When will we stop using Facebook?
thepinchandzoom.com
thepinchandzoom.com
I did have a lot of old friends on FB, but I didn't stay in contact with them in real life. I was just lazily snooping on their lives, without giving anything in return.
To be completely honest, I don't have space or time for them in my real life. It isn't because I didn't like them anymore, it was simply that I didn't have the time or energy to stay in proper contact. I had also moved away.
I had the realisation that some people are supposed to drift apart. The people who are important to you will remain in contact with, and it doesn't need Facebook spying on that friendship to enable it to keep functioning.
When my son was dying from cancer I just had to jump on Facebook and I had a ton of people that were willing to help out or send him messages and videos. It was a great tool to find people who could help.
Thank you for sharing your alternative viewpoint.
I'm wrong?
No I'm an individual with my own preferences. Each to their own. I wasn't telling anyone else to leave. I was just describing my experiences.
936 million daily active users on average for March 2015
1.44 billion monthly active users as of March 31, 2015
Oh, and let's not forget the believe in the existence of an omnipotent deity.
Yes, sometimes I do want real-time messages, but that's not how I want things to be most of the time. I'm perfectly okay with seeing "old friend had a baby" or "cousin graduated from high school" the next day, or whenever. It's not that I don't care about these things; I do care about them. I just don't want things that don't require a real-time response sent through a real-time communications medium.
Then, Edward Snowden revealed that the possible abstract threats I wanted to avoid can in fact become real. We are fortunate to have received this information. People still didn't understand me.
In the beginning of my time without the services I clearly felt that something was missing, but it wasn't hard to withstand, for the idealistic flame burning within me.
After some time my interest for the services faded away, like an addiction you successfully cured. Now, I'm not even thinking about using them anymore.
Many don't understand me even now, and I'm not holding my breath, anymore.
Frustrating as it is, it's The Right Thing to do. It's a shame that some people assume you're disinterested, but then don't return emails/calls.
I heard about an old Norwegian guy who had always made short calls to friends and family throughout his life and that those people appreciated that. That's more the direction I'd rather go in over the passive friend-surveillance that has crept in.
I'd rather do that over an encrypted line with open protocols, but you can't have it all! At least I've managed to move over nearly wholesale to open software - phone, OS, email, syncthing, text file notes etc. etc. - so that's one of the major personal benefits to me.
The drawbacks I still need to learn to better work around.
Addiction/productivity doesn't really come into it for me; I have my days of perfect self-discipline and others where my procrast-fu is strong. I've used and use all manner of productivity systems to make sure the bread and butter work gets done (currently running an espeak Pomodoro reminder every 25 minutes, with semi-ironic (totally not...) inspirational quotes read out in the breaks), it's just the side-projects that sometimes suffer. That's no fault of social media, though, that's on me.
Are there better more private solutions that are still very convenient for everyone from my 15 year old niece to my 80 year old grandparents? I also am friends with just about everyone I've ever had any sort of meaningful interaction with and I hate that I am constantly scrolling through my news feed seeing stuff that I could care less about but just doing it to pass time. I would love to shut Facebook off if it didn't mean losing the ability to share photos with my close family and friends.
Maybe its just a matter of paring my Friend list down to about 20-30 people (from about 350) but I'd still like to stop offering my personal information to a megacorp to sell out to their advertisers and who knows who else.
Now we have a group chat together with my partner (would've also added siblings if I had them) and share pictures and simple things. Everything syncs on all devices, my father who needs a big screen follows mostly on his PC and puts their pictures on from there, my mother uses her android phone.
Works better and surprisingly much more intimate than anything before, and everyone participates.
Of course, people around me have been having whatsapp groups among peers, but there's something about the telegram desktop clients' easy sharing of images and links that I started to realize recently 'just works'.
I had set everything to private and FB helpfully shared it with everyone. I stopped posting from that day onwards.
+ my climbing gym has some new routes!
+ a new video by K.I.Z, yeah!
+ oh, demonstration against some Nazis demonstrating in my neighbourhood, should definitely go there
+ Someone's looking for a climbing partner next weekend, finally heading out to the rocks again!
So likes have become a poor-man's subscription to an RSS feed and groups have become an easy to follow replacement of forums. The key in these cases is the newsfeed, which is okay for having an overview of important stuff (and without friends is not crowded with inane stuff).
I repeatedly have idle thoughts about a startup idea, combining Facebook with github's business model: Any entity such as users, companies, organizations get a page where they can post arbitrary stuff like on their current facebook profile. Users can subscribe and get an overview on their newsfeed. So far, just like Facebook but without the social crap. Financing is not done through targeted ads but by requiring companies to pay for the service - something like 500 subscribers are free, 1000 - 10 $/months etc. Quite rough around the edges, the idea, but I personally would like such a service. Anyone interested in working on that with me?
I don't find Twitter is at all useful for keeping on top of interests.
I much prefer Facebook with zero friends
I think your idea has legs but it might be worth focusing on a niche area first (like climbing) and expanding after. Much like Facebook started with Universities.
