“The step after ubiquity is invisibility,” my old friend from Apple Al Mandel explained to me years ago. And it’s true. Telephone service was once rare but is now universal and anything truly universal eventually become a commodity. No wonder phone companies no longer make money from long-distance calling nor — as Verizon’s sale of its New England landlines business confirms — even make enough money from local phone service. Now it is all about mobile and thank God for texting and ringtones, the telco execs say… for awhile. Well I think the same thing is about to happen to Facebook — privacy issues or no.
Facebook is huge with 350 million members but that’s not the problem. The problem is that my Facebook friends list is too long and so is yours. I have 809 Facebook friends. My wife has friend envy because she thinks my friends are generally more interesting than her friends. I wouldn’t know because I’m only on Facebook once or twice a week for a few minutes. But even that’s enough to know my friend list is too long.
Here’s what happened the other day. I had some news about the Startup Tour so I shared it on Facebook and looked for reaction from my 809 friends.
Nothing happened.
Well not nothing, but not much. I couldn’t immediately see my own post, for example, because in the time it took for me to go from writing it to reading it the post had scrolled off my screen, pushed out by generally inane people saying generally inane things about generally inane stuff I didn’t care about. That’s the downside of having 809 friends.
This didn’t happen when I had 350 Facebook friends. Then I’d write something important to me (I only write important things in Facebook and you should, too) and dozens of people would reply. But now they don’t because my screen is scrolling too fast and their screens are scrolling too fast, too, so the actual opportunity for intercourse (you know what I mean — get your mind out of the gutter) is nothing. It’s gone.
Facebook is useless to me. We’re all too connected to really connect.
Yes, I hide all the Mafia warriors and the Farmers and those people lately who are so thrilled to be breeding weird little animals. I hide as many of my inane friends as I can. I don’t join any groups and I am a fan of nothing, but it still doesn’t matter. There are people whom I’d actually like to know what they are doing and maybe they care about me, too, but we just no longer meet-up.
Facebook is being really stupid lately about making money from its traffic by violating user privacy. If the system goes kerblooey then pundits will point to that and say, “They abused their users, see.” But that won’t be true. Fans are used to being abused. How else do you explain Metallica?
If Facebook goes under it will be because of its own success. If Facebook doesn’t go under it will be because they learned in the nick of time the same lessons as every other successful serial publisher since the dawn of printing — that there is an ideal circulation size to monetize a given advertising base and you can easily get too big to make any money.
In this case there turns out to be a corollary effect that says you can be too big to be useful to your readers, too, which is why Facebook’s demise — if it happens — will be so swift.
If Facebook really wants to get profitable it needs to get smaller by kicking-off users who don’t make it money. Then it has to be be really nice to the ones they keep.
Their alternative is ubiquity, invisibility, then failure.
My bet’s on failure.
My bet is a compromise. Users can have no more than 350 friends.FB users will bitch and fume but will start weeding out people from friends list or set up multiple accounts to accommodate all their friends they think they can manage.
I can imagine most of the complaints about an idea like that would come from the mafia/farm types, since most of the facebook games give a huge advantage to people with more friends playing the game. Thus it’s not uncommon for someone to have a stable of facebook friends they wouldn’t know from a bar of soap. Just extra people they’ve signed up so they can get an extra ally in one or more of the 50 different (but essentially similar) facebook games they’re playing.
Perhaps a better solution would be to be able to group your friends… You could create a group say, “High School Friends”, “Work Friends”, “Game Friends” and so on… I think it’d be fairly simple to implement. Then, based on which group, you can choose to NOT see any postings, or see ALL postings from specific groups of people.
FB already has groups. You can do as you said, filtering your own message view so that it shows only this group or that. You can also restrict your own status updates so that they’re only shared with the members of a particular group.
precisely… you can already create lists to sort out your friends… but far too many facebookees have no idea they can do this…
Then maybe the problem is that they’ve got such an insanely crappy UI that many of their users don’t know that the features they pine for already exist. Grouping friends isn’t the only one of these.
