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Facebook is Dying

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Re: Facebook is Dying

#41

Post by philk »

fnid2 wrote: post #2

As a consultant to the dot-com industry around the turn of the century, I traveled a lot. I took a lot of long cab rides from airports to downtowns. I talked to lots of cabbies. At some point, I knew the end was near. I knew the end was near when cabbies started asking me if it was a good idea to invest in some particular technology stock or another. Why are cabbies investing in Juniper Networks? Recently, I started…

Recently, I started another side business. One of my cousins who knows almost nothing about technology came to me and said, "Let me tell you something. I know how you can get your business started and I want to tell you about it."

At this point, I was already skeptical, but she continued... "There's this thing on the internet called Facebook and millions of people use it and you can make millions of dollars there..."

Oh no, I thought.

Another negative indicator for FB: I've also had some of my more tech-savvy friends tell me "I don't really use Facebook much anymore, I've switched over to Twitter".

I'd suggest that "losing early adopters" might be an even better indicator of decay than having random laypersons tell you about a company.

Re: Facebook is Dying

#42

Post by michaelkeenan »

fnid2 wrote: post #33
michaelkeenan wrote: post #31

I'd like to bet against the notion that Facebook is dying. I suggest this metric: on May 7, 2015, Facebook will still be one of the top five websites in the USA, measured by Alexa traffic ranking ( http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/Facebook.com ), and it will still be the most popular social networking website in the USA, again measured by Alexa traffic rankings. USD$200, winnings go to the winner's favorite charity? Fee…

I'll take the top 5 metric charity bet. I bet that by May 7, 2015, Facebook will not be in the top 5 sites as ranked by Alexa. I think it's an easy metric free of dispute. In 5 years, we may argue, "What is a social network?" But I highly doubt facebook will be in the top 5. I choose my high school as the recipient of your money when I win. :) I'll be back here in 5 years to see who the winner is. Adding an item to m…

Thanks fnid2 for taking the bet! To clarify the terms of the bet though, I only want to bet on traffic rankings in the USA. It wouldn't surprise me if some Chinese website/s outcompete Facebook in world traffic rankings by then, but that's not really fair because the Chinese government bans Facebook. Is that acceptable to you?

Can you contact me (email address in my HN profile) so I have your email address?

If I win, I'll choose whatever GiveWell ranks as the most cost-effective charity at saving lives in 2015 (http://www.givewell.net/charities/top-charities).

If Alexa closes in the next five years, I suggest that the default action is to cancel the bet, unless we both agree on a new metric.

I'm going to use the email reminder service 3mindme.com to remind me about this bet in 2015, and also add it to my "todo" file in case 3mindme.com doesn't exist in five years.

I'm open to making additional bets with others too, so if you're reading this and want to bet, it's not too late.

Re: Facebook is Dying

#43

Post by alxp »

"Your engineers are running the aslum."

This is always the cliché, but I'm sure it's much more likely that some product manager in charge of "community pages" has their own idea of how things should work and insists that the devs make it work and the devs are just doing what they can to please the different bosses.

Re: Facebook is Dying

#44

Post by novum »

fnid2 wrote: post #22
jacquesm wrote: post #8

We're all dying, but that doesn't mean we'll be dying tomorrow. Titles like that should come with a qualifying end-date. Otherwise it's just about some undefined point in the future. If facebook is dying I'd like to see some proof. I'm very much of the opinion that facebook is transient, but I'd be very careful to stick an end-date on it smaller than at least 5 years in to the future, and a lot can happen in 5 years.…

It's much easier to predict what will happen than it is to predict when. For example, I can make the following predictions: Facebook will collapse India and China will erupt into violent war We will experience a water crisis Oil will run out (that one is actually easier, about 3 decades) Iran will be invaded These are all fairly obvious predictions. Sometimes math can be used to zero in on dates, but for most of us a…

Ours is the greatest industry of all, in part because there is no way to predict that far into the future.

Re: Facebook is Dying

#45

Post by mjfern »

fnid2 wrote: post #2

As a consultant to the dot-com industry around the turn of the century, I traveled a lot. I took a lot of long cab rides from airports to downtowns. I talked to lots of cabbies. At some point, I knew the end was near. I knew the end was near when cabbies started asking me if it was a good idea to invest in some particular technology stock or another. Why are cabbies investing in Juniper Networks? Recently, I started…

I don't think this analogy works, given the significant differences between investing and product adoption. Just because a product has become mainstream doesn't indicate that the "end is near." In fact, I would argue the contrary, particular in this case. There are significant network effects in social networking. As the number of Facebook users increases, the value of Facebook to existing users (those already on the network) increases. Now, not only can I use Facebook to communicate with my college and grad-school friends, but I can use Facebook to stay in touch with my extended family, more distant friends, acquaintances, etc. If I want to maintain these relationships, I'm forced to either stick with Facebook, or rebuild my social network elsewhere. If I wanted to rebuild my network elsewhere, I would have to convince most of my social network to defect to the new service, otherwise the new service is of little value. Facebook's recent moves around privacy (and changes in functionality) are clearly unnerving its customers; however, this alone won't cause the collapse of the service.

