Suppose you're in a room with 5 close friends having a conversation. You're comfortable, animated, energetic, outgoing. In the midst of this engrossing conversation 400 other acquaintances silently enter the room. Suddenly you notice them and realize they can all hear every word you're saying.
Most people find this scenario a bit socially uncomfortable and clam right up.
Facebook's growth has created this scenario for a lot of people. The basic currency of Facebook (voyeurism) relies upon a loose security model that prevents a person from walling off his/her 5-10 closest friends and using FB for the bulk of their online socializing. Eavesdropping is essential to the business model. The problem is, thusfar most FB users are not really aware just how intricately engineered this voyeurism is and how publicly their lives are being broadcast.
You can wall off groups of people within Facebook, but the effort required to do this is beyond the motivation level that I'd expect most Facebook users (myself included) to have. Like privacy, making Facebook more tolerable to use is an opt-in thing, requiring proactive measures by the user.
Even that process is confusing. I've created concentric circles of friends based on privacy levels (specific interest, friends, friends of friends, all). But what if I like a post that a specific-interest friend has posted? Does that mean all of my friends (or everyone) will see that like and that post?
If walling off your group is equivalently difficult to creating a yahoo/google group, then yeah.
Facebook's entire premise is that people LIKE being heard/seen and LIKE seeing/hearing others, in their social graph.
What is really needed is multiple distinct social graphs per user with distinct walls between them, done elegantly... this isn't an easy problem to solve.
There was a really nice presentation from a Googler (who subsequently moved to Facebook) which described this problem eloquently... but I can't seem to find the link.
Interesting. I'd love to see the presentation if you (or anyone else) end(s) up finding the link.
It's interesting to consider the threshold for the sort of social discomfort I described above. In my case it hit around 2/3 of my current friend count.
I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point.
My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example.
As more people move to avoid the noise, they'll find solace in mini-communities, and I think that's the way forward. Not just one service, but hundreds.
Strangely enough, could it be time to attack Facebook the same way they attacked MySpace? Facebook bootstrapped a user base by initially restricting to people with harvard.edu email, which made them more comfortable sharing. Then they expanded to other universities, but only allowed visibility to people within the same .edu.
Now that everyone has been socially obligated to friend their Mom, maybe it's time to attack Facebook with .edu specific sites again? What other natural community boundaries would make sense to target with exclusive sites?
While I find the idea of many micro-communities compelling, I don't think that this is the direction things are going.
Here's why: the Internet is extremely diverse as it is and overall makes for a bad user experience where people have to cognitively deal with many different (and disagreeing) interfaces, rules, quirks, web addresses, and so on. At the beginning this heterogeneity was seen as an advantage because the amount of easily accessible information was unparalleled. However, in the past few years it seems like most successful platforms (be it YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Amazon, Wikipedia, iOS, etc.) have done well because there was a consistent and one-stop shop experience throughout.
There is still tons of room on many different verticals to improve and disruption to occur, but I wouldn't expect things to come full circle.
Well, there's Reddit and its collection of small communities under the same banner.
But I think as more and more CMSs start introducing semantic information in their HTML, we'll start to have more client side features that work across all such websites, and eventually we'll go full circle and reinvent USENET, but now with a dozen layers of abstraction to support it.
I'm in a mini community of about 10. We all know each other. We communicate through email. I've gotten more out of that than I ever got out of Facebook, and some of the people in my mini group were part of my network in Facebook.
Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.
If they are really smart they'll make it even easier for niche communities to use their social graph, or to create custom data records within it. For a lot of site owners it makes sense to outsource account and user info management to someone else. FB has had trouble being reliable enough for that kind of service in the past, but it's not like they don't have the talent and money to do this.
If you look at the Like button, and their other endeavors, I don't think Facebook's ambitions are limited to just getting visits and clicks. They want to become a utility as indispensable as HTTP.
And Facebook are really smart. Keep in mind that if there is a drop, they've probably known about it for months and months, and we're just finding out it about now indirectly.
That said, I hope they don't succeed and a distributed system does succeed.
Not if they can't get us to join. Personally, I'll always be a little too paranoid about what they're doing with their data. Their past missteps gave us all an indication of what they really want to do.
