When Facebook was Fun
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bellm.org
That's what this article highlighted the most to me. It's hard to make something that feels small and personal and quirky yet appeals to everyone. If you make something beautiful and targeted inevitably someone says "Hey! You should expand!"
I had this conversation with the owner of a tiny Japanese steakhouse in Tokyo where I had the best steak of my life. There were only like 8 tables and I was there alone so he sat down with me and we talked for a half hour. He told me how many times he had been approached to expand to other cities or the US over the 30 years they'd been open. But he didn't want the stress and he didn't think he could deliver the quality of meal if he did. Sushi and ramen places are like this in Japan too. They may be the best but they often stay small.
I think we've lost track of that in the USA and particularly Silicon Valley (or maybe we never had it.) Would we be happier if Facebook had stayed elite university only and there were 100 social sharing websites for different niches? I dunno. Probably not. But I think we're also learning that one size fits all social is not as interesting on a massive scale as we thought it would be. Path isn't doing that well either though. Maybe the best we can do is subreddits. God save us.
Sub reddits are just Usenet on the web but worse, rather than anything social.
Maybe if Reddit added a profile page with some social stuff (for paying users?) they could destroy Facebook.
This may be why you are being downvoted, but:
Maybe if Reddit added a profile page with some social stuff (for paying users?) they could destroy Facebook.
Is of course very interesting, and probably much discussed at Reddit. Anonymity issues/pseudonyms is probably a determinant factor.
There are a few sub reddits where people are sharing real life information, so maybe confirmed profiles would be beneficial for them. I don't know if that just adds a bunch of cost and not much revenue.
People go to reddit to get away from reality.
The idea of subreddits applies more generally. One piece of software, one account, many communities with different foci and norms. A more social forum could do the same thing.
Google's search results are now almost-but-not-100% personalized, and that evokes a sense of annoyance in people.
[Disclaimer: Not the OP]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
I'm not entirely sure what you meant to say in that last sentence, but I know you didn't mean to say "uncanny valley". Stuck in limbo, perhaps? (whatever that would mean)
Some people find this useful. Other people find it creepy.
Google is really good at universal systems that produce quantitatively better results when the user input is minimal and the output is easily optimized.
You could argue my restaurant example is an input-output problem. Good ingredients in. Solid, repeatable kitchen process. Good food out. Unfortunately, food preparation is a manual process involving high levels of individual skill and has an inherently large variance. That's why running a restaurant is a people problem. The tricky output is the ambiance. Food is important but restaurants are also social entertainment. Combine those two and that's why niche restaurants are almost always better than chains (imo of course.)
Here's the tripadvisor for Gyu An: http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g1066444-d1677235...
Melbourne does alright but could be better. The way liquor licenses are designed skews the market towards fewer, much larger bars.
EDIT: I wasn't really thinking about your larger point when I wrote this - but I agree with my sibling - the tradeoff is a feature, not a bug. I think Tokyo and Kyoto are remarkable cities because they are not winner-take-all markets: the amount of niches the cities support is incredible.
In contrast to SF, Melbourne is way more interesting in terms of great small bars and restaurants to find. I tell people that Melbourne is one of my favourite cities in the world to eat for the variety and authenticity.
I think you're right about SV being focused on scaling ideas at the cost of losing the quirkiness of something small. But, rather ironically, I find that most of the smaller restaurants in SF seem to lack that special quality that can make mom-n-pop shops so great. Unlike the little udon shops you mentioned from Japan, these small businesses in SF seem to be focused purely on scraping by; I rarely find a place that seems like a hidden gem. (Maybe I'm spoiled; used to live in NY and the food options there are drastically better. Often I would stumble upon tiny restaurants that would be fantastic.)
I don't even know if I have a point to all of this, I guess I'm just saying that restaurants in San Francisco do charge high-end prices, but often offer middle-of-the-road quality.
And I remember the pleasure of sitting down at a cafeteria table with whatever collection of good friends had agglomerated there that evening. Maybe with one of their friends whom I did not yet know well.
