
How to Take Down Facebook -- Hint: It Ain't Twitter.  - dwynings
http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2010/10/how-to-take-down-facebook.html
======
revorad
I think Dave is dreaming up too complex a proposition.

If a social network has all these complexities, how will it grow? If FB had
all these complexities, it would never grow so big. Now that it is big, it can
experiment with groups, although even that is a second attempt because lists
didn't work. People hate settings. FB is like an online version of a bar.
People just want to hang out.

The intimate alternative he is imagining is email. People already use it and
it works fine.

Before Facebook came along, was anyone writing blog posts about how nice it
will be if a website let me share photos of my last holiday with my random old
school buddies who I haven't spoken to in 20 years?

These things are quite random. So, in as far as something will take down
Facebook, it will simply be something which is equally or more viral and fun.
It does not matter what its specific form or function will be. Intimacy is not
essential.

~~~
dfield
Dave isn't giving you a solution. He's pointing out a number of problems that
need to be solved. Just because technology works fine doesn't mean it's the
optimal solution. Tech develops incrementally.

Stack Overflow has a search feature and it works fine. But wouldn't it be cool
if someone aggregated results from different programming websites?
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1854731>)

Check out Union Square Venture's blogpost from May:
<http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2010/05/stackoverflow.php>. In addition to
describing their investment, the post describes problems in the space. If you
had never heard of Stack Overflow and you only read about the problems in that
post, would you say the solution was too complex?

~~~
revorad
The headline suggests he is proposing a solution: a social network which beats
FB by prioritising intimacy.

I think it's pretty much like dating sites. Before you solve the chicken-and-
egg problem, it's meaningless to talk about how you add value. And the
proposed value-add here (intimacy) makes the chicken-and-egg problem even more
difficult (a dating site only for Mac lovers, anyone?).

 _Edited for clarity_

------
Tyrannosaurs
This really isn't an issue for anyone who has used any sort of sensible
definition of "friend" when making and accepting requests. If you go with
"anyone who asks" as your definition then you really shouldn't be surprised at
a lack of intimacy.

Feels like a case of "people misuse software, blame software".

~~~
aswanson
I disagree. All friends aren't created equal, and I don't want certain people
hearing certain statements I make. Not that I distrust them, its just where
our relationship is. I find it incredibly annoying to see older family
"liking" status comments I make on pages of people they don't even know. After
I delete the link to the comment on my page. fb facilitates this with their
"so and so did so and so" in the feed. Too invasive.

~~~
DeusExMachina
But this thing is customizable, albeit not very easily. An example on how I
use Facebook: I created a list of friends that are able to see my wall. It is
a sort of a whitelist. If you ask me for friendship and I grant it to you, you
just see some albums and the generic info page. I have to put you explicitly
in the whitelist to let you see my wall.

Even if you are in the whitelist, I still can select what you see: I have a
list of people from work, close friends, people who speak a particular
language and so on. Everytime I post something to my wall I can decide to
which lists it's visible and to which it's not. It takes a little to set up
but after that it's easy to manage.

~~~
aswanson
That's the thing....it wasn't even on my wall. It was a comment on someone
else's page who wasn't a mutual friend. The link to the comment was deleted
and they still found it, probably through fbs "look what x said on y's page "
feature.

------
user24
I don't know how to say this without sounding self-promotional, but there are
a few points here which agree with my post on why Diaspora won't kill facebook
- [http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/09/why-diaspora-wont-beat-
fa...](http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/09/why-diaspora-wont-beat-facebook/)

Specifically, we agree on the fact that many friends=problem. Dave doesn't
really suggest a solution to that problem - I think it's something which can
be solved technically. Dave also brings out a great argument as to why privacy
matters to facebook, which I hadn't spotted before.

~~~
Ygor
Can the "two many friends" problem be solved with more powerful personal
internal groups, or better named - contact labels?

The problem is in the name "friend". Most of our facebook-friends are actually
just contacts. Only a subset of those contacts are your real friends. So, the
problem is with the name of the concept, not the concept itself.