I'm really hoping for decentalized peer to peer communities that are elastically created from locally computed interest profiles. Not a distributed facebook per se, but more like a user-centroid HN that aggregates similar people and interests... that would really make my academic life soar.
In the end, I don't think Facebook would fight for the long tail of user demographics. What they have is quite profitable enough. Why expend 90% more effort to convince all of the tinfoil hat wearers to join?
Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse.
are working quite well among my circle of friends to provide a focused view of one or another niche community that forms a natural subset of my friends. There is a particular Facebook secret group that I visit absolutely every time I'm on Facebook, which is several times a day. That's a practical place for me to ask focused informational questions, and also a place where I can share a lot of camaraderie with dear friends who have had similar--and yet very diverse--life experiences. Because of the stronger filtering abilities of Facebook, I can indeed see how it could supplant many niche sites. (Thus far, HN gets the second share of my attention after Facebook, among all websites, and it will be interesting to see what the consensus here is about the overall community experience in the next year or so.)
One problem with Facebook Groups I find is that you can't have wall posts from your groups appearing in your primary timeline/newsfeed. Because of this, you have to make a concious effort to visit the group to catch up.
Since none of the groups I joined have the same level of activity I'm used to on specialized forums for those subjects, I never bother to check up on them - which of course lends itself to a vicious circle of inactivity.
They just changed all Facebook Groups to a more-simplified version just a month or two ago so I doubt they're going to get any more sophisticated on that level.
What do you imagine they would do otherwise? More to the point, what's the business case for doing what you describe? They could require FGroups to self-categorize in order to narrow and aid their advertising sales, but that's not foolproof and lots of groups would just as soon choose "Other."
Technically speaking it takes to much "gardening" to run HN-like site. There are millions of niche forums there already. But it's the platform and the interface that makes HN different. I don't know if there is a technical expertise to similarly run other communities there.
Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.
I have long believed that Facebook/MySpace is like a TV show. Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends.
In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Those businesses have shorter shelf lives.
On the other hand, Google/Microsoft are in the productivity/time saving business and they have more durable advantages since they don't have to keep coming up ways to make people stick around. People stick around and use their service, because people save time.
Watch out for Twitter to do to Facebook what, Facebook did to Myspace and what Myspace did to Friendster.
Twitter on the other hand may not exactly be like a TV show as much as TV channel with each mega Twitter star (e.g. Charlie Sheen) a TV show within that channel.
Same here. I'm getting more and more bored with it. What was most interesting about Facebook for me was learning about certain people. This guy I work with likes cheesy movies, goes out to Irish bars with his wife, and likes to tweet quotes from whatever movie he's watching when he's drunk. Learning that was interesting. Seeing the same pattern every day is horribly boring. Same thing with most of my high-volume friends. A close high school friend's wife, whom I haven't had a chance to get to know in person, loves mariachi music, can't write a coherent sentence to save her life, goes to la pulga (the flea market) every weekend, enjoys drama with her coworkers, and is constantly sharing coupon deals. Fascinating to know, boring as shit to see every day.
And of course the highest volume people are the most boring. All my friends seem to have about the same volume of inanity, funny stuff, somewhat interesting comments, worthwhile content, and vital life updates to share. They just vary in what their sharing threshold is. If I could tune out everything below "worthwhile content" then Facebook would be great. I'd also only need to look at it once a day for two minutes to keep up with everybody. Alas, there is no "setLogLevel" method on my Facebook feed.
I am not on Facebook, but the last few games I tried on iOS have a "post achievement on Facebook/Twitter" every single level. I can't help thinking that if anybody is actually pushing those buttons it must drive their "friends" absolutely bonkers.
On some level I can understand the concept of "keep your friends up-to-date with your life". But not using these definitions of "friends" and "life".
You can block specific applications from ever being shown to you. If it wasn't for that feature Zynga games would have made me quit facebook a few times already.
Game updates are annoying, but they aren't much better than anything else anybody posts, ever.
Agreed. If I was only facebook friends with the 10 people I really am interested in, I'd hardly notice the difference. I don't want to go through and remove all the loose friends I met in college one-by-one, though.
