college --> high school --> young adults --> everyone
Trendy stuff generally follows the same cascade, more or less, where you don't see college students emulating the dress habits of the elderly.
facebook's biggest potential for failure is in not capturing the next generation of young users. The young users pick up some other social network, everyone else follows suit, and facebook withers, slowly starting to resemble an '85 buick.
Most of the teenagers I know have Facebook accounts. Facebook might lose the high school class of 2018, but they already have the class of 2014 sewn up.
How many people have MySpace accounts they never use anymore? The point of the article is not that people won't ever sign up, but that they'll lose interest.
I derive a huge amount of value out of it. I put in the time to train it to show me what I want to see, and I don't become friends with everyone I meet.
It's silly to say that nobody likes Facebook. You don't, and that's fine. But you're in a very small minority (and arguably for a reason).
The new it social network for tweens/YA is tumblr. Facebook will eventually lose market share to Tumblr.
All these social networks are simply an extension of the email use case. It's nothing new, nor do I see Facebook taking down google.
Social networks are like hot clubs. Eventually their popularity fades, as soon as another it scene opens, which is why I'd never invest in a social network site.
If Tumblr was going to take on Facebook, we would have already seen it trend in that direction. I love Tumblr, but I can't see it being as ubiquitous as Facebook.
I got my Facebook account in 2005 when I was a college freshman. At first it was amazing, then they opened it up to high schoolers which was okay, but not really what I wanted from Facebook. Then they added things like the Friend Feed which bombarded you with "Your friend [name you know] just added [someone you don't know or care about}." Which was okay, but then they opened the gates and suddenly all your coworkers and anyone you've ever talked to for more than 3 minutes is now adding you.
I think for me, the longer I've had my Facebook, the less useful it has gotten and the less time I've actually spent on it. It's like talking in a room with everyone you've ever met listening in. It's unnatural. I think Facebook's market will eventually fragment-- LinkedIn being the first chink in FB's armor, I imagine the next will be a college exclusive network like how Facebook got started.
I had the exact same experience as well, and then I discovered the "hide" button. I developed some rules and then spent about 20 minutes every day for a week hiding people who didn't fall within those. Examples of my rules were:
1) If I don't remember who you are, hide.
2) If I knew you in elementary/middle/high school/college and I don't think I'll ever see or speak to you again, hide. (This would cover people who don't share any of my interests, etc).
3) If you spam my newsfeed with "Farmville/Which Twilight character are you/I have a secret to tell you" sort of apps, hide.
4) If we have nothing in common, and I don't think anything you're going to say in the future is going to be interesting/have a real impact on me, hide.
There may be one or two more, but those were the core ones. After applying these rules, I found Facebook was SO much nicer and more fun to use, and there was none of the social stigma of "unfriending" people.
The hide is useful, but the unnatural part is the "everyone you ever met listening". The great thing about Facebook when I started was it was like blogs or photo sharing, except that everyone was a trusted, real-life friend. Facebook was like sharing photos, jokes, and stories with your circle of friends.
Now that everyone and (and every company) are on facebook, I'm more comfortable back on a blog, where there isn't the illusion of anything but talking to the internet.
You can still do that now. You just need to make groups of your different friend groups (family, real life friends, high school friends, work friends, etc) and share what you want with those groups only, depending on what it is.
This takes way too much work. As someone who was using Facebook for several years before friend-groups, it was going to be an unreasonable time-sink to sort all those people after the fact.
Someone using facebook AFTER the were introduced definitely should use them.
No, not just people that aren't your friends. If I was your friend and found out you spent time 'fine-tuning your facebook friends list', I would think you were a petty time-waster.
Well, speak for yourself. I, and many of my Facebook friends, have gone on deleting purges before and I've never seen that reaction. The main fear seems to be upsetting the acquaintances that you unfriend.
If you're going to spend time on Facebook at all, it's worth the time every now and then to make the time better spent. They even have a page called "edit friends" where you can just go down your friends list ticking the X button to unfriend them.
facebook gets much better when you unfriend lots of people. fred wilson has his "only bar mitzvah" rule and only has ~80 friends. i still have around 600 down from almost 1000.
