
Facebook's Newest Problem: Being Boring - wavephorm
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/09/facebooks-newest-challenge-being-boring/42595/
======
scott_s
I don't buy it. Before anything else, Yahoo was a combination search engine
and indexer. Google trounced them. There was just no way they could continue
to compete. So then they branched out into becoming a "media company," and
lost all direction. There is nothing they excel at.

Until someone is a better social networking site than Facebook, they are in no
danger of "becoming Yahoo." And I don't think that's going to happen anytime
soon - and maybe not ever. Facebook may become "boring," but only in the sense
that all of your utilities are boring. You rely on them, but they cease to be
exciting, and instead just become part of the background of things that you
take for granted. This is very different from Yahoo, which is boring because
it's irrelevant.

~~~
Philipe1L2P
I agree with your assessment of the curent Social Media's state of affairs.
Facebook is here to stay. Well for “ever” is a taboo word that I would never
use (not just in tech nowadays), but I think that their user base will ensure
sufficient longevity in tech years (which is akin to dog years).

I believe that Facebook will keep being somewhat interesting by default due to
their alluring ecosystem and viral potential for future entrepreneurs. Most
new Apps are built with a clear strategy of broadcasting itself (and showing
some of its features) through Facebook feeds. These new Apps have made peoples
feeds a lot more interesting. I think Instagram is a good example of this. It
made your friends amateur photos much cooler and aesthetically pleasing to
look at; thus drawing you to a more interesting Facebook experience.

Their strength lies in their ecosystem and ability to let their users and
developers easily create and share content. They have more or less nailed this
down already (along with a revenue sharing system to sustain some of their
infrastructure costs). At the end of the day, even if they stopped innovating,
they’ve done such a fantastic play with their infrastructure, that it ensures
that they remain interesting as long as new entrepreneurs keep developing Apps
that enhance their ecosystem.

If anything, I think their need to copy and catch up with new breakthroughs
from other social networks (i.e. Google+, Foursquare and Twitter) is actually
making their product more convoluted and less appealing. Less is more in
Facebook’s case. That was the genius of Facebook from day 1. You could strip
down Facebook to probably 5 core features and it would still remain relevant
and interesting because of others ability (developers and friends) urge to
create and share.

------
Pheter
The article claims that Facebook's messaging features are a failure. I
disagree; they have massive potential.

Facebook chat is the primary real time chat system that I use these days and
has replaced MSN for me and my friends. I recently installed the Messenger app
on my iPhone and it certainly has the potential to kill off whatsapp and
similar apps due two reasons: all my contacts are already available, and that
I can use either my laptop or phone, depending on whichever is available to me
when I need to communicate.

Unfortunately I doubt that this potential will be realised. Why? Because I
haven't seen Facebook advertise the app AT ALL. (I heard about the app through
HN.) None of my friends are aware the app exists and it's such a shame. It
wouldn't be hard for Facebook to push their chat service as an alternative to
txt/bbm/whatsapp, they already have an ad network in place that they can use
for free.

I really hope to see Facebook push their messaging service as a way to
communicate not just when you are browsing facebook.com but instead as an
alternative to text-based communication methods on phones.

~~~
saraid216
> The article claims that Facebook's messaging features are a failure. I
> disagree; they have massive potential.

Not realizing its massive potential _is_ a failure.

~~~
Pheter
True. I should have worded it differently, stating that it is possible for
them to turn the situation around.

------
joe_the_user
Boring isn't bad - for me. My yahoo email address still works and Facebook
still serves more or less the same purpose.

Like Yahoo, Facebook has accumulated a large base of _average_ users. These
are the people who aren't early adopters, who aren't concerned with "vision"
and who dig in their heels against change.

Facebook has the choice to alienate these folks by adding "new exciting
features" or keep these folks and stay what it is. Whatever "vision" is
involved, Facebook will likely make a choice halfway between these results and
wind-up satisfying no one and so indeed sink to the "status" of Yahoo.

But it seems like this whole process comes because "boringness" makes
operators no money even when serves end-users purposes perfectly. Look at
craiglist - the most boring, most successful-at-fulfilling-a-need and the
least-profitable-relative-to-traffic commercial website in the world.

------
RandallBrown
Facebook smart lists are not a copy of circles. Circles were an improvement on
Facebook's lists, that they've had for years. Smart lists are an improvement
on lists.

Facebook's messaging has effectively killed AIM at least for me and everyone I
know. Huge failure...

