I stopped two years ago. As far as I am aware I'm not missing much. I did have a lot of old friends on FB, but I didn't stay in contact with them in real life. I was just lazily snooping on their lives, without giving anything in return. To be completely honest, I don't have space or time for them in my real life. It isn't because I didn't like them anymore, it was simply that I didn't have the time or energy to stay…
I feel the same way @junto. Facebook was a nice phase but now it's phased out of my life. Anyone that is important to me has my email/phone.
The fact that 1.5 billion people use Facebook kind of suggests that you are wrong.
Feeling connected no matter how small is a very strong force. I like that I have connections from my childhood to my present and to all the places I lived. Even if it is I see that my friends kids are now in high school or that someone had a great event that I had zero impact on them having. When my son was dying from cancer I just had to jump on Facebook and I had a ton of people that were willing to help out or sen…
Did I get that correctly, that the hypothesis of facebook loosing 80% of its users (in the next years) is based on a link between google searches and facebook use? What if people google facebook less than a while ago because they already know what it is and have remembered the domain name?
The article itself scoffs at the study, and continues with a long discussion that has nothing to do with it.
I don't really get the first point about scale and brand, because the examples you give like email are built on open protocols, so it's the protocol itself that is the brand. I don't need a particular brand of email client to send emails to someone.
Yes, but the choice has to be made to use email rather than Facebook, iMessage, LinkedIn, etc. For some people it's the default, but there is always advertising trying to tempt them away. Email doesn't really have a brand identity. Note how easily email converges on big email providers too, rather than everyone running their own services. Gmail is definitely a brand. Lo and behold, Gmail is a service that is "free" b…
Yes, Gmail is definitely a brand but I don't need to have a Gmail account to send an email to someone who does.
I really should flesh out my "why you can't have a good distributed social network" post some time. What does FB provide that you don't get with a combination of email/USENET/blogs/chat? Branding, janitors, and indexing. Branding is useful because these things are so scale-driven that you want to be on the one that everyone else is using. It's easier for the uninvolved to figure this out if it's the one with huge adv…
> Why should you post life updates? Because it's the "done thing".
No - it's because you've done something you think your friends would be interested in and it's a lot easier to take a photo and click 'post to Facebook' than to write to 30 people.
That's really the fundamental function of Facebook and any successor will probably succeed by doing it better in some way. eg. Snapchat enabling you to send naughty pics without them being archived on the web for the rest of your life and so on.
The fact that 1.5 billion people use Facebook kind of suggests that you are wrong.
Feeling connected no matter how small is a very strong force. I like that I have connections from my childhood to my present and to all the places I lived. Even if it is I see that my friends kids are now in high school or that someone had a great event that I had zero impact on them having. When my son was dying from cancer I just had to jump on Facebook and I had a ton of people that were willing to help out or sen…
That is awful. I don't want to imagine one of my children being seriously or terminally ill. I'm glad Facebook was able to help you and your son in that horrible situation.
The fact that 1.5 billion people use Facebook kind of suggests that you are wrong.
> The fact that 1.5 billion people use Facebook kind of suggests that you are wrong. I'm wrong? No I'm an individual with my own preferences. Each to their own. I wasn't telling anyone else to leave. I was just describing my experiences.
I kind of had the same thought the person you are responding to had. You switch from "I" to "you" in your last paragraph, which seemed to imply that you were using your experience to declare how things are for others. I found myself nodding while reading the prior paragraphs, as I have similar experiences, but disagreeing with your last paragraph as it clearly wasn't true for many others. It's somewhat true for me now, but I joined Facebook because my mother was quite (terminally) ill, and it was a perfect medium to share with her but not place any particular burden for her to write emails or respond. And I'm the 'you' in the context of your message.
I stopped two years ago. As far as I am aware I'm not missing much. I did have a lot of old friends on FB, but I didn't stay in contact with them in real life. I was just lazily snooping on their lives, without giving anything in return. To be completely honest, I don't have space or time for them in my real life. It isn't because I didn't like them anymore, it was simply that I didn't have the time or energy to stay…
I have trouble leaving Facebook because for better or worse it is how many of my friends and acquaintances communicate. I ended up finding a nice compromise: I installed an extension which hides all the content on news feed but still allows FB chat. When I couple this extension with ublock, the only thing I see when I go to Facebook is the chat interface, which is perfect for how I use the service.
Facebook have done that themselves! No extensions required! www.messenger.com is literally just FB chat, nothing else.