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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

#71

Post by bad_user »

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.

The best thing about LinkedIn for me is their recommendations system. Whenever I'm looking at people's profiles on LinkedIn, I'm looking at their work history and their recommendations, the other stuff being basically useless. And mostly I value recommendations coming from people I know.

So it's a social network and I think it is more pure and valuable than the Facebook graph since on LinkedIn you only want a thousand connections if you're an HR person, not because you need friends for Zynga games, so most people on LinkedIn have between 10-200 connections representing old colleagues.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#73

Post by pagekalisedown »

bad_user wrote: post #71
tintin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The best thing about LinkedIn for me is their recommendations system. Whenever I'm looking at people's profiles on LinkedIn, I'm looking at their work history and their recommendations, the other stuff being basically useless. And mostly I value recommendations coming from people I know. So it's a social network and I think it is more pure and valuable than the Facebook graph since on LinkedIn you only want a thousan…

Aren't people giving out recommendations like it's going out of style?

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#74

Post by paganel »

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…

> Y and 15 other friends changed their profile pic > X is now friends with 10 new people

It might be just me, but isn't this the main use of FB, i.e. stalking? Of course I want to know when my friends have changed their profile pictures, how else would I assess their happiness and fulfillment in life if not by looking at their latest photos?

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#75

Post by arethuza »

pagekalisedown wrote: post #72
noonespecial wrote: post #13

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

My Facebook account is alright, but my Twitter and Linkedin are overrun by spammers.

I seem to be plagued by recruiters on LinkedIn - effectively the same thing as spam.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#77

Post by nextparadigms »

I felt this was bound to happen. Too many "friends", too much spam, and it became too "mainstream", which means the early adopters would want to move on to something else.

If there actually was "something else" right now, a paradigm shifting social network, the decay of Facebook would've been even faster, but unfortunately there isn't much to replace it right now, but I think there will be by the end of the year.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#78

Post by arethuza »

michaelchisari wrote: post #17
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

I agree that a distributed ecosystem would seem the way forward, do you have any pointers to the main features of the Appleseed project, particularly:

- What shortcomings in current approaches it is addressing

- What technical approaches are being used

- Why these are better than what we currently have

It would be great to have some description of how the distributed part of the system will actually work.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#79

Post by icebraining »

danielrhodes wrote: post #62
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…

Well, there's Reddit and its collection of small communities under the same banner.

But I think as more and more CMSs start introducing semantic information in their HTML, we'll start to have more client side features that work across all such websites, and eventually we'll go full circle and reinvent USENET, but now with a dozen layers of abstraction to support it.

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