~~~
technomancy
I stopped hearing about AIM at all within about two years of Google Talk being
released. It may have died out for you around the time Facebook messaging
showed up, but this is a great example of correlation not indicating
causation.

------
saturdaysaint
It's bewildering to talk about some kind of crisis when everything I've seen
indicates that Facebook commands more and more of the average user's time
online - [http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/07/comscore-facebook-keeps-
gob...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/07/comscore-facebook-keeps-gobbling-
peoples-time/).

Of course, the article's conclusion isn't based on useful metrics, but on
scattershot, poorly reasoned reactions to Facebook's product strategy. Like
Google, Facebook is steadily simplifying and unifying their products and as
with Google, journalists can't wrap their heads around it.

-Place-tagging is still in Facebook and is arguably more powerful than ever as Facebook has steadily made tagging people with you almost effortlessly easy on all platforms. Facebook's Places directory is probably as complete as Yelp's and they're doing some very interesting A - B user preference polling. I'd have a hard time finding a local restaurant or business _without_ a well maintained Facebook page.

-Every social network has had a hard time encouraging users to "group" so it shouldn't be a surprise that Facebook is iterating/experimenting. Google's implementation really isn't that sophisticated - it simply forces you to group everyone and has a pretty UI. For all we know, this overly-involved friending process is why + is flopping. Smart Lists automate the process to a degree that Google and Twitter haven't attempted.

-Subscriptions looks like another well-measured shot at Twitter. The "subscription" model looks like a much more comprehensible model for following public figures than Pages, which have been quite successful in their own right (see Places).

I could go on, but suffice to say, I find a lot of these criticisms poorly
reasoned.

------
daleharvey
On joining my company last year, one of the first things I heard my boss tell
me was that we were aiming to be boring

Getting nearly a billion users, being one of the most influential companies in
the world and not being exciting enough for tech pundits is an awesome problem
to have.

~~~
joe_the_user
For some things, boring is good. Sell good car parts. Sell reliable financial
services. Be boring and win.

But Facebook didn't their users and especially their sixty billion dollar
valuation by being boring.

Facebook - at this moment - has one of the most amazing web development teams
on the planet (if reports are to be believed). They do a lot of slick
development with relatively few people. But how long can they keep that up now
that they've stopped being "the thing that's happening??

------
mingyeow
This is a poorly researched article that takes a few anecdotes from him, his
observations about his friends, and choice quotes from random articles that
support his viewpoint.

I would wager that from a data point of view, facebook page views and
retention is likely to be stronger than ever.

------
j_baker
I call contrarianism. And no, I don't mean the good type that makes you
question all you hold dear. I mean the "Look at me! I think differently from
the uninformed masses." variety. The part where the author's analysis starts
to break is when they mistake Facebook adopting its competitor's good ideas
for running out of ideas.

------
jprobert
Google has been throwing shit against the wall for many years and most of it
hasn't stuck and their core product, search, is still 95% of their business
(and they're a juggernaut). I view Facebook in the same light. They are the
dominate social network and have by far the most users. Right now they are
throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks but it doesn't really
matter. They've already earned the eyes and ears of almost 1 billion people
and they will not fade soon.

------
9oliYQjP
Facebook is a social network. Being social, it is subject to the same laws of
attraction, affection, excitement, and coolness that the hot new restaurant,
dance club, and sports stadium are in your particular city.

Step 1: the cool kids spot a new place and start hanging out there.

Step 2: the first signs of the popped collared masses show up, pushing the
cool kids out as they realized the lame-streamers have spotted the new venue.

Step 3: the masses start reviewing the venue on Yelp and in local hipster
papers claiming it is the hot new spot.

Step 4: the suburbanites located a 30 minute drive from the venue (without
traffic) read these reviews and start frequenting the venue, causing long
line-ups outside.

Step 5: the masses proclaim the venue to be uncool and/or played out and move
on to the next best thing.

Step 6: the venue becomes filled with 30 and 40 something divorcées who are
trying to be cool and crossing their fingers that they win the lottery so they
can avoid having to do the whole Match.com and eHarmony thing.

Step 7: the neighbourhood that the venue is in becomes fully gentrified and
the venue is sold to some entrepreneur who wants to make it into a Starbucks
or fake Irish pub.

Facebook's history follows this same pattern:

Step 1 (2004-2005): The place for cool university kids.

Step 2 (2006-2007): The 20 somethings show up and proclaim how awesome this
new phenomenon is. Not to be out-done, they claim ownership to the new
network, and get their friends to start checking it out every so often instead
of MySpace.

Step 3 (2007): The young professionals show up and start discovering that
their old high school sweethearts grew fat, old, and unhappy. They revel in
the spectacle. The cool university kids start complaining that the place was
better when it was just Stanford, Harvard, et al.

Step 4 (2008-2009): Your mom, dad, uncles, and aunts show up to the show. With
every Like from their mom, 20 and 30-somethings start cringing and trying to
figure out how they can lock down their privacy settings. Word starts leaking
out about how the cool kids are now using something called Twitter.

Step 5 (2010): The first murmurings about it being cool to not be on Facebook
are actually taken seriously as every 50 year old and their day job at some
boring Fortune 500 company setup shop with a Facebook Group and a QR code
advertisement. "Quit Facebook Day" becomes a movement. The cool kids, having
adopted Twitter en masse, now start being over-run by the 20 and 30 something
professionals who are desperate to find their new fix.

Step 6 (2011): With most actual action happening on Twitter, Facebook is
relegated to the social networking equivalent of having brunch with your
friends. It's no longer the cool party spot. It's just a place you go to brag
about that other cool thing you were up to the night before.

Step 7 (2012): Facebook announces its IPO and officially becomes the Hotmail
of Web 2.0.

