Americans spend 7 hours per month on Facebook, on average. It's not dying any more than "TV" is dying.
Is Facebook dying?
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#22Re: Is Facebook dying?
#23Several of my friends have quit Facebook. Many on multiple occasions. Nearly all of them have eventually come back. Many of them multiple times. I think the ones who are still gone will come back sometime. Some inevitably won't. But I think the number of people who dislike Facebook enough to never want to use it are in the extreme minority. I think most people just don't think about whether it's evil or not. It's jus…
I agree with your thoughts about having an archive to look back through in many years to come.
I'm in college right now and I can imagine in a few years looking back the messaging history (i.e. private conversations) will seem funny.
I dunno. I think there is something to be said about the whole archival nature of it. And Facebook knows this - it's sort of the entire reason behind Timeline.
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#24It seems a little hasty to proclaim the death of Facebook based on a sample size of two kids. In fact, when I worked in marketing, I used to dread statements from leadership (or whomever) that began with "My kid was doing X, so we should get into X," or "I heard about Y on the radio, so I wonder...," etc. Dangerously flawed assumptions can come from this line of reasoning.
Anecdotal samples can be useful to form hypotheses, however, and in this case, I don't think the hypothesis is out of the question. My own anecdotes, be they personal, from friends, or from co-workers, seem to be indicating a very subtle paradigm shift in social networking. It's not so much that users are abandoning Facebook, or abandoning social, but that users are segmenting themselves by use case (or worldview, as the wonderful Amy Hoy would probably describe it).
The world seems to be dividing into People Who Use Facebook Every 5 Seconds, and People Who Use Facebook About Once a Week, with perhaps some other segments of significance within that spectrum. But "seems" is the operative word here. I'd need to look at actual usage data to make any real assumptions here, and my guess is that Facebook isn't going to share data that contradicts its own growth projections.
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#25Several of my friends have quit Facebook. Many on multiple occasions. Nearly all of them have eventually come back. Many of them multiple times. I think the ones who are still gone will come back sometime. Some inevitably won't. But I think the number of people who dislike Facebook enough to never want to use it are in the extreme minority. I think most people just don't think about whether it's evil or not. It's jus…
Not sure why people downvote this, it describes the real value that facebook has for most of its users (I think): it makes it easy to stay in contact with their friends, check what happens to distant family members on the other side of the continent or put online photos from the last holiday trip, etc. etc. and also have of all of that archived in one place for years.
The problem with that is that most of the time not that much happens in people's lifes so it's hard to keep users online for very long (read: generate money). Thus FB gradually converts itself into a poor man's version of twitter.
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#26I had a chance to work directly with Facebook API and in terms of documentation, bugs, overall robustness I can tell that it's pretty crappy. Takes a lot of effort to do simple stuff and things are often not working. That definitely doesn't look as a good trend.
Twitter API looked a lot more solid to me.
Anyways, just my 2 cents from a dev POV...
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#27Several of my friends have quit Facebook. Many on multiple occasions. Nearly all of them have eventually come back. Many of them multiple times. I think the ones who are still gone will come back sometime. Some inevitably won't. But I think the number of people who dislike Facebook enough to never want to use it are in the extreme minority. I think most people just don't think about whether it's evil or not. It's jus…
>Facebook is like your online social homebase. You leave it, travel different places, see new things, meet new people, but it's what you come home to. It's a part of your identity as it serves as an online archive of your life.
I really do agree with this.
I detest Facebook's attitude towards privacy. I've got my account on complete lockdown. Friends and family lament that they can't post to my wall, and that I don't post at all. Ever. I've never 'liked' anything to my knowledge. I've had the same three or so pictures on my profile for years, and I've never posted a status update once.
But you know what? Everybody I've ever known and still care to is on there, in my friends list. Paradoxically, it is Facebook's relentless pursuit of building the social graph (privacy be damned) that allowed it to crawl the address books of almost everyone I've ever known and let them track me down and attempt to friend me. Friends from middle school who I've wondered about for years. Right there. Family members whose contact information I'd never have tracked down. Right there. An entire database of all the people I could possibly care about and care to contact in my lifetime (even if it's just once every few years) is right there. All of this with zero effort expended from me.
Last year I was in NYC and was lamenting the loss of an old phone with a lot of contact numbers from friends who had moved out of state or I had otherwise lost touch with. I particularly wanted to meetup with one friend who had moved out to run a museum, but no longer had her number or email handy. I suddenly remembered "Oh wait. Everybody is on Facebook whether they use it or not." Fired it up, searched her name, found it, sent a message with my number, and 8 minutes later she called me for drinks.
That is great. That is useful and relevant to me. Facebook is a social home base. For me it is like the ultimate address book that self-populates and bombards you with tremendous amounts of noise that you wade through when you open it to do what you came there to do, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a very real value.
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#28facebook started dieing after my mom added me as a friend
Great point. Of course Facebook is dying, though probably not in the way the author intended. Since I signed up in my college days, I've seen way more negatives added than positives and the last two years has been largely downhill.
Most of the people I know don't actually want to be on Facebook, but it certainly is difficult to avoid.
I don't think Facebook is near the cliff right now, but it's headed towards it and accelerating.
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#29Is Facebook dying? Yes, because lately, everyone has been asking "is Facebook dying?". It's a self-fulfilling prophesy.
However, I also say yes because many people I know have abandoned their accounts or use their accounts reluctantly nowadays.
So yes, Facebook will continue to bleed users and die.
Re: Is Facebook dying?
#30http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines No.
It's so predictable that someone posts this on every submission with a question headline. Seriously, it's old. We get it. Just move on.