Same with Twitter and reducing how many people you follow. I do think with Facebook there is some social pressure to have many friends, especially for younger people.
|I developed some rules and then spent about 20 minutes every day for a week hiding people who didn't fall within those.
Oh believe me, I used the hide feature ASAP. But your quote above is my point, I shouldn't have to spend 2+ hours customizing Facebook. Everything should have been opt-in to begin with.
That's why I have friends lists. Just some weeks ago some girl I didn't know that happened to be the designated driver of the group of friends I was with on the new years eve sent me a friend request on facebook.
I don't want to be rude and accepted it, but she went to my list of people that I don't consider friends, but people that at some point in my life I had some interaction that as now ceased. That list doesn't have access to my photos, only some personal information and the majority of my status updates are invisible to them unless I explicitly set otherwise.
So yeah, they're my fake friends. If your friends list is already big setting this up and checking if there are no backdoors into your information will be painful, but I think it pays off. I did it mostly because I didn't want to bring the family and friends sides of my life together in a single website, with all the potential problems that could come from that, but I ended up creating more than just the friends and family lists.
Funny thing, right now Facebook privacy is more about protecting your information from your "friends" than from the outside world.
I have the exact same feeling about Facebook. I was appalled when they originally let high school students into the gates. The exclusivity was what made it so cool to be a part of. However, I never felt that it has become less useful, it just took a second to adapt to the new environment that it periodically throws at you. Perhaps if you do the same (take advantage of group privacy settings) you can weed out the junk and use it as it used to be?
Do you really think LinkedIn is a chink in Facebook's armor? I question how many people regularly use LinkedIn as opposed to those who just update when their job title changes. All Facebook needs is for an intern of theirs to add a couple more features around the career section of people's profiles and LinkedIn is toast.
The transaction is very clear for linkedin, not so much for facebook.
LinkedIn gives recruiters in various companies and consulting industries a way to find passive candidates that they will not be able to find on a job board like dice, mosnter, career builder, etc.
Passive candidates are ones that are not really looking, they have the skills that the recruiter is looking for, but candidate needs to be convinced to take another job.Passive recruting tools is a huge need right now, especially for areas and industries with labor and talent shortages, ie high level tech jobs that is being talked about now.
So think of how large websites like career builder, monster, the ladders, etc are.They for the most part offer actively looking candidates. Linkedin is the only player offering a database of passive candidates that you can get in contact with, build a relationship with and track.
LinkedIn is in control of a segment of a very large market, with a very definsible competitive advantage. They won't be a game changer or the next google, but they will be positioned to make a lot of money in the future. LinkedIn provides a legitimate solution to a legitmate demand and the demand is huge.
Also, a lot of the high level tech people i've spoken to do want to keep work and personal life seperate or keep facebook life and linkedin seperate.
I'd venture to guess that nearly all LinkedIn users are on Facebook, but I don't think the opposite is true. Along with that the information recorded under both sites overlaps quite a bit. At that point it's just a matter of how and to who you show your information on Facebook. I don't think Facebook is the least bit worried about LinkedIn.
Hours spend doing social networking things on sites other than Facebook cost Facebook money and relevance. Also, plenty of "important" people avoid Facebook like the plague because it's a time sink, so there is plenty of pull in the other direction.
Linkedin does a very good job of keeping me engaged.
When any of my contacts update their info, it sends me a weekly email. I like that. (And when I click on a link in the email, the web page HIGHLIGHTS the changed sections. I love that.)
The interactions on Linkedin, although fewer in number are of higher value.
And they charge to contact people outside your network. I think this is fair and lucrative to them. This seems like a steady source of income.
All in all, I'm impressed with Linkedin. They've avoided becoming sleazebags and managed to remain useful.
Facebook Purity can go a long way to helping with this sort of stuff too. It started life as a Greasemonkey addon (and still is available in that format) but is now also a native FF addon and Chrome Extn.
Same situation for me, which is why I much prefer to use Twitter these days. It's considered downright rude to defriend someone on Facebook, but on Twitter, you really only have to pay attention to the people you care about. It feels a lot more "opt-in" than Facebook in this way.