Different axes. Different contexts. I enjoyed both, but generally didn't try to glue them together. (Though our centralized computing did lead to early, local social use of email, TALK, and whatnot -- amongst friends.)
Complex societies -- like complex programs, as it happens -- rely on multiple contexts, scopes, sets, etc.
This universal, "social" web can run contrary to the fundamental building blocks of our society(/ies).
After the initial rush of a dramatic expansion of some of these axes, I think people start to figure this out for themselves, even when absent from a broader discussion on the topic.
One of the core ideas that I think really made it great was there were only two privacy options (if I remember correctly). Make your profile visible to just your friends, or just people in your network (nyu.edu email in my case). You could see pictures and names of other people, and you could see a limited profile if they sent YOU a friend request, but that was it.
Another thing is it was really easy to find people with common interests. For example if you listed a certain movie or book you liked, you could click on it in your profile and it would show you everyone else who also liked it (ordered by your friends first, then people in your network ordered by friends in common, then locked profiles of people outside your network).
It's a shame that they have gotten so far away from what they once stood for.
I was surprised by the claim that it was more private in those days, for just that reason. It was much easier to search for complete strangers (within your university) based on quite specific criteria.
The Facebook of today is still valuable, but in an entirely different way. Facebook in 2004 had nothing to do with sharing content, it was just a database of people that you'd met in college that was exceptionally fun to browse. That database of people aspect is almost entirely hidden now in favor of the feed (useful but different), and what you "like" (the pages where you clicked "like" to get a $2 coupon).
I recall reading somewhere PG saying there may be an opportunity now for a "Facebook for college students", which I'd imagine as a realization of the early value of Facebook. I've batted around the idea of setting up oldfacebook.com, just as a copy of that early version. Heck, you could even let people sign up by connecting with Facebook.
I wouldn't recommend using that domain name.
Anecdotally, most of the people I know are looking for an excuse to stop using Facebook because they no longer enjoy browsing the site, but they are locked in because people use it for event planning and they have a fear of missing out.
I think the site can continue to rely on these kinds of network effects to keep users active and signing in, but whether it keeps the company insulated from competition or profitable with users spending enough minutes on the site is another question entirely.
But now the weird algorithm they have gets it completely wrong. I get treated to an endless feed list of stupid cat photos from someone I haven't spoken to since high school, and yet a close friend posts a picture of them with the kids at the beach and it never shows up, probably because they only post once per month.
I try and click 'most recent' for my feed and then the dates get inverted and I end up seeing something posted a month ago.
Notwithstanding all the inserted sponsored stories (whatever, I get that they need to pay the bills), the fact that the newsfeed isn't any longer a newsfeed, but an algorithmically curated list of what it thinks I might like means that it has become useless and unreliable. Sure I can probably tweak settings to get it to work again, but why not just have it the way it was?
I check it less and less and I will probably drop off altogether in the next year or so. The network effect can work in reverse - if none of your friends are using it any longer, there is less incentive to use it yourself.
I much prefer Twitter as it is right now - it just shows your feed and it's up to you to add/remove people who contribute to your feed. Add some simple innovations to Twitter like an easy way to make a group of followers private for tweets, and the ability to load albums rather than single photos for tweets, and it would completely replace Facebook for my personal use.
The other problem Facebook faces is like that of any fashion label, movie franchise or performer - becoming old hat. There will become a point where Facebook is something that your parents use, and therefore to be avoided at all costs. But when the parents feel like using it less, and the kids won't go there, I can see lots of trouble heading down the pike.
The problem is not that one person posts too much spam - it's that I don't ever get to see other peoples posts at all. I don't want to have to make a list of my 'important friends'. I want to see it all, I can easily work the scroll bar to get past the bits I don't want to see.
In fact, now I can just go to Facebook, scroll down and skim a few hundred stories in a few seconds. Facebook isn't mean to be fun - it's meant to be a tool to enhance our daily lives; I think it's done just that.
(I haven't tried Google+, so I don't know how it works in that respect.)