Re: Facebook is Dying

#46

Post by nradov »

GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #10

One data point: management at my large government enterprise are suddenly getting all jiggy with social networking and want to do an internal Facebook (for no discernable business reason). That's a sure sign that something has passed it's prime.

IBM is actually trying to build a business around that through Lotus Connections and related products. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/connections/ And, by the way, I'm not criticizing IBM for that. It's a useful product and can add a lot of value for large enterprises.

Re: Facebook is Dying

#47

Post by potatolicious »

lsb wrote: post #7

Like Microsoft is dying?

A bit, yeah. Granted, given their size and cash in the bank they'll hobble along for quite a while longer - decades perhaps - but their days as a fast-growing industry leader are almost done (if not so already).

One of their two cash cows is doing well, the other (larger one) is losing market share rapidly to a competing desktop OS, as well as having its profitability absolutely shredded by low-cost computing (read: netbooks).

Their cash cow is almost milked out, and their desperate forays into other fields have been met with little success. The Xbox division is the only bright spot in a long, long, list of failures (even that has profitability issues, but at least the product is winning) - Zune? WinMo (though we will see how the new version does)... Seen any Surfaces around lately?

Their domination of the internet browser has not been so for years now, and keeps slipping ever further. For now, their customer base seems to be heavily reliant on the stickiness of existing institutional installations - this historically does not bode well for the company, when a large portion of your income is from customers who are legacy-locked into your product. It seems peachy until a more agile startup comes and eats your lunch.

Re: Facebook is Dying

#48

Post by potatolicious »

lukeqsee wrote: post #3

Wow. This is the 5th post of the demise or disgust of Facebook -- today. Are we just hating on them, or are these posts signaling a drastic change in our posture towards them? I don't know, but I suspect FB will have to respond to these cries, or risk their hacker users.

I predict FB will continue to ignore the cries of hackers and other internet enthusiasts - we are a tiny minority of their user base, and nobody will ever believe that the world will revolt against Facebook just because of a bunch of in-the-know geeks said so.

I also predict Facebook would be wrong on that point... hackers and other "hardcore" insiders are most often, as another poster has said, trendsetters. It's well known, for example, that hardcore gamers drive an impressive portion of sales to casual gamers - they're the ones that spread the buzz, or in this case, anti-buzz.

Time will tell if this is the beginning of the end for Facebook (I suspect not), but this whole privacy fiasco is going to be a bit more than a blip from a tiny vocal minority, that's for sure.

Re: Facebook is Dying

#49

Post by potatolicious »

faramarz wrote: post #15
jacquesm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to be somewhat desperate though, judging by the sign-off screen: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_happens_when_you_d...

Thats not desperate, that's a great retention technique! Every startup can learn from this. If you don't have a practice to retain your users, you don't care about the success of your business.

Holy hell, that screams dating site unsubscribe system. I didn't realize Facebook was that low about account deactivations.

Re: Facebook is Dying

#50

Post by potatolicious »

mburney wrote: post #26
faramarz wrote: post #12

What a crock of shit. Pardon my french. If you're going to close your account, the world doesn't need to hear about it. Those of you jumping on the bandwagon to close your accounts probably can't come up with a real reason why you joined the service in the first place. So stop your whining. 2 bloggers ranting about their demise doesn't count for the rest of the population. Facebook is here to stay. you know why? beca…

But how often do you and your family make any meaningful use out of it? A pattern I've seen is that people join, have an active wall for a couple weeks and then they just go back to using sms and email for keeping in touch with each other.

I make a lot of use out of it - that being said, Facebook is a whole lot of fluff these days. Nothing they have done recently is really compelling from a user perspective, all of the really useful/interesting stuff was done ages ago:

- Writing on people's walls, was there from the start.

- Status updates, was there from the start.

- Event invitations, have been done forever.

- Using as an address book, has been like this from the start.

- Photos/tagging, has been around since forever.

What has Facebook added in the last couple of years that's really made the site more engrossing and compelling? Chat? Nobody uses that, almost. Applications? Most users I know see them as annoyances more than features. Gifts? That was a completely flop too.

The core use of Facebook has barely changed at all since it launched - there's a very small core set of features that make the site what it is... I'm convinced someone can come along and do these core features better.

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