
Facebook users drop in the US and Canada - abalog
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/06/12/facebook-sees-big-traffic-drops-in-us-and-canada-as-it-nears-700-million-users-worldwide/
======
grandalf
Suppose you're in a room with 5 close friends having a conversation. You're
comfortable, animated, energetic, outgoing. In the midst of this engrossing
conversation 400 other acquaintances silently enter the room. Suddenly you
notice them and realize they can all hear every word you're saying.

Most people find this scenario a bit socially uncomfortable and clam right up.

Facebook's growth has created this scenario for a lot of people. The basic
currency of Facebook (voyeurism) relies upon a loose security model that
prevents a person from walling off his/her 5-10 closest friends and using FB
for the bulk of their online socializing. Eavesdropping is essential to the
business model. The problem is, thusfar most FB users are not really aware
just how intricately engineered this voyeurism is and how publicly their lives
are being broadcast.

~~~
noarchy
You can wall off groups of people within Facebook, but the effort required to
do this is beyond the motivation level that I'd expect most Facebook users
(myself included) to have. Like privacy, making Facebook more tolerable to use
is an opt-in thing, requiring proactive measures by the user.

~~~
r00fus
If walling off your group is equivalently difficult to creating a yahoo/google
group, then yeah.

Facebook's entire premise is that people LIKE being heard/seen and LIKE
seeing/hearing others, in their social graph.

What is really needed is multiple distinct social graphs per user with
distinct walls between them, done elegantly... this isn't an easy problem to
solve.

There was a really nice presentation from a Googler (who subsequently moved to
Facebook) which described this problem eloquently... but I can't seem to find
the link.

~~~
grandalf
Interesting. I'd love to see the presentation if you (or anyone else) end(s)
up finding the link.

It's interesting to consider the threshold for the sort of social discomfort I
described above. In my case it hit around 2/3 of my current friend count.

~~~
interknot
Here's the previous HN discussion for the (likely) article in question:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1867807>

------
nhangen
I don't think any single service will kill Facebook. Hell, I don't think you
can do anything but diminish them at this point.

My bet is that the micro-niche makes a comeback and is what catches on going
forward. We dont' care about high school friends we never talked to, or family
members that blab about their dinner. What we care about are the things that
interest us...HN is a great example.

As more people move to avoid the noise, they'll find solace in mini-
communities, and I think that's the way forward. Not just one service, but
hundreds.

~~~
evgen
Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide
the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse.
At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow
users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different
groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.

~~~
tokenadult
_Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide
the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook
expanse._

Facebook private groups

<https://www.facebook.com/groups>

are working quite well among my circle of friends to provide a focused view of
one or another niche community that forms a natural subset of my friends.
There is a particular Facebook secret group that I visit absolutely every time
I'm on Facebook, which is several times a day. That's a practical place for me
to ask focused informational questions, and also a place where I can share a
lot of camaraderie with dear friends who have had similar--and yet very
diverse--life experiences. Because of the stronger filtering abilities of
Facebook, I can indeed see how it could supplant many niche sites. (Thus far,
HN gets the second share of my attention after Facebook, among all websites,
and it will be interesting to see what the consensus here is about the overall
community experience in the next year or so.)

~~~
Leynos
One problem with Facebook Groups I find is that you can't have wall posts from
your groups appearing in your primary timeline/newsfeed. Because of this, you
have to make a concious effort to visit the group to catch up.

Since none of the groups I joined have the same level of activity I'm used to
on specialized forums for those subjects, I never bother to check up on them -
which of course lends itself to a vicious circle of inactivity.

~~~
agscala
Posts from groups that I'm a part of do show up in my main feed. Maybe you
need to tweak some settings here or there?

~~~
Leynos
Do posts made by others to the group wall show up?

------
nrao123
I have long believed that Facebook/MySpace is like a TV show. Once the
"content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am
personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends.

In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is
"time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and
needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Those businesses have
shorter shelf lives.

On the other hand, Google/Microsoft are in the productivity/time saving
business and they have more durable advantages since they don't have to keep
coming up ways to make people stick around. People stick around and use their
service, because people save time.

Watch out for Twitter to do to Facebook what, Facebook did to Myspace and what
Myspace did to Friendster.

Twitter on the other hand may not exactly be like a TV show as much as TV
channel with each mega Twitter star (e.g. Charlie Sheen) a TV show within that
channel.

