I suppose I am one of only a few here who agrees with the author. He calls them fashions, I'd call them fads. They are fads, like the pet rocks and beanie babies and friendster and on and on. There will probably be die hards forever, but innovation won't stop and there will be newer and better ways to communicate in the future, so these new things will become old, just like newspapers and magazines and television...
Facebook and Twitter actually damage real world interactions from what I have seen. Before facebook, when you saw someone, you had a conversation with them and you could make small talk filling in the gaps of what has happened since the last time you met.
Now, people say, "Why are you asking if I'm dating someone, why don't you look at my facebook page?" It's like you have to go catch up with someone's facebook page before you meet them.
I don't know maybe it is something about a particular kind of mind. I don't hate FB or Twitter, but I don't understand the real value. Maybe there is real value that can be gotten, I don't know... I don't really use them too much.
I suppose the author's point though is that he doesn't like Facebook and Twitter because they are just more of the same stuff in real life. In real life, people are boring and on Facebook and Twitter, there's just more of that same boring kind of interaction. I wonder if he were to find interesting friends in real life and interact with them online would it make his impression of facebook and twitter different? A lot of people I admire/respect use twitter and facebook, so there has to be something there, they just aren't for me. But neither is WOW or Shoots and Ladders or TV or reading romance novels. Doesn't make those things bad, just "not for me." There's no reason to believe that same "not for me" can't apply to things lots of people find popular on the internet too.
Article isnt saying much, and pretty much misses the point of social networking in general.
there is a huge gap between your friends that you talk to every day, and long lost strangers you havent seen in 20+ years. not only that there is a difference between the amount and type of information thats exchanged online / face to face.
facebook / twitter etc enable the type of information exchange that people have been trying to do since forever, in a better way.
the idea that they will just quietly pass through when didnt some study put facebook as 90% of internet time somewhere recently? just a bit off base.
> there is a huge gap between your friends that you talk to every day, and long lost strangers you havent seen in 20+ years.
The Cynic: Yeah, you care enough to stay in touch with one, and not so much in the other case. Sure, it might be kind of fun to catch up, and in some cases renew a friendship, but generally if you'd cared, you would have stayed in touch anyway.
for my close friends facebook / twitter is useful for passive information, they might say they watched a film and it wasnt great, I dont discuss every film my friends have ever watched, but I would take into consideration their opinion.
For friends that I dont live nearby, I can keep track of what they are up to, say hello once in a while, and not lose track of them for 20+ years, then when they or I have time to go visit I know where to get in contact.
I have people that I meet through the work I do, I want to know what they are working on, if they are working on something cool that I am interested in then I find out.
for people I dont even know but seem to consistently talk about things I am interesting in then I dont need to ask for them to send me a weekly update email
My bet is that Facebook doesn't die off, and it's because Facebook captures what really matters for social networking: keeping track of friends. That's why it beat MySpace. Before Facebook, no social network was good. Each one was a bit less shitty than the one before it. Facebook's Feed was what pushed Facebook over the top, and it's powerful enough that Facebook won't lose what it's got. Facebook might waver in popularity, but at its core it's so good that people have no reason to switch, whereas with every other site there was no reason to stay once something better came along.
Among my contacts, the only ones that use Twitter are the publicity hounds. The ones who want to keep in touch use Facebook and Facebook statuses, and because statuses are more interactive than Tweets (comments and likes), that's the sticky part of my communications world.
I don't get the people calling Facebook a fad. Perhaps it's only coming from people that aren't part of the Facebook generation? Looking at it from within, as I'm doing, the difference between this and MySpace/Livejournal/Friendster is enormous.
Geocities wasn't social networking, it was free web hosting for people who didn't care about having their own domain name. LiveJournal is a quasi-social blogging platform, MySpace never sustainably spread past a teenage/preteen/music niche, and Facebook/Twitter are complementary services (Facebook is privacy oriented and Twitter is publicity oriented).
If I had the genius to be able to conceive the next quantum leap in social web processes then I'd be able to answer this question. How many of us could envision the impact of a FB or Tw even 5 years ago?
I think I could. 5 years ago Friendster was popular and people were talking about blogs and rss. Facebook and Twitter are just iterations of those same concepts.
Which is my answer to the original question. I think the same concepts will be around 10 years from now but on the question of "will it still be Facebook and Twitter" I think that all depends on how well they deal with the issues that still plague these services (most notably the signal-to-noise ratio on both services)
One way or the other I think the idea of broadcasting information about yourself and having others be able to subscribe to that is here to stay..
Some people will, some people won't — unless of course either service shuts down due to lack of revenue, in which case nobody will.