Twitter is much more relevant to me; I'm only following around 50 people, all of which I deliberately chose.
My wife has the same issue with it. She gets too bound up in the day-to-day, and feels too obligated to keep up to date, which the site makes nearly impossible to do efficiently.
Then there's the typical drama on any social network, the annoyances with closed systems (we're happy with email and caldav, thanks, anything can use them!), and the endless, endless spam on the news feed. I always hid the feed with my user CSS file, and stayed on top of it, but she'd get roped back in when it occasionally broke. Being social is addictive, and she's more social than I am.
Sorry to hear you found the newsfeed so spammy - I work at Facebook on keeping spam out of the feed (and off the site in general), and I'm curious what you found most annoying. I'd love to work on reducing it, as it probably annoys other folks too.
Oh, it's a systemic issue, for the most part. And it's not so much actual spam as it is social spam. Facebook revolves heavily around pushing information towards your attention, and I'm very much a pull-oriented person with rare exceptions.
As to my CSS {display:none;}, though, I ended up distributing it to a large portion of my friends. The overall consensus was (and likely is, though this is mostly before the ability to categorize things) that the feed is:
A) too addicting, because it pulls you back in when you could be doing something else. There's always something interesting going on when you have a lot of connections, and you can't remove connections or risk offending people (though that's largely fixed now). Its mere presence is a threat to being productive, which ends up leaving you feeling like you wasted your day.
and B) utterly crammed with irrelevant information (app this, lame-quote-status-update that, drinking-photos those), so the bits you actually wish to keep up on get lost in the sea or pushed off the end of the world (page 2). I recognize this is a largely un-solvable problem, as everyone is different, but the tool-set simply isn't there to even manage it efficiently.
So it ends up being the zeitgeist of things you're not involved in and you either want to be in on or you want to just shut up. With the occasional relevant flotsam that keeps you checking it through all the failing times.
Last I saw, things had improved somewhat, with the most important step being lists of friends. But I've been out of it for a couple years now, so some of the gripes may not be overly relevant.
Gotcha. I guess I'm glad it's not straight up malicious spam (woohoo! I'm doing my job!), but rather an (admittedly tougher-to-solve) quality issue.
That being said, I think the folks working on feed ranking have done quite a lot of awesome stuff over the last couple years (most of which shouldn't require any explicit work on your part other than using the site) - I'd be curious what you thought if your account was still around and you gave it another shot for a few weeks.
This is throughout college, so add annoyance about normal college stupidity and a dash of escapism. Though I'm not sure what your age is, so it could be you're in that situation.
I don't find it particularly addicting either, but to each their own. I'd be willing to bet there are at least as many FB addicts as WOW addicts, though.
This is a problem inherent in any form of social media. Unfortunately, it's not easily fixed. You need to find a way to strike a balance between rewarding content creation and punishing spam, and the line in thin.
people bring this stuff on themselves by treating fb as a massive 'who I know or am related to' index instead of following who they are interested in. I suppose fb brought some of this on themselves when they went down the twitter-emulation path a few years ago.
It's interesting that you mention the "who am I related to" aspect, because Geni.com is exactly that. After altercations with unhinged second cousins-once-removed and unpleasant uncles, I set privacy to maximum and abandoned Geni (Geni's habit of spamming people who you added also led to a few unpleasant encounters at family reunions). The family tree idea was good, but the social aspect turned out to be unpleasant.
Some of the same relatives are friends on Facebook, and it is much more pleasant experience, because they are nominal "friends", but are in a high privacy group, so we don't have much opportunity to interact.
Don't kid yourself. Reddit has gotten to the point where reposts continue to make the front page because even if a lot of people have seen it, not all have. And I have noticed that the same comments will garner karma.
The problem with websites like Reddit is that they suffer from the so called black swans. A good post can garner karma in the thousands, but a bad one will only have a negative one or two. So, reposting is a great strategy especially when new content is so hard to come by.
Not really, when they message you whenever you mention a keyword they're tracking on (e.g. ipad), then all you can do is manually block them.
It's a fairly painful process, and considering how much visibility Twitter has of each twitter client, their automatic anti-spam process should actually be much more effective than it currently is.