FB is a prime example of the difference between two things that are too often conflated in the tech world: graphic design and UI design. FB is and always has been pretty good at the former, but it’s never been more than passable on the latter.
Or FB can just get a little “smarter” about what gets put near the top of your feed. FB can learn what you find interesting by examining the posts you comment upon and deriving keywords you find interesting, looking for patterns between what you and your friends comment on and deciding which of your friends are most likely to be posting things you find interesting, etc. There’s countless ways to make your newsfeed smarter. I see lots of matrixes and coefficients in someone’s future.
Oh, and FB, please consider this post “prior art” and send me a fat check when you make your patent filing. Thanks.
You are my new hero.
I don’t think you got the joke…Facebook already does that. See “Top News” at the top? If it’s bold and not clickable, that’s what Facebook is doing. (“Most Recent” is where the inane waterfall of friend updates is.)
Facebook does watch whose comments you like an comment on and whose comments your friends like and comment on, and uses that to create “Top News”.
-Erica
Again I say: it’s a crap UI that even allows a decently intelligent user to not know that.
Gee, doesn’t that sound like an avatar, or the old ATT commercials of “You Will” with a dog runnning across the screen fetching my newspaper? Sounds all too Snowcrash familiar to me.
Oh, thats because I used to work there: http://www.cyva.com.
Only problem is that its all hype, and until someone ‘gets it’ with money and an actual API, Facebook will meet the same demise of AOL/Yahoo/GeoPages/Yahoo360. It was all so crystal clear in 1995
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/cyberspace/
I think you might be over-generalising based on your own experience… maybe?
How many people actually have 800 friends? Looking at MY friends (80-odd), the average seems to be south of 200.
There’s an 80-20 rule in effect here, I’m sure. Looking at my Facebook friends many of them have more friends than I do. By the way, my policy is not to seek Facebook friends but to generally accept them. Our nanny has 1400+ friends!
I agree with Barney Greinke.
As Clay Shirky put it: it´s not information overload, but filter failure.
It´s like in Google Reader where I have +400 subscriptions (impossible to keep up with on a daily basis), but several very nice ways to group and search through posts, and a whole ecosystem of tools to help me even further to focus on the things I really care for.
Why would you think that Facebook won´t go that road?
Totally agree, Peter. I’d like to be able to create tabs on the newsfeed, and put certain groups of users in each tab (i.e. family+closest-friends, co-workers, students, etc). Clicking on the tab filters the feed to just content by those people. It’ll come with time.
That feature already exists.
Perhaps they will, but it is telling that so far they haven’t. Maybe it is technically too hard, maybe they are paralyzed or just arrogant. My point is that time for Facebook is a LOT shorter than they think. Something smarter will inevitably come along and — given the low cost of subscriber acquisition — will take over if Facebook doesn’t get a lot smarter a lot faster. They are screwing around with our privacy (making it less useful) when they should be making the service more useful.
I’m not convinced that Facebook’s time is so short. Doesn’t Metcalfe’s law (the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of users) come in to play here ? 350 million squared is a big number. At a certain point, the big guys seem to reach a critical mass which bars entry to anyone else offering that service. Look at eBay – they continue to dominate the online auction industry even though their last big innovation was, I dunno, “Buy it Now” circa 2002.
— they should be making the service more useful.
Well, aye matey, thar’s the rub!! What about Facebook (or any social software) is USEFUL??? You should spend some time reading Nick Carr, or me; he’s more famous, of course. But he and I (and perhaps, one hopes, a growing contingent) agree on the base principle: all this social shit is making humans stupid. Why should a couple of kids garner billions of dollars of productive money for THAT???????????? Riddle me that, Bat Man.
Prodigy, AOL, MySpace… is the term FlashMob a fair description of these flavor of the moment social gatherings? And isn’t FaceBook just the most recent iteration? Zuckerberg’s zoo may be perceived as worth billions today but Cringley is extremely accurate in predicting their inevitable demise.