~~~
dkarl
Same here. I'm getting more and more bored with it. What was most interesting
about Facebook for me was learning about certain people. This guy I work with
likes cheesy movies, goes out to Irish bars with his wife, and likes to tweet
quotes from whatever movie he's watching when he's drunk. Learning that was
interesting. Seeing the same pattern every day is horribly boring. Same thing
with most of my high-volume friends. A close high school friend's wife, whom I
haven't had a chance to get to know in person, loves mariachi music, can't
write a coherent sentence to save her life, goes to la pulga (the flea market)
every weekend, enjoys drama with her coworkers, and is constantly sharing
coupon deals. Fascinating to know, boring as shit to see every day.

And of course the highest volume people are the most boring. All my friends
seem to have about the same volume of inanity, funny stuff, somewhat
interesting comments, worthwhile content, and vital life updates to share.
They just vary in what their sharing threshold is. If I could tune out
everything below "worthwhile content" then Facebook would be great. I'd also
only need to look at it once a day for two minutes to keep up with everybody.
Alas, there is no "setLogLevel" method on my Facebook feed.

~~~
frossie
I am not on Facebook, but the last few games I tried on iOS have a "post
achievement on Facebook/Twitter" _every single level_. I can't help thinking
that if anybody is actually pushing those buttons it must drive their
"friends" absolutely bonkers.

On some level I can understand the concept of "keep your friends up-to-date
with your life". But not using these definitions of "friends" and "life".

~~~
bxr
You can block specific applications from ever being shown to you. If it wasn't
for that feature Zynga games would have made me quit facebook a few times
already.

Game updates are annoying, but they aren't much better than anything else
anybody posts, ever.

------
noonespecial
We're two of those deserters here. It seemed too much like tv, in reverse.
Everybody transmits and nobody watches.

~~~
jcitme
This is a problem inherent in any form of social media. Unfortunately, it's
not easily fixed. You need to find a way to strike a balance between rewarding
content creation and punishing spam, and the line in thin.

~~~
ChrisArchitect
people bring this stuff on themselves by treating fb as a massive 'who I know
or am related to' index instead of following who they are interested in. I
suppose fb brought some of this on themselves when they went down the twitter-
emulation path a few years ago.

~~~
ern
It's interesting that you mention the "who am I related to" aspect, because
Geni.com is exactly that. After altercations with unhinged second cousins-
once-removed and unpleasant uncles, I set privacy to maximum and abandoned
Geni (Geni's habit of spamming people who you added also led to a few
unpleasant encounters at family reunions). The family tree idea was good, but
the social aspect turned out to be unpleasant.

Some of the same relatives are friends on Facebook, and it is much more
pleasant experience, because they are nominal "friends", but are in a high
privacy group, so we don't have much opportunity to interact.

------
btilly
In related news for the first time ever, LinkedIn trumped Facebook in a survey
about which social networks people care about.

[http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/linkedin-
trumps-f...](http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/linkedin-trumps-
facebook-in-popularity-contest/1660)

Apparently helping get you sucked in to Farmville is not as valuable to people
as helping you get a job and stay connected with what is happening with old
co-workers. Go figure.

~~~
tintin
I'm not sure you could call LinkedIn a social network. It can be nice to find
out about an old friend, but most of it is pure business. So I'm not surprised
about the survey.

~~~
bad_user
The best thing about LinkedIn for me is their recommendations system. Whenever
I'm looking at people's profiles on LinkedIn, I'm looking at their work
history and their recommendations, the other stuff being basically useless.
And mostly I value recommendations coming from people I know.

So it's a social network and I think it is more pure and valuable than the
Facebook graph since on LinkedIn you only want a thousand connections if
you're an HR person, not because you need friends for Zynga games, so most
people on LinkedIn have between 10-200 connections representing old
colleagues.

~~~
goombastic
The recomendations aren't going anywhere these days. I distrust people with a
huge number of recommendations and when you read through, you understand it's
a mutual favors system. Not that mutual favors are bad, just that most of it
so shallow.

------
cheez
Twitter for me. One of the things I wanted out of Facebook is to talk to
people I knew regarding various topics. I found out that most people just play
Farmville, post happy birthday notes and pictures of their kids. While
catching up with old flames was fun, the interest is gone.

On Twitter, I can search the entire world for people who have the same
interests as me, read their thoughts and correspond with them.

So basically I left Facebook because I really wanted to connect with people on
an intellectual level. Turns out, I don't know anyone who I can correspond
with in that manner.

