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Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out

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Re: Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out

#91

Post by chaz »

r00fus wrote: post #55
chaz wrote: post #22

The metric that continues to really impress me about Facebook: 58% of users log in each day (that's 526mm DAU out of 901mm MAU, according to its SEC filing). That's roughly the same percentage as it was in 2007, when I first heard that kind of stat. I love customer surveys, but I don't think people are good at estimating how they actually spend their time or how frequently they do things.

What does this DAU indicate, actually - are these pageviews on a facebook.com website that are associated with potential advertising? Or are they related to the numerous and growing uses of FB as an identity provider?

DAU, from their Form S-1:

Daily Active Users (DAUs). We define a daily active user as a registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our website or a mobile device, or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website that is integrated with Facebook, on a given day. We view DAUs, and DAUs as a percentage of MAUs, as measures of user engagement.

Source: http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/00011931251203451...

When I first heard the stat, it was before FB Connect and Like Buttons had launched, and it seems to remain consistent today. The data seems to suggest that most users who use Facebook Connect or Like buttons will also visit Facebook.com (web or mobile) that same day. They do have a note saying that there may be mobile applications that drive daily activity automatically without active user intervention, and it may impact their measurement by up to 5%.

Re: Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out

#92

Post by CompiledCode »

jquery wrote: post #83
CompiledCode wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Ads are ubiquitous (I just tune them out), but clicking a link and being told "you can't read this unless you give us your personal info and let us tell all of your friends that you read this" is wrong on so many levels. I think this sort of thing will add to the downfall of facebook. Non-savvy internet users love facebook, but it only takes one learning experience (such as seeing broadcast that you read a hi…

Social readers are worse than you think. Once you've opted in, even reading a Yahoo! article via a Google search may show up in your news feed. My boss potentially seeing me reading articles about "How to ask for a raise" being the epitome of this. Don't know if he saw or not, but it was a educational experience nonetheless. I was trying to be careful and I still got burned.

Ugh. I wouldn't have thought that. And to think ten years ago people were worried about cookies... The bar for privacy on the internet has gotten pretty low.

A friend of mine publicly read "How to improve your sex drive". She's in a relationship....

Re: Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out

#93

Post by alttab »

taligent wrote: post #77
alttab wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it is this: Would I invite Mark Zuckerberg to be permanently and pervasively privy to my friends, my conversations with them, and all of my pictures? Seriously - Facebook is Zucker's brain-child in that it face-scans, categorizes, and picks apart your words and photos. Its like inviting Zucker himself into your photo-album, allowing him to think and learn more about you while you are away. Facebook is f…

You could well need help with paranoia this strong. Mark Zuckerberg is not going through your friends, conversations and photos. Nor is anybody else other than you and your friends. In fact due to its design your emails would be far easier to 'read' than Facebook would be.

Just because he isn't going it personally, doesn't mean that backend processes and features designed by him aren't fully automated. Thats almost worse - a robot Zuckers spying on me. At least if he was doing it himself he wouldn't be doing it perfectly and constantly.

Personally, I dont want a middle man for every social interaction. Then I don't own my relationships, Facecbook does.

Re: Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out

#94

Post by edibrac »

nkwiatek wrote: post #50
edibrac wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO privacy alone IS enough to negate the utility of Facebook. Privacy is not about just your name, gender and address. Nor even about what movies, music and books you enjoy. It's down to how you express yourself in words and what can be inferred by them. Your pics might seen harmless, but there's plenty you can infer from them too. Sure, there's controls on which groups of facebook friends can see things, but in th…

> this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily. Are you being ironic with a statement like this, or are you serious? The second there's even so much as a bug that affects some obscure privacy setting, the TechCrunch pitchforks are out, and the brand is on the line. Do you really think that FB is just gonna let anyone rummage through…

I believe that it's within reason that FB's internal controls are lax (like any other company) depending on what sort of access you have as an employee, contractor or family member of an employee ... or even a friend. It's totally possible for an internal employee to forget to encrypt a drive, or leave a backup somewhere of something. Or if a friend borrowed the password of an employee. I even think it's totally within reason that an employee could be paid off if the (extreme) situation deemed it necessary.

"OK, fine, we'll play along, except we'll let the users decide what data they provide, and we'll try to help them benefit from it as much as possible"

...sure that applies to the outer shell of it, and the official public stance. What else happens internally?

Disclaimer: my comments just are a result of trying to think critically. I could be totally/partially incorrect or correct. I do believe there is a truth out there about it, but that it's not in FB's interest to be super upfront.