Also predicable was the way the cynical take advantage of the innocent with Terms of Service. FaceBook’s recent circus about simplifying privacy settings is mere contemptuous distraction.
Perhaps FB’s “fish or cut bait” moment is coming soon.
With no filtering, your server requirements grow proportionally to your number of users. But if you’re filtering content, it’s a bit different. The CPU required to churn a simple matrix increases as the square of its base. So to filter my 80 friends requires 6400 cranks of the CPU, but to filter Bob’s 800 requires 640,000 cranks (100 times more CPU).
Does FB have the venture cap to hugely increase its server farm in order to support high-quality filtering? Or would that venture cap decide that it’s time to sell FB to Microsoft and let someone else make the multi-billion dollar investment in the server farm? FB might be popular, but they’re probably not sitting on all that much cash.
That’s only true iff you’re using a typical coders flat-file storage. Using a truly normalized (BCNF) relational store, it’s linear. The reason is that you store 1000, 1000 rows in 2 tables rather 1,000,000 in one table. But Kiddie Koders never figured that out.
I don’t know about all the tabs and UI things Derek Martin was talking about, but I already filter my friends. I just build groups and typically I only read things from those groups by clicking on the Friends link and the group name below it. I even have that URL bookmarked in my toolbar.
Any friend or “connection” can be in any number of groups as well. It also keeps things in chronological order in a way the generic feed doesn’t.
Oh, and while I’ve never used an RSS reader FB has become something like that for me. I join/like a number of groups and publications I’m interested in, put them in my “regular” group that I read, and now I have a scrolling feed of stories I’m interested in in one place.
I see Facebook as a proof of concept. You can get an absurd number of people to put a previously unprecedented amount of their life online by using web 2.0 techniques to make it simple. And you can monetize the whole thing.
You can start with a fixed known population (college students), work out the bugs, grow steadily by word-of-mouth, open the gates and the masses will come.
Privacy stupidity aside, content control is the issue. I may want to be “friends” with people who feel the need to post what they had for supper every night. Right now the only way to avoid reading this is to “unfriend” them, use Facebook’s predefined filter and hope it considers their dining habits irrelevant or hide their posts. In which case, why be friends?
Eventually, someone will come up with a good granular web 2.0 content filter (or port an existing one), slap it on top of a social media site and turn it into a license to print money the way Google did with a search algorithm.
Lets just hope they have more of a commitment to “not be evil” than Mark Zuckerberg.
— Lets just hope they have more of a commitment to “not be evil” than Mark Zuckerberg.
And you believe in Santa Claus, too, Yes? The “not be evil” folks have demonstrated that “evil” has a fungible definition when $$$$ are attached.
Heh. I have Tumblr for my bleating, FB for family and friends catch up and Buzz for interesting stuff.
FB’s becoming too bloated and convoluted for much else. But yeah, I can see it hanging around as Find Someone service.
“there is an ideal circulation size to monetize a given advertising base and you can easily get too big to make any money”
Interesting, what is the ideal circulation size? Or is it dependent on contextual factors?
It depends on a lot of factors. Look in the history of magazines and you’ll see examples of publications deliberately cutting their circulation for exactly this reason. There are examples of magazines (like LIFE weekly) that were closed-down despite having millions of paying subscribers but no profit.
The key is the cost advertisers are willing to pay to reach your audience. In the LIFE magazine example, the cost of actually producing and mailing a magazine out to a zillion users could not be recouped by advertising and subscriptions, because advertisers were not willing to pay an ever-increasing amount of money for an ever-increasing amount of subscribers. At some point, the sweet spot for how much an advertiser is willing to pay for a full page ad is reached and after that, the ability of the magazine to produce and distribute at a profit goes down.
Same thing for FB. Even worse, actually, in that you can more easily track internet advertising performance. A whole lot of people who talk about their latest inane thought, playing Mafia Wars, push out relevant posts, and who don’t click-through and spend will kill FB. I have to agree with Mr. Cringely, yet again.