By left, I mean I deleted the account, whatever that means in FB land.

------
jordan0day
Does anyone have any good guesses as to what the "next" Facebook will be? I
mean, in my experience, it basically went Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook.
While Facebook is certainly in the drivers seat to a much greater extent than
MySpace was five or six years ago, history indicates they'll eventually be
knocked off their throne. However, I haven't seen or heard of any serious
newcomers in that space. I've personally seen enthusiasm for Facebook
diminishing over the past year or two, but will Facebook be end up being the
ultimate "social network"? Is that basically settled?

~~~
politician
My hope is that people have simply tired of the concept. The privacy
implications are staggering.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I don't see anything wrong with a general social network that supports sharing
information with people you know. Regardless of how far people have stretched
and abused the concept of "people you know" (and "information"), the
infrastructure seems useful. So I don't want to see social networking go away;
I want to see it entirely decentralized, such that each person's social
network goes through that person's personal site.

~~~
gnosis
By their very nature, centralized social networking sites like Facebook force
you to share information not only with the people you know, but also with the
owners of site.

Some people don't mind this, but I for one don't want Facebook, MySpace, or
any other social networking site knowing who my friend are or what I'm sharing
with them. It's simply none of their business.

The only hope I see for a truly privacy-respecting social network is a
distributed, peer-to-peer network. That way you'd be communicating only with
those you know, at least in principle.

But even there there are major problems, such as the need for information to
travel over untrusted hops to get to its destination. Encryption can help with
some of it, but would still be subject to traffic analysis. Maybe a social
network could be created over TOR. I don't know.

~~~
michaelchisari
Encrypted, peer-to-peer social networks are prohibitively difficult. More
likely, we'll see node-to-node social networks first.

------
pointillistic
I don't think this is just Facebook, perhaps the so-called social media jumped
the shark. I think it jumped the shark a year ago for both Twitter and
Facebook (CNN, Ashton Kutcher contest) but the numbers are starting to catch
up now. Also don't discount the Linkedin IPO where some would argue the social
media was exposed.

------
bemmu
It could be that the churn just exceeded new users for the first time because
most possible users in USA have been reached already. Some decline is
inevitable if everyone is already using your product.

There's always churn. Even as FB was growing, a part of those new users were
always churning out. Each user makes their own decisions about staying in the
system, they are not a sentient whole except as far as media or changes to the
system might affect larger groups at once.

I imagine your tendency to leave the system to be some sort of a graph. Maybe
you are 30% likely to leave and never ever come back after your first day on
Facebook. After using it for a week, maybe that gets reduced to 20%. After a
month, maybe you are even more unlikely to leave. If they had for example 1
million people joining per day, then 300k would be quitting per day. If the
next day all of USA had been tapped out and only 200k people joined, that
would look like a sudden -100k turn to decline, even though the trend was same
as always.

What happens now will depend on what that churn graph looks like. Maybe it's
sticky enough that they'll be able to keep a big part of the users they got
and over time make it even stickier to keep even more. There will be
improvements to get those users to be more active on the site. Even if there
was no more user growth in the USA, there could be growth in the amount of
time and money the existing userbase spends on the site.

~~~
pessimizer
That this is true is a bit of a tautology. Assuming the graph is monotonically
decreasing sounds unlikely to me, though; I think there's likely to be
multiple peaks - like the proverbial "7-year itch" for marriages.

Another graph that would be relevant would be the likelihood of people who
have been exposed to facebook through their friends, media saturation and
advertising, yet still haven't joined, to be tempted to join later. In other
words - facebook has already saturated the internet world's radar, and people
who haven't joined already are completely aware of its existance, function,
and benefits, and still not joining. Those will be very expensive users to
get, so IMO retention should be their major focus. I stayed through the
"6-month updates-full-of-farmville problem", because they fixed it, they
barely kept me through the "1-and-1/2-year privacy panic" after backing off on
some portion of their stridency (and profitability per user), and they lost me
completely, along with a number of other people I know, after the "2-year
bored-to-shit-with-people-I-went-to-HS-with-telling-me-where-they-went-to-
lunch-and-what-they-think-of-Obama lull" which I'm not sure they can do
anything about.

If a large cohort of similarly aged users hit some peak that facebook is
unable or unwilling to iron out at the same time, and there's no supply of
cheap "Wow, there's a place on the internet where I can keep track of all of
my college buddies!" users to replace them, there could be a precipitous fall.