If it hadn't evolved I bet it would've been "killed" already—for instance, if FB didn't have the news feed, Twitter would become a lot more attractive to me.
But was it because of the stupid boxes on your profile (e.g "Which dictator are you"), because it was new, because my parents weren't on it, or because every next show or communication of my favorite band didn't appeared on my home page back then ? I don't know.
We also had "everyone" on MySpace. And before Friendfeed. And in times when most did not know what "internet" is, geocities.
Its not a rocket science to realize that to your users its all about cost of adoption versus reward they will get. Said that, if there is some new cool feature that Facebook does not have, and that feature is so awesome that is worth me spending my time on creating just another account, then I will do so. If that new website and new cool feature keep me away from Facebook, then Facebook will be in trouble. But so far, noone has come, just yet, with some universal cool feature that would be much cooler than socializing online with people I know offline via site that has mostly everyone signed in.
But rest assured internet will evolved because at the end of the day, its run by humans and their behavior offline/online evolves too. The "new Facebook", whatever it will be, will have nothing to do with whether current Facebook succeed or not (it did), as it made plenty of people millionaires, gave thousands jobs, and served it purpose of "connecting everyone in the world together".
I understand where you're coming from, but people forget about scale when they make comparisons like this. Myspace at its peak had around 100 million users, mostly teens and young adults. Your parents and aunts and uncles and grandma were never on Myspace, but for many people, all of the above are on Facebook, which has a billion users. Far more people are on the internet in general, as well as a broader and more representative sample of the population, compared to the days of GeoCities. “Everyone” was not on GeoCities or Myspace to nearly the extent that “everyone” is on Facebook today. It's not at all impossible that Facebook will be replaced, but the task is a much harder one because compared to Myspace at its peak, Facebook's reach is an order of magnitude greater.
In terms of penetration and reach-wise, there is no difference between MySpace and Facebook. While there may be 100MM on MySpace and 800MM on Faceook, the difference is that back then much fewer people were aware that internet exists.
If anything, I dont find "facebook killer" to be harder to achieve just because FB reach is so great. Things go viral nowadays; if something cooler comes along, then it will be spread across FB. I rather find it hard to find something that users would value more than hanging out with friends online.
That's pretty much the point. In the time that Facebook got big, hundreds of millions of people were beginning to use the internet to socialize for the first time. They didn't have to unlearn how Friendfeed worked, or abandon their contacts on Myspace, because they had never used these services. It was all new and Facebook snapped them up.
There aren't hundreds of millions more for the next social network to snap up. In the developed world, the internet is done growing. Every North American or European who is ever going to use the internet already does. Everyone who would be interested in using a social network is already on Facebook.
Not literally everyone (we all know a few people who aren't on Facebook), but close enough that the trick they pulled off can't be repeated.
This is an absurd generalization. I've always grown up with computers and was the only one in my circle of friends to ever use BBSes. Five years ago, it blew me away to see random strangers logged on to Facebook...it was bizarre to see an online network as something normal people used...before that, adoption was rare, even in college through the 00s. Facebook has a dominance of the consciousness that no other network prior to it came close to having...there is simply no parallel
But certainly by that time, "ordinary" people were already primed for online social networking. I agree that this doesn't quite extend to GeoCities though.
In any case, I keep on my previous statement. It usually blows my mind, and is something I would have thought impossible 10 years ago.
> Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 said he was accused of breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy by creating the website
> The charges were based on a complaint from the computer services department over his unauthorized use of on-line facebook photographs, he said.
> “Issues about violating people’s privacy don’t seem to be surmountable,” he wrote at that point. “I’m not willing to risk insulting anyone.”
On the other hand, you have much more anonymous (remember, I'm talking about how anonymous users feel) venues like reddit, 4chan, or IRC, which have a rather large niche that is relatively stable and full of engaged users.
This reminds me of a study that found that many East Germans were nostalgic about East Germany before the wall came down, but the researchers concluded that it was because it was because the interviewed people had been in there 20s at that time, not because of any particular aspect of the East German society.
Substitute "public" for "hidden", and that line could describe most social media these days.