

Why We are Moving Away from Facebook as a Platform - fezzl
http://blog.zuupy.com/3-reasons-that-we-are-moving-away-from-facebo

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nextparadigms
Facebook seems ripe for disruption, or at the very least it shouldn't be that
hard to compete with it as it was a while ago. Former early adopters and
addicted users are getting tired of it and want something new, better, less
spammy.

It's also in the nature of early adopters to move on by the time a product or
service becomes _too_ mainstream. They just need to see something else that is
compelling first. But I think many of them are already using it much less than
they used to.

I think a true distributed P2P social network would be very interesting for
them, but it would also need to get the execution right. I haven't heard much
about Diaspora lately, but something interesting came out a few days ago with
BitTorrent trying to make a P2P social network around torrents. I think that's
an intriguing idea, and it's a bit similar to what Opera tried to do with
Unite.

As a side note, I think all social networks so far have had one major design
flaw. I've joined other social networks before Facebook and they all seem to
suffer from the "too many friends" problem, which does become a problem once
you start having hundreds or thousands of friends.

I think there needs to be 2 categories of "friends": true Friends and
Followers. When you accept a request it should make that person a Follower by
default, but it should give you the option to make him a Friend also. So many
people add others on Facebook now, when it's just so they can see more info
about them or their private pictures, with no real intention of "befriending"
them later on. That's why I think most requests should become followers by
default, and only choose to make them "Friends" when you really know the
person.

I think Twitter's model works a bit like that. You can have thousands of
followers, but only a few "friends" where you basically follow each other.
Just something to think about for whoever wants to build the _next_ social
network or whatever, so they don't repeat this huge mistake that almost every
social network has made so far.

~~~
qjz
In the real world, someone who follows you that is not a friend is a stalker.
I suggest that the "too many friends" problem might better be described as the
"too many stalkers" problem. How many is too many? One.

The real problem is that we want to map our existing relationships to online
tools without redefining them according to some nebulous model. Nobody has
offered that capability yet. Friendship is intimacy. How can you achieve that
in an environment where anyone can invade your privacy to some degree?

~~~
shubble
No one want's to be a second tier friend.

But it seems to me most people have up to 10 close friends, up to 100 sort of
friends (the colleague you like and talk to daily, but wouldn't ask about your
sexual problems), and then a large number of people they want to follow or not
fall completely out of touch with (second tier friends who you no longer work
with, but might ask a favor at some point).

I've found that people get upset if you don't ad them on facebook. It marks
them as unimportant to you. I doubt they'd like to be categorized as a second
tier friend, or demoted to third tier.

I'd say rather than creating categories, it would be better to allow users to
make groups of friends, and select which group gets which news. That way you
could say "Oh I'm sorry I didn't invite you to my party, I had you down under
work people"...

~~~
ams6110
Are most people really so insecure that they would be bothered by not being a
"top tier" friend to everyone they have ever known? Surely you can name a
person with whom you have a cordial acquaintance, but are quite obviously not
in their circle of "close" friends. I my case that's the big majority of
people I know. So what?

~~~
dodo53
Well it's fine if it's a symmetrical both of you think each other as same
tier; less so if you'd disagree (e.g. some bosses think all their subordinates
are their friends and would want them at their parties).

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perlgeek
How about reason 0: You depend on a platform that can shut you down in an
instant without any justification and without possibilities to reactivate your
app?

~~~
ignifero
this argument comes up over and over when talking about facebook APIs etc, but
this is an inherent risk in all kinds of online and offline applications: from
the electric power company to the ISPs, to browser vendors, to facebook, there
are all kinds of dependencies you have to rely on. True, facebook is more
likely to have conflicts of interest with your web app. But the main issue is
that facebook doesn't yet have a financial interest to maintain a healthy app
ecosystem.

~~~
chopsueyar
I can sign contracts with electric companies and pay for SLAs from ISPs.