It would be pretty useful if facebook expanded on the concept of labeling
contacts and thus making contact subgroups. Yes, putting friends in groups is
already possible, but I feel it is highly underpowered. It should rank a lot
higher in the whole user experience and the facebook core itself (separate
walls, photos, easier management, easier viewing, easier control).

~~~
user24
The feature you're suggesting will only be used by the sort of people who like
tagging and keywording and organising things. I.e. not facebook's users.

I think facebook should automatically and invisibly group your friends for you
- in fact they already do filter out some of your uninteresting contacts
automatically, but I feel there's more work to be done on that area.

~~~
uxp
Facebook already knows the likelyhood that Friend_A is closer to you socially
than Friend_B based on the number of shared friends you have. Combine that
with the frequency you "like" the posts and links of friends in that category,
which signifies you pay attention to them, and you have an impressive dataset
to dissect. I'm not saying it would be an easy task, but they already have
enough data to build a reasonably accurate friend-group graph, at least for
people that use it personally instead of an extension of business (marketers
and lead generation).

It could be just enough for people to use the service and have to clean up a
dozen or less of their 300 friends which have been mis-categorized, instead of
individually placing the 300 friends in a group.

~~~
user24
yep. And it's not just explicit actions such as like; facebook records
everything you click on[1], so every time you view one of Joe's photos, or
view his profile, or even just hover over his status update for a few seconds,
that could bring you a little closer to him in the friend space.

This kind of thing probably already exists in facebook's internal labs,
they're just waiting for their users to become ready for this kind of feature.

[1] - [http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/facebook-employee-
clai...](http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/facebook-employee-claims-they-
record-everything-you-do-and-can-read-your-me/)

------
bradgessler
Dave's writing style is distracting.

~~~
davemc500hats
btw, u _do_ realize this post had no crazy fonts in it as an A/B test for u
Haterz out there, right? ;)

~~~
Sukotto
Yes, it was the difference between "His writing style is quirky but his point
is interesting" and "I'm not reading that".

------
shadowsun7
This may be a tiny blip in a larger trend, actually. Jonathan Harris wrote an
essay sometime back called _World Building in a Crazy World_
(<http://www.number27.org/worldbuilding.html>) where he argues, approximately,
that social connection over the Internet has been moving towards the short and
superficial for some time now, and has found an end-point in Twitter.

I believe he's right - when you've hit Twitter, the only way to go is to swing
right back to intimacy - to meaningful, private digital connections. The whole
essay is well worth a read.

Edit: Also, isn't the things that McClure is arguing for essentially what
<http://www.frid.ge/> is doing?

------
mayutana
The reason for Facebook's popularity is its simpleness. Now that it is
popular, it can experiment with additional features such as groups and more
intimate group settings. Orkut, on the other hand attempted to do it the other
way around. I am not sure how does it work now, but 2-3 years back, when one
adds a friend, he is expected to rate the closeness in a scale of 1-5. This
was to improve friend of friend suggestions as well as who is allowed to see
what. The problem with this approach was that it was confusing for the users.
This might be a stumbling block for new applications that try to foster a
private group structure. But I do agree with Dave that there is a need for
such applications.

------
anthony_franco
The basic problem is that FB models the social graph with a rigid, undirected
graph when in fact we live in multiple, constantly-evolving, weighted graphs
of social connections.

The newsfeed-ranking algorithm, privacy controls, friend lists, and latest
groups incarnation are all simply hacks to try to shoehorn it's flawed social
schema into what we actually experience in the real world.

------
edanm
It took me a long time to understand why Facebook limits your friends to 5000,
but I get it now. Facebook is very explicitly _not_ like Twitter, in that you
want to connect to as many people as possible.

Facebook is a direct map of your real-life social circle, to the internet.
It's just a way of taking your friends in real life and interacting with them
more easily (much easier than emailing everyone, for example.) Of course, lots
of people don't really use Facebook that way, but that's the behavior that is
encouraged, and most people more-or-less follow that pattern.

In that case, I don't think having 500 friends is that big a problem. Sure,
for most people, 300 of those friends will be people you aren't very close
with, but so what? Other than the news feed, it shouldn't matter to you who
these people are, except in terms of privacy. And you know what? With matters
of privacy, I think the world is moving towards Robert Scoble's view - just
assume everything is public anyway.