That pretty much stops any serendipity when it comes to people following you - very few people are going to click follow on a protected feed just to see whether they're saying interesting things about their local area or a technology are they work in?
Apparently helping get you sucked in to Farmville is not as valuable to people as helping you get a job and stay connected with what is happening with old co-workers. Go figure.
I'm not sure you could call LinkedIn a social network. It can be nice to find out about an old friend, but most of it is pure business. So I'm not surprised about the survey.
The best thing about LinkedIn for me is their recommendations system. Whenever I'm looking at people's profiles on LinkedIn, I'm looking at their work history and their recommendations, the other stuff being basically useless. And mostly I value recommendations coming from people I know.
So it's a social network and I think it is more pure and valuable than the Facebook graph since on LinkedIn you only want a thousand connections if you're an HR person, not because you need friends for Zynga games, so most people on LinkedIn have between 10-200 connections representing old colleagues.
The recomendations aren't going anywhere these days. I distrust people with a huge number of recommendations and when you read through, you understand it's a mutual favors system. Not that mutual favors are bad, just that most of it so shallow.
I agree with your point about the survey results being due to it being pure business, but I still think it is a 'social network'; it's just not one that is made to spend a long time on. I take a gander at it circa once a month. (Their new feature that shows everybody that I looked at their profile though really concerns me.)
Twitter for me. One of the things I wanted out of Facebook is to talk to people I knew regarding various topics. I found out that most people just play Farmville, post happy birthday notes and pictures of their kids. While catching up with old flames was fun, the interest is gone.
On Twitter, I can search the entire world for people who have the same interests as me, read their thoughts and correspond with them.
So basically I left Facebook because I really wanted to connect with people on an intellectual level. Turns out, I don't know anyone who I can correspond with in that manner.
By left, I mean I deleted the account, whatever that means in FB land.
Does anyone have any good guesses as to what the "next" Facebook will be? I mean, in my experience, it basically went Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook. While Facebook is certainly in the drivers seat to a much greater extent than MySpace was five or six years ago, history indicates they'll eventually be knocked off their throne. However, I haven't seen or heard of any serious newcomers in that space. I've personally seen enthusiasm for Facebook diminishing over the past year or two, but will Facebook be end up being the ultimate "social network"? Is that basically settled?
My sense is that Facebook is really well made, and isn't going anywhere (i.e., Facebook is to social networking what Google is to search). I could see LinkedIn getting destroyed, though. They fill a very real need, but don't seem to do it very well. This is all very qualitative, but I never feel like I have a pleasant experience on LinkedIn.
Facebook is absolutely fabulously done (complaints about it concern privacy and abuse potential but the interface is top-notch).
The thing about Facebook though, is
A) The interface requires lots of care and feeding to stay clean and appealing - Facebook has stayed nice through it small number of very talented engineers.
B) Facebook's economics and its supply of topnotch talent has been leverage from its constant growth and its quality as the thing that's happening.
If it instead is faced with a slow decrease in users and a feeling that it's "jumped the shark(tm)", it will have a lot of trouble keeping its economics, its talent and thus the quality of the interface. So I imagine that FB could fall apart in some medium-scale time frame. Oddly enough, I think the end of Facebook wouldn't be good news for those plots "alternatives" to it.
I actually hope Facebook IPOs soon, might postpone some problems...
Are we talking about the same service? The User experience is horrible. I am not just talking from a hacker perspective, as most of the people I know that complain about facebook are very NON technical people. They just complain about the same things that I also hate: That facebook makes it impossible ( by design ) to hide the endless stream of inane auto-generated SPAM that fills your news stream. The worst is that this spam is directly from facebook. My news stream is now 90% "X is now friends with 10 new people", "Y and 15 other friends changed their profile pic", "That book you [Liked] has a fun factoid to blather about".
The iPhone app is worse. You can't even see your own lists at this point, and clicking on youtube links doesn't just play the video, it opens an embedded browser that gleefully suggests that you try adding youtube to your Home screen.
The iPad optimized site is so useless for reading anything a friend links to that I don't even bother clicking anymore, I just wait until I am at a PC.
The message viewer makes it impossible to quickly mark as-read or delete the vast numbers of messages that I never open because the popup notification on my phone contained enough information to never need to open the full message.
