121–130 of 139 posts
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.
We're two of those deserters here. It seemed too much like tv, in reverse. Everybody transmits and nobody watches.
Wait, isn't that TV in forward?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Then there's the typical drama on any social network, the annoyances with closed systems (we're happy with email and caldav, thanks, anything can use them!), and the endless, endless spam on the news feed. I always hid the feed with my user CSS file, and stayed on top of it, but she'd get roped back in when it occasionally broke. Being social is addictive, and she's more social than I am.
Suppose you're in a room with 5 close friends having a conversation. You're comfortable, animated, energetic, outgoing. In the midst of this engrossing conversation 400 other acquaintances silently enter the room. Suddenly you notice them and realize they can all hear every word you're saying. Most people find this scenario a bit socially uncomfortable and clam right up. Facebook's growth has created this scenario fo…
You can wall off groups of people within Facebook, but the effort required to do this is beyond the motivation level that I'd expect most Facebook users (myself included) to have. Like privacy, making Facebook more tolerable to use is an opt-in thing, requiring proactive measures by the user.
Facebook's entire premise is that people LIKE being heard/seen and LIKE seeing/hearing others, in their social graph.
What is really needed is multiple distinct social graphs per user with distinct walls between them, done elegantly... this isn't an easy problem to solve.
There was a really nice presentation from a Googler (who subsequently moved to Facebook) which described this problem eloquently... but I can't seem to find the link.
In related news for the first time ever, LinkedIn trumped Facebook in a survey about which social networks people care about. http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/linkedin-trumps-f... Apparently helping get you sucked in to Farmville is not as valuable to people as helping you get a job and stay connected with what is happening with old co-workers. Go figure.
I'm not sure you could call LinkedIn a social network. It can be nice to find out about an old friend, but most of it is pure business. So I'm not surprised about the survey.
It can do this because people care about where/what their friends and colleagues are working.
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You can disable/block a lot of those types of updates. I get very few automated updates, and it's very easy to block automated updates from apps people might use. I only say this because I don't see "X is now friends with 10 new people" or notifications that "X changed their profile pic." You can disable a lot of these notifications by clicking the little X on each post, and blocking the specific item you want to blo…
If you click the X it removes the specific story you clicked on. It does not (at least in the fb version I am being served) block all stories of the same type, nor do I see any option to do so.
That being said, I remember the first time I discovered that. For the longest time, I just assumed it would remove only the post.
Odd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can wall off groups of people within Facebook, but the effort required to do this is beyond the motivation level that I'd expect most Facebook users (myself included) to have. Like privacy, making Facebook more tolerable to use is an opt-in thing, requiring proactive measures by the user.
If walling off your group is equivalently difficult to creating a yahoo/google group, then yeah. Facebook's entire premise is that people LIKE being heard/seen and LIKE seeing/hearing others, in their social graph. What is really needed is multiple distinct social graphs per user with distinct walls between them, done elegantly... this isn't an easy problem to solve. There was a really nice presentation from a Google…
It's interesting to consider the threshold for the sort of social discomfort I described above. In my case it hit around 2/3 of my current friend count.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If walling off your group is equivalently difficult to creating a yahoo/google group, then yeah. Facebook's entire premise is that people LIKE being heard/seen and LIKE seeing/hearing others, in their social graph. What is really needed is multiple distinct social graphs per user with distinct walls between them, done elegantly... this isn't an easy problem to solve. There was a really nice presentation from a Google…
Interesting. I'd love to see the presentation if you (or anyone else) end(s) up finding the link. It's interesting to consider the threshold for the sort of social discomfort I described above. In my case it hit around 2/3 of my current friend count.
Suppose you're in a room with 5 close friends having a conversation. You're comfortable, animated, energetic, outgoing. In the midst of this engrossing conversation 400 other acquaintances silently enter the room. Suddenly you notice them and realize they can all hear every word you're saying. Most people find this scenario a bit socially uncomfortable and clam right up. Facebook's growth has created this scenario fo…
You can wall off groups of people within Facebook, but the effort required to do this is beyond the motivation level that I'd expect most Facebook users (myself included) to have. Like privacy, making Facebook more tolerable to use is an opt-in thing, requiring proactive measures by the user.
It could be that the churn just exceeded new users for the first time because most possible users in USA have been reached already. Some decline is inevitable if everyone is already using your product. There's always churn. Even as FB was growing, a part of those new users were always churning out. Each user makes their own decisions about staying in the system, they are not a sentient whole except as far as media or…
Another graph that would be relevant would be the likelihood of people who have been exposed to facebook through their friends, media saturation and advertising, yet still haven't joined, to be tempted to join later. In other words - facebook has already saturated the internet world's radar, and people who haven't joined already are completely aware of its existance, function, and benefits, and still not joining. Those will be very expensive users to get, so IMO retention should be their major focus. I stayed through the "6-month updates-full-of-farmville problem", because they fixed it, they barely kept me through the "1-and-1/2-year privacy panic" after backing off on some portion of their stridency (and profitability per user), and they lost me completely, along with a number of other people I know, after the "2-year bored-to-shit-with-people-I-went-to-HS-with-telling-me-where-they-went-to-lunch-and-what-they-think-of-Obama lull" which I'm not sure they can do anything about.
If a large cohort of similarly aged users hit some peak that facebook is unable or unwilling to iron out at the same time, and there's no supply of cheap "Wow, there's a place on the internet where I can keep track of all of my college buddies!" users to replace them, there could be a precipitous fall.