~~~
joelg87
I'm not sure that 5000 number is so deliberately chosen. Take the Tweet from
Mark Zuckerberg in March 2009: "I find it funny that it's on Digg that I'm
here. I'm looking forward to when people can have unlimited connections on
Facebook soon!" - <http://twitter.com/#!/finkd/status/1297171671>. Then again,
it's not happened yet, so maybe they changed their mind :)

~~~
edanm
I'm not sure it's so deliberate either - but I think that's what their
strategy _should_ be, at least.

By the way, the number 5,000 is a great number: it doesn't really matter what
the number is, as long as there _is_ a ceiling, it's pretty clear that you're
_not_ supposed to add anyone and everyone. On the other hand, 5,000 is large
enough that most users won't realistically hit it.

------
bd
There was an excellent presentation about real life social networks by Paul
Adams from Google making similar observations:

[http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-
networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2)

------
prawn
Twitter capped the length of a post. The upstart he's talking about might cap
the number of people in a clique. Let's say 12 which could give rise to a
domain with "dozen" in it. Like Twitter, it won't be built because it ticks
boxes or has a great business plan, but just because. Rather than Twitter's
asymmetric following or Facebook's friending, all members of a clique may need
to approve any new member, and it won't be done lightly. "Is this person
Sponge-worthy?" [1]

It could be simplified to its core. Picture New Twitter now but even simpler,
and flipped horizontally. Post/item on the left side, and then banter on the
right. Maybe one of the crew posts a jacket they're thinking of buying, or the
result of a game, or a new movie trailer. Chit-chat fills the right hand side
until people lose interest and move on to other posts.

Editing to add: I run a basketball forum which is a free-for-all. Anonymous
posting, etc. And I often wonder how my experience of it would change if I
just locked it down to the best 12-20 contributors - might miss a few
challenging viewpoints, but there'd be no spam, griefers, brainless posts,
etc. Perhaps picture the aforementioned concept as a micro-forum based around
a particular niche rather than necessarily a particular group of friends?

And again (still thinking): You pick niches of interest and are randomly
lumped with 12-20 others for as long as the group lasts. As with online
gaming, you can privately kick out griefers or passengers. Perhaps you can
only commit to 3 groups (wine, NBA, travel) to ensure you don't spread too
thin. Elevator spiel is: Chatroulette + microforum + group decisions.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sponge>

~~~
revorad
If you cap the number of people in a network in any way, all you are doing is
limiting its growth. A social network without growth is not a social network.

~~~
prawn
Good point, but I do wonder if there would be viral opportunities that arise
because of the limitation, through value of invitations, etc. Picking and
choosing the people for your group rather than seeing if they'll join so you
can find and friend them.

~~~
revorad
Viral and limitation don't go hand in hand. Paul Buchheit made this point
realy well in his startup school talk couple of years ago:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZxP0i9ah8E#t=21m56s>

------
DanielBMarkham
There's a contextual problem that's been around for 50 years that FB is just
making worse.

Human communications depend largely on context. We weren't made to blurt out
every one of our feelings and observations to the community at large. Instead,
we share this piece of information with this person, ask this other person for
advice, listen in on these other folks when they talk about X, etc.

The is the natural way of being human -- to use a phrase from the movie, it's
the social experience.

Every technical solution I've seen so far fails to include this contextual
nature of communication. It's too much of a pain for folks to pick certain
people for certain kinds of talk, and it's all so much a pain in the ass
(compared with the old way of physically moving from one group to another)

Oddly enough, this was first noticed with TV back in the 1950s. Up until then,
conversations were small and cliquish -- the natural order. TV brought in the
idea of "universal" communicating in a way that radio, plays, or newspapers
didn't. Suddenly everybody in the family was in the room when Lucy got
pregnant, or when Opie killed the bird with the slingshot.

Of course, nobody bothered much complaining back then, because, after all,
back in the 1950s what kind of radical information was going to be on TV? And
nobody complained (much) when TV got into a lot more controversial issues in
the last couple of decades.

But now it's not TV -- it's _us_. It's our lives, our pregnancies, our
sorrows, etc.