The only reason I still have it is because I have friends overseas and it's the best way to keep in touch with them if I need to get a hold of them; otherwise I don't need it.
I still use FB because everybody is there, if I need to talk to someone or arrange an event, I can send them a message without knowing their actual email or phone. I'm not interested in knowing that a friend I meet once a year went to the restaurant (I can easily block it) but I am interested in being able to contact him if I need to. Facebook is great for that.
"Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly?"
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/feb/08/business.c...
Key quote: MySpace is well on the way to becoming what economists call a "natural monopoly". Users have invested so much social capital in putting up data about themselves it is not worth their changing sites, especially since every new user that MySpace attracts adds to its value as a network of interacting people.
I don't doubt that it will eventually go the way of AOL and MySpace but there are some key things keeping it in use. With early ISPs like AOL, there was nothing really stopping you from moving to another provider that offered something better. Combined with the move toward broadband, any AOL-exclusive features just weren't enough to keep people around for the most part and you could still access the rest of the web, email, etc. regardless of your provider.
With Facebook, you need to use their service in order to interact with people on it. I can't just use Google+ because I like the interface and mobile app better than Facebook. No matter how much I prefer another service, they aren't based on any common protocol like email so I need to use Facebook to interact with people who use it.
And with MySpace, the audience was mostly younger people. Sure, some of us had parents or employers that maintained a profile but Facebook was the first big social network that got your mom, your grandma, your boss, your doctor, your old college professor, and all the neighbors on your block to sign up. The under-30 crowd will switch services for something newer and better but the critical mass of Facebook users is hard to get around.
Coming back to Google+, I really am one of the (few apparently) people who think it's a much better alternative to Facebook. Chat is better. Levels of sharing work better and are easier to manage. The interface is smoother. There aren't game and app requests. The mobile app is better. Photo sharing is better. Basically on a technical level, it's better all around.
But when it came out and I started using it, the thing I quickly came to realize was that even if my techie friends also were trying it out, the vast majority of non-enthusiasts found the idea of setting up a profile to be annoying and not worth their time. They already had a Facebook after all. To use G+ you would either need to maintain two profiles on two services or decide to only talk to the 10% of your contacts who took the time to set up this new thing.
In the end, it never really made a dent outside of niche uses (Photography, Ingress players, etc) and has largely become the butt of jokes. Another failed challenger undone by lack of interoperability and the momentum of a large incumbent.
If there were some way to choose your platform and still communicate with the same people (a la email) then Facebook would have some sort of competition but there's no way in hell they would open themselves up to that sort of competition. And currently, there aren't any must-have features compelling enough to make people either maintain multiple profiles or just uproot en masse.
Zuckerberg is smarter than that. Facebook may (probably will, at some point) lose its dominance, but it won't be a repeat of the MySpace debacle. Perhaps people will gradually realize that "Facebooking" is not the same as real socializing, it's a low-effort, low-value pseudo-social entertainment activity.
If I'm not mistaken, this is the first time in history that anyone in the tech industry captured this crowd in a major way. Those in my family over 70, on both sides, can barely make a phone call on a cell phone and don't even really know what texting is... but they sure know how to use Facebook. That's how they see their grandbabbies, of course they know how.
The other problem with having family on a social media is that this immediately limits what people can safely use the service for, which leads to an inevitable but slow exodus of users and their content. Facebook is the family friendly zone for sharing photos and short notes, and it's increasingly only that and nothing else. You have Instagram for stuff you don't want your family to see. You have tumblr for stuff you don't even want many of your friends to see. And then there are the messaging apps. FB still performs very well in this arena, but it's clearly struggling against the likes of Snapchat, and I expect in 5-10 years Snapchat itself will be struggling against another newcomer with FB messenger a distant memory.
I actually thought about that too... but if you think about it relatively, the expected lifespan of someone who's 70 in 2015 (10-20yrs) is nearly an eternity in technology.
And those who are in that age group currently are very reluctant to change. It's just part of getting old. I can't see new generations of older people being much different. Maybe more accepting of change, but not actively seeking it like someone in their 20's.
>Facebook is the family friendly zone for sharing photos and short notes, and it's increasingly only that and nothing else.
I don't see this as a bad thing, but as a huge positive. Look at movies. There has even been a push in the decade or so to PG-13 everything to make more money.
But unlike movies, where they destroy stories in the name of making them Family Friendly, you can just move your non-family friendly content somewhere else. Which is personally exactly what I do.
My parents (~65) started using FB more when my great grandmother (~90) started using it. They are resistant to tech change, but they use it quite a lot. I'd imagine that given the long spans older folks tend to use technology, the drop off in folks as they die is offeset by the steady, if slow, adoption of the system by earlier generations.
I personally am not too stoked about how folks who don't know me might look at my feed (from potential clients to potential band mates to the NSA), but I might care less if I was 67 instead of 37.
I'll switch when there's a dominating replacement. All I want, for the rest of my life, is:
- a way to see updates from friends and acquaintances and people I've fallen out of contact with, and post mine for them.
