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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

#101

Post by utellme »

gaius wrote: post #91
oldcynic wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If, as seems to be the case, Instagram is the popular destination to migrate to will Facebook be too bothered by a drop in Facebook numbers? Sure some will go elsewhere, and block enough FB tracking to disappear entirely. Instagram, of course, will allow Facebook to keep tracking and advertising to people just fine. No doubt they've already linked Instagram and FB identities wherever possible. So all that remains is…

Instagram, of course, will allow Facebook to keep tracking and advertising to people just fine There aren’t many “like/share this in Instagram” buttons around the web.

That's the key idea - they will continue to do M&A to get advantage in tracking and exploring user behavior.

Instagram is just data provider.

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

#102

Post by utellme »

clay_the_ripper wrote: post #32
utellme wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's correct and incorrect at the same time. Social networks like cars, they give value when it's being used. To sell ads social networks must be sure that someone scrolling feeds. No usage - no gains. Even with huge amount of users data nothing guaranteed. You can't sell same stuff periodically, big data has value only when they are actual.

That’s the point though-they don’t need you to scroll to make money off you. You only need a registered account, and they can track a massive amount about what you do online and then serve you ads across millions of sites and mobile apps. All of this happens off of Facebook owned properties.

You can have account, but if you don't use it, which means you don't share your user experience, social network can't feed you and your friends with fresh and actual stuff.

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

#103

Post by utellme »

Canada wrote: post #37
clay_the_ripper wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the point though-they don’t need you to scroll to make money off you. You only need a registered account, and they can track a massive amount about what you do online and then serve you ads across millions of sites and mobile apps. All of this happens off of Facebook owned properties.

Except for those who block third party trackers, which is something like 25% of desktop users and 15% of mobile users.

Companies like Google or even Mozilla can easily ruin or at least make it harder for social networks to track you and your interests with their browsers. You already have "block thirdparties" checkbox and similar restrictions, soon you will be provided with builtin ad-blocking. Sounds bad for all social networks and tracking services.

So Google has everything in his pocket, but if FB really has something to put against?

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

#104

Post by lawl »

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

Why not? In my friend circle only one guy has a facebook account, he created it to talk to a girl he met and i don't think he uses it anymore or even deleted it.

Not sure why that's so unbelievable.

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

#105

Post by pdimitar »

pimterry wrote: post #98
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…

> What matters is the fact that they can associate web browsing actions (pages visited etc) with your Facebook account. And what will kill them is the increasing regulatory pressure (GDPR especially) that will end this soon, for a significant percentage of their most valuable users. Once GDPR lands Facebook will need every user to explicitly opt- in to tracking their non-FB browsing actions, plus separate opt-in for…

I so wish you are right... but historically, corporations have been just fine after regulatory hit, 99% of the time.

They have pretty strong lawyers. I fear the GDPR is already backdoored and only faintly hope this is not the case.

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

#106

Post by prostoalex »

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…

While it doesn’t involve a fancy camera, you’re describing a loyalty card.

The merchant tracks your buying habits, and in return you get a variety of promotions. Square does this, FiveStars does this, Ritual does this, Clover and every other “connected” register company do this, Starbucks app does this.

The fancy camera, while interesting, is not a necessary aspect of this. Customization when the customer is physically in the store is nice, but the real money seems to be in getting that customer to the store.

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

#107

Post by usrusr »

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…

People who walk into a McDonalds will spend money there. How much more would they spend at that hypothetical CreepyMcDonalds?

Ad targeting has it's place for certain applications, but it is easy to overestimate its impact.

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

#108

Post by stonith »

dasil003 wrote: post #78
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not changing the menu, they’re just subtly highlighting things, offering discounts, etc. And yeah, he’s in the store already, but if they can sell him MORE on that visit, that’s good. How much do you think McDonalds would pay for a magic camera + menu that boosted all their store revenue by 5% overnight?

Changing the menu "subtly" is still changing the menu. How does it work with everyone else in the store, are you going to compute optimal clusters on the fly? How are people going to react when the menu is morphing in front of them? Are franchisees expected to pay for all the hardware and compute involved? Sorry, but I'm just not buying the vision. Facebook has ridden this incredible wave, first of investors spooging…

In Australia we have ordering kiosks now at a lot of stores, so maybe that would be one avenue where it's easier to cater to a customer's specific tastes by warping the menu a bit.

I'm not suggesting it's a good idea, just that it's an option.

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

#109

Post by rupertj »

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…

HHVM never really took off in the PHP community. These days regular PHP performs as well, and has adopted most of the additions HHVM made to the language. Larger projects like Symfony dropped support for HHVM a while ago. It’s main purpose these days seems to be a thing to run Hack (the langauage) on.

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

#110

Post by bcherny »

ikeyany wrote: post #81
bcherny wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have some JavaScript code, it goes through a few phases as it's evaluated by your browser:

1. Parsing

2. JIT optimizing

3. Compilation to bytecode

4. Re-optimization as the program runs

Steps 1 and 2 are expensive, and there are a few ways to cut down on them:

- Removing dead code before you ship

- Optimizing your code for the JIT compiler (eg. Closure Compiler does this)

- Webassembly

- Pre-evaluating your code with Prepack

More philosophically, the question is "when does my code run?". The answer has usually been "on the client". With Prepack, the answer is "as much as possible during compilation, and the remainder on the client".

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