I think people need the contextual nature of communication -- it makes society
function. But I don't see any technology solution on the horizon that easily
and naturally facilitates this. And yes, if it happens it might just be the
next FB killer. But that's a big "if". Lots of folks have went down the road
of trying to add context, including FB itself, and so far nobody has been
successful.

~~~
callmeed
_"But I don't see any technology solution on the horizon that easily and
naturally facilitates this."_

Email

------
dchs
Facebook's NEW groups feature solves this (the old one didn't):

<http://facebook.com/groups/>

------
jim_h
I think Facebook will be hard to replace until something else has enough mass.
The problem is the FB is continuing to gain mass.

FB has enough gravity to pull most users back in. To break free, the user will
need will power to ignore all their friends trying to drag them back.

~~~
akharris
People said the same thing about myspace a few years back. It was king of the
social internets. Clearly, it wasn't quite as big as Facebook, but it's all a
question of giving users what they want. If someone can identify the
discontents and innovate on them faster than Facebook can, then we'll see a
new, legitimate, challenger.

Of course, in order to do that, you have to think that FB won't innovate
quickly enough to sit on whoever tries. It's the classic startup v. big
company challenge.

------
InclinedPlane
Yup. Facebook friends trend towards bloat, which is problematic. Twitter
followers/followees can be somewhat more manageable because there's a
different set of assumptions about what following means vs. "friending".

The difficulty is that this is a very deep problem, and it is "solved" only
partially by a very complex, very subtle, very tricky set of societal and
personal customs and behaviors. The biggest problem from a social networking
service standpoint is that computers very much prefer clear, explicit data,
whereas human relationships exist in varying degrees of fuzziness. Most people
don't sit down and write out a complete list of everyone who they consider a
friend, nor do they create a tiered set of levels of friendships or a ranked
list, nor would that necessarily be helpful as such levels are often in flux
as friendships change, evolve, grow, and dissolve.

This is a problem everywhere with human behavior, it's one of the reasons why
google was successful, for example. Back in the day every search engine was
very practical and straightforward. Searching a set of terms brought you a
list of web pages that had those terms on them, ranked by whatever convenient
concrete metric seemed reasonable. To improve the quality of search results
people would have to manually provide cues to search engines, via meta tags
for example. Google decided instead to use a more sophisticated search
strategy, extracting the implicit meta data about web pages via page rank and
such-like. In short, google made web search conform to human behavior, rather
than trying to get human behavior to conform to the requirements of search.

I suspect the same breakthrough is waiting to happen in social networking and
will have just as big an impact.

~~~
notahacker
Facebook could start by realising that I'm not interested in Farmville updates
from people I have never interacted with beyond accepting their initial friend
request, and am very interested in updates from the people whose events I
attend and messages I reply to. They have a wealth of data on how I
_intentionally_ interact with other Facebook users.

But most of the manual features for managing friends are already in place -
you can update particular lists of people through groups, events and private
messages. It's really not that tricky to decide who you want to invite to that
awesome house party or on the cheap trip to Vegas.

Other features, such as the "how do you know them?" and focus on
work/school/city networks seem to have actually been removed due to lack of
use despite offering very intuitive and automatic categorisation of friends.
Facebook's trajectory towards openness probably reflects a lack of desire
towards using it in a structured way. A hypothetical startup whose main
strength is removing the spam in the newsfeed and adding in the features they
chose to remove probably isn't going to keep Zuck awake at night. I preferred
Facebook before Zynga and gratuitous "liking", but I'm not going to persuade
my closest friends to move to a clone to get rid of the bloat.

FWIW I think Dave's example of friend bloat is probably more a reflection of
his social circle than underlying changes in Facebook itself. He'd have had a
lot more friends in 2006 if he'd been attending university, and considerably
fewer now if he was working 9-5 for an unglamorous small business and nobody
read his blog. The number of friends I had grew far faster in early 2006 than
in any subsequent period, and people I shared fleeting conversation whilst
waiting for lectures with were arguably far more tangentially connected to me
than, say, my sister.

