

Facebook's Problem Isn't Privacy - rfreytag
http://www.cringely.com/2010/05/lets-get-small/

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kevinh
"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."

As far as I can see, this contradicts most of what he was talking about
previously. If you kick the people off of Facebook who don't make them much
money, you'll be kicking off the people who _don't_ play Farmville or Mafia
Wars, and you will be left with an even worse signal to noise ratio.

Despite that, I thought it was an interesting article.

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ori_b
The reason people use facebook is because everyone is there. Get rid of that
network effect by kicking off 90% of users, and facebook has just suicided.

~~~
stcredzero
Better curation of posts is what's needed. The rushing torrent of information
is useless. We need to reward those who post interesting things and penalize
those who post drivel, without alienating friends. We also need better
filters.

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Jun8
This criticism is spot on, but it's not FB's fault. Look, if you have >800
"friends", chances are you will get many less than interesting status updates,
that is true for any social medium. You can of course hide people, but I've
found that the cost of miss is much larger than the cost of false alarm, e.g.
I can quickly filter, maybe 20 status updates per minute to judge their level
of relevance. However, even people who post "inane" updates sometimes post
interesting stuff.

Now, one interesting thing that FB doesn't have is a "best-of-today" display
of all public updates, that can be voted up or down by all users. This would
be an incentive to post interesting updates. What do you think?

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mortenjorck
_Facebook is useless to me. We’re all too connected to really connect._

Exactly. Once again, it's the problem of social flatland. Meeting everyone we
know all at once is never conducive to meaningful interaction. It's why, even
at a party, surrounded by many people we know, we rarely address the entire
group and certainly never carry on a conversation that way.

Social networking will stagnate until someone builds upon a non-flat model.

~~~
natrius
Facebook isn't flat. It has friend lists. The problem isn't the product; it's
the people. It's not always easy to mentally categorize new people you meet
because you don't know what bucket they're ultimately going to end up in.
Pruning and adding to lists is work. Worst of all, creating lists to begin
with requires sifting through all of your friends and bucketing them.

Facebook has tried to address this by automatically filtering your feed to
show you the people it thinks you care about. I don't know how well this works
because I'm too much of an information glutton to allow things to be hidden
from me, so I turned the filtering off.

~~~
mortenjorck
_The problem isn't the product; it's the people._

I think Don Norman would probably disagree with you.

I maintain that this is a design problem. We meet people in a variety of
different contexts in real life: These contexts vary by geography, time, and
purpose, but they're discrete entities that should be as translatable to an
application's design patterns as our person-to-person relationships already
are. How to do this smoothly, of course, is a bit trickier than just making a
buddy list, hence the fact that it's not being done very well right now. But
that's no reason to give up and blame the users!

The funny thing is, Facebook actually got this mostly right at the beginning.
The "networks" were exactly the kind of construct that a non-flat social
network needs; their downfall was that they started out too big to be useful
and only bloated from there until they were retired. Networks the size of your
immediate family, a group close friends, your team at the office, would have
worked. And, with proper design, they still can.

~~~
natrius
Some problems are just hard. No one blames calculators for the difficulty of
calculus. Classifying relationships is something we don't normally do
consciously.

People use email and Facebook messages for the small groups you've mentioned.
Attempting to shoehorn that use case into the news feed and the post workflow
would complicate things. Most things that people share outside of work don't
need to be limited to few people.

Cringely is basically saying, "I wish Facebook solved this problem that I
have, but few of its other users probably have as well." It makes no sense.

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kscaldef
I guess I'm just a social leper or something, but I don't have this problem.
Nor do most of the people I know who aren't professional networkers. I have
something in the neighborhood of 150 "friends" on FB. Only about 30 or so of
them post with any regularity.

If you are "friends" with ever person you ever meet, yeah, this will be a
problem for you. On the other hand, if you limit your "friends" to people you
would actually make a point to hang out with in person when you're in the same
place, it doesn't seem to be an issue.

In other words, this isn't Facebook's problem, it's Cringely's problem.

~~~
stcredzero
An alternative view: Facebook needs more kinds of friends. Best friends.
Respected advisors. Acquaintances. Annoying friends. Tolerated relatives.
Workable filtering could be inferred from these designations. (Which could
then be tweaked into good filtering.)

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der_ketzer
I think the problem of facebook is not the size of your friend list, but the
size of "useless" (matter of tastes) apps that populate the timeline, like
quizzes, and a big etc of questions, games...

I block one, and ten new appear...

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natrius
By default, Facebook limits the Live Feed to show only posts from people it
thinks you care about to limit overload. I assume few people change this, but
Cringely has. Click "Edit Options" at the bottom of the Live Feed.