- a way to search for and 'add' people I meet.
- a way to chat with those people (including in groups)
- all of those things, without social baggage that constrains it to 'only teenagers' or 'only colleagues and classmates' etc.
- and in a network that contains most people I meet, or doesn't have social baggage that prevents most people from being willing to join it.
To me it's an enriched version of what I get by having lots of contacts in my phone or email address book: exactly a list of people, plus the additional fact that I feel physically near them in some sense (and I think this is a concrete emotional thing. My family and friends don't feel too far away when I get to see snippets of their life streamed into mine).
Everything else - groups, events, pokes, company pages, apps, games, friend suggestions, wall posts, public about-me sections, places, reviews, ads, etc... I don't care about any of it. Maybe something that trims off all this fat would be innocuous enough to actually find adoption. I could see it living in some peer-to-peer structure too, but it has to still be absolutely trivial for anyone to join.
The fact that people want to use Instagram, Vine, Snapchat and Whatsapp is proof many people don't want a single service for everything. It's just unfortunate that Facebook happens to have acquired many of those.
> In other words - the Internet.
I think that those other interest groups will probably come to break off into custom sub-sites with their own message boards and chat.
I think clubs are well suited to discovery by FB, meetup and the like, but a bit too restricted in practice.
The corporate attempts to gather "likes" is B.S. mostly.
What you want potential coworkers to see isn't the same as friends/family...
In the end it's all muddled currently, and I think things may break apart a bit in the near future.
Thinking of it, it's interesting how long ago Facebook last changed functionality-wise.
I don't like them that much, but I do think Facebook does a decent job of predicting trends. That's also why I think we'll have Facebook around for a long time. In a few years, people may not even think of that they're using Facebook services since they've further specialized and added various apps, all under the Facebook umbrella but only on the back end.
I think Facebook is even on their way of breaking out the friend contacts part from their main site, with Messenger.com now an own website, and other Messenger platform changes like games.
I think that where Facebook wants to go is to no longer require any user to actually use Facebook to stay in touch (we now have Messenger, Groups, Snapchat, Instagram), so that Facebook only becomes a place that pulls them all together (except for sensitive users like youth who don't want Snapchat to get involved with parents). For those who fancy that.
That's a common tipping point that lead to unfavorable side effects.
Is there a service that does everything? I don't see how you connect your proof to what people actually want. It seems more likely that people will just use what is immediately available to them.
To be a bit dramatic, I get frustrated whenever:
- I have to choose between identity platforms to sign up for a site. I wouldn't be sad if there was an option (e) that was open source, transparent, not planning to monetize me, and easy to integrate with lots of various apps and services.
- I have to come up with credentials to a new website
- I have to remember what apps and services I've signed up for
- I have to save data on two different distributed file systems that don't interop.
- I have to connect with the same person on two different platforms. Or, I have to decide how much of my life I want a person to be able to see on two different platforms.
- I have to figure out if I'm okay with the privacy and security of various platforms on which I have an identity.
- I have to fill out a form with data I've already given to a service on the web.
- I discover that a friend uses a service I also use and I just wasn't aware of it.
- I have to choose between text, email, snapchat, FB message, gchat, Skype, Whatsapp, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram based on what (I've memorized) a particular friend or colleague uses.
I don't mind the different services doing different things. Users do want to use Instagram for Instagram things and SnapChat for SnapChat things. I just don't like the part where they're all mostly standalone but solving the same problems over and over and forcing me to jump through the same hoops over and over for no benefit. But I don't trust any existing system to aggregate these responsibilities either. I barely and reluctantly trust Google/FB/Twitter enough to use them for identity services across multiple sites, just because the alternative is so painful that I have to.
- family & close friends
- acquaintances & loose friends
- school alum
- social groups / clubs
- those who you might work with/for
- linked in, you failed this audience
- interests beyond clubs, outside acquantances
The reality is that what will probably "win" will be a few discrete social networks... one for your career (probably not linkedin), a new one for your family and close friends, facebook for your loose friends and acquantences... and something closer to bulletin boards and/or webchat for social interest groups (probably not meetup).
I don't think the one site to rule them all will survive in the long run. And those groups trying to do so with facebook, twitter and pinterest are failing... those trying to build business models that aren't bought are failing.
Doesn't g+ solve this with the whole "circles" idea? You control which groups you share with.
I'm sorry, I don't really understand what you mean here. If they don't want to 'follow' you, why would you expect to send them things?
> I can really just group the input feed, not the output feed
You can choose which circle(s) you wish to share with, is that not controlling your output feed?
People can filter their input (who they have in their circles) and their output (which circles they share each piece of content with).
I suppose you can't follow a chosen subset of a single users output, unless you can do something fancy with tagging.
Don't you get recruiter spam through Linked In? What about the more general advertising and marketing industry? They survive off such a model.
> Don't you get recruiter spam through Linked In?
Yes, the rate of which makes LinkedIn just an inbox for job offers for me, not a social network.