I see where you’re going wrong:
– You’re trying to use Facebook as a blog, yet you have a perfectly good blog right here. Those who care about your business stuff will/should know to come here for such news.
– “…even that’s enough to know my friend list is too long.” Then why don’t you cull some of them? Just add only your family members and a dozen or so of you’re closest friends.
– “…kicking-off users who don’t make it money.” So they’re gonna send out messages like “Hey bozo, you haven’t clicked on any of our ads this month, you’re outta here.”?!
Yes, I have a blog, but this is different — the content is certainly different. Twitter is much more bloglike.
Yes, I could cull the numbers, but that’s why God invented LinkedIn.
OF COURSE they’ll kick-off users. Publishers have always done things like that. Heck, it’s what you proposed I do!
It sounds like more of a problem with your lack of ability to connect with an audience than with Facebook. If you posted something good, and important, and shared it with 800 people who are supposedly your friends, then it should have received a decent reaction. If it didn’t then those people aren’t your friends, or you didn’t craft a social-media friendly message.
Why didn’t I think of that? I’m an inept communicator! Maybe I can take a class.
LMAO – nice sarcastic retort mate!
My experience has been when I respond to a public figure’s facebook status, I end up receiving an absurd number of update notifications as seemingly everyone else on the planet throws in their “me too”s AOL style. To avoid this, I avoid responding to facebook statuses of people who aren’t in my immediate circle.
I agree though. Even at just over 200 friends, the status updates of people I really care about are usually gone before I have a chance to see them.
=-M
There are solutions to both your problems:
“I couldn’t immediately see my own post, for example, because in the time it took for me to go from writing it to reading it the post had scrolled off my screen”
View your profile, click “options” at the top of the stream and filter to just your posts
“There are people whom I’d actually like to know what they are doing and maybe they care about me, too, but we just no longer meet-up.”
Create a list or lists with just those people on it. You don’t have to view everyone at once or filter out noisy people one by one.
The problem isn’t only wanting to see only your own posts. It’s sharing information that you actually find useful. Cringely wants to see what others are saying. Cringely wants to see other people’s comments. The problem is what Cringely want’s to see is being drowned out by all the nonsense thats tossed onto your wall.
On my wall, I get a picture posts from various friends who’ve toured various parks and wild places around the world. I love posts. I get news when a performer I want to see will be in town. One of the original reasons I signed up for Facebook in the first place.
But, then I get a lot of “Bob has become friends with Bill”, “Robin likes Cheryl Facebook Status”, and “Steve likes Pizza with pineapples” posts too. It makes for a bad “signal-to-noise” ratio.
I can imagine someone as popular as Cringely having so much dross posted on his wall that any meaningful posts and comments simply disappear. Sure, you can delete the nonsense if you didn’t waste all that time breathing, eating, and having a life. And, you can start tossing out friends left and right too. But, then you also limit the people who can see your wall.
BTW, there are two Robert Cringely pages. The real one — Robert X (no period) Cringely and a Robert X. (with period) Cringely with only fourteen fans. When searching for Cringely, I first got the other one because I kept putting a period after the “X”. The real Cringely might want to contact Facebook about that.
As a friend of mine pointed out not long ago, “Everybody is talking but who is listening?”
In your case the solution would appear to be setting up a second account for your private persona.
I note from people who decided they wanted to be my friend there are a number of ego accounts. Look at me, look what I am doing, aren’t I awesome?
Self promotion is fine in its place but I would rather have a thoughtful friend who encourages interesting conversation.
Feel free to add me to any account where thought prevails.
I check this blog several times a week and on most occasions the comments. Whenever I stay away for too long, sometimes there are too many comments on a given topic. I might read a few comments, but then I realize that it is such a time sink that I don’t bother. So I end up not reading some interesting and informative viewpoints. And I think that is the point of this article. There might be some very interesting comments posted on FB, but how do you separate the chaff from the kernels of interest? I doubt software filters can do the job, so it has to be done by the end user. Talk about taking something fun and turning it into a chore….