The reason that facebook is still going strong is not good user interface or experience, it is that it is incredibly sticky. They managed to become the new email for a lot of people, and that utility is enough to force a lot of people to grind their teeth and ignore the horrible parts.
I suspect the streams are optimized for people whose "friends" are actually their friends. My friends list contains 30 of my real friends that I care about, so these notifications you mention aren't actually Spam to me.
The problem is that a lot of people have turned number of friends into a high score, but when your friends list is 500 people you barely know, it seems like you are basically using Facebook for the wrong thing.
Let's see, 349 friends today. I personally know every single one of them. Do you really care when one of your friends adds someone they met last night at a bar? Or when they change their profile pic, again?
I would say it's a combination of caring a little bit and having those events be so rare with only 30 friends that the signal to noise ratio is still really high.
You can disable/block a lot of those types of updates. I get very few automated updates, and it's very easy to block automated updates from apps people might use. I only say this because I don't see "X is now friends with 10 new people" or notifications that "X changed their profile pic." You can disable a lot of these notifications by clicking the little X on each post, and blocking the specific item you want to block.
If you click the X it removes the specific story you clicked on. It does not (at least in the fb version I am being served) block all stories of the same type, nor do I see any option to do so.
> Y and 15 other friends changed their profile pic
> X is now friends with 10 new people
It might be just me, but isn't this the main use of FB, i.e. stalking? Of course I want to know when my friends have changed their profile pictures, how else would I assess their happiness and fulfillment in life if not by looking at their latest photos?
Is your newsfeed literally 90% "x is friends with 10 new people" stories? If so that's very likely a bug (I work at FB am incidentally a pretty active user and have never seen that).
Search and social networking are very different in their ability to persist, IMO.
While switching costs are low with search, the ability to offer a better product is difficult. Momentum gives you little advantage in search. For example, Bing is not marginally better positioned with 14% market share vs when it had 9%.
Social networks are almost the polar opposite. It's hard to get any traction at all in social because switching costs are high. But if Facebook sees a competitor get 5% of its user base and then a few months later have 10% they should be scared to death. It probably means Facebook is already dead and just don't know it yet.
I don't see anything wrong with a general social network that supports sharing information with people you know. Regardless of how far people have stretched and abused the concept of "people you know" (and "information"), the infrastructure seems useful. So I don't want to see social networking go away; I want to see it entirely decentralized, such that each person's social network goes through that person's personal site.
By their very nature, centralized social networking sites like Facebook force you to share information not only with the people you know, but also with the owners of site.
Some people don't mind this, but I for one don't want Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site knowing who my friend are or what I'm sharing with them. It's simply none of their business.
The only hope I see for a truly privacy-respecting social network is a distributed, peer-to-peer network. That way you'd be communicating only with those you know, at least in principle.
But even there there are major problems, such as the need for information to travel over untrusted hops to get to its destination. Encryption can help with some of it, but would still be subject to traffic analysis. Maybe a social network could be created over TOR. I don't know.
I think FB has another 2-3yrs before a newcomer comes along. FB will eventually be the 'old' site and uncool to be there. Speaking of privacy, there's a huge privacy hole on the site right now. Currently if I request to add certain people, their data feed starts to populate my wall before they've even accepted the friend request. I think it's because they're part of a group or network I'm already in.
Facebook pulls in anything a user you've requested to be a friend of shares publicly. It's not because you're part of a group, it's because of the privacy settings on their status updates.
How many Facebook users care about privacy? I agree that there are considerable issues with regard to Facebook and privacy, but I'm not sure that most of their users are proactive in caring about it as much.
It is probably more likely that people are tired of Facebook, and aren't using it as much.
That's my point -- we know that people aren't proactive about their privacy, yet we also know that there are "considerable issues with regard to Facebook and privacy." So what can we do but hope that the fickleness of public interest eventually steers the culture away from this danger?
Although I do not want to come across as being biased (due to me working on a multi-live social concept), however I do believe Live interaction both on mobile devices or web app is where the next legion of 'Social networking' is headed.