Also, I really don't care about people's virtual mafia's and pictures where everyone is obscenely drunk.
the more features they add to facebook, the more noise it seems to generate, and the more the signal gets lost. the problem is the noise is put there by facebook to try and keep people glued to the site, because the more updates you need to chew through before you get to the interesting content the more time you spend on the site, and the more time you spend on the site, the more dollars they can get for advertising. anyway the only way to get rid of all the noise is to use third party filtering, my weapon of choice is FB Purity its a browser extension available for all the major browsers it gives you options to filter out the noiser functions and components of Facebook, and also gives you a word or phrase filter, so you can specify the textual content that you wish to hide from the steram. Its a great add-on, highly recommended for people that want to tame their noisy news feeds: You can get it here: http://www.fbpurity.com
> Which was okay, but then they opened the gates and suddenly all your coworkers and anyone you've ever talked to for more than 3 minutes is now adding you.
That's exactly what I hate about FB. These days, I just keep my profile so that people can contact me, but never log in to.
facebook beginning in college can be explained because its creator was in college at that time, and is natural to expand in your habitat. Sometime young people copy old habits of old people, so I don't see any trend.
The power for expansion is in the marketing, very creative people selling water vapour (in Spain people now smoke water vapour since the prohibition to smoke in public places).
"This week's news that Goldman Sachs has chosen to invest in Facebook while entreating others to do the same should inspire about as much confidence as their investment in mortgage securities did in 2008."
Except of course, GS aren't investing in Facebook. They're backing out their stake to other investors via this SPV they've set up. I doubt they care what happens to facebook stock: there's huge demand at this valuation and all they care about is answering that.
"Goldman will be creating a “special purpose vehicle” to sell the stock to its wealthy clients and then will charge them a 4 percent initial fee plus 5 percent of any profits."
Heads we win, tails you lose. I'm just waiting until they start dividing up the stock into tranches.
"We will move on, just as we did from the chat rooms of AOL, without even looking back. When the place is as ethereal as a website, our allegiance is much more abstract than it is to a local pub or gym."
I disagree with this, simply because grandma wasn't on any AOL chat rooms, but she _is_ on Facebook. The only reason I'm on FB is because Aunt Tilly and Uncle Bob and grandma are also on there, and I can connect with them that way, and know what's happening in their lives in real time, instead of seeing them once a year at Christmas.
Grandma isn't going to sign up for IM or get a blog. She's on Facebook.
That's the difference between FB and everything else that came before it. The thing creates its own gravity field that attracts everyone, and as long as everyone I care about is on Facebook, so will I. Even though I really hate the thing.
That's the genius of FB, I think. Hate it or love it.
This isn't really unique to Facebook. It's called lock-in and it's the desire of every service provider and software maker; they want you to be held hostage to their network, so that even if you want to leave, you can't without potentially serious ramifications (like losing contact with your grandma, or losing access to your documents).
Facebook has reached a level that had never been reached by any social network before it. Did your grandma use MySpace or LiveJournal? Once something crosses the threshold of youth and tech-savvy and "regular people" or even old people start using it, you have a much less transient userbase. Look at Microsoft -- the young and tech-savvy are happy to use Apple products over MS, but MS is king and will remain king at least until anyone born before 1975 is well into retirement. Once these things reach a certain level, they become generational standards, and then only minimal effort is needed on the part of the vendor.
I know old people that still use AOL. Most old people never would have left AOL in the first place if they'd come up with something sensible for broadband. Perhaps Facebook will come upon a stumbling block that's similarly fatal, but I wouldn't necessarily expect that, at least not within a reasonable timeframe.
I agree with the way you describe the lock-in, of course that's the whole point of any closed network. But I disagree as far as the phenomena not being unique to Facebook. While grandma might have been on AOL, to her it was just the way to "use the internet" or whatever, she wasn't on any communities or groups or chat rooms. That required a slight uptick in the level of computer savvy one had to possess, which she never had or bothered to acquire. More to the point, her family wasn't on AOL, or wasn't interested in AOL, or if they were they couldn't interact the same way with her.