Don’t forget that there are a ton of small companies that are competing for FB customers.
FB needs a slight change to the UI. Something similar to my RSS reader. I probably have as many subcriptions (or more) as Bob has friends and I probably miss some of the feeds. But I can go straight to Cringley to check if there is anything new from him.
Yes, the system needs to be refined, but also people need to get past doing something just because you can. I don’t care that you are drinking a coffee right now. Stop being amazed by the technology that lets so many people know that.
I get that people don’t know how to start a conversation and be interesting, but that’s not the way to connect.
Oh and I don’t care that you just became friends with Ima Hammahead, I don’t care that you are a fan of ‘People who hate the word guacamole’ , I don’t care that you just reached level 456 in Mafia Wars. Applications shouldn’t be able to promote the crap out of themselves. There needs to be a balance between promotion and projectile vomiting.
Different people use facebook differently, different needs for different users.
For some it’s a great way to share pictures and keep in touch with people.
For some it’s a place to play games.
For some it’s a soap box without having to keep up with a blog.
For some it’s a place to promote.
For most it’s a combination of those things.
And it’s the combination that made it work. Stupid things like games keep people going back everyday, otherwise many people might only check it once in a while, which isn’t good for business. So that games keep daily usage up, but those games abuse the system by posting updates and requests every 5 seconds which clogs up the works.
I have no hope of people learning balance and communication as a whole. The media promotes such crap, hell most of the media is that crap, people just follow suit.
I don’t think it should be treated like a newspaper, the dynamics are different. What needs to happen is a very simple way for people to customize the experience to fit their needs, without having to choose either column A or column B. some people will want 35%A and 55% B and 10% C.
For those saying ‘filter failure’ – facebook _used_ to have a lot better filters. They deliberately removed them in favor of their current ‘grey goo’ style filtering where more popular things go to the top. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I hardly use the front page these days. It’s too darn useless because I don’t control what’s there and what’s not.
Me too.
I suspect their filtering started to eat more CPU than they have. Building even the simplest matrix means your CPU use increases (per filter) as the square of the number of users. Whereas “gray goo” just increases linearly with the number of users.
When we notice FB buying huge, enormous, Google-sized server farms, then we’ll know they’re making a move towards better filtering. It’ll require such a huge investment that that’s the moment the venture cap will probably decide it’s time to sell FB to Microsoft.
It often takes a huge financial hit for a company to realize it has screwed up part of their business model. In the early ’90s at Intel, it was the Pentium flaw – a bitter pill to swallow but showed that the way Intel was presenting itself to consumers wasn’t working. Once Facebook starts getting hit financially, they will either change or die.
Facebooks problem isnt performance but mandate, it decides for you then changes on a whim, purposely failing to educate users.
The problem with Facebook (and pretty much every social network) is that everyone is treated equally. But, in the words of George Orwell, “[some] are more equal than others”. My email program treats messages from my wife equally to messages advertising Viagra (assuming it gets past the spam filter).
Same thing for SMS messages on my phone.
I want a way to rank my “friends” and to be able to choose what information I share with each of them. Social networking sites should be able to figure this out over time without my telling them. Facebook does have the ability to group people and I use that to some extent, but it really needs to be inherent in the entire concept from the ground up. The first site to figure this out and execute it well will win (I hope).
Your problem with facebook is that your friends aren’t turning into blog readers. The REASON isn’t that you have too many friends, but that your FRIENDS have too many friends and aren’t ranking you as high as you would like.
The solution isn’t kicking people off facebook. It’s personas. I may be on FB to see what colleagues are doing, maybe neighbors, maybe old friends. Facebook stupidly throws all my disparate networks into one big box, so there is no context. Sure I could create lists and organize the hell out of things – but I already do that with my newsfeeds, where it is a professional necessity.
