111–120 of 126 posts
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There is social stigma. You'll be seen as petty and somebody that micromanages unimportant parts of life.
facebook gets much better when you unfriend lots of people. fred wilson has his "only bar mitzvah" rule and only has ~80 friends. i still have around 600 down from almost 1000.
They cost to run the site compared to how much they're making does not work. Their only hope is to run really fast and create a better advertising story. Otherwise, they need to get acquired by MS, Google or Apple and become an augment to a business that actually generates profit. Problem is their market cap is so huge that's becoming nearly impossible.
"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…
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The hide is useful, but the unnatural part is the "everyone you ever met listening". The great thing about Facebook when I started was it was like blogs or photo sharing, except that everyone was a trusted, real-life friend. Facebook was like sharing photos, jokes, and stories with your circle of friends. Now that everyone and (and every company) are on facebook, I'm more comfortable back on a blog, where there isn't…
You can still do that now. You just need to make groups of your different friend groups (family, real life friends, high school friends, work friends, etc) and share what you want with those groups only, depending on what it is.
"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…
I hate to sounds misanthropic, but Aunt Tilly and Uncle Bob are why I'm not on Facebook, and why I didn't use it much when I was. The Tillys and Bobs of the world meant I had to spend basically all my time tweaking my hide/show settings to see anything useful, and everyone else's own Tillys and Bobs kept them from saying anything interesting. Like AOL, Tilly and Bob will still be using it and still generating revenue…
"This week's news that Goldman Sachs has chosen to invest in Facebook while entreating others to do the same should inspire about as much confidence as their investment in mortgage securities did in 2008." Well said. Sounds like a bubble to me.
Except of course, GS aren't investing in Facebook. They're backing out their stake to other investors via this SPV they've set up. I doubt they care what happens to facebook stock: there's huge demand at this valuation and all they care about is answering that.
Heads we win, tails you lose. I'm just waiting until they start dividing up the stock into tranches.
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…
"...the merger turned out to be a disaster: AOL's revenue stream was reduced to a trickle as net users ventured out onto the Web directly." So facebook will fail when people venture out and socialize in real life? Seriously, though, I get the point generally, but I don't think it's quite the same. AOL and MySpace were assimilated and stifled by their parents' ways of doing things, whereas Facebook will likely continu…