Re: Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out

#95

Post by duaneb »

its_so_on wrote: post #12

I think facebook should charge 75 cents per month to use it. This will weed out users who just don't care; it will give more information to advertisers as well. Oh and what's that? 75 cents per month actually ends up tripling their income! (if they now get $9 per year off the seventy-five cents, plus the same four in ad revenue.) Anyway if even 75 cents per month is too much, then they can go ahead and make OEM deals…

If facebook started charging 75 cents a month to use it, it would be abandoned so fast it would make movement from myspace look glacial. Facebook might as well just convert their users accounts to Google Plus accounts - it would make everything less painful.

Re: Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out

#96

Post by naisu »

edibrac wrote: post #94
nkwiatek wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily. Are you being ironic with a statement like this, or are you serious? The second there's even so much as a bug that affects some obscure privacy setting, the TechCrunch pitchforks are out, and the brand is on the line. Do you really think that FB is just gonna let anyone rummage through…

I believe that it's within reason that FB's internal controls are lax (like any other company) depending on what sort of access you have as an employee, contractor or family member of an employee ... or even a friend. It's totally possible for an internal employee to forget to encrypt a drive, or leave a backup somewhere of something. Or if a friend borrowed the password of an employee. I even think it's totally with…

Disclaimer: I work for fb.

Do you really think Facebook employees are wandering around town with backups of user data? That's completely ridiculous.

Facebook takes privacy very seriously. You Facebook data is no less safe than using Gmail for your email (as an example).

Re: Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out

#97

Post by abraham »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #44
trebuch3t wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Facebook has turned into a stream of blabber and pictures of people's kids (no offence). What is NOT noisy is: * Path (just my close friends) * Pair (just my girlfriend) * Google+ (the "what's hot" news feed is actually pretty interesting)

I found the Google+ "what's hot" feed interesting too, until they went through yet another redesign and I couldn't find it anymore. I didn't have enough interest to ask the Internet how to find it again, so I slowly just forgot about it. Now I don't felt like I've lost any utility from not giving it three minutes of my time every day.

Unless you disabled it there are hot posts every half dozen posts in your home stream. The hot stream itself has it's own link in the left hand sidebar called explorer.

Re: Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out

#99

Post by edibrac »

naisu wrote: post #96
edibrac wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that it's within reason that FB's internal controls are lax (like any other company) depending on what sort of access you have as an employee, contractor or family member of an employee ... or even a friend. It's totally possible for an internal employee to forget to encrypt a drive, or leave a backup somewhere of something. Or if a friend borrowed the password of an employee. I even think it's totally with…

Disclaimer: I work for fb. Do you really think Facebook employees are wandering around town with backups of user data? That's completely ridiculous. Facebook takes privacy very seriously. You Facebook data is no less safe than using Gmail for your email (as an example).

I took time to word what I said, to match what I mean. It seems that what you read, were ones that you seem to have injected in.

It would be nice to know exactly what precautions are taken to prevent access from insiders. You may work for FB, but is storage or backups part of your role? Not that I think you have to be, how would I know as an outsider. Maybe as a developer you know how things are setup, and how well people adhere to policies.

And I'm curious, what are those? If users' data is taken seriously then wouldn't they make difficult to prevent casual snooping across the database? So that even if you had root access you couldn't get to it as an insider?

Probably not. The data is meant to feed an ad/marketing machine so, how locked down could the data be internally?

I don't expect these questions to be answered, but just throwing them out there in an attempt to reason things out.

Re: Facebook 'boring'? 1 in 3 users are tuning it out

#100

Post by jdminhbg »

Karunamon wrote: post #67
jdminhbg wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These functions in times past were done with the laborous process of making a million letters or phone calls or in many cases (like my hometown page) scarcely made or not made at all. Or with Geocities? FB hardly invented the concept of a page on the internet where events are listed. I'm sure it provides some nice functionality around calendaring and networking, but we didn't go from xeroxed fliers to Facebook with…

> I don't have to wade through 50 Farmville clone updates to get to an important message someone sent me. It's in my email now. And no offense, but you suck at Facebook then. Blocking apps is a two click operation. Sending a message to your friends/relatives along the lines of "Don't send me game requests" isn't difficult either.

> And no offense, but you suck at Facebook then.

None taken, but this is exactly my point. I don't want to be "good at Facebook," I just want to know what's going on. Constantly having to complete "two click operations" to hide new games in order to find the one piece of information I actually care about sucks; I don't want to do it.

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