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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

#31

Post by pointillistic »

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…

Technically speaking it takes to much "gardening" to run HN-like site. There are millions of niche forums there already. But it's the platform and the interface that makes HN different. I don't know if there is a technical expertise to similarly run other communities there.

Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#32

Post by nrao123 »

I have long believed that Facebook/MySpace is like a TV show. Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends.

In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Those businesses have shorter shelf lives.

On the other hand, Google/Microsoft are in the productivity/time saving business and they have more durable advantages since they don't have to keep coming up ways to make people stick around. People stick around and use their service, because people save time.

Watch out for Twitter to do to Facebook what, Facebook did to Myspace and what Myspace did to Friendster.

Twitter on the other hand may not exactly be like a TV show as much as TV channel with each mega Twitter star (e.g. Charlie Sheen) a TV show within that channel.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#33

Post by evgen »

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…

Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#35

Post by paulitex »

pointillistic wrote: post #31
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…

Technically speaking it takes to much "gardening" to run HN-like site. There are millions of niche forums there already. But it's the platform and the interface that makes HN different. I don't know if there is a technical expertise to similarly run other communities there. Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.

> Unless of course the HN platform is released as an open source project.

1. go to http://arclanguage.org/install

2. download, untar arc3.tar

3. see news.arc (hn source)

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#36

Post by anthony_franco »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #2

I see their numbers. How can I trust them? Mostly I see a lot of stuff trying to sell to you their service but I don't see how they actually collect their data.

As someone else mentioned, they use Facebook's own advertising tool to estimate the numbers. And their could be many things wrong with it. But if you put that number in the context of other metrics, such as Google trends (http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook&ctab=0&geo=u...), then the numbers make sense. Now the question is, are they gonna have slow sustained growth from now on like Skype (http://www.google.com/trends?q=skype&ctab=0&geo=us&#...) or fall off a cliff like MySpace (http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace&ctab=0&geo=us...)? Remains to be seen.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#37

Post by jsz0 »

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…

I think it's settled for the next decade or so at least.

With 687 million users if each user spent 15 minutes switching to an alternative it would take a combined time investment of about 20,000 years for Facebook to disappear.

Of course they don't have to lose all their users to become irrelevant..

If Facebook's growth stopped today and they began to lose users at a rate of about 90,000 per day it would take 10 years to lose 50% of their users.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#38

Post by rhizome »

evgen wrote: post #33
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…

Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.

They just changed all Facebook Groups to a more-simplified version just a month or two ago so I doubt they're going to get any more sophisticated on that level.

What do you imagine they would do otherwise? More to the point, what's the business case for doing what you describe? They could require FGroups to self-categorize in order to narrow and aid their advertising sales, but that's not foolproof and lots of groups would just as soon choose "Other."

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#39

Post by zitterbewegung »

anthony_franco wrote: post #36
zitterbewegung wrote: post #2

I see their numbers. How can I trust them? Mostly I see a lot of stuff trying to sell to you their service but I don't see how they actually collect their data.

As someone else mentioned, they use Facebook's own advertising tool to estimate the numbers. And their could be many things wrong with it. But if you put that number in the context of other metrics, such as Google trends ( http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook&ctab=0&geo=u... ), then the numbers make sense. Now the question is, are they gonna have slow sustained growth from now on like Skype ( http://www.google.com…

I guess the real question is if they have reached market saturation or not.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#40

Post by a3_nm »

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…

There is a social network called Sone on top of Freenet http://new-wiki.freenetproject.org/Sone

Still experimental though.

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