------
zitterbewegung
I see their numbers. How can I trust them? Mostly I see a lot of stuff trying
to sell to you their service but I don't see how they actually collect their
data.

~~~
anthony_franco
As someone else mentioned, they use Facebook's own advertising tool to
estimate the numbers. And their could be many things wrong with it. But if you
put that number in the context of other metrics, such as Google trends
([http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook&ctab=0&geo=u...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook&ctab=0&geo=us&date=all&sort=0)),
then the numbers make sense. Now the question is, are they gonna have slow
sustained growth from now on like Skype
([http://www.google.com/trends?q=skype&ctab=0&geo=us&#...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=skype&ctab=0&geo=us&geor=all&date=all&sort=0))
or fall off a cliff like MySpace
([http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace&ctab=0&geo=us...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=myspace&ctab=0&geo=us&geor=all&date=all&sort=0))?
Remains to be seen.

~~~
nikcub
that Google Trends result is filtered to show the USA only, yet the 'top
languages' are, in order, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, French and then English
in fifth.

makes me very skeptical about their numbers

------
nextparadigms
I felt this was bound to happen. Too many "friends", too much spam, and it
became too "mainstream", which means the early adopters would want to move on
to something else.

If there actually was "something else" right now, a paradigm shifting social
network, the decay of Facebook would've been even faster, but unfortunately
there isn't much to replace it right now, but I think there will be by the end
of the year.

------
abbasmehdi
I'm still not sure why FB has not figured out an easy way to segment and
categorize friends. FB puts me in the same room with my mom, coworkers, school
buddies, and nephews. Awkward.

~~~
ern
It allows you to group/categorize your friends, and set privacy for each group
for most actions. If you wanted to hide everything from your mom, you could.
If you need to share an update with your nephews, but not your school friends
that's easy.

Perhaps having separate Walls for different groups is the next step.

~~~
zb
That's true for a certain category of content - wall posts, photo albums,
notes - although they don't make it especially easy. For comments, you not
only can't control the privacy setting (it's controlled by whoever posted the
original content), you can't really even tell what it is. For other things -
likes, your friend list - you can't control it at all.

------
auganov
As any other social site ever created it seems to be following the same path.
Each month what I'm seeing on my landing page is getting less relevant and
more annoying (even without growing my friend base too much and having around
20 friends, I cannot imagine what happens to those over 100). Most of that
spam is generated by few active friends, while the rest does pretty much
nothing. Most of communication that I see taking place is very very
meaningless, somebody posts a video: "lol", "haha", "nice one", that's pretty
much it.

For me it's a socially filtered spam [funny stuff?] site.

If some site can encourage people to have meaningful communication again it
will take on Facebook, no doubt. Get 3 of my important friends on the site and
I'm sold. Then Facebook just becomes a big contact list. And at that point I'm
not sure where it goes. It might be a contact-list site for a long long time.

Facebook might not die as a website, but competitors will definitely takeaway
a lot of value from it. And so far I don't see it becoming much more than a
contact-list.

And keep in mind that the less engaged the users are the less ad revenue there
will be. I have no doubt that as we're speaking right now users are less and
less engaged with the site. Growth is still fast so the revenue is rising, but
once that stops it will crumble.

The will have to get more aggressive with ads or people will simply stop to
notice them at all. Or perhaps start selling more of the user data. At this
point there's not much you can do.

Also the growth they see outside of the western world might be very much junk.
I'm in Poland, Facebook craze is already old news here yet I get english ads?
It's great that AT&T has high speed internet for 20$, but I'm sorry, I cannot
purchase that here.

Everybody knows ad revenue is tricky. Facebook is no different.

Nobody is going bankrupt, I'm not saying that. Facebook is here and it will
stay for few more years for sure, but to compare it to google is crazy. Google
can be conquered too I'm sure, but Facebook definitely makes for a far more
fragile target.

Personally I'd say it will simply decay and we might not see another social
site being that big in a long time to come. Facebook has half of the world on
there, cool, but guess what, I am not connecting with those people and never
will.

Facebook managed to get a lot of people registered in one place, but has it
managed to truly connect a lot of people? Not at all.

