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Comment by smrtinsert | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has a mindshare problem. I no longer consider it a driving force in my social interaction and I'm of the older generation. The younger generation seems to have abandoned it already. It's now a deposit for the occasional family photo and lately seems to be full of chain spam.

When you think back to the history of social networks (AOL, Compuserv, Friendster, Myspace) these things don't have a great half-life.

They need to reinvent themselves and fast, and extending their reach isn't as much the issue as reasserting relevance through great content.

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I've noticed this, too. I still log into FB often. But, my FB feed is dead. Only 1 of my 100+ friends still posts something regularly (every week or two). At first, I just thought people created filters that didn't include me (when that feature was introduced). But, they're just not using FB anymore. Thinking back, I almost totally stopped posting stuff around the time they did because the site just began to feel creepy (foto tagging, etc) and started feeling like a mostly empty room at the end of a party. FB feels today like lj and myspace felt right before they died.

I've been keeping an eye out for the next social site where everyone is going. But, there doesn't seem to be one this time. I think social might finally be over.

Reddit, Google+, and this great game called RealLife.

I haven't posted anything on Google+ is well over a year. I don't think people moving to Google+ from FB. And, I'm sure Google+ is not the next big social network.

I hope that the next social network will be real life and that online services will go back to what those things used to be: websites that do one thing good (see Flickr) rather than trying to buy our mortal souls. Or giving me (us?) the feeling this is is what they're trying to do.

Real life? Are you suggesting that there's no value in socialising online?

G+ has its set of users and it might grow in the coming days, but by integrating G+ with Google search they are destroying the sanctity of search. Having to sign up for a social network so that my blog posts can have my photo and name appear in search results is evil. Google can use existing microdata to achieve a similar result. But they want to push their social network down my throat if I want to make my website appear in google search with authorship data.

Uh, your sample is wayyyy different from mine. There are six posts in the last hour just by people I'm close to. I don't think Facebook is dying in any sense of the word among normal people.

Normal people eh? ;)

Speaking of late to the party Facebook is just in the process of taking off here in Japan, it's already very popular and appears to be taking over from social networks like Mixi which have previously dominated here.

I don't have any numbers to back this up though, I'm just basing it on the change in usage I've seen here in the last two years. Certainly Facebook is alive and well here, even _useful_ if you can imagine it!

>>Thinking back, I almost totally stopped posting stuff around the time they did because the site just began to feel creepy (foto tagging, etc) and started feeling like a mostly empty room at the end of a party.

I can almost picture your friends snickering at you saying thinks like "Boy, look at vabmit, still has not realized that Facebook is so yesterday"

Regardless of Facebook's future, I can say with a certainty that human beings, as a social species, are very unlikely to stop being so at any point in the near or distant future.

I'm the one early adapters of Facebook in Turkey since 2006. I was 19 at that time and studying in college. I was trying to push my friends to sign up because it looked like i was the only one in facebook town, alone. Since then i have chance to watch evolution of facebook while I and my friends are growing up. Now I'm 26 and i have bunch of people in my friends (400+) including 50< and 15> years old relatives. I can say that now I'm feeling alone again, despite the crowded feed(bunch of sponsored stories and meme). I can say that I don't have friends to push them to sign up anymore. Summary it's time to move on for all of us even facebook. In this perspective It makes sense to buy b2b company.

Totally disagree. I'm in college right now and Facebook+Instagram are still the social networks of choice. If anything Facebook has only lost it's novelty because it's assumed everyone has one.

The only thing that sucks up more of my time is Hacker News :)

Also totally disagree. Sounds like the average Hacker News comment that has no bearing on real users. I keep up with all of my college friends (recently left), high school friends, and almost all new San Francisco friends through Facebook.

- I get its messages delivered to my phone.

- Most every party I go to has a Facebook event associated with it.

- Pretty much every picture taken with my friends goes to it (or Instagram).

I'd say that's pretty normal for most people I interact with.

Same here, still at university and Facebook takes up far too much of my time. I and my classmates are on it before, during and after class.

> If anything Facebook has only lost it's novelty because it's assumed everyone has one.

Sometimes I think every social network is doomed to die in a certain number of years. Facebook simply isn't cool any more because everybody's on it now, which mean's it's ripe for disruption by a network of cool people.

I feel inclined to agree. The same thing happened to MySpace, and (in the Netherlands) to Hyves. I'm sure there are more examples.

Maybe the Hacker News take on Facebook is similar to the Yogi Berra quote on Ruggeri's restaurant:

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

by the time a company reaches $65 billion market cap, the time for a complete reinvention is over. businesses of that size should be mature cash machines. if the plan is to generate cash by offering b2b services, whereas up until now everyone thought it was advertising to slavish users, I think now might be a good time to run as far away from possible from facebook stock.

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