Facebook's success is a combination of making things easy for people like grandma and attracting everyone related to her. Without those two pillars FB would be just another MySpace.
It's not really 'lock-in' unless the potential switching costs are too great to overcome. If another social network could set up your friend network with minimal effort (and are better than Facebook), they will win. No one has long term contracts to use Facebook or pay a monetary penalty (like a cell phone). So if someone can re-create your social graph with you putting in less effort than you normally put into facebook, they will win.
Switching costs are absolutely the thing to focus on here, but limiting the switching costs to a replication of the social graph may be understating the true cost. Think of all the photos, and to a lesser extent, wall posts. I would imagine a lot of the time that's spent on Facebook is just browsing through photos (and again, to a lesser extent, people's wall posts). Much of it probably is just new photos, so obviously those don't need to be replicated since if you port the social graph over, people will start posting photos on the new site and people will just look at those, but a ton of the viewing is probably of legacy photos. That is, some of the viewing is seeing what's happening with your friends (the party last night) but a ton of it is just checking people out (facebook stalking). How can I stalk somebody without seeing all their past photos/videos/notes/posts/etc.?
Everyone has a facebook account. If they want to look at old photos, they will look on facebook. Just like you used to be able to look at old blog posts on Geocities. People will post new photos and their favorite old photos on the next facebook, and stop looking at the old site. The old content sounds like a big deal if you are a geek who is worried about vendor lock-in, but I doubt that real people will really care.
It's activity that matters, not membership. If facebook stops talking about activity, and only talks about membership, that's when you know there's a problem.
Do you know how many times I've had to show my mom how to upload something to Facebook? A lot of times. Facebook upload support is baked into her photo manager (Shotwell), and it's as easy as clicking "Publish", and she still usually can't figure it out.
Do you really think that many FB users are going to know how to move "their favorite old photos" from Facebook? Unless the next product includes an automatic importer, which Facebook would attempt to destroy as quickly as possible, and it would devolve into an arms race/lawsuits (as scraping Facebook has for people with much more innocent intentions), then I don't think that many FB users will be interested in coming over.
I hate to sounds misanthropic, but Aunt Tilly and Uncle Bob are why I'm not on Facebook, and why I didn't use it much when I was. The Tillys and Bobs of the world meant I had to spend basically all my time tweaking my hide/show settings to see anything useful, and everyone else's own Tillys and Bobs kept them from saying anything interesting.
Like AOL, Tilly and Bob will still be using it and still generating revenue for them long after the rest of us have moved on.
It's funny, my mom just sent me a Facebook message saying that I need to build a replacement because all of her friends on Facebook are getting sick of the ads and spam...so it's not just "us geeks" who have had enough.
A bubble created around a legitimate service does not itself kill the service; the service becoming obsolete does.
The author seems to completely miss this. AOL didn't die because it was bought by TW, it died because broadband became commonplace and people realized there was much more to the internet than AOL's walled garden. Myspace died because it was the last vestige of the "personal homepage" style internet and never ran with its burgeoning use as a network for musicians.
Facebook will fade when the next major gap in social connections+communication is filled. Simply saying "something more popular than Facebook will happen" seems a horribly obvious and empty statement. Now talking about what we still need or might discover with connections would prove insightful, but of course no one's going to blog about that until it's launched.
"...the merger turned out to be a disaster: AOL's revenue stream was reduced to a trickle as net users ventured out onto the Web directly."
So facebook will fail when people venture out and socialize in real life?
Seriously, though, I get the point generally, but I don't think it's quite the same. AOL and MySpace were assimilated and stifled by their parents' ways of doing things, whereas Facebook will likely continue to do things its own way. This is a company that is able to convince its investors that it knows best, and I don't think things will change with the Goldman investment.
I don't know if Facebook will be on top in 10 years, but I don't think this is the beginning of the end.
The author's main points seem to be that:
1. Facebook has similarities to AOL, and AOL's bubble burst
2. There was a bubble in the late '90s therefore there must be a bubble now
3. Goldman is investing in Facebook, Goldman invested in other bubbles, therefore the investment must be bad
4. Social is a fad
Nothing on why Facebook specifically is doing a bad job and why someone else is positioned to upset them. Not much evidence at all if you ask me. You could write the article with 90% of the content the same and replace "Facebook" with "Google" or "Apple" or "Microsoft"
"Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue."