Whether i'm right or wrong, only time will tell. On the subject of de-throning facebook, that will be hard. Though it is do-able but for the moment, let's not kid ourselves, Facebook will remain the beast and king of Social media for while.
They are just to big and efficiently run to go down like myspace.
"With" from Path. I think Path is not going to get critical mass. "With" or a copy of it, however, is going to be big. The service essentially lets you say who you are with in the moment by snapping a picture. It's like checking in Time with a picture.
I think it's settled for the next decade or so at least.
With 687 million users if each user spent 15 minutes switching to an alternative it would take a combined time investment of about 20,000 years for Facebook to disappear.
Of course they don't have to lose all their users to become irrelevant..
If Facebook's growth stopped today and they began to lose users at a rate of about 90,000 per day it would take 10 years to lose 50% of their users.
There's a class of kids out there who are 12 right now; by the time they're 16 or 18 are you sure they're going to want Facebook accounts? According to researcher danah boyd, these kids will probably have created and disposed of many different social networking accounts by that time.
I'm not suggesting Facebook is unchallengeable just that it will take much longer due to the enormous number of users. The exodus from MySpace took several years with about 1/4th less users. So a 10 year timeframe seems completely reasonable to me when you're talking about almost 700 million users. I just can't see how that happens in 4-6 years as you suggest. Facebook would have to stop growing entirely and begin losing hundreds of thousands of users per day to a competitor.
I don't think this is just Facebook, perhaps the so-called social media jumped the shark. I think it jumped the shark a year ago for both Twitter and Facebook (CNN, Ashton Kutcher contest) but the numbers are starting to catch up now. Also don't discount the Linkedin IPO where some would argue the social media was exposed.
It could be that the churn just exceeded new users for the first time because most possible users in USA have been reached already. Some decline is inevitable if everyone is already using your product.
There's always churn. Even as FB was growing, a part of those new users were always churning out. Each user makes their own decisions about staying in the system, they are not a sentient whole except as far as media or changes to the system might affect larger groups at once.
I imagine your tendency to leave the system to be some sort of a graph. Maybe you are 30% likely to leave and never ever come back after your first day on Facebook. After using it for a week, maybe that gets reduced to 20%. After a month, maybe you are even more unlikely to leave. If they had for example 1 million people joining per day, then 300k would be quitting per day. If the next day all of USA had been tapped out and only 200k people joined, that would look like a sudden -100k turn to decline, even though the trend was same as always.
What happens now will depend on what that churn graph looks like. Maybe it's sticky enough that they'll be able to keep a big part of the users they got and over time make it even stickier to keep even more. There will be improvements to get those users to be more active on the site. Even if there was no more user growth in the USA, there could be growth in the amount of time and money the existing userbase spends on the site.
That this is true is a bit of a tautology. Assuming the graph is monotonically decreasing sounds unlikely to me, though; I think there's likely to be multiple peaks - like the proverbial "7-year itch" for marriages.
Another graph that would be relevant would be the likelihood of people who have been exposed to facebook through their friends, media saturation and advertising, yet still haven't joined, to be tempted to join later. In other words - facebook has already saturated the internet world's radar, and people who haven't joined already are completely aware of its existance, function, and benefits, and still not joining. Those will be very expensive users to get, so IMO retention should be their major focus. I stayed through the "6-month updates-full-of-farmville problem", because they fixed it, they barely kept me through the "1-and-1/2-year privacy panic" after backing off on some portion of their stridency (and profitability per user), and they lost me completely, along with a number of other people I know, after the "2-year bored-to-shit-with-people-I-went-to-HS-with-telling-me-where-they-went-to-lunch-and-what-they-think-of-Obama lull" which I'm not sure they can do anything about.
If a large cohort of similarly aged users hit some peak that facebook is unable or unwilling to iron out at the same time, and there's no supply of cheap "Wow, there's a place on the internet where I can keep track of all of my college buddies!" users to replace them, there could be a precipitous fall.
I see their numbers. How can I trust them? Mostly I see a lot of stuff trying to sell to you their service but I don't see how they actually collect their data.
that Google Trends result is filtered to show the USA only, yet the 'top languages' are, in order, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, French and then English in fifth.