Facebook should be able to do the needed network analysis to auto-tag everyone I add and use “more like this” logic on networks and content to be smarter about what it shows me.
I don’t believe this is too hard – I believe that as long as they are growing exponentially they are going to throw tech effort and monetization, not at usability. But that leaves a HUGE opportunity – FB would do well to remember just how quickly MySpace imploded.
More thoughts – http://jonathan-peterson.com/blog/2010/05/27/after-ubiquity-death/
[…] post is titled, “Let’s Get Small” and points out that the amount of members Facebook has is not the problem. The problem is that my […]
Stepping back from the technology, I think Facebook and other communication/social-media platforms would improve if they more closely modeled themselves after patterns of communication and socialization which have proven themselves over and over throughout human history. For example, the ideal tribe size is no more than 150 members, people typically don’t develop and maintain meaningful friendships with more than a dozen people, or when having a “fireside chat”, you don’t necessarily want the whole world to listen.
And to quote Yogi Berra: “No one goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”
I “hide” 80% of my friends either for inanity (I really don’t care how your pilates class went this morning) to stupidity (my college buddy who has gone full Tea Party retard) and I have yet to hear anyone say, “did you see so-and-so’s post on ______” and the person was on my hide list.
Yeah. Facebook to many people is “Dear Diary.” If it isn’t really important, useful, or entertaining, don’t post it. Please.
The same problem faces Yelp. As more and more people review businesses, the ratings tend to be heavily skewed to 4 or 5 stars. And like Facebook posting, the quality of the Yelp reviews have also deteriorated precipitously.
Robert,
Looking back at what you said, and triggered by James´ (May 27, 2010 at 7:19 am) comment I took a better look at Facebooks friend filtering/grouping capabilities.
It /is/ possible to make one or more sub-groups of friends, and subsequently only see the updates from that sub-group:
– go to “https://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/friends/?ref=tn” and select “create new list”
– start adding all the friends you want in this group (unfortunately you need to do this one by one)
– to see only the News Feed for this group, on the page of the overall News Feed select your newly defined group (it´s in the sub-menu under “Friends” in the menu on left side of your screen.
Agreed,
– your friends might need to do the above with /their/ News feed in order see your potentially interesting updates
– it would be far better if Facebook found a way to do this automagically;
– Facebook should make the creation of these sub-groups easier and promote this option more
Facebook might not care enough and/or might not act fast enough;
this will then inevitably lead to their downfall
I expect them to be júúúst a little bit more flexible, adaptable and capabel than that, though.
Also keep in mind that most (unfortunately Kevin Fox left) of the former Friendfeed crew is still there; and those guys almost nailed this filtering and grouping
I signed up a long time ago because Leo Laporte talked about it a lot and he is a technology journalist and podcaster. He quickly reached his limit of 5000 friends and had to start a fan page. After the last privacy situation he decided that FB wanted to be like the old AOL and simply become the Internet. So he just deleted his accounts and now has nothing to do with it. I found that nearly all of what Leo posted and most posts from everyone else, including myself, were of no real value or interest compared to other means of purposeful communication, like email or websites. I can only see myself using FB if the people I want to hear from refuse to communicate in any other way.
My life is boring. But still not boring enough to have a Facebook account.
Hear! Hear!
Bob,
You could communicate information about the startup tour more effectively if you created a group for that purpose. You may have 850 friends, but odds are that most of the people who would like to hear updates about the startup tour do not. A group provides a means of one-way communication. Letting people join your group does not grant them the capability to spam your main page with their inane status updates. That privilege is reserved for people from whom you actually want to read inane status updates.
Mark
Maybe FB should provide a special place for people to put “inane status updates”.
Oh wait…they already do; they call it “status updates”.
“Fans are used to being abused. How else do you explain Metallica?”
And thats how you lose all credibility…. Could have said this sooner and I wouldn’t have lost the time reading through the whole post…
“We’re all too connected to really connect.”
Bob, you’ve given me my quote-of-the-week.
