2 online identities, a profession one and a personal one and Facebook keeps trying to tie them together with complete disregard for your privacy.

===== HOW IT WORKS =====

If someone has a Facebook account and shares their gmail or yahoo contacts with Facebook. Facebook will crawl through the email contact info and see if any of its already registered Facebook members' emails match the contact list. It will then put those matches up on the "People you may know" sidebar and suggest that you friend them.

That's what happened to me. I had 2 identities, one for family and relatives and one for my personal life & friends (goofing around, joking with friends). Facebook revealed my other identity to all my family and relatives. Some of them added me to their friends list and asked about my other name. I worked so hard to keep them separate but made the mistake with the emails. As soon as I changed the email the suggested friends recommendations stopped.

That. Really. Pissed. Me. Off.

I will never forget that, nor will I ever forgive Facebook for it. It was creepy and disrespectful.

I think they use IP addresses too. An old colleague once created a fake account to test an app, using totally fake data. Next time I signed up he appeared in the sidebar.

Does facebook have any documentation anywhere listing exactly how they're making these connections?

Also your mobile phone number - http://www.alexmuir.com/2011/10/facebook-reveals-who-has-you...

> I know FB has to make a profit somehow, but that's really not my problem

I'm reminded of a few other blog posts I sometimes spot here on HN. They say something along the lines of "please charge me for your service so you'll still be around next year." Facebook's profit margins are a problem for all their users.

I do not agree with their methods for making a profit, but I can see why they have high costs to cover. I've had to build social-network-like features for clients. I can attest to the following about functionality like the news feed or photo sharing. It's:

1. complicated to implement

2. complicated to maintain and expand upon

3. resource intensive

For these reasons, maintaining the status quo requires non-trivial engineering and hardware. Users expect persistent storage of their old photos and content, after all. I could see that by refreshing my news feed a few times, I'm incurring a cost on Facebook that they can't recoup with non-invasive measures like Adwords on the side.

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