China is really a stumbling block. I've actually been thinking about the best way to penetrate the Chinese market... I'm thinking the strategy is to start young, and keep good relations with their government. I guess this is tricky, especially if the founders can't speak Chinese, and have no family ties.
Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
111–120 of 139 posts
Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
#112 It's trendy to hate Facebook these days but I think it's more than that.
People want to stay connected especially people 20 to 30 years-old and how do they do that now? Smartphones, iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices.
Facebook hasn't lost the battle it's just become obsolete.
Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
#113I deleted facebook about six months ago because it was a huge stressor that added very little value to my life. I have too many subsets of friends, which makes it impossible to maintain one personality without offending someone. This just isn't how human's interact and I think it will eventually kill off facebook, unless they find some way to mitigate it. For reference: 1) Highschool friends and family who are incred…
I think humans inherently want to nurture each of their relationships, whether close or not, individually. Along with tailoring our communication to each person, we exclude large parts of our lives and minds from people that we want to be friends with. Doing that naturally and through different contexts is one thing, but having to electronically do that for each relationship is just impossible.
Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
#114 To quote the Disney Hipster meme, "it's too mainstream". Perhaps I have an obscure point of view, but Facebook lost it's luster for a lot of people when the older crowd started to really embrace it. It's not as cool as it once was. This is a big problem for a lot of companies, not just social media.
Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
#115We're two of those deserters here. It seemed too much like tv, in reverse. Everybody transmits and nobody watches.
Same here. My wife and I called it quits because it was just a big stressor and added nothing of value.
I don't understand why it would stress you out. Can you explain?
Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
people bring this stuff on themselves by treating fb as a massive 'who I know or am related to' index instead of following who they are interested in. I suppose fb brought some of this on themselves when they went down the twitter-emulation path a few years ago.
It's interesting that you mention the "who am I related to" aspect, because Geni.com is exactly that. After altercations with unhinged second cousins-once-removed and unpleasant uncles, I set privacy to maximum and abandoned Geni (Geni's habit of spamming people who you added also led to a few unpleasant encounters at family reunions). The family tree idea was good, but the social aspect turned out to be unpleasant.
Some of the same relatives are friends on Facebook, and it is much more pleasant experience, because they are nominal "friends", but are in a high privacy group, so we don't have much opportunity to interact.
Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
#117I'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.
It’s too difficult, and too much work, and too much to remember, and even then fails. What if I wanted to share some posts with some friends, some with other, some with all. Have some activity visible to some, some to others, and some to all? What if I wanted to share some friends with some, some with others, some to all.
FB does a terrible job at mimicking real-life social interactions. How comfortable would you feel if everyone whose number you added to your phonebook could see all your other contacts in the phone? Well FB does that. They let new friends see all friends without any relevancy guard or protections.
Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
#118I 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…
When you are shopping, you want a trusted second party. E.g., Amazon.
While Wikipedia is cool, it still doesn't beat the enthusiast's homepage.
And Facebook has never had the personality of GeoCities.
Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
#119They 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.
Where else would they go, at this point? I don't know of any competitors that are live and able to target Facebook refugees. Diaspora is still in Alpha, for example, and I suspect that the buzz on that one has been fading for some time.
Flickr and meetup, or similar services. Sharing photos and organizing events are pretty much the only real uses for FB in any case.
Re: Facebook users drop in the US and Canada
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Can you limit who can contact you? Or do the 'pro'-versions undo this privacy setting for those who pay?