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The real anti-Facebook is good old email

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Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#81

Post by simoncion »

cortesoft wrote: post #53
aws_ls wrote: post #51

I don't think email is a good replacement for Facebook. Rather what we need is open (email protocol like) social networks. The problem with Facebook is that its a monopoly, and closed. What if it were open, such that I can send a friend request from G+ to Facebook. Just like I can easily send an email from yahoo email id to gmail. This openness, if incorporated, can solve the monopoly problem as well. Plus we don't h…

That is what diaspora tried to do. It has not gone well.

Diaspora did a few things wrong.

Two of them were:

* Their federation protocol was (still is?) very poorly documented. This made alternate implementations difficult.

* A user cannot move his data from one Diaspora server to another. (This might have changed in the last six to twelve months, but I doubt it.) This sort of moots the benefit of decentralization; what good is it if I can pick from any one of a sea of hosts, but must stick with that host for the rest of forever, even if they turn evil?

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#82

Post by ajro »

jsaxton86 wrote: post #12

I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized: 1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons 2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing w…

Newsletter is not connecting your subscribers together - add that and you have good old mailing list. One of my friends created such a mailing list for our circle of friends some time ago but it didn't win with the Facebook.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#83

Post by TeMPOraL »

rdtsc wrote: post #37
jsaxton86 wrote: post #12

I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized: 1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons 2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing w…

I think email works better because people perceive it as a more direct message just to them. If say, you send an email and bcc people on it, they feel like they were sent a direct one-on-one personal message (even if they objectively know it is a newsletter). Status updates on Twitter, Facebook, etc, when it was obvious that they are for multiple people not just a one-to-one message don't produce the same effect. Peo…

I think the difference is subtle, but a little different. Status updates on Twitter, Facebook, etc. feel like a part of the service - something that exists on Facebook. By checking your timeline you're only looking at events that exist elsewhere. On the other hand, receiving a mail feels like it came to you. It does not exist as an entity somewhere in the world, it's a message that came to your inbox (and possibly to others in the CC/BCC field).

It's sort of like receiving a letter vs. reading something on a pubic notice board. The former is yours, the latter is in public space.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#84

Post by hugh4 »

libso wrote: post #28

Facebook is flexible enough to provide this. You can post updates visible only to a group of people. Problem with Facebook is how people use it. Users tend to have > 500 friends on an average including ones to whom you have never spoken or never want to speak. This would make your timeline pretty irrelevant and uninteresting to you. Why would I care if a colleague in your first job (10 yr ago) went on a trip with his…

>Practically speaking you'd never un-friend people unless they personally bother you.

I've started unfriending people the moment they start posting baby photos. My friends list is shrinking fast!

The only people who don't get unfriended are the people I actually like or the people who never post.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#85

Post by zokier »

amelius wrote: post #70
joe_the_user wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about multiplicity is that most people aren't glued to multiple applications. The ideal for someone not putting a lot of effort to computers themselves is to just have a single window where everything of interest comes through. A single application that melds together multiple protocols would nice. But then you're talking something that seems like Facebook to the end-user but has the delivery mode changed.

The important issue is that we might want different identities for every protocol. Right now, lots of people prefer to have different identities on youtube than on gmail.

Instead of segregating identities on services I think a better model would be just a good support for multiple identities (which then can span between services).

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#87

Post by lmm »

simoncion wrote: post #78
estonian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But getting someone's Facebook is less socially awkward than their email address. You can also remember them easier and communicate with them faster. Most of the people I met this summer didn't have an American phone number so Facebook (or Whatsapp) was the only way to communicate with them.

> But getting someone's Facebook is less socially awkward than their email address. I don't understand why this would be. Would you explain why -for your cohort- this is true?

An email address feels more intimate - it's something a romantic partner would have but a friend wouldn't necessarily. And asking someone for an email address is asking them to spend thirty seconds spelling things out (particularly in a bar), and another thirty waiting for you to send them an email to confirm. Facebook is just a question of typing their name, which you already know - often it can autocomplete based on your network - and they get a notification if you've done it right without needing any extra step.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#88

Post by lmm »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #36
libso wrote: post #28

Facebook is flexible enough to provide this. You can post updates visible only to a group of people. Problem with Facebook is how people use it. Users tend to have > 500 friends on an average including ones to whom you have never spoken or never want to speak. This would make your timeline pretty irrelevant and uninteresting to you. Why would I care if a colleague in your first job (10 yr ago) went on a trip with his…

I didn't know that Facebook can send status updates via email to people who are not on Facebook.

It can't, but that's an incredibly niche feature.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#89

Post by lmm »

fiatjaf wrote: post #26

Why feeds? Getting a newsletter is getting a feed, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp are all about getting a feed of endless news. All alternative social networks are the same. Why "social network" became synonymous of producing and reading news from the life of people? MySpace and Orkut were not that way. I imagine other social networks from the early 2000's were not that way also.

Livejournal was definitely that way. Did Myspace really not give you updates? I find it hard to believe it was so popular with bands if you couldn't tell your friends/followers/whatever "here's our new track"/"we're playing a gig on x date".

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#90

Post by lmm »

wyclif wrote: post #42

Now, only a year later, Ello is nearly forgotten, filed away with other would-be Facebook killers like the open source Diaspora and the near-dead Google+ The problem with this statement is that there is a vast difference in number of users between Ello and Google+. The latter is far from "forgotten" or "near dead." Every time I hit G+, it's teeming with activity. I can't say that about Ello, which seems to be populat…

Shrug. Not my experience. Google+ looks deader than disco here.
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