Well, maybe solution is not to have 800+ persons in contact list (can’t call 800+ persons friends)? But it easier to blame it on the someone else than to solve problem by yourself.
I’ve got twelve friends. Anybody wants to be my friend?
Amusingly snarky, and yet I can’t disagree with your general premise. I don’t have nearly as many friends as you, but I have enough, and it’s surprising how fast something I put out into my FB stream gets pushed way down my own list, let alone the list of others. It’s almost like Twitter; you have to be live to see many new missives.
I have discovered a secret of Facebook: The Facebook user interface (what’s the technical term?) sucks.
I’ve been on Facebook for a while. I am a technical manager. I create webpages. I’ve been programming for year. I’ve been a SA for Unix and Linux, and I can’t figure out how in the heck to do anything.
For example, I want to see a list of my friends. Look, there’s a link in the left hand column called “Friends”. I’ll just click on it.
Nope: That asks me to import my email address book, so Facebook can find my friends. Sorry, I’m not giving them the password to my email, so they can spam all of my friends.
There’s a list of friends on the bottom. Nope, that’s only those on line. How do I see a list of all my friends? Apparently, I have to click on my Profile page and not my Home page. Then, another two or three clicks to get what I want.
My wall, like Cringely’s is a big mess, but not because my friends post on it, or even write their own posts. Nope, Facebook writes on it every time one of my friends clicks on something. You click on a “like” button, it shows up on my wall. You make a new friend, I see it too. Join a group, I see it. Then, there are apps like Foursquare that follows you everywhere, and every time you stop to scratch an itch, I see it.
And, I only have a dozen or so friends. What do you do when you have hundreds?
I think what Cringely wants is a Fan Page. A fan page has a lot less noise because only posts show up, and you can set up a Fan Page to only allow the owner to post and everyone else comments on the posts. You can also setup discussions, post pictures, etc.
However, try to figure out how to create a fan page. Facebook help pages don’t give you a clue. In fact, there are at least two ways to setup a page to do what Cringely wants: One is to setup a group, and another is to setup what use to be known as a Fan page. What’s the difference? I’ve asked over 30 people between the ages of 13 and 23 the very same question and no one knows.
If Facebook dies, it won’t be because of user policy violations. It’ll be because their site is an absolute mess. Originally, I thought the impossible to understand privacy settings were a plot to get people to make their information more public than they want, but I suspect now it’s just part of the mess.
Well, I don’t have your problem. I have less than 2 dozen “friends” and it should be less than that.
Facebook is a fad. Stop acting like its anything else. Once the site has been marginalized, like AOL before it, all its useful services will still be available to web users via other far less exploitative means.
I have to admit carefully limiting my friends list: I only accept friend requests from people I actually know and want to know what they are up to.
Who actually knows 809 people?
My rule is if I can’t figure out who a friend request is, I’ll reject the friend request. Merely being a friend of a friend is not enough. . . In any case it keeps the volume manageable.
Of course, as a (somewhat) public figure, I guess you have friended all and sundry.
Privacy issues aside. What have we learned after watching Aol, friendster, and then Myspace?? Certainly that users will eventually abandon a platform unless they actually have a stake in there users life. Facebook is a trend which will be replaced eventually. Yes, any technology person can point out countless privacy holes, but your average 15 year old doesn’t really care. When it all comes down to it the public will realize that social networking is in itself not a very social activity. Honestly I believe no platform will ever be everything for everyone. People will migrate and have to more specialized social platforms that are centered around a specific interest. Elminating the need for filters all together and friend list numbers will go down to managable levels.
Nice post. I wrote something similar in my blog some time back (http://bennomatic.blogspot.com/2010/02/clash-of-social-titans.html); my core point is that the behaviors necessary to build a successful social network aren’t the same as the ones necessary to maintain one in a useful state. My post was inspired by the release of Google Buzz and the simultaneous epiphany that FaceBook is no longer useful to me for the same reasons you cited.
