Facebook users drop in the US and Canada • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#21

Post by ddkrone » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:30 AM UTC

michaelchisari wrote: post #18

gnosis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And then the internet will be reinvented.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#22

Post by teej » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:31 AM UTC

moultano wrote: post #19

Anyone know their methodology? I clicked around a bit and couldn't find any information. Without knowing more my prior would attribute it to a bug.

The methodology is basically using the Facebook Ad Tool. The tool let's you target a set of users for your ads and tells you the size of that population.

The article clearly discloses the inherent issues at play.

> Going forward, we’ll be watching closely to see what longer-term trends emerge. Bugs in the Facebook advertising tool that we draw this information from, seasonal changes like college graduations, and other short-term factors, can influence numbers month to month and obscure what’s really happening.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#23

Post by rokhayakebe » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:37 AM UTC

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…

"With" from Path. I think Path is not going to get critical mass. "With" or a copy of it, however, is going to be big. The service essentially lets you say who you are with in the moment by snapping a picture. It's like checking in Time with a picture.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#24

Post by bemmu » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:38 AM UTC

It could be that the churn just exceeded new users for the first time because most possible users in USA have been reached already. Some decline is inevitable if everyone is already using your product.

There's always churn. Even as FB was growing, a part of those new users were always churning out. Each user makes their own decisions about staying in the system, they are not a sentient whole except as far as media or changes to the system might affect larger groups at once.

I imagine your tendency to leave the system to be some sort of a graph. Maybe you are 30% likely to leave and never ever come back after your first day on Facebook. After using it for a week, maybe that gets reduced to 20%. After a month, maybe you are even more unlikely to leave. If they had for example 1 million people joining per day, then 300k would be quitting per day. If the next day all of USA had been tapped out and only 200k people joined, that would look like a sudden -100k turn to decline, even though the trend was same as always.

What happens now will depend on what that churn graph looks like. Maybe it's sticky enough that they'll be able to keep a big part of the users they got and over time make it even stickier to keep even more. There will be improvements to get those users to be more active on the site. Even if there was no more user growth in the USA, there could be growth in the amount of time and money the existing userbase spends on the site.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#25

Post by joe_the_user » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:41 AM UTC

sage_joch wrote: post #9

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 sense is that Facebook is really well made, and isn't going anywhere (i.e., Facebook is to social networking what Google is to search). I could see LinkedIn getting destroyed, though. They fill a very real need, but don't seem to do it very well. This is all very qualitative, but I never feel like I have a pleasant experience on LinkedIn.

Facebook is absolutely fabulously done (complaints about it concern privacy and abuse potential but the interface is top-notch).

The thing about Facebook though, is A) The interface requires lots of care and feeding to stay clean and appealing - Facebook has stayed nice through it small number of very talented engineers. B) Facebook's economics and its supply of topnotch talent has been leverage from its constant growth and its quality as the thing that's happening.

If it instead is faced with a slow decrease in users and a feeling that it's "jumped the shark(tm)", it will have a lot of trouble keeping its economics, its talent and thus the quality of the interface. So I imagine that FB could fall apart in some medium-scale time frame. Oddly enough, I think the end of Facebook wouldn't be good news for those plots "alternatives" to it.

I actually hope Facebook IPOs soon, might postpone some problems...

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#26

Post by nhangen » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:43 AM UTC

I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point.

My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example.

As more people move to avoid the noise, they'll find solace in mini-communities, and I think that's the way forward. Not just one service, but hundreds.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#27

Post by Mazy » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:51 AM UTC

jarodlam wrote: post #10

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 think FB has another 2-3yrs before a newcomer comes along. FB will eventually be the 'old' site and uncool to be there. Speaking of privacy, there's a huge privacy hole on the site right now. Currently if I request to add certain people, their data feed starts to populate my wall before they've even accepted the friend request. I think it's because they're part of a group or network I'm already in.

Facebook pulls in anything a user you've requested to be a friend of shares publicly. It's not because you're part of a group, it's because of the privacy settings on their status updates.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#28

Post by abalog » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:52 AM UTC

nhangen wrote: post #26

I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you can do anything but diminish them at this point. My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that interest us...HN is a great example. As more people move to a…

I concur with you.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#29

Post by zmmmmm » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:55 AM UTC

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.

> If the users aren't going anywhere else, they just decided that Facebook weren't for them.

This is what I would guess. I suspect that one of Facebook's problems is that people naturally overshoot with their social network and at some point you end up with "too many" friends and logging into Facebook reveals less interesting content and more noise. I know this has certainly happened to me. 80% of the content I see upon logging in is information from people that I couldn't care less about. Facebook has encouraged this from the start by avoiding support for stratifying friends into separate groups. It's worked well for them by simplifying things, but I think they'll begin to experience some natural attrition from it as time goes by - social networks just naturally grow and grow because you very rarely "unfriend" someone. At some point it becomes burdensome to check it instead of fun and then it's all over.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#30

Post by kenjackson » Mon, Jun 13, 2011, 3:55 AM UTC

sage_joch wrote: post #9

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 sense is that Facebook is really well made, and isn't going anywhere (i.e., Facebook is to social networking what Google is to search). I could see LinkedIn getting destroyed, though. They fill a very real need, but don't seem to do it very well. This is all very qualitative, but I never feel like I have a pleasant experience on LinkedIn.

Search and social networking are very different in their ability to persist, IMO.

While switching costs are low with search, the ability to offer a better product is difficult. Momentum gives you little advantage in search. For example, Bing is not marginally better positioned with 14% market share vs when it had 9%.

Social networks are almost the polar opposite. It's hard to get any traction at all in social because switching costs are high. But if Facebook sees a competitor get 5% of its user base and then a few months later have 10% they should be scared to death. It probably means Facebook is already dead and just don't know it yet.