I had a phone call with a Japanese friend the other day, and she told me she also quit (deactivated her account) Facebook. Since their traffic is still on the climb, it seems the birth rate is simply outpacing the death rate as we are starting to hear about more and more people quitting. There will be so many lessons learned from Facebook 10 years from now.
it seems the birth rate is simply outpacing the death rate as we are starting to hear about more and more people quitting
Though I have pretty much quit, I'm not sure how true that is, because most of my friends are still on Facebook, posting updates to it everyday, as far as I can tell. Of course, most of my friends aren't hackers and they joined Facebook later than I. So I'm wondering if we're ahead of the curve where social sites are concerned or if we're simply a biased sample. My reason for quitting: invitation fatigue.
I don't think she was on Mixi -- she's been in USA for the past 6 years. Another one of my Japanese friends is on Mixi, though, and she simply never uses it. Interestingly, she (the girl who uses Mixi) knows the wife of a Japanese official who sent her a Hi5 invite. Not sure if she joined.
I quit Facebook about a year or so ago, which as an expatriate Australian in London was quite painful due to my friends being far more frequently seen on FB than on email or Skype. Still, I don't regret it - they seem to push the privacy boundary every once in a while and sometimes they get caught. I don't miss it.
If you have an addictive personality then you probably should be very wary of using websites like this, I have facebook and check it for maybe 10 minutes every day or two, I couldn't use it for longer because it's so bloody boring.
I check it a couple of times a day, but never for more than a minute. I don't get many notifications. Email is much more important to me and through trial and error I've set things so that I get emailed about important things, and nothing else. That said, it would be very hard for me to go for a few days without having Gmail open.
Anyone here on HN using Facebook successfully to promote their startup and/or personal website? I'm actually curious, and know of people in general who use it effectively but I'm more curious about the results from fellow Hackers.
I've run workshops for clients on using new media for new leads. The consensus has been that Facebook is a neat way to give news to people who already know you (though the signal to noise ratio continues to lower), but a poor way to find new people.
That said, I would encourage most businesses to have a presence on there as part of their online content management. If it's quick to copy news from your site over to Facebook (etc), then the costs are low and it will support your brand.