All the other stuff in the article is an attempt to back this argument up (AOL/TW merger stuff, Goldman deal a symptom of cashing-out mentality, MySpace collapse as a precedent.)
Facebook has done great capitalizing on the growth of the web in general, just like AOL. And similarly, Facebook will not be as popular when these new users find out there are other websites out there.
I don't understand the comparisons of FB to AOL, besides their seemingly common goal to sandbox the internet.
People who use AOL who discovered "the real" internet had no reason to go back. Everything they wanted was just as available + more. There's no friction to switching, beyond learning how to use a search engine.
Facebook has billions of photos, posts, comments, friend requests, updates, registrations through connect, all being added to the site every day. The longer someone uses it, the higher the cost to stop using it, or switch to another.
I agree that popularity of social networks is faddish, and that Facebook will follow that rise and fall pattern, however...
I think that an open, distributed social networking protocol is a game changer. If there exists the ability to move between social networks while maintaining your social graph, that makes the way that social networks rise and fall very different than when sites hold your social graph hostage if you try to leave.
It continues to be hard for me to envision what that would really look like in practice. I don't mean from a network typology standpoint; I mean how would it look in my browser?
Keep in mind, this is beta software in active development, so you'll notice a few bugs here and there (and the live server is missing a major update I'm running locally).
Thanks! I'm interested specifically in the day-to-day usage: the situations of signing up, finding/adding my friends, posting statuses, reading and commenting on other peoples', sharing media like photos, etc etc.
So to start with a simple one: how does one add somebody else? Can you just search by name? I'm just having a bit of difficulty imagining how that sort of thing would work well in a truly distributed, federated way. But I haven't done much thought on it so I'm interested to hear.
If you'd like, you can get an Appleseed invite. Send an email to invite@appleseedproject.org and I'll send you one back right away (this is open to anyone, by the way). You can sign up for the main beta test site (currently around 500 users).
Searching is being worked on, that's coming in the next update, but yes, you just search by name (or other attributes). Distributed search is difficult, but only on the backend, on the frontend, it's similar to what you're used to. Only caveat is that it is not exactly real-time, and is more like a P2P search than a google search.
Once you find someone you're looking for, you identify yourself to their site by remotely logging in. This is as simple as giving your ID, which looks like an email address (username@domain). Then you click "Add as friend", and they're sent a friend request. When they approve it, you are mutual friends.
You can post stuff to your "page" (what appleseed calls your wall), and an update will be sent to your friends list. You upload a photo, and an update shows up in your friends lists newsfeeds. They click on the thumbnail and it takes them to your photo album on your home node, etc.
Some other distributed social networking sites are breaking from convention in a lot of ways, but Appleseed's goal is to try and make it work as much like the current systems people are used to as possible. Certain growing pains are inevitable, but so far it's pretty similar after the first couple minutes.
Except that's a thoroughly one-directional approach. How can I log in to Facebook with an external identifier, without having a Facebook account? How can I add someone on Facebook as a friend, while maintaining my identity on another site? Until it can accomplish those basic things, it's less than a solution.
I don't necessarily agree the article but I'd be interested in hearing opinions on the interesting point the author presents near the end of the article: That social networking sites are like physical social spaces that will rise and fall in popularity.
My personal experience is exactly that. My parents, a grandparent, nieces, nephews, coworkers, bosses, college friends, and everyone in between are now in my network. My status updates are now a megaphone to everyone I've ever had any relationship with and more frighteningly, anyone I ever will have a relationship with in the future.
This kind of assemblage is perfect for weddings and funerals, and that's it. For daily living, it's just too much. If my Facebook friends all went to a building every day to hang out, I wouldn't go there. And I don't find myself using FB nearly as much now as I once did for this very reason. There's too many things to consider when posting even the simplest thing (will I offend my second aunt, will some future boss not like this political view, what if I run for political office in my 50s and find out I friended someone who ended up doing x, etc., etc.)