~~~
iaskwhy
Has step 6 happened already? I have a hard time figuring it out since I was
part of step 2 and haven't seen all the cool kids that were there in 2006
leaving for Twitter...

I believe you could apply the same logic to almost everything but Google is
still the cool kid after all these years as is Manchester United, right?

~~~
9oliYQjP
Until now, Google has not had to care about the coolness factor. They weren't
in the social space. Now that they are, just look at how Google+ has fizzled.
They pulled the worst stunt you possibly could have pulled when you're trying
to be cool: hold a line-up outside your club only to have people come in and
find out nobody is inside and the party sucks.

Step 6 has definitely already happened. Remember what is cool is not
necessarily what is popular. Cool is the derivative of popularity though. At
any given time, if you want to find out what will become popular later on,
just find out what's cool. Twitter has 106 M users vs Facebook's 500 M as of
2010. It's clearly not as popular as Facebook. But Twitter's growth has been
faster (and more sustainable than Google+'s initial exponential growth) than
Facebook's was. The trend is keeping up and as much as we can laugh and joke
about the utility of Twitter, I'd say that it is already at Step 4. You
already are finding people that want to move onto something else that's cool
(which IMHO is what drove the initial adoption of Google+).

We can relearn all of these lessons or we can just admit that we're really
doing social businesses and these sort of things have been around for a long
time. How they work is well known. Just, up until this past decade or so, we'd
never seen them in the technology space.

------
agioe
I thought Facebook was supposed to a utility.

I use FB to keep in touch with those I might not otherwise. But FB's messaging
is horrible. I _hate_ the fact that they keep all your old messages in a
stream. Last week, I sent you a funny NSFW photo and this week I want to
discuss business.

I don't want "messaging" to be a constant chat log. I want a UTILITY like
gmail that works extremely well and allows me to contact friends & family in a
central database.

Instead I get "Attachment Unavailable" when sending messages -- with no way of
fixing it or understanding why.

I used to marvel at how awesome, efficient and effective FB was at design and
coding. But now I'm more shocked at how stupid some companies could be like
FB, eventually devolving into an AOL-attitude of stupidity.

Facebook = AOL of 2010s, it's better coded but equally obnoxious

------
zyb09
Yeah I think its doomed, too. I mean just look at it. Everybody and their dog
is on Facebook, with status updates and comments quickly approaching the
niveau of Youtube comments. Meanwhile marketing firms are vigorously trying to
get as much attention as possible in more or less shady ways, which is getting
increasingly annoying. A large portion of the userbase is so annoyed, bored or
has serious privacy concerns, that they stopped submitting altogether already.
The main reason a lot of people are much more happier with Google+ and Twitter
nowadays is not because some features are marginally better - it's because the
atmosphere is so much nicer there.

