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Facebook hype will fade

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41–50 of 126 posts

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#41
If I were 14 years old or so, I would be very much interested in partbook, where part is some part of the body.

I think it would be a very visited site, but unfortunately this is not permited by my imaginary Dad, so this site is not real.

Edited: I discovered Bart Simpson thought about this.

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#42
post #29

"We will move on, just as we did from the chat rooms of AOL, without even looking back. When the place is as ethereal as a website, our allegiance is much more abstract than it is to a local pub or gym." I disagree with this, simply because grandma wasn't on any AOL chat rooms, but she _is_ on Facebook. The only reason I'm on FB is because Aunt Tilly and Uncle Bob and grandma are also on there, and I can connect with…

This isn't really unique to Facebook. It's called lock-in and it's the desire of every service provider and software maker; they want you to be held hostage to their network, so that even if you want to leave, you can't without potentially serious ramifications (like losing contact with your grandma, or losing access to your documents). Facebook has reached a level that had never been reached by any social network be…

I agree with the way you describe the lock-in, of course that's the whole point of any closed network. But I disagree as far as the phenomena not being unique to Facebook. While grandma might have been on AOL, to her it was just the way to "use the internet" or whatever, she wasn't on any communities or groups or chat rooms. That required a slight uptick in the level of computer savvy one had to possess, which she never had or bothered to acquire. More to the point, her family wasn't on AOL, or wasn't interested in AOL, or if they were they couldn't interact the same way with her.

Facebook's success is a combination of making things easy for people like grandma and attracting everyone related to her. Without those two pillars FB would be just another MySpace.

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#43
post #8
post #5

facebook growth went something like this: college --> high school --> young adults --> everyone Trendy stuff generally follows the same cascade, more or less, where you don't see college students emulating the dress habits of the elderly. facebook's biggest potential for failure is in not capturing the next generation of young users. The young users pick up some other social network, everyone else follows suit, and f…

Most of the teenagers I know have Facebook accounts. Facebook might lose the high school class of 2018, but they already have the class of 2014 sewn up.

They have at least the class of 2016-2017 given the 12 and 13 year-olds I know that have accounts...

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#45
It will take more than something "cool" to knock off Facebook - 600m users isn't fad-ish. A competitor has to have a MUCH better product and be very cool. It could happen, but Facebook is much more in the driver's seat than MySpace or Friendster ever were.

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#46
related from 2007: "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook" http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/webdev/showArti...

It certainly hasn't, but can facebook be the first social network to somehow help people maintain their different personas and keep their social circles unentangled when appropriate? Over the summer I facebook updated something about hacking on my front porch, and my wife's aunt commented asking how I got sick. Stuff like that isn't creepy, it's just awkward, and keeps me coming back here and to friendfeed or to reddit or wherever the community feels right for having a discussion.

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#48
All social media sites these days are bound for backlash because of the sins of their fathers, Thats why its so hard to get a great idea to catch on, people are growing skeptical about social media's benefits in a sea of high priced commercial promotion.

People make sites like facebook popular, commercial entities buy in and then corner the initial value that these sites created. All of the marketing potential individual users had in the initial stages vanishes once commercial ads and user tracking appear, and once a value is placed on a site. Myspace still gets great hits, but mostly from spammers and bots, which makes it value worth less than the computers its hosted on. Its their own damn fault. Tom played the game right when he sold early I tell you.

These social media sites aren't doing anything substantial in order to help productivity nor promotion for individual users. They have features that encourage users to spam each other, which make their added peers end up blocking each other because of incessant tagging and messages to user inboxes that require tedious manual deletion, etc [all tactics to generate empty clicks]...