+1 I stop sharing my opinion with my network because of this same problem (I have clients, close relatives, extended family, etc.). What if I post something that a client finds offensive and leads to business problems that otherwise wouldn't have existed? What if I post something serious for my clients and some jackass high-school friend leaves an embarrassing comment on my status?
Initially, I had to block the ability for people to tag me in photos because I was being used to spam other people's walls, then I had to block other people from posting on my wall, because they would post "funny" stuff that wasn't good for my business-contacts to see.
Finally, I started using lists, but having different "personas" for each list was just too much. As a result, I'm slowly letting my profile fade away.
As social networks get bigger, you keep adding more and more connections to the point where that set you've created doesn't matter / mean anything anymore.
You think? I'm more liberal in my friending policy than most (I think - at least that's my perception), but, still, I've met in person >85% of the people I'm friends with on FB.
I could see that being true for me regarding something like Twitter, though... there, if something new came along ("SuperTwitter") that replaced it, I'd be able to take the 10% that I really like (the 10% I'd know by name) and follow them on that new network.
Facebook needs to generate more revenue or if they go public, their stocks are going to tank like crazy after the speculation fades. Facebook's P/E ratio is out of proportion. Doesn't matter how many users Facebook have, if the company doesn't generate the proportional profits to match its valuation, then the company is going to go through some tough phases.
Many people are looking at the Facebook stocks like it's a Pablo Picasso painting, and with users twice as the population of United States, it's bound to be valuable. However, in the economy of supply and demand, the bubble will pop if it decides to go public. Unless Facebook can think new ways to earn more money.
But that's hard, because Facebook users hate changes. They aren't exactly Obama fans.
Facebook is definitely waning among my friends, but strong areas remains:
1. Social graph. Many are not active Facebook users but are keeping the accounts cos all their contacts are there. Facebook has actually helped people found their long loss friends and classmates.
2. Sharing links, picture and video. Facebook is replacing email as a means to share interesting contents. One friend actually visits Facebook just to read those contents posted by friends instead of going to the source such as YouTube. "It is easier". Twitter is an obvious alternative.
3. Facebook is the new Flickr.
4. Games. Hopefully when people think of FarmVille or CityVille they think of Zynga and not Facebook. Zynga should seriously break loose of this eco, build its own currency/credit system and focus on iOS/Android platforms.
5. All-in-one ness. Grandmas and aunties love this. Contacts, photos, video, links, cute apps are all-in-one. But this will mean less and less, as this group of not savvy web users will decrease with time.
It will take more than something "cool" to knock off Facebook - 600m users isn't fad-ish. A competitor has to have a MUCH better product and be very cool. It could happen, but Facebook is much more in the driver's seat than MySpace or Friendster ever were.
Best quote of the article, "Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue."
They cost to run the site compared to how much they're making does not work. Their only hope is to run really fast and create a better advertising story. Otherwise, they need to get acquired by MS, Google or Apple and become an augment to a business that actually generates profit. Problem is their market cap is so huge that's becoming nearly impossible.
All social media sites these days are bound for backlash because of the sins of their fathers, Thats why its so hard to get a great idea to catch on, people are growing skeptical about social media's benefits in a sea of high priced commercial promotion.
People make sites like facebook popular, commercial entities buy in and then corner the initial value that these sites created. All of the marketing potential individual users had in the initial stages vanishes once commercial ads and user tracking appear, and once a value is placed on a site. Myspace still gets great hits, but mostly from spammers and bots, which makes it value worth less than the computers its hosted on. Its their own damn fault. Tom played the game right when he sold early I tell you.
These social media sites aren't doing anything substantial in order to help productivity nor promotion for individual users. They have features that encourage users to spam each other, which make their added peers end up blocking each other because of incessant tagging and messages to user inboxes that require tedious manual deletion, etc [all tactics to generate empty clicks]...
