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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

#61

Post by JeffL »

delackner wrote: post #51
joe_the_user wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gro…

Are we talking about the same service? The User experience is horrible. I am not just talking from a hacker perspective, as most of the people I know that complain about facebook are very NON technical people. They just complain about the same things that I also hate: That facebook makes it impossible ( by design ) to hide the endless stream of inane auto-generated SPAM that fills your news stream. The worst is that…

I suspect the streams are optimized for people whose "friends" are actually their friends. My friends list contains 30 of my real friends that I care about, so these notifications you mention aren't actually Spam to me.

The problem is that a lot of people have turned number of friends into a high score, but when your friends list is 500 people you barely know, it seems like you are basically using Facebook for the wrong thing.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#62

Post by danielrhodes »

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…

While I find the idea of many micro-communities compelling, I don't think that this is the direction things are going.

Here's why: the Internet is extremely diverse as it is and overall makes for a bad user experience where people have to cognitively deal with many different (and disagreeing) interfaces, rules, quirks, web addresses, and so on. At the beginning this heterogeneity was seen as an advantage because the amount of easily accessible information was unparalleled. However, in the past few years it seems like most successful platforms (be it YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Amazon, Wikipedia, iOS, etc.) have done well because there was a consistent and one-stop shop experience throughout.

There is still tons of room on many different verticals to improve and disruption to occur, but I wouldn't expect things to come full circle.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#63

Post by sucrenoir »

delackner wrote: post #51
joe_the_user wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gro…

Are we talking about the same service? The User experience is horrible. I am not just talking from a hacker perspective, as most of the people I know that complain about facebook are very NON technical people. They just complain about the same things that I also hate: That facebook makes it impossible ( by design ) to hide the endless stream of inane auto-generated SPAM that fills your news stream. The worst is that…

25 millions ipads sold and still no way to get a decent user experience on the iPad. And i have tried a lot of apps...

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#64

Post by tintin »

btilly wrote: post #49

In related news for the first time ever, LinkedIn trumped Facebook in a survey about which social networks people care about. http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/linkedin-trumps-f... Apparently helping get you sucked in to Farmville is not as valuable to people as helping you get a job and stay connected with what is happening with old co-workers. Go figure.

I'm not sure you could call LinkedIn a social network. It can be nice to find out about an old friend, but most of it is pure business. So I'm not surprised about the survey.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#65

Post by delackner »

JeffL wrote: post #61
delackner wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we talking about the same service? The User experience is horrible. I am not just talking from a hacker perspective, as most of the people I know that complain about facebook are very NON technical people. They just complain about the same things that I also hate: That facebook makes it impossible ( by design ) to hide the endless stream of inane auto-generated SPAM that fills your news stream. The worst is that…

I suspect the streams are optimized for people whose "friends" are actually their friends. My friends list contains 30 of my real friends that I care about, so these notifications you mention aren't actually Spam to me. The problem is that a lot of people have turned number of friends into a high score, but when your friends list is 500 people you barely know, it seems like you are basically using Facebook for the wr…

Let's see, 349 friends today. I personally know every single one of them. Do you really care when one of your friends adds someone they met last night at a bar? Or when they change their profile pic, again?

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#66

Post by delackner »

sucrenoir wrote: post #63
delackner wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we talking about the same service? The User experience is horrible. I am not just talking from a hacker perspective, as most of the people I know that complain about facebook are very NON technical people. They just complain about the same things that I also hate: That facebook makes it impossible ( by design ) to hide the endless stream of inane auto-generated SPAM that fills your news stream. The worst is that…

25 millions ipads sold and still no way to get a decent user experience on the iPad. And i have tried a lot of apps...

There is no facebook ipad app. Just a poorly implemented mobile site. It would be perfectly easy for them to have done it right.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#67

Post by jcitme »

noonespecial wrote: post #13

We're two of those deserters here. It seemed too much like tv, in reverse. Everybody transmits and nobody watches.

This is a problem inherent in any form of social media. Unfortunately, it's not easily fixed. You need to find a way to strike a balance between rewarding content creation and punishing spam, and the line in thin.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#68

Post by JeffL »

delackner wrote: post #65
JeffL wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the streams are optimized for people whose "friends" are actually their friends. My friends list contains 30 of my real friends that I care about, so these notifications you mention aren't actually Spam to me. The problem is that a lot of people have turned number of friends into a high score, but when your friends list is 500 people you barely know, it seems like you are basically using Facebook for the wr…

Let's see, 349 friends today. I personally know every single one of them. Do you really care when one of your friends adds someone they met last night at a bar? Or when they change their profile pic, again?

I would say it's a combination of caring a little bit and having those events be so rare with only 30 friends that the signal to noise ratio is still really high.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#69

Post by hessenwolf »

tintin wrote: post #64
btilly wrote: post #49

In related news for the first time ever, LinkedIn trumped Facebook in a survey about which social networks people care about. http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/linkedin-trumps-f... Apparently helping get you sucked in to Farmville is not as valuable to people as helping you get a job and stay connected with what is happening with old co-workers. Go figure.

I'm not sure you could call LinkedIn a social network. It can be nice to find out about an old friend, but most of it is pure business. So I'm not surprised about the survey.

I agree with your point about the survey results being due to it being pure business, but I still think it is a 'social network'; it's just not one that is made to spend a long time on. I take a gander at it circa once a month. (Their new feature that shows everybody that I looked at their profile though really concerns me.)

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#70

Post by auganov »

As any other social site ever created it seems to be following the same path. Each month what I'm seeing on my landing page is getting less relevant and more annoying (even without growing my friend base too much and having around 20 friends, I cannot imagine what happens to those over 100). Most of that spam is generated by few active friends, while the rest does pretty much nothing. Most of communication that I see taking place is very very meaningless, somebody posts a video: "lol", "haha", "nice one", that's pretty much it.

For me it's a socially filtered spam [funny stuff?] site.

If some site can encourage people to have meaningful communication again it will take on Facebook, no doubt. Get 3 of my important friends on the site and I'm sold. Then Facebook just becomes a big contact list. And at that point I'm not sure where it goes. It might be a contact-list site for a long long time.

Facebook might not die as a website, but competitors will definitely takeaway a lot of value from it. And so far I don't see it becoming much more than a contact-list.

And keep in mind that the less engaged the users are the less ad revenue there will be. I have no doubt that as we're speaking right now users are less and less engaged with the site. Growth is still fast so the revenue is rising, but once that stops it will crumble.

The will have to get more aggressive with ads or people will simply stop to notice them at all. Or perhaps start selling more of the user data. At this point there's not much you can do.

Also the growth they see outside of the western world might be very much junk. I'm in Poland, Facebook craze is already old news here yet I get english ads? It's great that AT&T has high speed internet for 20$, but I'm sorry, I cannot purchase that here.

Everybody knows ad revenue is tricky. Facebook is no different.

Nobody is going bankrupt, I'm not saying that. Facebook is here and it will stay for few more years for sure, but to compare it to google is crazy. Google can be conquered too I'm sure, but Facebook definitely makes for a far more fragile target.

Personally I'd say it will simply decay and we might not see another social site being that big in a long time to come. Facebook has half of the world on there, cool, but guess what, I am not connecting with those people and never will.

Facebook managed to get a lot of people registered in one place, but has it managed to truly connect a lot of people? Not at all.

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