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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

#81

Post by frossie »

dkarl wrote: post #60
nrao123 wrote: post #32

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. Th…

Same here. I'm getting more and more bored with it. What was most interesting about Facebook for me was learning about certain people. This guy I work with likes cheesy movies, goes out to Irish bars with his wife, and likes to tweet quotes from whatever movie he's watching when he's drunk. Learning that was interesting. Seeing the same pattern every day is horribly boring. Same thing with most of my high-volume frie…

I am not on Facebook, but the last few games I tried on iOS have a "post achievement on Facebook/Twitter" every single level. I can't help thinking that if anybody is actually pushing those buttons it must drive their "friends" absolutely bonkers.

On some level I can understand the concept of "keep your friends up-to-date with your life". But not using these definitions of "friends" and "life".

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#82

Post by nikcub »

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…

that Google Trends result is filtered to show the USA only, yet the 'top languages' are, in order, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, French and then English in fifth.

makes me very skeptical about their numbers

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#83

Post by jonknee »

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.

Can't you just not follow the spammers on twitter and be fine?

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#84

Post by EwanToo »

jonknee wrote: post #83
pagekalisedown wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can't you just not follow the spammers on twitter and be fine?

Not really, when they message you whenever you mention a keyword they're tracking on (e.g. ipad), then all you can do is manually block them.

It's a fairly painful process, and considering how much visibility Twitter has of each twitter client, their automatic anti-spam process should actually be much more effective than it currently is.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#85

Post by bxr »

frossie wrote: post #81
dkarl wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I'm getting more and more bored with it. What was most interesting about Facebook for me was learning about certain people. This guy I work with likes cheesy movies, goes out to Irish bars with his wife, and likes to tweet quotes from whatever movie he's watching when he's drunk. Learning that was interesting. Seeing the same pattern every day is horribly boring. Same thing with most of my high-volume frie…

I am not on Facebook, but the last few games I tried on iOS have a "post achievement on Facebook/Twitter" every single level . I can't help thinking that if anybody is actually pushing those buttons it must drive their "friends" absolutely bonkers. On some level I can understand the concept of "keep your friends up-to-date with your life". But not using these definitions of "friends" and "life".

You can block specific applications from ever being shown to you. If it wasn't for that feature Zynga games would have made me quit facebook a few times already.

Game updates are annoying, but they aren't much better than anything else anybody posts, ever.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#86

Post by windsurfer »

jcitme wrote: post #67
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.

Reddit seems to do a great job.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#87

Post by zb »

ern wrote: post #58
abbasmehdi wrote: post #56

I'm still not sure why FB has not figured out an easy way to segment and categorize friends. FB puts me in the same room with my mom, coworkers, school buddies, and nephews. Awkward.

It allows you to group/categorize your friends, and set privacy for each group for most actions. If you wanted to hide everything from your mom, you could. If you need to share an update with your nephews, but not your school friends that's easy. Perhaps having separate Walls for different groups is the next step.

That's true for a certain category of content - wall posts, photo albums, notes - although they don't make it especially easy. For comments, you not only can't control the privacy setting (it's controlled by whoever posted the original content), you can't really even tell what it is. For other things - likes, your friend list - you can't control it at all.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#88

Post by Leynos »

tokenadult wrote: post #43
evgen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. Facebook private groups https://www.facebook.com/groups are working quite well among my circle of friends to provide a focused view of one or another niche community that forms a natural subset of my friends. There is a particular Facebook secret group that I visit…

One problem with Facebook Groups I find is that you can't have wall posts from your groups appearing in your primary timeline/newsfeed. Because of this, you have to make a concious effort to visit the group to catch up.

Since none of the groups I joined have the same level of activity I'm used to on specialized forums for those subjects, I never bother to check up on them - which of course lends itself to a vicious circle of inactivity.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#89

Post by joe_the_user »

paganel wrote: post #74
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…

> 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?

Yes, a new profile picture is either a statement about how they're doing or a clever enough little image that it's interesting.

Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada

#90

Post by jonknee »

EwanToo wrote: post #84
jonknee wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just not follow the spammers on twitter and be fine?

Not really, when they message you whenever you mention a keyword they're tracking on (e.g. ipad), then all you can do is manually block them. It's a fairly painful process, and considering how much visibility Twitter has of each twitter client, their automatic anti-spam process should actually be much more effective than it currently is.

I only get alerts from people who @reply when I already follow them. That makes it pretty much spam free.
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