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Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#51

Post by DataWorker »

bsbechtel wrote: post #46
clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

Your argument is reasonable, until a better way to market to individuals comes along. It's not about the size of Facebook's user base or their reach on the web, it's how cheaply and effectively brands can sell their product by paying Facebook to help them do that. Once someone else can do it better, that's when it's game over for Facebook.

Like Amazon or Visa?

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#52

Post by shostrift »

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

GDPR will require informed consent for much of the tracking you've suggested to be done. How many people will actively opt in?

The regulatory environment for FB will change dramatically on 25 May for the data of all EU citizens.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#53

Post by shostrift »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #40

Facebook is just getting started. Imagine you have a dataset that can identify over a billion people around the world simply by looking at their face. When you walk into McDonalds, cameras analyze you and the people you enter with. Oh, there's John Smith and his friend Tom. He loves the McFlurry. Instantly the digital menus rearrange to feature a large McFlurry, animating and advertising a deal on the largest size. F…

GDPR will prevent that unless there's an active opt-in, so you can strike out EU citizens from that scenario.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#54

Post by dasil003 »

omarforgotpwd wrote: post #40

Facebook is just getting started. Imagine you have a dataset that can identify over a billion people around the world simply by looking at their face. When you walk into McDonalds, cameras analyze you and the people you enter with. Oh, there's John Smith and his friend Tom. He loves the McFlurry. Instantly the digital menus rearrange to feature a large McFlurry, animating and advertising a deal on the largest size. F…

Why would Macdonald’s pay for that? Tom is already in McDonald’s and is going to buy what he wants. There’s no incremental value in making the menu confusing by changing it all the time.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#55

Post by scythe »

Facebook just needs to lose its "evil" image. I could throw out ideas but let's face it everyone does that and I have zero experience running a social network. Right now the biggest obstacle facing Facebook is that people are starting to think that using Facebook is bad for you and bad for society. Facebook cannot survive in such a climate indefinitely. If it's true, make it false. If it's false, prove it.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#56

Post by ec109685 »

ssivark wrote: post #45
clay_the_ripper wrote: post #17

I’m no fan of Facebook, but I don’t agree with the premise of the article. The power of Facebook lies in its network effect: something on the order of 2 billion have active Facebook accounts. Whether or not people are spending more or less time on the platform doesn’t matter as much as people seem to think it does. What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Fac…

Are there ways to use Facebook data to serve advertisements outside the Facebook platform? I was under the impression that FB customers (advertisers) can only serve ads on Facebook i.e. Facebook does not display ads on other websites (unlike Google), and it does not pass on user data which advertisers can use to serve ads on other platforms/websites.

NY Times shows Facebook ads.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#57

Post by git-pull »

They're influencing the internet in more ways than just social stuff, though. From a technology perspective, Facebook is doing solid work. And it looks like they're continuing the trend - rather than being at the end of it.

Facebook's open source footprint is quite influential. Namely, React + Redux + Reselect are pretty sweet. React-Native. Haven't used it, but hhvm.

And I haven't heard of this one before, but it looks cool: https://github.com/facebook/prepack

https://github.com/facebook

That's a nice portfolio.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#58

Post by bcherny »

git-pull wrote: post #57

They're influencing the internet in more ways than just social stuff, though. From a technology perspective, Facebook is doing solid work. And it looks like they're continuing the trend - rather than being at the end of it. Facebook's open source footprint is quite influential. Namely, React + Redux + Reselect are pretty sweet. React-Native. Haven't used it, but hhvm. And I haven't heard of this one before, but it lo…

Prepack is one of the coolest ideas to come out of FB OSS.

The idea is to run your JS program as part of compilation, evaluating it as much as you can. Then take what's left in the heap and serialize it back to JS. Then ship that to browsers/devices.

AFAIK, that sort of AoT evaluation has been limited to academia and niche applications in Haskell and OCaml because purity analysis is so tricky in languages that don't track effects.

Re: Reasons to think that, in terms of influence if not wealth, Facebook has peaked

#59

Post by sytse »

dang wrote: post #4

I'm not sure if this article can support a substantive discussion or not, but thought it might be worth the trick of taking a more complex phrase for the title in the hope of stimulating more substantive responses. HN threads are often like those psych tests that measure complexity of response by time delay. It's a bit weird, but there's some reason to believe that just the small tax it imposes on the brain to parse…

Love your consideration in order to get us to reflection.
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