G+ was a really nice imo way to work through it... too bad nobody used it in practice. I also hope that they work through a few of the issues I have with hangouts, mostly in taking over Google Voice duties, and the limited UX on the desktop (searches from contacts for SMS don't show up before random strangers in G+).
I actually think the fact that you have to specifically put people into circles when you follow them makes it pretty straightforward. It only takes a moment, I like the inline dropdown interface to check the circles you want to add them to, and while it does take a few minutes to wrap your head around the first time you use it (probably not a non-tech-Grandma-ready interface), once you get it, it's easy and works well (IMHO).
But in the end, the only thing that matters on a closed communications platform is where the people are. Most people won't bother switching platforms and in order for any competitor (G+ or otherwise) to take off is for everyone voluntarily migrate over.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I'm willing to bet that would have changed if they reached the level of engagement that Facebook did.
It was just bad. With something like Facebook rises up from being unknown, its UI was pretty much vouched for early on (otherwise someone else would have won out). Google didn't have to survive competition. They just picked a UI, and I'm sure they followed lots of good UI principles and had lots of experts, but it was completely unappealing.
They also forced everything to integrate with G+ in really useless ways, which made me dislike it before even trying it. It didn't have any material problem in my life that it solved that would have made me put up with the UI. FB did: it was required for mainstream society, and it let me message my friends and others easily on the computer.
If "Google+" was first an initiative to create a universal single sign-on across all their own product lines (OAuth/OpenID), to better unify "profiles" which they did some of but didn't push it... and allowed the individual communities to continue to grow on their own (YouTube, their Blog thing, etc)... actually kept reader and extended with their own comment system etc.
By going that route, they could have made your "Google+ Profile" the center of your presence/contacts for the different social hubs. In the end, this is what happened anyway, at the cost of cannibalizing a few products, and alienating others, instead of doing the profile first, then offering "follows" across the sub-communities in a single interface later.
I think google's engineers are/were skilled enough to go this route, which would have been less "pure" architecturally, but more organic and better received.
Not so good as a subject matter filter though. I can create a list of only tech people on FB, but if a tech friend wants to post about his puppy to everyone, not so much I can do about that.
So your enriched version of address book does exist, but only in China, and it is one of the few things I miss so much when living outside China.
Though, I guess, as a tech person, I have the additional preference that whatever I use be fairly open (open-source somehow if possible) and not liable to doing things like selling user data or onboarding corporate partnerships in an attempt to monetize. Even though I know how silly it is to ask for an amazing product for free with no mechanism for generating revenue and a promise not to try to come up with one. Actually, I think I would pay for such a thing.
Actually, I know of Diaspora and Ello having tried this in some capacity, but neither caught on for various reasons.
Time and again, I've seen sites appear, grow, become definitively dominant, taper off, and largely disappear (never quite dying outright but gone from "everyone's on it!" to "who? what?"). High-profile lifespan is vaguely around 7 years. I've no question Facebook will do the same, already peaked and declining as the article notes, suffering from too many people, too much content, and not enough signal to retain users against the oppressive & discouraging noise. "Oh, but FB is different! Everyone is on it, even my grandmother!" many will declare; yes, and odds are your grandmother can tell of her days when CompuServe and AOL were the place to be (to the point of AOL having so much money they bought Time-Warner because they didn't know what else to do with all that cash), yet here she is on Facebook because that's what her grandkids use, but she's thinking of moving on more to Twitter/Instagram/whatever because those kids just don't post much on FB anymore.
I suspect the mayflies might beg to differ :( We humans can romanticize anything.
AOL may have been the place to be in the 90s, but it was still a sharp subset of my friends and acquaintances that were there, vs. the almost complete set on Facebook. And USENET/dialup/etc were even more selective. It's only been very recently (relatively speaking) that a majority of people were online at all, never mind aligned on a particular site.
I think you probably should compare more to something like AOL Instant Messenger, which had much closer to a 1:1 usage ratio of online computer users to software users (at least in the US market). The only real reason they went away was because social networks like Facebook are much more cross-connected and oriented towards group communication. The tagging features are huge, for example, since they potentially engage a lot of people at once. Ditto resharing, etc.
So the IM paradigm in general got consumed by larger social media--it wasn't a problem with AOLIM itself. But that sort of obsolescence is a vulnerability of a system that only does one thing. Facebook would probably mutate in the same situation, not die off.
The other factor is smartphones: a much larger number of people are online all the time now. If MySpace had their rise in the smartphone era, I'm sure they would have been much harder to displace. The fact that Facebook's opening their doors to the general public corresponded roughly with the release of the iPhone and subsequent rise of the smartphone was a huge bump for them.
Upshot is that a vastly larger percentage of a vastly larger number of customers are aligned on Facebook compared to older social media, and Facebook itself, as a platform, is relatively resilient to the changing needs of the customer. In an industry where both the customer acquisition and customer retention metric is "how many of your friends use it," I think Facebook will prove to be much harder to displace.
