Can Anyone Stop Facebook?
slate.com
slate.com
I am surprised by how pervasive facebook is. I insist that people post their photos on flickr or some other service because I don't want to use facebook. They in turn insist that I sign up to facebook just to see their photos.
No, I can't stop facebook but, I don't have to use it either.
I've been a heavy fb user for 5 years and can't recall the last time I saw a fake profile.
I would absolutely hate to use my real profile as I find the whole 'incoming' side of it intrusive and desperate.
The last thing is need is to have to deal with all the useless drivel people would be expecting me to take part in with a real profile.
I would also say that at least 4 of my friends do the same.
Yes I have a few accounts too. But my mom, my sister, my hundreds of uni friends have incredibly personal stuff on their fb profile.
Fake profiles can be quite elaborate.
Fake profiles can be quite elaborate.
You are referring to profiles where someone builds an elaborate fake character. I don't think those were ever that common.
Lastly, facebook always reports active users. I have a couple accounts with fake names that I haven't logged in for at least a year. I created them to test out something.
FB only counts users with recent activity.
I insist that people post their photos on flickr or some other service because I don't want to use facebook
The problem with Flickr is that not everyone is on Flickr. Facebook's ability to tag photos and associate them with events is light years ahead of anyone else, not least because they have a critical mass of the people in the photos on the service.
I have been a member since before they added the photo feature, and I have deactivated my account for over 4 months before, but messaging + events + all my friends are on it compels me to stay.
Also, I know people who are either or both email and voicemail bankrupt (more messages than they can possibly ever check), and facebook is the best way to contact.
EDIT: Purpose of this reply: why do I find it compelling to use facebook. Also I don't do IM, don't even answer the phone some days (need quiet time) so it isn't just because I can't help myself.
Anyhow, I must be one of the few according to Slate, who does not like sharing everything I do with my friends, enemies and strangers.
I've really left Facebook more as a living, breathing address book rather than anything else for now. I am much more likely to be on Twitter than Facebook. It also happens that I'll talk to people on Twitter and then eventually add them as friends on Facebook, but just continue talking to them on Twitter. It's even the case now where most of the folks from Facebook (and school) that I'd talk to on a daily basis have migrated over to Twitter and they're more active on Twitter than Facebook. We can't be the only ones doing that...
Everything goes in waves though, it lies in human nature to grow bored with sameness. Ten years ago there existed a community product in my country that had managed to capture 90% of all high-school students, and they seemed unstoppable. Now, the product is almost forgotten, they lost to other products, similar products, but people had just gotten tired of it and wanted something new, something cool, something different.
But ten years from now Facebook will probably be gone. It will be very interesting to see what replaces it though.
If facebook can get one, or both, of these from its 350 million users it has a significant chance to stick around. You also have to consider teen markets shift much faster than adult markets. I know in my high-school a single thing could spread throughout the whole school, but when a new grade entered the viral spread had disappeared and they remained 'uninfected' by it. So any trend automatically lost 1/5 of its teen market if it didn't capture the new grade.
This happens less so with more mature crowds, who tend to be more loyal. You don't see people buying from the same car manufacturer time after time because it's an 'in thing', it's because they're loyal, which is in essence reliance and trust.
Facebook-today is, for my uses, much worse than Facebook-of-years-past.
In the past it was simplistic, elegant, and did one job and did it well. Now it is trying to be everything and is bloated, slow, and spammy. The signal-to-noise ratio is terrible and I can't find a way to turn off "Mafia Wars" spam.
On the notifications that display, hover over the top-right corner and an X should appear. It prompts to hide all notifications from the application.
Thankfully notifications are one thing Facebook is removing. Perhaps the signal-to-noise ratio will improve when they make the spamming more difficult.
Also I just read very recently that over 50% of monthly active users log in to Facebook everyday.
So surely that shows your friends are using it a lot :/
Personally, I find facebook far more usable than twitter - upload images/videos/share URLs, no silly char limit etc.
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
Think of this with respect to google. Their business grows linearly with search usage, so their incentives are to create faster and more open access to the internet. Don't believe that "don't be evil" bullshit. They act the way they do because it makes them a great deal of money. AND, it benefits pretty much everyone expect dinosaur incumbents.
[this is just my opinion]
I wouldn't be so quick to call it evil. It's about as good as it gets. True altruism doesn't sustain a business.
"Did anyone seriously ever think facebook was not evil? Facebook will stab your grandma in the eye for a quarter"
etc. etc.
