Are the Cool Kids Leaving Facebook? | Hacker News Reader

Are the Cool Kids Leaving Facebook?

markevanstech.com

7 pointsbuckpost12 comments

The Cool Kids aren't leaving Facebook; the Cool Kids were never on Facebook.

Facebook, like Myspace before it, gained popularity for the same reason as sports cars are popular -- people used large lists of "friends" just like powerful car engines to compensate for their feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.

This isn't to say that social networking sites have no useful purpose: Just like sports cars provide the service of getting from point A to point B, social networking sites provide mechanisms for manycasting news. But this is a secondary function of far less importance than compensating for genitalia size.

What he said.

I don't think that the cool kids ever were on Facebook. They're all too busy on Hacker news.

Hear, hear.

... apparently the humble ones too.

grin

My thoughts as well. I've often called Facebook the Geocities and/or webring of this decade.

In the 90's, you put up your very own Geocities page in a virtual neighborhood, and then joined a webring of like minded folks.

Facebook, MySpace, et al, just seem to be the Web 2.0 Ajax Reflectioned Logo version of Geocities, and will probably follow a similar path.

No matter how you view it, I think 2008 is the year for the trough of disillusionment for Facebook.

I bet everyone who upmodded this has a facebook account.

I'm a cool kid, dammit, and I have a facebook account - because it gives me the broadest channel for passive information sharing. As soon as all my friends are Cool Kids and join Friendfeed.com, I can get rid of my facebook account. That may never happen though. In the meantime - all my content goes on that and on my personal homepage as well as facebook, so that I can use it however I want in the future.

I agree with brk, below (and hope we're right), that 2008 will be a year when people are increasingly disillusioned with facebook.

OK - I just clicked through to the article and if Cool Kids means "high-profile bloggers" then no, I'm not.

Other than that - I wish people would post disagreements rather than downmodding. That ought to be reserved for really dumb comments or abusive ones or off-topic ones. Not that I give that much of a crap about my karma, it just makes me go, "WTF was wrong with that?!" When somebody downmods a perfectly on topic, personal response to the article.

I have a facebook account. Created this only to develop facebook plugins for one of my clients. That's all.

Like a hot night spot, each social networking site will eventually fall out of favor to the next cool place.

The business-arc of social networking sites will be much shorter than for non-social applications, and I'm not sure how anyone can ever build a decades-long success on social networking.

I think the next hot social networking site is your own website.

I've been improving my blog with stuff like Twitter/Jaiku widgets, OpenID, Gravatar, photo albums, etc. I can push my presence out using RSS. Piece by piece I'm adding all of the useful features of Facebook.

I can own all of my own data and control all of my own privacy.

I use the Wordbook plugin for Wordpress to bridge to my Facebook profile.

I agree! I actually stayed up all night the other night doing that. I registered www.jeremyraines.com and it just uses ruby's xml and rss parsing libraries to scrape certain pictures from my flickr account, certain kinds of posts from my tumblr, and it has my friendfeed widget on it. I had more fun building it than I've ever had on facebook -- I learned some stuff about XPath, Ruby, CSS and regular expressions.

Well, I'd like to leave, primarily because I don't trust facebook with my personal information, or at least I want to be in control of how it's used. But I often find sending messages with facebook more pleasant than sending them via my email account for some largely aesthetic reasons. And I really enjoy being a little closer to (knowing about, basically - photos, status updates, etc) my geographically distant friends and email does not permit that at the moment.

I'd definitely leave for an open, easy-to-use system where I am in control of my personal data's usage. Perhaps an open protocol that email providers could abide by. But until that day I'm sure I'll stay, albeit while attempting to minimise the personal data I exude (which is difficult, I know).

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