BTW: IBM just announced it's offering Apple computers to its employees.
Though to that point, interoperability between social networks would certainly be a nail in Facebook's coffin. As soon as the service commoditizes to a simple portal all bets are off.
Sure, some of the acquaintances are obnoxious on FB. The mechanisms for focusing on what I like vs what I don't seem to work well enough.
I don't like the surveillance. I try to minimize it in a number of ways. I'm sure my measures have limited effectiveness and I'm leaking details about my whereabouts, reading habits, and other preferences anyway. If FB was the only place I was doing that -- if I wouldn't have to essentially give up mobile/internet communications to truly solve that problem -- I might think harder about whether the value I get out of FB was something I could trade for privacy.
What does FB provide that you don't get with a combination of email/USENET/blogs/chat? Branding, janitors, and indexing.
Branding is useful because these things are so scale-driven that you want to be on the one that everyone else is using. It's easier for the uninvolved to figure this out if it's the one with huge advertising billboards.
Janitors are a necessity. Some are human, some automatic. People want spam to be fought, and they want abuse to be removed.
Between those two is the "nudging" of people into how to use Facebook. Why should you post life updates? Because it's the "done thing".
Indexing is useful because it enables you to find people you want to get in contact with using their human-recognisable name. (Facebook occasionally undermines this by refusing to accept names that people are known by)
Both of these are ongoing effort that has to be paid for if it is to scale and be done properly. Hence all the underhand cash-extraction processes.
Have a look at bittorrent. Scale is not a problem. Money isn't either. Perhaps we should have a distributed social network based on it, or a similar technology.
If you were to build a system for distributing "wall posts" in a bittorrent manner, it would probably end up looking a lot like USENET with a group per-person. (Long ago I knew a couple of people who did in fact have their own newsgroup in alt.) That would also replicate the problems of USENET, especially with regards to spam fighting.
THAT user experience (UX) has been the main issue I've seen with attempts at a distributed social network (such as Diaspora).
Note how easily email converges on big email providers too, rather than everyone running their own services. Gmail is definitely a brand. Lo and behold, Gmail is a service that is "free" but paid for by selling analysis of the content of your emails.
No - it's because you've done something you think your friends would be interested in and it's a lot easier to take a photo and click 'post to Facebook' than to write to 30 people.
That's really the fundamental function of Facebook and any successor will probably succeed by doing it better in some way. eg. Snapchat enabling you to send naughty pics without them being archived on the web for the rest of your life and so on.
Then, Facebook filters all my friends' feed so only 50% of them see it.
All I want from Facebook is a way to reliably see all the posts from all the people I want to follow, and have it keep doing that. I have found settings in the past that let it happen, but it seems to reset to filtered every time I take my eyes off it.
Is there an easy way to choose who sees a particular post (ie, the way one sees a display of friends to click on when inviting them to an event)? They should implement this, allowing for deselecting unwanted viewers (rather than selecting for wanted viewers - for those with too many friends).
You should read more. http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/Snapchat_admits_deleted...
I'm posting a picture a day. Surprising how many people go out of their way to mention how much they follow & like it.
Just to offer a different perspective: to me, the valuable part of sharing life events is the engagement with another person. IE, the extreme convenience (broadcasting 1-to-30 people) undercuts the reason for sharing: connection.
(I also have recently identified concerns I have with group mechanics, and this no doubt influences my perspective.)
I've recently stopped using reddit for the same reason and I'm now using HN as my main/only source of social media.
What will set the trend for the future is our understanding of how digital slavery works. We can be entering one of the darkest eras of modern history, or one of the most liberating. The choice is up to us, human beings, whether we sell ourselves to whoever is better at manipulating our emotions and thoughts, or whether we choose the free and open path that liberates us from digital tyranny.
Like with peak oil you've got to distinguish the US peak (which happened about 1970 though there may be second higher one coming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak_theory#/media/File...) and a global peak - not yet for oil. Facebook's probably peaked in the USA but has a lot of growth ahead globally.
It was useful but I pretty much only used it in my role as a fitness coach and when I quit that job I deleted all posts, photos and details, changed my primary email to nonsense and changed my password to something I would never remember before going through the two-week "cool-off" period they force on you to delete your account.
Facebook has been useful for us. It drives a lot of traffic to our site and presumably some of those people come to our event (we made an official facebook event so that we don't have a bunch of unofficial ones).
Oddly its a difficult way to communicate with members and build community. Facebook also requires payment to guarantee showing up in feeds now, for a non-profit its not worth it. A fair number of our younger and older artists just aren't on it (myself included). We're finding email is the best way to communicate whats going on with our members.
Facebook works best if Everyone is on it. Once fewer people aren't on it becomes less useful. I think thats its staying power currently. Its actually amazing that it runs at its scale. Myspace was popular, but it didn't have the nearly the volume of users as facebook (plus facebook is better at sharing photos, seemingly its reason for existing). If your not on it and your friends use it as an organizing tool, it can be a little isolating (Don't be that guy/gal who they have to go out of the way to invite to things...), but with more people not on it email seems to be returning as an organizing tool.