The subject of this article is such a strawman's argument though, and a very weird one at that. Who ever claimed that Facebook or Twitter would be around forever?
What will be around forever is the basic human behavior to want to communicate and stay in touch with others.
Funny you ask, I just deactivated my Facebook account this morning for an unrelated reason (too much junk and drama, too little utility). I don't have much need for Twitter/Digg/Flickr/TechCrunch either. But I log into HN and reddit every single day. Five years ago I commented on Fark/Mefi forums diligently and ten years ago it was IRC and Yahoo chat. I think what it really boils down to is a good, intelligent crowd with decent moderation system. Social sites end up having little of that and a lot of useless banter.
What made you abandon mefi for reddit? I've never had time for mefi, but from casual browsing had the impression that its quality was higher than what I'm seeing at reddit.
I love Mefi and the crowd is extremely intelligent but the threaded commenting system on reddit is way better for following topics. I still visit Mefi few times a week and go to Mefi meetups in St. Pete/Tampa. If HN didn't have this kind of threaded commenting system, I wouldn't be on it either because I don't have time to go back to all the various comments I've posted to manually check if someone replied to my post 30 comments below.
Something like them, yes -- with much of the same functionality within some larger superset, and perhaps even a direct line-of-descendence from Twitter/Facebook to whatever I'm using in 2019.
I was using features similar to the profile-page/friend-messaging/doing-field cores of Facebook and Twitter in 1999, so why not 2019 too? But in 1999 the profile-page was generic web-hosting; the communication via email/IM/chat; the doing-fields only in IM and chat.
There are things which make the current incarnations special and new:
- the convenience and trust/privacy controls provided by the explicit social-graph
- the importance of reverse-chronological logs/blogs/feeds
- the public visibility of Twitter
- most especially: the mass-adoption
But their core features are far older than 10 years, and the future of related functionality will extend many decades forward.
We've heard it all before, but I think the real value of Facebook is the "Social Graph." Most services are more interesting when made relevant to your social connections (e.g., Flickr, YouTube, Yelp, Games). Facebook Connect does this pretty well, especially considering how many people are on Facebook. Facebook.com is a bit of a headache at times with status updates, unnecessary app notifications, and a generally increasing noise level (aside-- anyone else notice this lately? the 'home' feed is much less customizable or interesting than before.). Also the monocultured look and feel of Facebook.com is dull at times. But importing Facebook friends into Yelp, fantasy sports, Netflix, Xbox Live and other services would be really useful and convenient for me, I think, in the long term.
"I’m not surprised to see my cousin use such things as she’s a “people person” - she always wants to be a center of attention - that validates her existence. Don’t get me wrong - I don’t condemn her"
His main argument seems to be "I don't like it, therefore eventually people will stop doing it." Just because he doesn't see a point to social networking doesn't mean that everybody feels that way.
I for one am with him on this. Just yesterday deleted my second FB account, just don't see the point of it. This whole social networking thing feels like high-school all over (might have sth to do with connecting to old high-school people, but not just). Generally, I find those messages about who thinks what about what and does what right now, eh, embarrassing. It's like a 3-year old saying "look at me, Mum". Still, I don't think they will fade. There is a large segment of humanity that enjoys just this behavior. I also think there is a cultural element here, although this is simply a hunch, no data on that.
While I agree with your point, I have to admit I know absolutely noone who reads techcrunch or are even aware of its existence. Only reason I even know about it is that people here keep on yammering about it constantly.
I think you might have been tricked into thinking techcrunch is important. Maybe by the power of marketing? ;)
Facebook and Twitter actually damage real world interactions from what I have seen. Before facebook, when you saw someone, you had a conversation with them and you could make small talk filling in the gaps of what has happened since the last time you met.
Now, people say, "Why are you asking if I'm dating someone, why don't you look at my facebook page?" It's like you have to go catch up with someone's facebook page before you meet them.
I don't know maybe it is something about a particular kind of mind. I don't hate FB or Twitter, but I don't understand the real value. Maybe there is real value that can be gotten, I don't know... I don't really use them too much.
I suppose the author's point though is that he doesn't like Facebook and Twitter because they are just more of the same stuff in real life. In real life, people are boring and on Facebook and Twitter, there's just more of that same boring kind of interaction. I wonder if he were to find interesting friends in real life and interact with them online would it make his impression of facebook and twitter different? A lot of people I admire/respect use twitter and facebook, so there has to be something there, they just aren't for me. But neither is WOW or Shoots and Ladders or TV or reading romance novels. Doesn't make those things bad, just "not for me." There's no reason to believe that same "not for me" can't apply to things lots of people find popular on the internet too.