Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Can Anyone Stop Facebook?

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 52 posts

Re: Can Anyone Stop Facebook?

#21

Post by chunkyslink »

zaidf wrote: post #9
mmphosis wrote: post #5

I have one facebook account with a totally fake profile that I used once to view someone's photos. I'm done with facebook, but I guess my once-only fake account still counts towards the growing number of facebook users. I am surprised by how pervasive facebook is. I insist that people post their photos on flickr or some other service because I don't want to use facebook. They in turn insist that I sign up to facebook…

You're in the absolute minority with your fake profile. I've been a heavy fb user for 5 years and can't recall the last time I saw a fake profile.

I completely disagree. I have a fake facebook profile that I use to access useful groups / access content from organizations that use it.

I would absolutely hate to use my real profile as I find the whole 'incoming' side of it intrusive and desperate.

The last thing is need is to have to deal with all the useless drivel people would be expecting me to take part in with a real profile.

I would also say that at least 4 of my friends do the same.

Re: Can Anyone Stop Facebook?

#22

Post by ryanwaggoner »

electromagnetic wrote: post #11
marltod wrote: post #6

Facebook's business model is busted. Costs are higher than revenue per user. The model has to change, become a search gateway, start selling products people want to buy, or cut costs features and charge high bandwidth users.

Facebook should be cornering its games market with online payments. Charge $5 for 450 'game points', basically you charge $5 for 450 real-world equivalent 'cents' that you can spend arcade style in whatever game you want. No facebook game will ever get a payment from me while they're relying on third party providers. There's a slim chance they'll get my money through paypal (since I've had a paypal account longer tha…

People are going to trust facebook, but they're not going to trust 'cherry credits' or whatever suckass companies you know nothing about that you're signing your credit card information over to.

Judging by the ridiculous amounts of money that social gaming companies are hauling in, this is clearly not true.

Re: Can Anyone Stop Facebook?

#23

Post by gaius »

mmphosis wrote: post #5

I have one facebook account with a totally fake profile that I used once to view someone's photos. I'm done with facebook, but I guess my once-only fake account still counts towards the growing number of facebook users. I am surprised by how pervasive facebook is. I insist that people post their photos on flickr or some other service because I don't want to use facebook. They in turn insist that I sign up to facebook…

I guess my once-only fake account still counts towards the growing number of facebook users

FB only counts users with recent activity.

I insist that people post their photos on flickr or some other service because I don't want to use facebook

The problem with Flickr is that not everyone is on Flickr. Facebook's ability to tag photos and associate them with events is light years ahead of anyone else, not least because they have a critical mass of the people in the photos on the service.

Re: Can Anyone Stop Facebook?

#24

Post by sireat »

mmphosis wrote: post #5

I have one facebook account with a totally fake profile that I used once to view someone's photos. I'm done with facebook, but I guess my once-only fake account still counts towards the growing number of facebook users. I am surprised by how pervasive facebook is. I insist that people post their photos on flickr or some other service because I don't want to use facebook. They in turn insist that I sign up to facebook…

I am in the same boat, I have a fake facebook profile that I used once for a specific (slightly nefarious) purpose and that was that.

Anyhow, I must be one of the few according to Slate, who does not like sharing everything I do with my friends, enemies and strangers.

Re: Can Anyone Stop Facebook?

#25

Post by sireat »

zaidf wrote: post #9
mmphosis wrote: post #5

I have one facebook account with a totally fake profile that I used once to view someone's photos. I'm done with facebook, but I guess my once-only fake account still counts towards the growing number of facebook users. I am surprised by how pervasive facebook is. I insist that people post their photos on flickr or some other service because I don't want to use facebook. They in turn insist that I sign up to facebook…

You're in the absolute minority with your fake profile. I've been a heavy fb user for 5 years and can't recall the last time I saw a fake profile.

With all due respect, how do you know you haven't seen a fake profile?

Fake profiles can be quite elaborate.

Re: Can Anyone Stop Facebook?