I felt this was bound to happen. Too many "friends", too much spam, and it became too "mainstream", which means the early adopters would want to move on to something else.
If there actually was "something else" right now, a paradigm shifting social network, the decay of Facebook would've been even faster, but unfortunately there isn't much to replace it right now, but I think there will be by the end of the year.
I'm still not sure why FB has not figured out an easy way to segment and categorize friends. FB puts me in the same room with my mom, coworkers, school buddies, and nephews. Awkward.
It allows you to group/categorize your friends, and set privacy for each group for most actions. If you wanted to hide everything from your mom, you could. If you need to share an update with your nephews, but not your school friends that's easy.
Perhaps having separate Walls for different groups is the next step.
That's true for a certain category of content - wall posts, photo albums, notes - although they don't make it especially easy. For comments, you not only can't control the privacy setting (it's controlled by whoever posted the original content), you can't really even tell what it is. For other things - likes, your friend list - you can't control it at all.
It’s too difficult, and too much work, and too much to remember, and even then fails. What if I wanted to share some posts with some friends, some with other, some with all. Have some activity visible to some, some to others, and some to all? What if I wanted to share some friends with some, some with others, some to all.
FB does a terrible job at mimicking real-life social interactions. How comfortable would you feel if everyone whose number you added to your phonebook could see all your other contacts in the phone? Well FB does that. They let new friends see all friends without any relevancy guard or protections.
As any other social site ever created it seems to be following the same path.
Each month what I'm seeing on my landing page is getting less relevant and more annoying (even without growing my friend base too much and having around 20 friends, I cannot imagine what happens to those over 100). Most of that spam is generated by few active friends, while the rest does pretty much nothing.
Most of communication that I see taking place is very very meaningless, somebody posts a video: "lol", "haha", "nice one", that's pretty much it.
For me it's a socially filtered spam [funny stuff?] site.
If some site can encourage people to have meaningful communication again it will take on Facebook, no doubt.
Get 3 of my important friends on the site and I'm sold. Then Facebook just becomes a big contact list. And at that point I'm not sure where it goes. It might be a contact-list site for a long long time.
Facebook might not die as a website, but competitors will definitely takeaway a lot of value from it. And so far I don't see it becoming much more than a contact-list.
And keep in mind that the less engaged the users are the less ad revenue there will be. I have no doubt that as we're speaking right now users are less and less engaged with the site. Growth is still fast so the revenue is rising, but once that stops it will crumble.
The will have to get more aggressive with ads or people will simply stop to notice them at all. Or perhaps start selling more of the user data. At this point there's not much you can do.
Also the growth they see outside of the western world might be very much junk. I'm in Poland, Facebook craze is already old news here yet I get english ads?
It's great that AT&T has high speed internet for 20$, but I'm sorry, I cannot purchase that here.
Everybody knows ad revenue is tricky. Facebook is no different.
Nobody is going bankrupt, I'm not saying that. Facebook is here and it will stay for few more years for sure, but to compare it to google is crazy. Google can be conquered too I'm sure, but Facebook definitely makes for a far more fragile target.
Personally I'd say it will simply decay and we might not see another social site being that big in a long time to come. Facebook has half of the world on there, cool, but guess what, I am not connecting with those people and never will.
Facebook managed to get a lot of people registered in one place, but has it managed to truly connect a lot of people? Not at all.
The methodology is basically using the Facebook Ad Tool. The tool let's you target a set of users for your ads and tells you the size of that population.
The article clearly discloses the inherent issues at play.
> Going forward, we’ll be watching closely to see what longer-term trends emerge. Bugs in the Facebook advertising tool that we draw this information from, seasonal changes like college graduations, and other short-term factors, can influence numbers month to month and obscure what’s really happening.
Other factors like Facebook finding and removing spam accounts, users enabling privacy features, etc. seem like a much more likely cause.
I could see people getting bored / busy and not bothering to use it any more, but it's unbelievable that 1.5 million would delete their accounts in one month.
I deleted facebook about six months ago because it was a huge stressor that added very little value to my life. I have too many subsets of friends, which makes it impossible to maintain one personality without offending someone. This just isn't how human's interact and I think it will eventually kill off facebook, unless they find some way to mitigate it.