~~~
tokenadult
_The main reason a lot of people are much more happier with Google+ and
Twitter nowadays is not because some features are marginally better - it's
because the atmosphere is so much nicer there._

Let's put some numbers around this interesting statement. Are there really a
lot of people who find the atmosphere on Twitter much nicer than the
atmosphere on Facebook? How about Google Plus? How many people find its
atmosphere much nicer than the atmosphere on Facebook? And for the most
important numbers, how much revenue is each of those companies gaining from
the people who like each company's atmosphere best?

P.S. I like Facebook very well indeed, because my international network of
friends is largely all there. I use Facebook much like a social linking
service (not too differently from how I use HN), posting links I find
interesting to invite comments from friends, and posting comments in threads
about links posted by other people. The intellectual tone of the discussions I
encounter on Facebook is very high--although that surely mostly has to do with
how I met many of my friends. We (all my various friends and I) devote time
and effort to cultivating a respectful atmosphere of people expressing
frequently wildly varying opinions, as long as everyone is civil and everyone
is encouraged to look up facts. That's like being invited to graduate seminars
(a real-life experience I have had) on interesting subjects at any hour of the
day that is convenient for me. As long as Facebook can monetize enough,
somehow, to allow people like me who don't give it money (but arguably do give
it content) to meet one another there, Facebook will be part of my life for a
long time. After all, my FRIENDS are there.

After edit: regarding the comment elsewhere in this thread about the submitted
article,

 _This is a poorly researched article that takes a few anecdotes_

I can't say I necessarily disagree, but note for the record that most blog
posts are poorly researched and mostly based on anecdotes. In actual fact, on
HN poorly researched blog posts tend to be much more upvoted as new
submissions than professionally written research articles. It's a rare case
when a general readership of a website (e.g., HN's readership) prefers
discussing careful research to discussing a few anecdotes.

Another comment asks,

 _Are people excited by search?_

I was very excited by Google when it first became available. (I discovered
Google before it was publicly announced, by noticing what search engines were
spidering my personal website back in the 1990s.) Google's results were so
plainly superior to those of Excite, Lycos, and even AltaVista (my previous
favorite search engine) that I soon told all my friends about Google. Search
results that turn up reliable, accurate, readable links are always a pleasure.
The way to do better at search than Google does would be to somehow serve up
better results more consistently--that would be exciting, if it is possible.

------
werg
"Yahoo has no vision. It has no purpose. It's dispensable."