If browser vendors simpy start disabling browsers, we have much bigger
problems.

Facebook's interest is in policing apps, and acquiring/crushing/copying the
relevant ones.

~~~
ignifero
Crushing apps is not a big problem (Zynga still earns more than facebook
itself). The problem is we cannot sign an SLA, or have any other contractual
relationship with facebook, even though they take a 30% cut or ouf virtual
currency sales.

~~~
nl
_Zynga still earns more than facebook itself_

Citation please? I think this was true in 2009, but hasn't been the case for
quite a while.

~~~
ignifero
You 're right wrt earnings (zynga had $0.85B vs facebook $2B in 2010). Zynga
will probably earn $1.8B this year
([http://blogs.forbes.com/afontevecchia/2011/03/02/zynga-
revea...](http://blogs.forbes.com/afontevecchia/2011/03/02/zynga-reveals-
profit-and-revenues-as-it-looks-to-raise-500-million/)). I can't edit the
previous comment, though.

Still, for a company that is essentially a parasite on facebook, the money
they earn is staggering. They could even earn a lot more if they used
advertising on their games (they stopped using ads in 2010).

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veyron
"even though Facebook actually has 600 million active users" <\-- does
facebook have 600 million actual active users or 600 million accounts?

~~~
jfarmer
Active users

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pkennedy
Reason 3 is why I am constantly advising friends not to take "promote your
business on Facebook!" classes, especially when there are other, more direct
avenues available to them. I've come to the conclusion that social and
marketing are an awkward mix, and most people route around attempts to inject
the latter into the former.

On the other hand, social media is a great way for your customers to tell
their friends if they've had an exceptional experience with you. So I believe
making it easy for your customers to talk about you is far more valuable than
building on Facebook itself.

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ThomPete
There are many more problems with FaceBook IMHO. That doesn't mean you should
move away from it simply just use it to your advantage.

(Shameless plug) <http://000fff.org/how-to-think-like-facebook-and-twitter/>

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dr_
Hold on a sec - replacing facebook with something else is not that simple and
i'd venture probably unlikely. there's a huge network effect that facebook has
in place. it is not just for games. it is starting to drive traffic to various
news outlets: (<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385095,00.asp>) and it
is probably just getting started. There is something substantial to facebook
that makes people come back. And naturally as a company is growing and adding
more features, the API is going to change. I personally use it a lot to share
news articles with my "friends", but the ability to now share those articles
with only certain friends, directly from the news website - which hasn't been
implemented everywhere yet, is pretty interesting and shows that facebook
realizes that there are friends and there are "friends".

It would be far easier to have disrupted something like Google, which doesn't
have the same network effect as Facebook - but even that has been very
challenging for anyone to do.

~~~
chopsueyar
So you can use it like Twitter?

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surfingdino
I agree. The Facebook API is a mess. It is too costly for developers to chase
the changes and the API itself is too restrictive. It's like AppleScript, a
great idea, pity you cannot do much with it.

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ignifero
Facebook platform is only good for games. No other type of app can get
traction there, because facebook is an entertainment medium , no matter how
hard they 've tried to become more "serious". The thing is, it has gotten
increasingly off-putting for indie game developers to follow facebook's
labyrinthine platform roadmap. Their platform designs and updates are
notoriously amateurish and short-sighted. I believe they have changed 3
platform leads, each of whom introduced a new API. Their weekly code pushes
regularly introduce bugs along with the fixes.

For us, it's taking more time to adjust to facebook's everchanging APIs,
policies, designs etc, than adding features to our games. The fact that
facebook nonsensically banned Adsense advertising does not help either.

That said, facebook is still the most efficient amplifier that can provide
exposure to web apps.

I would personally vouch for another provider that can offer a stable social
gaming platform. There were rumors about a google game network, and i m
hopeful about it

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gcb
how can someone find only three?

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tibbe
Requests per minute!