FriendsReunited was /the/ social network [amongst a certain demographic at least] in the UK before anyone knew the term social network. They established a massive userbase including paid for users but Facebook came along and destroyed them, particularly because FR did the paid for communications like LinkedIn do.
Isn't that a very very bad decision ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
That's not exactly being rich, those aren't billions that Facebook can go spend in the same way as Apple can spend their cash reserves. The $192 billions is the evaluation of Facebook, not the money Facebook has available to spend.
Profits are what makes companies rich, not that Facebook is doing to badly in that department.
If we are talking about liquid cash, FB is sitting on 12 bn, which is not so far than AAPL 33 bn.
I've noticed I get bombarded with far more notifications as an inactive user than I was when I was active. I get emailed notifications far more frequently when I used to never have them emailed.
A friend posted on your wall? Notification. Someone liked a post on your wall? Notification. A friend is having a birthday? Notification. A friend's birthday is coming up? Notification. Invited to an event? Event coming up? Event tonight? Notification. Someone with no connections in common commented on a post you've never read on a large public group that you have never contributed to? Notification. Someone completely unrelated to you LIKED a post you've never viewed on the same large group? Notification.
Facebook gets desperate when a user starts churning, but holy crap I just do not care. The only reason I keep this account is because of close family on the network. I could divide my friends list by 40 and I don't think I'd miss any of the lost content.
All the stream ever shows is shared posts from Buzzfeed-clones. It's not interesting. It's a feed of spam with a very, very rare text post or meaningful photo.
In the past 2-3 months I have heard two less savvy people recite the "it's not an official relationship until it's Facebook official" social norm, which inclines me to believe that Facebook is still firmly entrenched in the way people interact with each other: even if they never visit the site it needs to be there so that they can turn their significant other into that all important profile trophy/achievement.
I had this exact conversation with some coworkers (3 of us) and all of us found out that all of us only have our profiles because our significant others demand it. We never visit the site or use the site but have to exist there because of the people around us who do use it. My S/O can't have me as a partner, my sister can't tag me in a picture etc. People are worried that if there is no "paper trail" on Facebook, other people will think that they are an imposter.
Therefore I'm not inclined to agree that the current trend is a long term trend. There are many other websites that provide exactly the same features of Facebook, if not more. Facebook is a part of culture now. It's a verb. It probably has a good few decades of life left in it.
Finally "search query frequency" is the poster child of "correlation does not imply causation." E.g. People might not be searching for Facebook because everyone already knows what it is and what the address is. It's like ranking Google's health on how often people search for Google.
Local neighbors network? No-interface social networks? Peer-to-peer? Anonymous social networks? Video based (YouTube/Twitch)? Messanger-only? No central news-feed?
Then again, fb will probably just try to acquire them.
"Embrace, extend, extinguish"
Reasons: - Local/OSS/decentralized social networks will not work for the common population because their friends and updates will not be there.
- Video based is already a success, see Twitch, but people sometimes prefer text and likes.
- Messenger only is also a success, see Whatsapp/FB messenger, but some people have the need to expose themselves to people outside their groups.
- Pinterest, Instagram and Google+ have their own public which mostly likely are also in FB. They use it for difference purposes.
- Twitter, well this one it's difficult. First of all most of the communication is public and some users are not interested in that. Also there's a lot of self promotion messages which does not mean it will engage users to communicate. Finally Twitter tries to reinvent itself and the features are not consistent. i.e. For several weeks they enabled translations and after it was disabled. Twitter might have a chance to engage more people with Tvshows, movies, music and personalities.
Facebook after all is the social network which is easier to get started, makes a balance between public and private/groups, lot's of features available (games, messenger, groups etc...) and families and friends in the same feed. I guess it's pretty hard to beat that currently for other social networks.
It has slowly become the centralized place for connecting with people, especially when not considering the minority of very tech-savy people.
I am at a party and I met somebody I want to hang out with? He/she's probably on facebook then we'll communicate on that. Wanna look up for my old class-mates? Let's search for them on facebook.
The timeline will be empty/boring/spam, but the messaging app will be full.
FB is basically AOL, which was basically CompuServe, which was a combination of DEC networking and BBS culture. (Kind of, if you squint hard and wave your hands around in the right way.)
There is always niche for this kind of all-in-one social/messaging/groups/etc. It's a very big and profitable niche, and someone always owns it. But the incumbents change over time, and there are disruptions whenever the underlying technology changes.
FB is likely a safe bet until something new appears. The obvious near-term move is 3D social/gaming, which is why FB bought Oculus. Longer terms that may not be enough, because it's not obvious head-mounted 3D VR is going to be pleasant and friction-free enough for everyday casual use.
My guess is the something new will have strong elements of AI and social and perhaps VR too - but I could be wrong about that.
Social networks are only useful to people if the other people with whom they want to communicate are ON those networks.
Right now, Facebook has that massive directory. This can change, of course. The Internet does not have permanent favorites. But today, Facebook is where you can easily find and interact with people.