For reference:
1) Highschool friends and family who are incredibly religious/right wing/etc
2) Friends from skiing, many of whom make a living on the mountain, who are about as vile as one can imagine
3) Friends from college or work, which consists mostly of PharmD's, MD's, and nurses.
4) Other random friends from startup stuff, partys, etc
I think humans inherently want to nurture each of their relationships, whether close or not, individually. Along with tailoring our communication to each person, we exclude large parts of our lives and minds from people that we want to be friends with. Doing that naturally and through different contexts is one thing, but having to electronically do that for each relationship is just impossible.
To quote the Disney Hipster meme, "it's too mainstream". Perhaps I have an obscure point of view, but Facebook lost it's luster for a lot of people when the older crowd started to really embrace it. It's not as cool as it once was. This is a big problem for a lot of companies, not just social media.
This. Was pretty cool at first connecting with classmates and writing messages about papers, projects, and planning stuff for the weekend. Now it's some gossipy aunt you haven't talked to in months and your seven year old niece sending a friend request.
I don't have figures to back it up, but Facebook in Belgium also feels like it's declining. Not necessary new users, that may be still even rising.
But mainly active users becoming inactive. Im daring to bet that's declining big in Belgium.
China is really a stumbling block. I've actually been thinking about the best way to penetrate the Chinese market... I'm thinking the strategy is to start young, and keep good relations with their government. I guess this is tricky, especially if the founders can't speak Chinese, and have no family ties.
They don't say why or where those users are going. If the users aren't going anywhere else, they just decided that Facebook weren't for them. This might be alright for Facebook because I guess they want committed users that log on the site several times per day, not users that log once in a while.
The "social graph" is more valuable when it has everybody in it. One of the reasons facebook has such a tremendously high valuation is that social graph concept; the notion that the way people are connected and the way they interact is valuable information.
I'm not sure that the revenue they've begun to generate (which is reportedly sizable) is actually coming from that magical "social graph" rather than just plain old advertising (and quite spammy advertising at that), but that was the premise for huge valuations in the past.
So, facebook gets value from occasional users, and having occasional users go away does hurt them in the long run, since I guess the long bet with facebook is still the "social graph".
Regardless of that, negative growth in their most lucrative markets is a horrible sign for a company like facebook. Slow growth is one thing...but losing people by the millions? That indicates significant breakage. I don't know enough to know what kind of breakage, as I'm not really a facebook user (I login maybe once a month).
> If the users aren't going anywhere else, they just decided that Facebook weren't for them.
This is what I would guess. I suspect that one of Facebook's problems is that people naturally overshoot with their social network and at some point you end up with "too many" friends and logging into Facebook reveals less interesting content and more noise. I know this has certainly happened to me. 80% of the content I see upon logging in is information from people that I couldn't care less about. Facebook has encouraged this from the start by avoiding support for stratifying friends into separate groups. It's worked well for them by simplifying things, but I think they'll begin to experience some natural attrition from it as time goes by - social networks just naturally grow and grow because you very rarely "unfriend" someone. At some point it becomes burdensome to check it instead of fun and then it's all over.
Where else would they go, at this point? I don't know of any competitors that are live and able to target Facebook refugees. Diaspora is still in Alpha, for example, and I suspect that the buzz on that one has been fading for some time.
Yeah, I'm not sure there's really such a thing as a "Facebook refugee" yet. That is, someone who leaves Facebook and is looking for something better. My guess is that those leaving Facebook are those saying "This whole thing is dumb", and are not looking to continue to engage in online social networking... at least in the way it's been presented so far.
I am personally seeing the growth from Mexico. In the past month, a large chunk of my cousins have added me. But like others have said, most of their updates are from the Spanish version of Farmville, etc.
Most people find this scenario a bit socially uncomfortable and clam right up.
Facebook's growth has created this scenario for a lot of people. The basic currency of Facebook (voyeurism) relies upon a loose security model that prevents a person from walling off his/her 5-10 closest friends and using FB for the bulk of their online socializing. Eavesdropping is essential to the business model. The problem is, thusfar most FB users are not really aware just how intricately engineered this voyeurism is and how publicly their lives are being broadcast.