These social media sites all make the same mistakes in not emphasizing their talented users, and helping to build followings, while promoting businesses and services that are reliable and relevant to their own users. I'm a firm believer in a future of micro-social sites that focus on specific user communities rather than trying to warehouse everyone into a huge template. Facebook, as it is really doesn't provide much in terms of letting "like minds come together". There should be no reason why I can't communicate [through a social media buffer of course] with Jay Z about rapping, or Kanye about being a douchebag, or ask the real Ivanka Trump out on a date, and they all should be able to block me if they get pissed off in the process, thats what happens on Twitter, and thats why this year Twitter will capture a large percentage of Facebook's user shares, because its much more fulfilling than fake user profiles [for the moment]
American Idol has made a lot more people "famous" than Facebook, yet there are many more musicians and artists on Facebook, how is this possible? I see that as a problem. YouTube has been the only consistently unobtrusive and highly functional/useful social media tool that has survived. They do have user profiles, they host content, allow comments, sharing and communication, and do it all pretty much in an amazing and unobtrusive way. YouTube also allows its users to cross-share content on sites completely unrelated to itself, a major hosting expense, but really solid in terms of usefulness to site users, no idiotic "like" button required. Based on this, the concept of YouTube, perhaps, should be used as a key "roadmap" to social media success in the future.
Instead of working on promoting normal users you don't know, most social media sites are geared towards the "celebrity machine", for celebrities that are already popular. Promoting the same stuff that's on TV, and the radio, because someone paid for the ad space. Following this "celebrity machine" is a losing battle because it has to put on a new expensive outfit every time its launched, and it fails once people uncover its motives, or once innovation can't disguise it.
Facebook makes it appear to users that the only method to generate 5,000 followers requires landing a major record or movie deal, so much for being a talented musician. Programming and monetizing is only a tiny part of creating a successful social media site, this is why most get it wrong. If you want 4 years of profit, who cares, make the next big social media warehouse, if you want a lifetime of success, think carefully of the benefits your site can provide to the average joe, and make sure you keep that in your mantra for as long as your site lives. The motives have to be clear cut, highly functional, and it must offer fair and equal promotion for all of its users while limiting spamming and upholding privacy, otherwise it will stay the game of rise and downfall. There's a reason why YouTube has been a great site all of these years, it sticks to its user base and keeps them content.
I see so many people compare facebook to (late '90s) AOL these days. But the two never had much in common with each other.
I think if facebook continues to bring out innovative ways/products/features that connect people with each other it will continue to be successful. Will it one day fade away? Probably. As do most huge dotcoms. But some even stay relevant for well over a decade (ebay, match, expedia, google). Most of them get a bit smaller and cruise along.
Originally, but AOL never expanded on it. A profile was like a text box and that's it. As for AIM, everyone I know that used to use it still do. I don't think that's changed very much other than that people now use web based clients to chat on AIM.
Really? I only know a fraction of people who still use AIM, most just use the Facebook chat. It guessing it must be a generational thing? I'm 23, how about you?
Same age. It's probably just the people I know. I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley amongst 90% Asians and the non-tech savvy subset of those I know all use the same AIM screen names but through different interfaces. The tech-savvy subset use multi-clients like Pidgin, Digsby, etc. I personally use Gchat and no one I know uses FB as their main chat client, only for a quick message if two people are coincidentally on FB.
I have no real use for facebook anymore. Honestly, I think most people right now just go there for lack of something to procrastinate with. Twitter is much better for that anyway. Trying to get all my fb friends to jump ship with me. http://blog.ruedaminute.com/2011/01/dear-facebook-friends/ Honestly, the more people on Twitter, the better for the internet IMHO.
Facebook has the advantage of being built into way more mobile devices than anything before it ever was. Many phones now come with a facebook icon on the main page when you first turn it on.
Also the amount of free advertising it gets from companies using it's logo everywhere with add us on facebook and have your say on facebook, how many other companies get their logo and a call to action to use there service for free on TV every day around the world?
There are at least a few important differences that the author ignored:
* Not many "trends" have had 500 million followers.
* The other companies mentioned actually ceded control in some fashion; Facebook is simply taking investment dollars.
* The other companies mentioned didn't have Mark Zuckerberg at the helm. Only a crank wouldn't acknowledge that Zuckerberg's leadership has been masterful.
