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Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

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Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#11

Post by abalog »

jordan0day wrote: post #4

Does anyone have any good guesses as to what the "next" Facebook will be? I mean, in my experience, it basically went Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook. While Facebook is certainly in the drivers seat to a much greater extent than MySpace was five or six years ago, history indicates they'll eventually be knocked off their throne. However, I haven't seen or heard of any serious newcomers in that space. I've personally…

Although I do not want to come across as being biased (due to me working on a multi-live social concept), however I do believe Live interaction both on mobile devices or web app is where the next legion of 'Social networking' is headed.

Whether i'm right or wrong, only time will tell. On the subject of de-throning facebook, that will be hard. Though it is do-able but for the moment, let's not kid ourselves, Facebook will remain the beast and king of Social media for while.

They are just to big and efficiently run to go down like myspace.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#12

Post by noarchy »

politician wrote: post #5
jordan0day wrote: post #4

Does anyone have any good guesses as to what the "next" Facebook will be? I mean, in my experience, it basically went Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook. While Facebook is certainly in the drivers seat to a much greater extent than MySpace was five or six years ago, history indicates they'll eventually be knocked off their throne. However, I haven't seen or heard of any serious newcomers in that space. I've personally…

My hope is that people have simply tired of the concept. The privacy implications are staggering.

How many Facebook users care about privacy? I agree that there are considerable issues with regard to Facebook and privacy, but I'm not sure that most of their users are proactive in caring about it as much.

It is probably more likely that people are tired of Facebook, and aren't using it as much.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#14

Post by noarchy »

olihb wrote: post #3

They don't say why or where those users are going. If the users aren't going anywhere else, they just decided that Facebook weren't for them. This might be alright for Facebook because I guess they want committed users that log on the site several times per day, not users that log once in a while.

Where else would they go, at this point? I don't know of any competitors that are live and able to target Facebook refugees. Diaspora is still in Alpha, for example, and I suspect that the buzz on that one has been fading for some time.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#15

Post by SwellJoe »

olihb wrote: post #3

They don't say why or where those users are going. If the users aren't going anywhere else, they just decided that Facebook weren't for them. This might be alright for Facebook because I guess they want committed users that log on the site several times per day, not users that log once in a while.

The "social graph" is more valuable when it has everybody in it. One of the reasons facebook has such a tremendously high valuation is that social graph concept; the notion that the way people are connected and the way they interact is valuable information.

I'm not sure that the revenue they've begun to generate (which is reportedly sizable) is actually coming from that magical "social graph" rather than just plain old advertising (and quite spammy advertising at that), but that was the premise for huge valuations in the past.

So, facebook gets value from occasional users, and having occasional users go away does hurt them in the long run, since I guess the long bet with facebook is still the "social graph".

Regardless of that, negative growth in their most lucrative markets is a horrible sign for a company like facebook. Slow growth is one thing...but losing people by the millions? That indicates significant breakage. I don't know enough to know what kind of breakage, as I'm not really a facebook user (I login maybe once a month).

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#16

Post by gnosis »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #8
politician wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My hope is that people have simply tired of the concept. The privacy implications are staggering.

I don't see anything wrong with a general social network that supports sharing information with people you know. Regardless of how far people have stretched and abused the concept of "people you know" (and "information"), the infrastructure seems useful. So I don't want to see social networking go away; I want to see it entirely decentralized, such that each person's social network goes through that person's personal…

By their very nature, centralized social networking sites like Facebook force you to share information not only with the people you know, but also with the owners of site.

Some people don't mind this, but I for one don't want Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site knowing who my friend are or what I'm sharing with them. It's simply none of their business.

The only hope I see for a truly privacy-respecting social network is a distributed, peer-to-peer network. That way you'd be communicating only with those you know, at least in principle.

But even there there are major problems, such as the need for information to travel over untrusted hops to get to its destination. Encryption can help with some of it, but would still be subject to traffic analysis. Maybe a social network could be created over TOR. I don't know.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#17

Post by michaelchisari »

jordan0day wrote: post #4

Does anyone have any good guesses as to what the "next" Facebook will be? I mean, in my experience, it basically went Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook. While Facebook is certainly in the drivers seat to a much greater extent than MySpace was five or six years ago, history indicates they'll eventually be knocked off their throne. However, I haven't seen or heard of any serious newcomers in that space. I've personally…

My (admittedly biased) hope is that a distributed social ecosystem will emerge.

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#18

Post by michaelchisari »

gnosis wrote: post #16
JoshTriplett wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anything wrong with a general social network that supports sharing information with people you know. Regardless of how far people have stretched and abused the concept of "people you know" (and "information"), the infrastructure seems useful. So I don't want to see social networking go away; I want to see it entirely decentralized, such that each person's social network goes through that person's personal…

By their very nature, centralized social networking sites like Facebook force you to share information not only with the people you know, but also with the owners of site. Some people don't mind this, but I for one don't want Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site knowing who my friend are or what I'm sharing with them. It's simply none of their business. The only hope I see for a truly privacy-respec…

Encrypted, peer-to-peer social networks are prohibitively difficult. More likely, we'll see node-to-node social networks first.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#20

Post by ddkrone »

The only reason I still have my fake profile is because pretty much every site out there has 'connect with facebook' so it makes it super easy to get access to content that's only viewable by registered users. I basically provide 0 value to facebook in terms of my activities since I never visit my actual profile. I wonder how many of those millions of users are like me.
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