------
moultano
Anyone know their methodology? I clicked around a bit and couldn't find any
information. Without knowing more my prior would attribute it to a bug.

~~~
teej
The methodology is basically using the Facebook Ad Tool. The tool let's you
target a set of users for your ads and tells you the size of that population.

The article clearly discloses the inherent issues at play.

> Going forward, we’ll be watching closely to see what longer-term trends
> emerge. Bugs in the Facebook advertising tool that we draw this information
> from, seasonal changes like college graduations, and other short-term
> factors, can influence numbers month to month and obscure what’s really
> happening.

~~~
Padraig
Other factors like Facebook finding and removing spam accounts, users enabling
privacy features, etc. seem like a much more likely cause.

I could see people getting bored / busy and not bothering to use it any more,
but it's unbelievable that 1.5 million would delete their accounts in one
month.

------
threejay
I deleted facebook about six months ago because it was a huge stressor that
added very little value to my life. I have too many subsets of friends, which
makes it impossible to maintain one personality without offending someone.
This just isn't how human's interact and I think it will eventually kill off
facebook, unless they find some way to mitigate it.

For reference: 1) Highschool friends and family who are incredibly
religious/right wing/etc 2) Friends from skiing, many of whom make a living on
the mountain, who are about as vile as one can imagine 3) Friends from college
or work, which consists mostly of PharmD's, MD's, and nurses. 4) Other random
friends from startup stuff, partys, etc

~~~
chriserin
I think humans inherently want to nurture each of their relationships, whether
close or not, individually. Along with tailoring our communication to each
person, we exclude large parts of our lives and minds from people that we want
to be friends with. Doing that naturally and through different contexts is one
thing, but having to electronically do that for each relationship is just
impossible.

------
indigoviolet
134 points, 76 comments, and maybe 3 of them critically examining the
methodology :/

------
int3rnaut
To quote the Disney Hipster meme, "it's too mainstream". Perhaps I have an
obscure point of view, but Facebook lost it's luster for a lot of people when
the older crowd started to really embrace it. It's not as cool as it once was.
This is a big problem for a lot of companies, not just social media.

~~~
jocote
This. Was pretty cool at first connecting with classmates and writing messages
about papers, projects, and planning stuff for the weekend. Now it's some
gossipy aunt you haven't talked to in months and your seven year old niece
sending a friend request.

------
SebMortelmans
I don't have figures to back it up, but Facebook in Belgium also feels like
it's declining. Not necessary new users, that may be still even rising. But
mainly active users becoming inactive. Im daring to bet that's declining big
in Belgium.

------
jerrya
"Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users..."

You know who else lost nearly 6 million users?

Yep. AOL.

------
mscarborough
If true, this is pretty interesting in the context of the privacy and other
mishaps from Facebook over the last few months.

I wonder what the breakdown would be for the reasons for quitting.

------
Shenglong
China is really a stumbling block. I've actually been thinking about the best
way to penetrate the Chinese market... I'm thinking the strategy is to start
young, and keep good relations with their government. I guess this is tricky,
especially if the founders can't speak Chinese, and have no family ties.

~~~
jamesteow
Well Mark Zuckerberg is into Asian girls so I suppose that's his in.

------
olihb
They don't say why or where those users are going. If the users aren't going
anywhere else, they just decided that Facebook weren't for them. This might be
alright for Facebook because I guess they want committed users that log on the
site several times per day, not users that log once in a while.

~~~
noarchy
Where else would they go, at this point? I don't know of any competitors that
are live and able to target Facebook refugees. Diaspora is still in Alpha, for
example, and I suspect that the buzz on that one has been fading for some
time.

~~~
jordan0day
Yeah, I'm not sure there's really such a thing as a "Facebook refugee" yet.
That is, someone who leaves Facebook and is looking for something better. My
guess is that those leaving Facebook are those saying "This whole thing is
dumb", and are not looking to continue to engage in online social
networking... at least in the way it's been presented so far.

~~~
zenspunk
Anecdotal: yes, that's exactly the thinking of my friends and I who have given
up Facebook. It's turned us off the very concept.

------
dhughes
It's trendy to hate Facebook these days but I think it's more than that.

People want to stay connected especially people 20 to 30 years-old and how do
they do that now? Smartphones, iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices.

Facebook hasn't lost the battle it's just become obsolete.

------
golgo13
I am personally seeing the growth from Mexico. In the past month, a large
chunk of my cousins have added me. But like others have said, most of their
updates are from the Spanish version of Farmville, etc.

------
oldpond
And what do you know, The Social Network came out on cable around the same
time. Coincidence?

------
ashcairo
I blame teenybopper exams.