Personally, I think that the behaviors are, to some degree, determined by the leadership, and unless they’re willing to shed MZ, FaceBok will not jump the shark that you’re describing.
Nice Post!
Should i url up to this, from my world-wide-web page? I’m planning to get as many sources of data as i am able.
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I don’t think you got the joke…Facebook already does that. See “Top News” at the top? If it’s bold and not clickable, that’s what Facebook is doing. (“Most Recent” is where the inane waterfall of friend updates is.)
Facebook does watch whose comments you like an comment on and whose comments your friends like and comment on, and uses that to create “Top News”.
Stepping back from the technology, I think Facebook and other communication/social-media platforms would improve if they more closely modeled themselves after patterns of communication and socialization which have proven themselves over and over throughout human history. For example, the ideal tribe size is no more than 150 members, people typically don’t develop and maintain meaningful friendships with more than a dozen people, or when having a “fireside chat”, you don’t necessarily want the whole world to listen.
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Reading this reminds me of my old room mate. That guy was one of the smartest people I know, but he was a little outlandish for my tastes though. Anyways I loved reading this, thanks. Will give me something to go into when I see him.
What a great post my friend. I am a facebook addict and mostly spend my time playing some facebook games and just chatting out with my family. Surely, there are so many ways we can use facebook and I really love using it. I hope they have something more new to come for all of us.
You can really see your enthusiasm in the articles you write. The world can do with more passionate bloggers like you who aren’t fearful to say how they feel. Always follow your heart.
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I thought it was going to be some boring old site, but I’m glad I visited. I will post a link to this site on my blog. I believe my visitors will find that very useful.
Reading through your blog gives me a chance to realize why I love reading things with so much insights. It is nice to know that there are still great authors out there that can put humor into knowledgable information. Thank you for your input and eagerness to reveal your thoughts with us.
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I used to love reading your blog, but lately it’s been a little boring. I’ll still read it though =)
Reading through your blog gives me a chance to realize why I love reading things with so much insights. It is nice to know that there are still great authors out there that can put humor into knowledgable information. Thank you for your input and eagerness to reveal your thoughts with us.
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Great info and straight to the point. I don’t know if this is truly the best place to ask but do you people have any thoughts on where to hire some professional writers? Thank you
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100% agree with your sentiments in the following comment:
“If Facebook really wants to get profitable it needs to get smaller by kicking-off users who don’t make it money. Then it has to be be really nice to the ones they keep.”
I do not understand what all the thank you posts are all about. You are bitching about being too connected.. you have 800+ contacts? How many do you know?
I have 100 real friends. I can tell you about all of them. They are people that I converse with. Weekly. Drop your friends and see what happens with your Facebook account. Only have people you actually talk to. If you are only on there once a week then no one will notice if you dump them.
Don’t complain to the man. See if you can fix the issue.
Sorry I just saw the older comments. So everything I said has already Ben said. 🙂
interesting writeup, i’ve got to mention this to a friend of mine
“If Facebook really wants to get profitable it needs to get smaller by kicking-off users who don’t make it money. Then it has to be be really nice to the ones they keep.”
[…] death technology Add comments May 272010 Cringely bets that Facebook is getting so large that they are bound to fail and notes that as our social networks get larger, the VALUE of those networks becomes less and […]
Facebook is full of fluff. They have been talking about monetizing it for a while with no main success. Social media gurus speak of the potential of facebook as a marketing tool, for small and large business alike. The thing is though, people log on to facebook to check out photos of their friends. Not to buy things. Anyway, just a few thoughts.
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seems ok so far
Oh Facebook, I love and hate you at the same time. Facebook won’t be around forever, I think it will follow the route of myspace at some point and have to move on. There will always be something bigger/better/different.
-Michelle
website for network marketing, a social network…
site is a great idea too. you need to boost your online presence to grow your network. an interesting blog with plenty of readers is worth developing, also.sometimes, network marketing is turned into a vicious sport where the person with the…