My observations are that people don't care about being social, they want a place where they can post their frustrations, Facebook is a good platform for that.
Twitter, Instgram, Snapchat and others all have their user base, but it's way smaller and less relevant than the people using the services believe. If you and your circle of friends are only on e.g. Snapchat, that's platform will seem much more valuable and relevant that it really is. Same with Twitter, the tech world sees Twitter as way more relevant and valuable than it really is, because that the platform that many of us use (I don't, Twitter is in my just a way of following celebrities in the TV/Movie/politic or tech- world).
Some for of group chat might be handy, but there's room for a ton of these services. Although users will tend to cluster. Videos and voice is unimportant, text and pictures are not.
I think that WebRTC will deliver a lot of opportunities in that arena.
I don't think news feeds are going away, and I think that Twitter (if they can clean out the bot accounts) is one of the better resources in that gateway.
As to messenger systems... no idea... right now it kind of sucks... it was bad enough with yahoo, icq, aol, and msn messenger... now it's even more networks with even more disconnect outside facebook, and fb's app is about as invasive as it gets in terms of device privacy.
FB:Path::Reddit:HackerNews I think.
Text me to know more 916-479-4366
Anyway, just some of my experience so far. At least they allow me to export my data, unlike Yelp bookmarks. I kept my usage of Facebook extremely light, but this has taken a lot of my spare time. Few people will go through this effort.
Before you start using a SaaS solution, figure out how you can stop using it.
It's really not. All the saving of contacts, birthdays etc. that you talk about here... If you give a crap about any of these people, you will already have that information in another medium. The Facebook logins? Only one I had to change manually was Spotify, everything else I was able to switch to Google.
It's seriously easy. Just stop using it.
If that's their only set of data, then I'm guessing this is equally likely to indicate that Google is losing users, or at least losing users trying to access common sites, at a pretty steep rate.
What if people google facebook less than a while ago because they already know what it is and have remembered the domain name?
I'd be interested in seeing action metrics over time for FB. My gut feeling is that people use it more passively these days (I do, it's mostly a fancy contact book for me). Every now and then I catch myself posting stuff for reasons of "look isn't this great...please like it" but for the most part my FB use is fairly passive these days.
I also feel like I should just delete my FB account for various reasons every now and then but usually talk myself out of it.
Facebook is creepy, most people hate it and hate themselves for using it. Everybody knows somebody who lost friends because of it, or who broke up or got divorced. It's supposedly cited in one out of seven divorce cases. In terms of branding it's pretty toxic.
I don't know how long it will be around, probably for a while (if you run Facebook and Snapchat through Google trends Snapchat barely registers) but brand loyalty isn't going to keep it afloat.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=myspace%2C%20facebook...
If google trends is of any predictive value, Uber and Instagram should not exist (or at least be worse than myspace). The keyword 'snapchat' also shows near zero volume.
Or that browsers have gotten smart enough that they're autocompleting facebook.com instead of just letting you search for facebook.
I do love a good Google trends "research" dive but I'd hardly consider it good enough to cite for a scholarly paper. There aren't even real numbers, just relative search volumes.
I don't hold it against you if you don't have a FB but I'm also not going to feel back if you miss out on an event because you were harder to reach. I find the vast majority of FB-Defectors to be insufferable to listen to when they talk about how they aren't on FB (seriously, they fucking talk about FB MORE than the people ON FB!) and when they whine about a group of us talking on FB (therefore leaving them out) I just ignore them. I don't like FB and the reach it has into our lives but I'm not about to cut off my nose to spite my face by deleting my FB. There are plenty of ways to use FB without letting it use you IMHO and people who just flat out quit are too lazy to do so (Sign up for an account, don't add any info, turn off all location stuff, block the FB widget so it can't track you one sites, etc...).
What I really want is identity provider and FB gives that to me today (along with "first party" chat, messaging, photos, etc). Ideally I would have something like OAuth (but not OAuth) and all my friends could pick a messaging platform that supported it but right now nothing like that exists and/or the UI/UX is so terrible I'd never get my friends to switch.
I'm not the biggest fan of facebook obviously, but when I wqs studying abroad in France it really was a handy way to connect with people when I didn't have a cellphone. Now, after deleting for such a long period, I don't have any connection to my old friends which is a shame.
There's the argument that if people wanted to talk to you they'd make it happen but then there's the argument that if you're on facebook people are more likely to talk to you because of the convenience. No one wants to lose touch, and facebook provides and easy way to make sure that (had I not deleted) when I wanted to go back to Europe I'd have easy access for communication lines to the individuals I might want to visit.
Everything is double edged and while I've enjoyed my time off of facebook (why does everyone have to hate on the poorest in America? I will never understand. If the people on welfare were actual leechers maybe they'd own a portion of the country, anyways I digress).
That being said, it's a total privacy invasion, and the people I apparently know don't critically think too often unfortunately even as I try to gently prod, and yet, it has allowed me to find events I might not have gone too, and friends I may not have seen.
