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Facebook hype will fade

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121–126 of 126 posts

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#121
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…

> Which was okay, but then they opened the gates and suddenly all your coworkers and anyone you've ever talked to for more than 3 minutes is now adding you.

That's exactly what I hate about FB. These days, I just keep my profile so that people can contact me, but never log in to.

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This takes way too much work. As someone who was using Facebook for several years before friend-groups, it was going to be an unreasonable time-sink to sort all those people after the fact.

Someone using facebook AFTER the were introduced definitely should use them.

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#123
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Originally, but AOL never expanded on it. A profile was like a text box and that's it. As for AIM, everyone I know that used to use it still do. I don't think that's changed very much other than that people now use web based clients to chat on AIM.

Really? I only know a fraction of people who still use AIM, most just use the Facebook chat. It guessing it must be a generational thing? I'm 23, how about you?

Same age. It's probably just the people I know. I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley amongst 90% Asians and the non-tech savvy subset of those I know all use the same AIM screen names but through different interfaces. The tech-savvy subset use multi-clients like Pidgin, Digsby, etc. I personally use Gchat and no one I know uses FB as their main chat client, only for a quick message if two people are coincidentally on FB.

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#124
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is social stigma. You'll be seen as petty and somebody that micromanages unimportant parts of life.

By people who aren't actually your friends? Chances are they won't even miss you.

No, not just people that aren't your friends. If I was your friend and found out you spent time 'fine-tuning your facebook friends list', I would think you were a petty time-waster.

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#125
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By people who aren't actually your friends? Chances are they won't even miss you.

No, not just people that aren't your friends. If I was your friend and found out you spent time 'fine-tuning your facebook friends list', I would think you were a petty time-waster.

Well, speak for yourself. I, and many of my Facebook friends, have gone on deleting purges before and I've never seen that reaction. The main fear seems to be upsetting the acquaintances that you unfriend.

If you're going to spend time on Facebook at all, it's worth the time every now and then to make the time better spent. They even have a page called "edit friends" where you can just go down your friends list ticking the X button to unfriend them.

Re: Facebook hype will fade

#126
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switching costs are absolutely the thing to focus on here, but limiting the switching costs to a replication of the social graph may be understating the true cost. Think of all the photos, and to a lesser extent, wall posts. I would imagine a lot of the time that's spent on Facebook is just browsing through photos (and again, to a lesser extent, people's wall posts). Much of it probably is just new photos, so obvious…

Everyone has a facebook account. If they want to look at old photos, they will look on facebook. Just like you used to be able to look at old blog posts on Geocities. People will post new photos and their favorite old photos on the next facebook, and stop looking at the old site. The old content sounds like a big deal if you are a geek who is worried about vendor lock-in, but I doubt that real people will really care…

Do you know how many times I've had to show my mom how to upload something to Facebook? A lot of times. Facebook upload support is baked into her photo manager (Shotwell), and it's as easy as clicking "Publish", and she still usually can't figure it out.

Do you really think that many FB users are going to know how to move "their favorite old photos" from Facebook? Unless the next product includes an automatic importer, which Facebook would attempt to destroy as quickly as possible, and it would devolve into an arms race/lawsuits (as scraping Facebook has for people with much more innocent intentions), then I don't think that many FB users will be interested in coming over.

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