I'm not saying facebook will last forever - just that it is easy to poke holes in your examples.
IBM and Microsoft are probably the best examples of decades long dominance that eventually began to decline.
That said, I think there's more to be done in the social networking space than mere marketing differences. Twitter was just the first and probably simplest example of what you can do once you get away from the traditional count-my-friends social networking model.
The issue will be who do you distrust the least.
Who is going to make it easiest to export my personal data to use somewhere else? Hopefully us geeks will keep pushing for this and then help everyone else follow.
Until then I feel like I'm just toying around with the flavor-of-the-month.
I check Facebook 2 or 3 times a week to see what family and friends have been doing. With Twitter, I follow people into the same technologies that I am interested in, and I get a lot of interesting links.
re: gmail: I have never bought anything from a sponsored search link, but I do occasionally buy things from advertisement links on my email - also, sometimes I get an email from a customer asking me to help them with a problem and a useful link is on the right side of the customer email.
Sure, privacy issues are huge, but I think that people need to make a personal calculation of benefits vs. potential problems.
But I prefer to keep up with friends and family either in person, or via phone or email, and I don't update my own page more than once every few weeks.
I found Twitter to be far too expensive (in terms of wasted time) to be worth bothering with. It's not just the necessarily regular checking for new tweets, but the fact that this distracts me and breaks the flow of whatever I am supposed to be doing. I would guess that twitter users waste many hours per week (and possibly per day for heavy users) like this, in exchange for relatively few insightful comments or useful links.
I think it plays off people's desire for instant gratification, but the opportunity cost of using it is very high.
Do you just object because some companies make it their primary revenue stream or because it's obvious?
i wonder how people felt when phones first came out. the privacy nuts must have gone crazy: oh no! the operator could be listening to my personal conversations.
I often wonder if the business of online advertising really works well. Targeted advertising certainly has better results that blanket campaigns, but don't most users ignore advertisements by now? I know that I hardly even notice them anymore (even the good ones).
Not well targeted ads! One of the forums I frequent has a fairly new ad up almost all the time. A number of people have commented on their experiences purchasing the products from that vendor and as a result, many more (myself included!) plan to buy from them when the need arises. It's a simple banner ad and clicking it takes you to a gorgeous website that is a perfect showcase for what they're selling.
I really don't think most people (non-developers) dislike ads; we dislike annoying, generic ads that have nothing we're interested in.
Then again, my wife and I love the "messing with sasquatch" TV ads because they're so funny although I can't even remember what they're selling!
Either that or I'll be the first up against the wall when Facebook becomes SKYNET.
If Apple got into the business of social networking, they could fracture the community.
I stopped using facebook much when it got bloated and slow. This tends to be what always kills these massive sites. Someone will figure out a way to do better than them and the internet elite will jump shit and eventually there will be more than one facebook.
And yet fb is about to breakeven or hit profitability.
Bust? Not really.
No facebook game will ever get a payment from me while they're relying on third party providers. There's a slim chance they'll get my money through paypal (since I've had a paypal account longer than I've had a facebook account), but as the money you pay goes into solely one game there's no interoperability. Every developer is stuck developing their own way to implement credits using companies that have no reason to care.
People are going to trust facebook, but they're not going to trust 'cherry credits' or whatever suckass companies you know nothing about that you're signing your credit card information over to. Facebook is already trusted by its users (or they wouldn't be users), which gives them an unbelievable edge without them having to play unfairly against the other game credit providers.
Judging by the ridiculous amounts of money that social gaming companies are hauling in, this is clearly not true.
Essentially, it would be if Apple didn't allow you to put money onto your account. You instead have to use your credit card to make a transaction on every single song purchase. It would be stupid, and Apple wouldn't make nearly as much money as it could.
> We’ve found once you get into these digital-only goods and services there’s massive opportunity for fraud. We couldn’t find a single company that could manage or solve that problem for us. We had to build the whole infrastructure in-house. We had to go out and get relationships with credit-card processing companies. - Mark Pincus
Facebook would have a unique opportunity to step in and dominate this market. If Zynga cannot control these transaction companies, how can smaller developers? Like I said, tapping into this market could mean Facebook could not only boost revenues to many of these social gaming companies, but it could be taking profits off of every transaction. 5/6ths of Zynga's users are from social networking sites, meaning Facebook could easily take profits from 5/6ths of Zynga's users by being trustworthy. There are then plenty of other developers in the market, especially thousands of smaller developers, who could make Facebook hundreds of millions that they're not tapping.