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The Facebook experiment has failed

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Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#291

Post by mhaymo »

untog wrote: post #221
austenallred wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google+ really was on to something with its circles: My friends are easily divisible into groups, and, apart from life events like getting engaged, what I want to share is only really relevant to a specific subset. I know Facebook has groups you can share specific things with, but it's not a feature Facebook has focused on, so even I don't really use it. I could use google +, but no one else does, and there's not muc…

Agreed that Circles are a great idea- and they're just as great on Facebook. I am lucky that I have a relatively small number of friends- categorising them did not take long at all. Now I can post updates to different groups, and it works great.

Even those who can't be bothered to categorise their contacts can use the automatically-generated ones, based on family, location and college/workplace. It's very freeing to be able to ask only close friends in my city if they want to see a movie, or link only those that I have put in the "Techie" group to a great article I found on Hacker News.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#292

Post by scholia »

cargo8 wrote: post #284
scholia wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really easy to hide people on Facebook, if you even see their stuff in the first place. Mainly, you'll see stuff from the people you interact with. Otherwise, G+ Circles are ridiculously clunky and slow, due to Google choosing superficial eye-candy over functionality.

The problem with Facebook's mechanism for "hiding people" is that until you go through immense effort, your experience sucks. The "Acquaintances" list (which I might add was a knee-jerk reaction to the launch of Google+) only serves to take certain people out of your stream, while plugging in other friends that you don't care about. Until you go through this cycle (which is actually phenomenal social engineering as i…

Odd, but your experience is completely unlike mine, and that of everybody else I know well. I almost never see stuff from people I don't interact with (except when close friends share it, which is bad enough). In my experience, most people don't need to hide more than a couple of friends, and certainly not more than a few at once.

Almost all my extended global family uses Facebook several times a day (we have a closed group), and I often sit next to other family members using the system. I am much more familiar with it than most people, especially with non-expert users.

It does require some effort to sort Facebook friends into half a dozen channels, but Facebook suggests people to add, which actually makes it rather easy. It becomes a natural progression, over time.

Meanwhile, whatever the theoretical claims, G+ remains almost completely unusable. In my experience, it's virtually impossible to get ordinary people to use it, and they don't last more than a day or two. And from a usability point of view, Circles are crap.

Although I've used G+ quite a lot, and have something over 5,000 followers, my use has declined over time. Following the last desperate (Facebook copying) redesign, I've more or less given in...

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#293

Post by sssparkkk »

I'm surprised no one has mentioned WhatsApp groups and Google Hangouts yet. To me this is the evolution of social networking, where people finally start sharing stuff with each other again. Only this time, it's in a very private group of people, real-time and organised around a common interest/background.

I see this happening all around me: groupchat with pictures is the new Facebook.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#294

Post by robomartin »

bittercynic wrote: post #280
robomartin wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, sure. You go and try to run a real web-based business with employees, offices and the required infrastructure without "money money". The point stands: If you as a user don't explicitly pay for it with cash, using an ad blocker means you have chosen to deny the service some revenue. OK, don't call it theft. That's fine. Here's a simple mental exercise: Assume that 100% of the entire world-wide Internet audience us…

That might not be so good for Silicon Valley, but I believe mankind would be richer overall if a huge chunk of the internet ceased to exist.

Sadly enough, it is hard to argue with that.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#295

Post by pseut »

jarek wrote: post #283
pyoung wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could use google groups (it's basically a mailing list). Pretty straight forward. We had one for our 'post-college' social circle. It was a good way to spread the word about happy hours and parties, without spamming everyone on facebook.

I would caution against using a service like Google Groups for this, actually. There's been too many changes to corporate-backed services like this (Yahoo! Groups' 2010 mess, remember Google Groups was originally a usenet reader to begin with) and moving a community is a pain. Host it somewhere that won't pivot.

That's exactly my concern about google/yahoo/zoho/whatever.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#296

Post by gavinpc »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #169

Facebook is performance art. It's a phonebook of people I lost contact with many years ago. It's also a quasi-broken emailing list program. It might be a decent advertising platform for small businesses. Don't know. It's not a news feed. It's not stories relevant to me. It's not a way to actually have friends. It's not a place where people create things and share (mostly). People might think it's those things. Hell,…

> I've always thought Facebook was from the devil.