#26

Post by csomar »

michael_dorfman wrote: post #20
ivenkys wrote: post #4

"Perhaps one day not long from now, everything on the Web will be a mere extension of Facebook." - a very optimistic view of the growth of FB , to put it mildly.

Sure. But remember that there was a time in recent memory where the notion that AOL would be a mere extension of the web was a very optimistic thought as well, or that some young upstart would knock AltaVista from king-of-the-hill in Search. "Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

+1, may be something new come and take it! It's just a luck for facebook that no other new startup screw them (Twitter is good, but too limited comparing to Facebook)

Re: Can Anyone Stop Facebook?

#27

Post by theli0nheart »

tiffani wrote: post #2

I have to ask of that article, though, how many people are actively using Facebook nowadays (as in, how many login everyday and actually do something), too. It never mentions it like a lot of articles about Facebook do (although I suspect it's a lot). I ask this because my Facebook usage has declined greatly since graduating from college last year and it's really gone down since they introduced the stream and became…

I totally agree. Facebook at this point is a phonebook. That's all I use it for now. I could care less what a random acquaintance did last weekend. It is totally irrelevant and wastes my time. Twitter forces me to focus on only those who I care about.

http://twitter.com/dwlz/status/1379312535

Re: Can Anyone Stop Facebook?

#28

Post by acg »

ams6110 wrote: post #13
figital wrote: post #8

Look at Facebook ... look at ChromeOS .... it's the same thing (only Facebook is further along). The business is data mining and advertising. The issue will be who do you distrust the least. Who is going to make it easiest to export my personal data to use somewhere else? Hopefully us geeks will keep pushing for this and then help everyone else follow. Until then I feel like I'm just toying around with the flavor-of-…

I don't trust any of them. That's why I don't have a Facebook page, I don't have a MySpace page, I don't use gmail or any of Google's services. I don't have a Twitter account. I do have an account on LinkedIn because my boss at my last job asked me to set one up, but I never update it.

If you start along that road who do you trust. Many organisations now collect data on their customers: loyalty cards are a good example. That is before you get to public organisations. You'd have to be a hermit for data not to be collected on you and to be sold.

Do you just object because some companies make it their primary revenue stream or because it's obvious?

Re: Can Anyone Stop Facebook?

#30

Post by electromagnetic »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #22
electromagnetic wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook should be cornering its games market with online payments. Charge $5 for 450 'game points', basically you charge $5 for 450 real-world equivalent 'cents' that you can spend arcade style in whatever game you want. No facebook game will ever get a payment from me while they're relying on third party providers. There's a slim chance they'll get my money through paypal (since I've had a paypal account longer tha…

People are going to trust facebook, but they're not going to trust 'cherry credits' or whatever suckass companies you know nothing about that you're signing your credit card information over to. Judging by the ridiculous amounts of money that social gaming companies are hauling in, this is clearly not true.

Actually the social gaming companies that are actually hauling any real money in (IE Zynga) sell their credits themselves. You either pay Zynga directly by credit card, or you can pay indirectly through paypal. Those are the only two options, but as for games on facebook the points are still only going into a single game and cannot be used in different games by one developer, or in games by different developers, like a facebook controlled 'currency' could.

Essentially, it would be if Apple didn't allow you to put money onto your account. You instead have to use your credit card to make a transaction on every single song purchase. It would be stupid, and Apple wouldn't make nearly as much money as it could.

> We’ve found once you get into these digital-only goods and services there’s massive opportunity for fraud. We couldn’t find a single company that could manage or solve that problem for us. We had to build the whole infrastructure in-house. We had to go out and get relationships with credit-card processing companies. - Mark Pincus

Facebook would have a unique opportunity to step in and dominate this market. If Zynga cannot control these transaction companies, how can smaller developers? Like I said, tapping into this market could mean Facebook could not only boost revenues to many of these social gaming companies, but it could be taking profits off of every transaction. 5/6ths of Zynga's users are from social networking sites, meaning Facebook could easily take profits from 5/6ths of Zynga's users by being trustworthy. There are then plenty of other developers in the market, especially thousands of smaller developers, who could make Facebook hundreds of millions that they're not tapping.

Post reply on HN