When you have so much traffic, it's easy to find other avenues for product changes. You can move into new niches. You gain flexibility.
But when you also have a high valuation, and have been taking money off the table, those choices become limited to those that are perceived as the highest growth. You lose flexibility.
The thing which amazes me about Facebook is how perplexing the basic UI is and remains. My wife will tell me "hey someone has made a comment on your wall you HAVE to reply to it" and it will take me five minutes to figure out where this comment is buried. Oh it's not under "status" it's under "profile". WTF?
It certainly hasn't, but can facebook be the first social network to somehow help people maintain their different personas and keep their social circles unentangled when appropriate? Over the summer I facebook updated something about hacking on my front porch, and my wife's aunt commented asking how I got sick. Stuff like that isn't creepy, it's just awkward, and keeps me coming back here and to friendfeed or to reddit or wherever the community feels right for having a discussion.
Agree,
Just wonder if all these people were incredibly good at cashing in at the top or the overwhelming tidal wave of news stories about them cashing in is what caused their decline
most of the complaints here could be solved by facebook implementing (better) disjoint friend networks. I would imagine they are working on this. I currently have draconian privacy in place to prevent most of my friends from seeing status updates. Once this becomes easier wont these issues go away?
Some people will get a lot of money in shares. The difficult question is when to buy and when to sell. The hype will fade and shares will fall down very quickly but to win in this game you have to determine when it will happen. I don't know when, but I think that the fall down will be the extraordinarily stiff, in one day or two a complete collapse. Wait and see.
Comparing Google with Facebook. I was using google since it was pretty unknown, I think it is still, after all these years, a good tool for searching. I will never use facebook, I think local solutions for meeting people will emerge soon and they will be much more appealing and useful.
Facebook only can exists if it can find a way to be a local tool.
I've never met anyone on Facebook either. I've run into the strange misconception from non-facebookers that Facebook is somehow a dating site, which is strange. Obviously those people also perceive that facebook is a way to "meet people."
Interesting. I would like to know if the majority of people use Facebook like you (with people they knew previously) or they use it to get new connections. How can I get this information? Any poll published somewhere?
I think I can say pretty confidently and without providing any data that most people use Facebook to connect with people they know from real life.
I believe that adding a complete stranger is seen as a bit creepy. Maybe the new Groups feature (like the hacker news group) will change that, but that's only a recent addition.
Maybe for our generation it is, but I can confidently say that this has changed amongst high school students and other youngsters. For them (at least the ones I have contact with), facebook is a tool for meeting new people. Hell, even a few people I know professionally has met their SO on facebook.
Post ordering doesn't work that way on HN; from the FAQ:
> On the front page, [posts are ordered] by points divided by a power of the time since they were submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way.
For clarity, this post isn't getting down voted per your request (which would have no effect on your other post), it's getting down voted for not adding content to the conversation.
I don't know how people can seriously believe facebook is a bunch of hype. Or even that it's at the top of its success, as this article claims.
The $50 billion valuation, yeah there's some hype there. But whether Facebook will one day surpass such an evaluation is I believe a strong reality.
I'm just amazed at how well-run a company Facebook is. I'm in awe of how it is in a constant state of evolution and constantly being tinkered with. Usually when companies get big you see them play the game more conservatively. Facebook is exciting because it doesn't do this. I see so much room for Facebook to grow and surpass my expectations for it, as it has time and time again.
I really think he doesn't know what he's talking about. Let's look at his qualifications. He's a professor of "Media Studies" at the New School. I think he's going to be taking everything with a lot of lit crit palavering.
Myspace to Facebook is a shallow analogy. If we would like to make an analogy with that analogy it would be like comparing Yahoo and Google. Facebook has far exceeded the market penetration of MySpace. Facebook has one of the best engineering teams around while MySpace attempted to some sort of media company (failing miserably at that). Facebook has a fairly credible revenue stream while we are never sure if MySpace every developed that.
facebook's biggest potential for failure is in not capturing the next generation of young users. The young users pick up some other social network, everyone else follows suit, and facebook withers, slowly starting to resemble an '85 buick.