These social media sites all make the same mistakes in not emphasizing their talented users, and helping to build followings, while promoting businesses and services that are reliable and relevant to their own users. I'm a firm believer in a future of micro-social sites that focus on specific user communities rather than trying to warehouse everyone into a huge template. Facebook, as it is really doesn't provide much in terms of letting "like minds come together". There should be no reason why I can't communicate [through a social media buffer of course] with Jay Z about rapping, or Kanye about being a douchebag, or ask the real Ivanka Trump out on a date, and they all should be able to block me if they get pissed off in the process, thats what happens on Twitter, and thats why this year Twitter will capture a large percentage of Facebook's user shares, because its much more fulfilling than fake user profiles [for the moment]

American Idol has made a lot more people "famous" than Facebook, yet there are many more musicians and artists on Facebook, how is this possible? I see that as a problem. YouTube has been the only consistently unobtrusive and highly functional/useful social media tool that has survived. They do have user profiles, they host content, allow comments, sharing and communication, and do it all pretty much in an amazing and unobtrusive way. YouTube also allows its users to cross-share content on sites completely unrelated to itself, a major hosting expense, but really solid in terms of usefulness to site users, no idiotic "like" button required. Based on this, the concept of YouTube, perhaps, should be used as a key "roadmap" to social media success in the future.

Instead of working on promoting normal users you don't know, most social media sites are geared towards the "celebrity machine", for celebrities that are already popular. Promoting the same stuff that's on TV, and the radio, because someone paid for the ad space. Following this "celebrity machine" is a losing battle because it has to put on a new expensive outfit every time its launched, and it fails once people uncover its motives, or once innovation can't disguise it.

Facebook makes it appear to users that the only method to generate 5,000 followers requires landing a major record or movie deal, so much for being a talented musician. Programming and monetizing is only a tiny part of creating a successful social media site, this is why most get it wrong. If you want 4 years of profit, who cares, make the next big social media warehouse, if you want a lifetime of success, think carefully of the benefits your site can provide to the average joe, and make sure you keep that in your mantra for as long as your site lives. The motives have to be clear cut, highly functional, and it must offer fair and equal promotion for all of its users while limiting spamming and upholding privacy, otherwise it will stay the game of rise and downfall. There's a reason why YouTube has been a great site all of these years, it sticks to its user base and keeps them content.

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#49
post #5

facebook growth went something like this: college --> high school --> young adults --> everyone Trendy stuff generally follows the same cascade, more or less, where you don't see college students emulating the dress habits of the elderly. facebook's biggest potential for failure is in not capturing the next generation of young users. The young users pick up some other social network, everyone else follows suit, and f…

I got my Facebook account in 2005 when I was a college freshman. At first it was amazing, then they opened it up to high schoolers which was okay, but not really what I wanted from Facebook. Then they added things like the Friend Feed which bombarded you with "Your friend [name you know] just added [someone you don't know or care about}." Which was okay, but then they opened the gates and suddenly all your coworkers…

I had the exact same experience as well, and then I discovered the "hide" button. I developed some rules and then spent about 20 minutes every day for a week hiding people who didn't fall within those. Examples of my rules were:

1) If I don't remember who you are, hide. 2) If I knew you in elementary/middle/high school/college and I don't think I'll ever see or speak to you again, hide. (This would cover people who don't share any of my interests, etc). 3) If you spam my newsfeed with "Farmville/Which Twilight character are you/I have a secret to tell you" sort of apps, hide. 4) If we have nothing in common, and I don't think anything you're going to say in the future is going to be interesting/have a real impact on me, hide.

There may be one or two more, but those were the core ones. After applying these rules, I found Facebook was SO much nicer and more fun to use, and there was none of the social stigma of "unfriending" people.

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#50
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got my Facebook account in 2005 when I was a college freshman. At first it was amazing, then they opened it up to high schoolers which was okay, but not really what I wanted from Facebook. Then they added things like the Friend Feed which bombarded you with "Your friend [name you know] just added [someone you don't know or care about}." Which was okay, but then they opened the gates and suddenly all your coworkers…

Do you really think LinkedIn is a chink in Facebook's armor? I question how many people regularly use LinkedIn as opposed to those who just update when their job title changes. All Facebook needs is for an intern of theirs to add a couple more features around the career section of people's profiles and LinkedIn is toast.

"and LinkedIn is toast" I doubt that. I think people who take career networking seriously tend to keep their personal and professional lives separate.
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