But you can't stop using it. Why?

I quit Facebook about two years ago, when I stopped liking it. Too many political arguments and misunderstandings. Guess what? Life goes on.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#297

Post by dreamdu5t »

puredemo wrote: post #288
dreamdu5t wrote: post #224

Am I the only one who has no issue with Facebook whatsoever? I love it. It's free. I find incredible value in it. People need to get a grip.

You find incredible value in it because you're so old. Of course someone in their fifties wants to feel like they're "more a part of something."

I'm 25.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#298

Post by onedev »

andyhmltn wrote: post #75
onedev wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My FB feed is phenomenal. I hide people that post spam, and unfollow pages that spam me. What's left is the people I care about and the content from pages I care about (e.g. The Economist posts really good content every day, so does Rap Genius, and brands like Nike/Adidas; all of which I like-- in the traditional sense). It's basically my "newspaper". I even follow HN and it feeds me the newest stuff from HN alongsid…

You're a very lucky person then! Sadly I'm at around the 1,000 friends mark and I have a feeling it'd be a bit too much work to make my timeline useful again.

It doesn't take any work at all.

Just look at your feed. As soon as you see someone you don't care about just one click hide them or unfriend them (if socially possible).

If you see a post from a page you don't care about, then one click unfollow them.

It's really simple. Their newsfeed algorithms are actually really awesome at figuring out the rest once you give it a tiny bit of feedback like I mentioned above.

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#299

Post by cargo8 »

scholia wrote: post #292
cargo8 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Facebook's mechanism for "hiding people" is that until you go through immense effort, your experience sucks. The "Acquaintances" list (which I might add was a knee-jerk reaction to the launch of Google+) only serves to take certain people out of your stream, while plugging in other friends that you don't care about. Until you go through this cycle (which is actually phenomenal social engineering as i…

Odd, but your experience is completely unlike mine, and that of everybody else I know well. I almost never see stuff from people I don't interact with (except when close friends share it, which is bad enough). In my experience, most people don't need to hide more than a couple of friends, and certainly not more than a few at once. Almost all my extended global family uses Facebook several times a day (we have a close…

I'm curious, how many Facebook friends do you have approximately? Two years ago I removed 600 friends, and now I still have 1200 again -__-

I think none of the networks are perfect, but I don't use Google+ only for personal connections. There is quite a lot of (photographic and technology, at least) content that is interesting to read.

And not to get into any sort of Fanboy war, but which redesign are you talking about? Before Google+'s most recent redesign into the multi-column pinterest-esque layout, Facebook's timeline update is in fact quite a copy of Google+'s old design (bigger pictures in speech bubbly things out of profile pictures).

Re: The Facebook experiment has failed

#300

Post by scholia »

cargo8 wrote: post #299
scholia wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd, but your experience is completely unlike mine, and that of everybody else I know well. I almost never see stuff from people I don't interact with (except when close friends share it, which is bad enough). In my experience, most people don't need to hide more than a couple of friends, and certainly not more than a few at once. Almost all my extended global family uses Facebook several times a day (we have a close…

I'm curious, how many Facebook friends do you have approximately? Two years ago I removed 600 friends, and now I still have 1200 again -__- I think none of the networks are perfect, but I don't use Google+ only for personal connections. There is quite a lot of (photographic and technology, at least) content that is interesting to read. And not to get into any sort of Fanboy war, but which redesign are you talking abo…

I have about 500 Facebook friends, but only about two dozen in a family channel and another two dozen in a Close Friends channel. The bulk are in channels for work colleagues (big company), business contacts, and people I know who live abroad. Today, I wouldn't friend most of the business contacts, but that's ancient history.

I've lived in North America and my wife's family is Chinese so we are pretty widely spread. I have close relations in five different countries, but the majority are in Asia.

So, in an average Facebook session, I see posts from about 50 people, and I know almost all of them very well. I see a lot of baby and toddler pictures, with more to come ;-)

I have no relatives at all who use G+, and very few colleagues/business contacts who actually use it. Also, I don't see much new content there. I've usually seen it already via Twitter, Reddit, HN or RSS feeds.

I also use LinkedIn and Quora, and as a former /. and Digg user, I sometimes drop by those as well. They all have their niches. Unfortunately, it's hard to see anything that G+ does better than the rest, from my point of view.

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