~~~
smackfu
"Facebook could start by realising that I'm not interested in Farmville
updates "

OTOH, should Facebook be "smart" about this, or should they just provide a
button to hide all Farmville updates? In fact, they try to do the first, and
also do the second, so I don't know why people still complain about this.

~~~
notahacker
I think they should do both, in a better and more obvious way. Certainly, some
level of filtering of the feed has alwaye existed, but 1997 Yahoo tried at
search and 2004 Hotmail had rudimentary spam filters and reporting tools.
Google admittedly didn't have to fight against strong network effects to grab
market share there, but it was the ability to incrementally improve that made
their product offering more compelling rather than anything staggeringly
original. And Yahoo and Microsoft had a better starting position to make
improvements had they realised the true value of the underlying data on their
user behaviour...

To be fair to Facebook's team, the feed does seem to have improved recently
and not just because I've manually blocked Zynga apps. But with their data and
talent there really shouldn't be any suggestion that a competitor starting
from the ground up could better facilitate the social interaction they started
off specialising in.

------
stevenj
currently, my cell phone (non-smartphone) provides me with more meaning and
intimacy than fb.

i get information quickly; it's fast, efficient, and effective; i don't have
to sign in to anything (except for voicemails, which i very rarely check);
it's pretty much with me wherever i go; it's relevantly actionable -- i get
timely invites to go do stuff with people that i care about and want to do
(because people with my # know what i'm interested in); i can actually talk to
people, which is something i enjoyed doing a lot growing up.

------
Robin_Message
I think this is something the Fridge
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631684>) is good for.

------
blr_hack
Think it may go in cycles, for both search engines and social networks.

For search engines: First we had specific directories (Yahoo, others), then a
single search engine (Google), followed by need of vertical search engines

For social: First we had all those nice forums; then (now) Facebook; again we
could go to context specific verticals (e.g. HN a hacker vertical version of
FB, which has the context for hackers)

------
smiler
He's only got himself to blame - he clicked 'Accept' on every single one of
those 2000+ friends. If he didn't want that many, he shouldn't have added
them.

~~~
schlichtm
The total number of friends does not matter. It comes down to the fact that
there is simply information you want to share with only your close friends.

You're not going to tell everyone that the VC you just met with is a tool -
but I bet you anything there are a handful of people you do want to tell and
discuss it with.

This issue needs to be solved from both angles. An experience that encourages
the sharing of content with dynamic lists of connections + an interface that
organizes content based on conversations and not strictly a news feed of
interactions taking place within your personal network.

------
madmaze
I completely agree with Dave. Especially on his points about how many friends
people have. I really dont want to share everything with everyone. I want a
feeling of community not a feeling of exploitation. Its been driving me nuts
that every page I visit has a facebook "like" or comment option. This is why I
have been supporting Diaspora, I want to jump ship, but there is nothing
viable to jump to, yet.

------
dave1619
I agree with Dave. Facebook is like your public social network, and you don't
want to post private things on your wall. The question is can Facebook address
this or is Facebook just fundamentally too public?

~~~
Estragon
I don't understand why people don't have multiple facebook accounts reflecting
different levels of privacy. I facebook-suicided because I didn't want to mix
my personal and professional lives, and when I contemplate going back to it
(mainly for professional reasons) I always have a two-account system in mind.
Obviously, I don't use facebook much, so I might be missing something, though.

------
greglockwood
>>> in each case above, there's a specific tight circle of connections I'd
like to draw on, but they aren't always the same

Which, presumably, does not include Ron Conway or Michael Arrington.

~~~
davemc500hats
LOL +1

(but strangely, I _would_ choose them not, in diff situations...)

------
p01nd3xt3r
FB treats friendship like its bimodal when in fact its not. People have many
levels of friendship and FB does not take that into account. IMHO that is the
main weakness w/ their site right now.

------
al_james
All they need to add is the ability to star (or favourite) a friend. Then you
can view just your newsfeed from your favourite friends. Perfect.

~~~
swombat
That doesn't resolve the context problem. Your close friends from school
aren't your close friends from work. The two are not necessarily going to
intersect. Starring is to one-dimensional, hence groups. But groups are a pain
to manage. Pick your poison...

~~~
al_james
To me, starring captures enough of the functionality without being a pain to
manage. But I see your point.

------
peterwwillis
Am I the only one who was just inspired to reduce his 'friends list' from 145
to 38?

~~~
revorad
No, I did it too. But I'm a nerd who has a love-hate relationship with FB.
Most of my friends just gave me a "why would you do that?" look when I told
them.

------
noverloop
Facebook groups solve this problem. However I don't think you want to manage
your closest friends on one platform.

I communicate with the people I care about through all communication methods
available, restricting this to one method would be a distraction.

