201–210 of 252 posts
ITT: people with no kids. Facebook is indispensable for sharing baby pictures with extended family.
I've been on various social media for about 30 years, starting with dial-up BBSes and Usenet (when small enough you could read _every_ message posted). Time and again, I've seen sites appear, grow, become definitively dominant, taper off, and largely disappear (never quite dying outright but gone from "everyone's on it!" to "who? what?"). High-profile lifespan is vaguely around 7 years. I've no question Facebook will…
There were also a ton of oil companies before Standard Oil completely dominated the industry. They were the only player in town for a very long time. And their post-monopoly breakup offspring still are (Exxon is still the biggest).
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…
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There were also a ton of oil companies before Standard Oil completely dominated the industry. They were the only player in town for a very long time. And their post-monopoly breakup offspring still are (Exxon is still the biggest).
Counterpoint: Mayflies live as adults for only weeks before mating and dying. Theirs is a brief, beautiful dance of life[0] [0] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176365
I suspect the mayflies might beg to differ :( We humans can romanticize anything.
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.
Yes, sometimes I do want real-time messages, but that's not how I want things to be most of the time. I'm perfectly okay with seeing "old friend had a baby" or "cousin graduated from high school" the next day, or whenever. It's not that I don't care about these things; I do care about them. I just don't want things that don't require a real-time response sent through a real-time communications medium.
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Sorry, I actually forgot about g+, since none of my friends/family/acquaintances actually use it... mostly followed industry people's posts for a while, but I get most of that on twitter. G+ was a really nice imo way to work through it... too bad nobody used it in practice. I also hope that they work through a few of the issues I have with hangouts, mostly in taking over Google Voice duties, and the limited UX on the…
That's just it though. G+ did most of what was listed here without the annoying app/game requests and a better interface. They had cross-platform text and video chat long before Facebook did either. But in the end, the only thing that matters on a closed communications platform is where the people are. Most people won't bother switching platforms and in order for any competitor (G+ or otherwise) to take off is for ev…
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I'm willing to bet that would have changed if they reached the level of engagement that Facebook did.
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Facebook has something MySpace never achieved and something that could easily set it's place firmly where it's at, given they don't make any major changes to mess it up: The Geriatric Crowd . If I'm not mistaken, this is the first time in history that anyone in the tech industry captured this crowd in a major way. Those in my family over 70, on both sides, can barely make a phone call on a cell phone and don't even r…
I know this is going to be morbid, but the problem with the geriatric crowd when it comes to technology is that they have a tendency to die. The current geriatric generation is using Facebook to some degree (though in the case of my family no one over 70 uses it). What about the next generation of old people? Facebook will have to keep recapturing this market. This is very problematic because the older generation onl…
My parents (~65) started using FB more when my great grandmother (~90) started using it. They are resistant to tech change, but they use it quite a lot. I'd imagine that given the long spans older folks tend to use technology, the drop off in folks as they die is offeset by the steady, if slow, adoption of the system by earlier generations.
I personally am not too stoked about how folks who don't know me might look at my feed (from potential clients to potential band mates to the NSA), but I might care less if I was 67 instead of 37.
I've been on various social media for about 30 years, starting with dial-up BBSes and Usenet (when small enough you could read _every_ message posted). Time and again, I've seen sites appear, grow, become definitively dominant, taper off, and largely disappear (never quite dying outright but gone from "everyone's on it!" to "who? what?"). High-profile lifespan is vaguely around 7 years. I've no question Facebook will…
AOL may have been the place to be in the 90s, but it was still a sharp subset of my friends and acquaintances that were there, vs. the almost complete set on Facebook. And USENET/dialup/etc were even more selective. It's only been very recently (relatively speaking) that a majority of people were online at all, never mind aligned on a particular site.
I think you probably should compare more to something like AOL Instant Messenger, which had much closer to a 1:1 usage ratio of online computer users to software users (at least in the US market). The only real reason they went away was because social networks like Facebook are much more cross-connected and oriented towards group communication. The tagging features are huge, for example, since they potentially engage a lot of people at once. Ditto resharing, etc.
So the IM paradigm in general got consumed by larger social media--it wasn't a problem with AOLIM itself. But that sort of obsolescence is a vulnerability of a system that only does one thing. Facebook would probably mutate in the same situation, not die off.
The other factor is smartphones: a much larger number of people are online all the time now. If MySpace had their rise in the smartphone era, I'm sure they would have been much harder to displace. The fact that Facebook's opening their doors to the general public corresponded roughly with the release of the iPhone and subsequent rise of the smartphone was a huge bump for them.
Upshot is that a vastly larger percentage of a vastly larger number of customers are aligned on Facebook compared to older social media, and Facebook itself, as a platform, is relatively resilient to the changing needs of the customer. In an industry where both the customer acquisition and customer retention metric is "how many of your friends use it," I think Facebook will prove to be much harder to displace.
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I stopped at about the same time as you, but I actually returned a couple of months ago. Without friending anyone. And the reason? I use Facebook as a very simple way to get news about really minor things of importance to me: + my climbing gym has some new routes! + a new video by K.I.Z, yeah! + oh, demonstration against some Nazis demonstrating in my neighbourhood, should definitely go there + Someone's looking for…
So, like twitter with more media and text options?