I hate to do this to hackernews where the discussion is the key reason I come here... but I did not read the article. Sorry!
If I (as a hypothetical FB user) hit a deer driving to work tomorrow, would I email all my old friends about it? Absolutely not. Would I post something to FB? Sure!
I have email addresses for old friends, and they have mine, and I have no idea what's going on their lives.
Less and less people can write with the energy of Erik Naggum. Its not rewarded. Searching that great article from 6 months ago is a PITA. Almost no one reads longform articles anymore. Thanks Obama.
Dude.
Gradually, users find other websites to channel their interests and avoid biases, like Reddit, Pinterest, HN,...
It's a serious falacy to assume one will always need a network filled with friends and family.
One of the great things about family (if you have a good one) is you have to put up with them no matter how much you disagree on the little things. Interest sites like Reddit let people form into their own ignorant cliques without serious personal effort.
It seems to be a fundamental problem of humanity.
Is there any way I can separate myself from the website without losing these things that I might need later in life at some point? I'm really wanting to just delete it but the history makes it important to me.
We? I never became a user. Apart from that: Our children will, at the latest. For our children's generation, FB already is the pinnacle of boredom and stuffiness. Whatever is cool about “where our parents humiliate themselves publicly”?
Surely your family and acquaintances and people in the street are free - depending where you live (?) - to take pictures. So you're going to have to police all of those images in perpetuity to prevent images from appearing online. The likelihood is that when they're a teenager they'll put their lives online themselves in some way ... so?
If your child goes on a playdate or attends a nursery or goes to a public location then there's a good chance (at least in the UK) that they'll appear on Facebook no matter how many "I do not consent for my child to appear in photographs" statements you sign. Once they appear in the background of images then in the not too distant future face recognition is likely to be good enough to trawl the net for images of them. I think what you'll find is that the images are all one's you haven't curated whereas if you were adding your own images (no matter if it's only a few) then you at least have some control over the general presentation of images.
As for the other people taking photos, sure, if he is in the background there is not much we can do, but other places (nursery or school or even playdates) can't by law do that and to be fair, those places we tend to hand pick them and they do share this with us.
Malls are ubiquitous in much of the US, and people use them differently. Some people wander, some people run in to the one store they need and leave. Some people hang out at the food court. I view Facebook the same way - as they continue to build out features, different people will choose to use the bits and pieces that work for them.
What's funny is we've had to convince our younger members to even sign up so we could communicate with them. Anyone younger than 20 in our group didn't usually have an FB account.
We've tried running traditional forums for the local group but it has never worked. FB is the only way to do it for now.
They're already ON Facebook. It's on their phone. They don't have to do anything.
Trust me, I -want- an updated platform to use, but the rest of the gamer community here just doesn't seem to want to migrate.
That statement is just so intellectually dishonest, it completely ruins the entire conversation. Pretending like there's no value in what Facebook offers ignores billions of dollars and billions of users who do find value. Now I'm not one for an ad populum, but when we define usefulness as "provides value to others", how can't Facebook be considered useful?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-32902170
(Interesting that mobile is declining, suggests the distinction is lost in a world of tablet, laptop and phone use where desktops are a thing of the past domestically)
I would say that mobile is declining because land lines basically don't exist anymore, so we can just say phone instead of mobile phone.
Everyone I know has access to a landline (UK).
True the only reason I have a landline really is that you can't get a broadband internet connection on its own that's cheaper than phone + broadband.
- Informing old friends about so-called "Life Events" - not by actually posting, but by private messages
- Private groups of separate friend circles, mostly for sharing cool news/websites or music
- My facebook newsfeed mostly constitutes local news, international editorial/opinion pieces and lots of pictures of nature stuff which I like. I've unfollowed most people so I don't get their posts.
I don't have a one-stop shop for all the above except facebook, so I think I'll definitely be using it for a while.
Facebook, like everything, will disappear some day, but it will be because people decide to start using some other way of keeping in touch -- not because they decide that they're bored of keeping in touch. Many people just stop using Facebook, don't replace it with anything else, and are happy with that decision -- but that will not be the norm.
FB is superb for organizing events with people. IMHO that's its strongest offering. But I'd rather just use webapps, word of mouth and email.
Other people are still engaged; my NEET friends will come over and look at Facebook for hours and even people I know with jobs find it compelling but I don't.
In fact I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet.
It lets you filter out certain posts or in my case, put in a bit of custom CSS to never show the news feed => no distractions when I go onto fb chat.
Nothing I have heard about them since I quit has made me regret my decision to leave.
Facebook won the social network land-grab and it will be difficult for anyone to assail their stronghold. I hope someone does, but it's probably going to take a lot of money and time.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/27/google-flu...
I'm assuming this is just for the main FB platform? They still have access to many users through messenger and FB login.
And? They own Instragram and WhatsApp which, apart from SnapChat, makes up 50%+ of what teens are doing on their phones
https://medium.com/@nickgrosvenor/facebook-is-myspace-7559ff...