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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

#81

Post by ikeyany »

bcherny wrote: post #58
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…

> 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.

Could you elaborate on what is cool about that? I feel like I'm missing something...sounds like it analyzes javascript to make it run faster.

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

#82

Post by omarforgotpwd »

nitwit005 wrote: post #62
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…

You can make the "just getting started" argument for just about any company. What you describe does not seem to require the involvement of Facebook. It doesn't even seem to require cameras. Just ask them to swipe their credit card to start using the automated ordering system.

Not any company. Every decade has a foundational technology upon which most of the economic growth of that period is based. 1987 - 1997 was the decade of the personal computer. 1997 - 2007 was the decade of the world wide web. 2007 - 2017 was the decade of mobile which is just starting to get mature. 2017 - 2027 will be the decade of AI / autonomy. Who will be the companies that excel at AI? The ones that can invest the most engineering dollars, and the ones that have access to large datasets for training. So I suppose you could say all tech companies with large datasets are just getting started given the growth I imagine we’ll see in the next decade.

Also I’m talking about tracking someone using their face, without them interacting with any systems at all or even checking out. Sure you could do implement a simpler similar system with credit cards but people have many credit cards that change often and so it would be difficult to get an accurate full profile of an individual. By contrast Facebooks AI would be universal and would be able to look at what you ordered at Wendy’s and use that to optimize the menu that is presented to the user for optimal conversions, even if you’ve never been in a mcdonald’s before. This is nice if you’re mcdonald’s but if you’re a small restaurant it’s a game changer. I don’t even know if Facebook is working on this but you can imagine them making a lot of money offering these types of services.

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

#83

Post by adventured »

Gatsky wrote: post #76
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…

Facebook has no solution for China, which will never allow a foreign company to capture all the wealth of that network. The totalatarianism of China also allows them to create the type of invasive dystopian social network that is probably Facebook's ultimate, yet inaccessible, business model.

Facebook doesn't need China. They'd like to be in China, it could be worth several billion dollars in annual profit, but they do not need it.

Facebook nearly generated as much profit in 2017 as Tencent and Alibaba combined, to put it into perspective.

The flip side of China's behavior, is that their domestic tech giants have been unable to go global like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Netflix have (Amazon is still trying to push its model fully global with mixed results). Baidu was supposed to challenge Google globally, it has completely failed at that. The US is the world's most lucrative advertising market, Alibaba and Tencent can't access it because they're wildly incompetent at operating outside of their protected kingdom (as witnessed by Alibaba's embarrassing failure with 11 Main). China is an extremely unique market, the approaches and protections that have given Tencent and Alibaba their dominance there, will not translate well to most of the rest of the world.

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

#84

Post by Gatsky »

adventured wrote: post #83
Gatsky wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has no solution for China, which will never allow a foreign company to capture all the wealth of that network. The totalatarianism of China also allows them to create the type of invasive dystopian social network that is probably Facebook's ultimate, yet inaccessible, business model.

Facebook doesn't need China. They'd like to be in China, it could be worth several billion dollars in annual profit, but they do not need it. Facebook nearly generated as much profit in 2017 as Tencent and Alibaba combined, to put it into perspective. The flip side of China's behavior, is that their domestic tech giants have been unable to go global like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Netflix have (Amazon is…

This is a fairly USA centric view of the world. USA GDP per capita is ~$57k, China's is ~$8k. As the GDP per capita continues to rise in China, lack of access to this market will be an increasing problem for an advertising company. The fact that Tencent's profit is half of Facebook's doesn't mean much when you compare the relative wealth of the markets.

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

#85

Post by outtaCTRL »

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…

You can say that now, when they turned their open-source project into truly open-source, and not something they can Trojan horse other companies with. React had BSD + parents licence until they go a lot of criticism.

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

#86

Post by eecc »

abecedarius wrote: post #77
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…

> the fact that you have a Facebook account allows advertisers to track and target you I use a separate browser profile just for Facebook; I never log in from my main profile. Do they link the separate browsers? There'd be a bunch of clues like the IP address, window size, browser version and OS, related but not identical time of activity, etc. So how hard do they work at linking up data from people who expressly don…

You are quite the exception. Most people don’t even have a computer and get along with an old Android phone for everything (as admittedly, it’s quite enough)

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

#87

Post by logicallee »

itronitron wrote: post #75
halflings wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote rebuttal to an anecdote: None of my personal friends have more than one account on facebook. Facebook estimates than 10% of the accounts are duplicates [0], so that wouldn't match with most people (~50%?) having 2 to 4 accounts. [0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/02/facebook-ad...

Anecdote^3 ... none of my personal friends have more than zero facebook accounts :)

>none of my personal friends have more than zero facebook accounts

There's no way this is true

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

#88

Post by abecedarius »

eecc wrote: post #86
abecedarius wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that you have a Facebook account allows advertisers to track and target you I use a separate browser profile just for Facebook; I never log in from my main profile. Do they link the separate browsers? There'd be a bunch of clues like the IP address, window size, browser version and OS, related but not identical time of activity, etc. So how hard do they work at linking up data from people who expressly don…

You are quite the exception. Most people don’t even have a computer and get along with an old Android phone for everything (as admittedly, it’s quite enough)

Yeah, it's unfortunately rare, but it is easy: on mobile you could install some separate browser app. In Chrome on a desktop it's two clicks to switch profiles, and about three to create a new one. I used to open an incognito window for Facebook, but you'd have to log in anew each time.

Of course I wish people would leave Facebook instead. I'm doing my part by not posting there.

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

#89

Post by gaius »

abecedarius wrote: post #77
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…

> the fact that you have a Facebook account allows advertisers to track and target you I use a separate browser profile just for Facebook; I never log in from my main profile. Do they link the separate browsers? There'd be a bunch of clues like the IP address, window size, browser version and OS, related but not identical time of activity, etc. So how hard do they work at linking up data from people who expressly don…

So how hard do they work at linking up data from people who expressly don't want them to?

It actually doesn’t matter how much effort they put in or how effective their techniques are. Doing that at all for people who have expressed a wish not to be is stepping over the line. That is why GDPR is going to hammer them.

And the funny thing is, with both Facebook and Google, this is completely obvious to anyone outside the very narrow demographic they hire from. So much for (their fake) diversity.

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

#90

Post by elgenie »

logicallee wrote: post #87
itronitron wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote^3 ... none of my personal friends have more than zero facebook accounts :)

>none of my personal friends have more than zero facebook accounts There's no way this is true

It could be trivially true for someone with zero personal friends :D
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