Facebook may have no vision. (I actually think they do. Even if it's not very
clear or savory.) But facebook certainly isn't dispensable. The analogy would
be much more complete if you imagined that Yahoo was the only main email
provider, emails didn't get exchanged between servers and in order to get an
email to yahoo mail users you had to go to Yahoo to mail them. That's about
how dispensable Facebook is to a lot of people's private lives.

~~~
rjd
Yeah I think Facebook has a vision which is plain to see if you look for it,
they are working very hard on unified messaging/communication system. Which in
its current state isn't interesting, and if successful probably won't be
interesting, instead it will be subtle and invasive into my daily routine.

I for one haven't noticed a change at all on my Facebook... I think the
"boring" aspect maybe a tech related issue where people expect to see
something crazing happening every week. I know I often open up Hacker news and
go "ooohhhh nothing to see here today", which is more a sign of my indulgence
in news as opposed to article nothing happening out there.

------
spacemanaki
This author claims that "lax patent laws on the web" allow Facebook to copy
features from Twitter and Google, but the article he cites (by Farhad Manjoo
on Slate) doesn't ascribe this to patent laws so much as the behavior of these
particular companies.

Mentioning "lax patent laws" seems misleading, or am I missing something here?

------
jeffreyrusso
Billions of users or not, becoming boring is a huge problem for Facebook. With
a revenue model so heavily dependent on pageviews, they need to keep their
users engaged and on the site... and that doesn't appear to be the case over
the long term. New users ride a wave of heavy usage, but over time, Facebook
takes on more of a role as a utility than a diversion. It has for me and most
everyone else I know who started using it when it was a shiny new toy
exclusively for college students.

Facebook can't keep up the rate of new user acquisition it has enjoyed for the
past couple of years forever - and as the userbase collectively ages, interest
wanes, pageviews decline, and revenue drops off. Right now, it looks like they
will inevitably be caught in the same race to the bottom, doing whatever they
can to scrounge up page views, that Yahoo is in.

------
artursapek
Facebook's problem is all these announcements. Zuckerberg never appeared at a
huge conference when he first made Facebook, it spread completely on merit.
Now everything's more formal, and every time they make anything new they have
to introduce it to the world like it's some boring cocktail party.

They have become too confident because of their numbers - size doesn't really
matter. Despite having the largest user-base online, they have been unable to
convert users from any of these smaller services they've attempted to copy.
That's because people still go on Facebook for the same reason they always
have, to check up on their friends. That's what they did best, and what they
need to continue doing. Most of these extra services like "deals" and
"seamless messaging" have generally been flops because people aren't
unanimously going to switch over to Facebook for them when the originals
(Groupon, cell phones) _began_ as providers of said service and therefore have
a committed user-base. Every tech service introduced into the world either
succeeds and generates a user-base, or fails and disappears. The services
Facebook is trying to copy and replace have stood the test of time.

However I don't agree that Google's hangouts "upstaged" Facebook-Skype because
usually when I, like most people, use video chat it's with one person anyway.
It's hard to catch multiple people who I want to talk to who are online with
nowhere to go or nothing to do at the same time for more than a minute or two.
Perhaps Hangouts is more impressive to hackers and tech pundits because of its
maximum capacity, but to me Skype is all I will ever want because it follows
the always-valuable advice, "Keep It Simple Stupid."

This is advice that Facebook needs to learn to start following again. It did
so in the beginning, but all the money and engineering power have somewhat
blurred their vision. As an example, Twitter is the most excellent company I
can think of that follows K.I.S.S. An x-y graph of simplicity and success
would have time-tested services like Twitter, Foursquare, and cell phones
looming over everyone else.

------
robryan
I think Facebook being more exciting would actually hurt them, from what I
have seen people generally have a lower opinion of Facebook because of new
features, not because of lack of features.

I think they have leant a bit on this front, the subscribe and the enhanced
lists are there for those that want them but try to stay as far out of the way
as possible for the general crowd who would dislike them being forced in as a
key component.

What I look forward to is a proper rollout of credits, I think at the moment
Facebook apps appear similar to me to a lot of the free apps on the app store,
of questionable quality and loaded with ads. Once there is an easier path for
developers to monetise apps (and probably improvements in the process of
making an app docs and stable api wise) I think we will see more quality,
useful things popping up.

------
schiptsov
It isn't just FB's problem, and it is not becoming a new Yahoo (it is becoming
a new MySpace). ^_^

The vision should be a little bit broader (and scarier to those invested in it
and its clones) - OK, every teenager in the world already has a FB page and
uploaded some photos of herself and exchanged some stupid messages with so-
called friend. Wow-impulse has faded away. Now what? ^_^

Don't even try to say 'the next facebook' - it will be 'just another social
site', af FB was for MySpace or Livejournal's addicts. ^_^

What it could be? Ok, something like a cam on your clothes to broadcast 24/7
via some G5 GSM directly to some datacity which sends it back to your personal
3D movie hall (forget Youtube with a that crappy flash player)?

No, I don't think so. The time of the mass-exhibitionism in the net is, it
seems, over. ^_^

------
bsiemon
Are people excited by search?

------
27182818284
The death of Facebook has been predicted by someone nearly every month of
their existence. I've pointed this out before, so I'll do it again. Facebook
could lose an entire half of their users and it would only set them back a
couple of years. Their doubling rate has been amazing.

------
jeromeparadis
It's only boring if your network is boring. I'll take a boring UI anyway if I
connect with others in a way that wasn't possible in the past. Social networks
are tools. How you use them and with whom is what may make them engaging or
not.

------
rbreve
For me facebook has always been boring, all my friends are there, thats the
only reason I use it, to keep in touch. Not because I am excited at looking at
the latest picture of their baby eating some pudding.

------
Kookaburra
Their saviour is going to come in fb vibes. Hope they nail th vibes music deal
well. I'm watching from the sidelines, i deactivated my account this year
after not using it for a year

------
endlessvoid94
The idea that facebook doesn't have a vision for the future is 100% asinine.
In 20 years I'll have detailed memories and archives of most of my past
because facebook has made it easy. Contrast this with what our parents or
grandparents' generation has. Younger kids and older folks will all interact
more and more through facebook in the coming years.

Facebook just cares less about what the industry looks at. They're looking way
down the line and figuring out what human beings will want.

The "post-facebook era" is something that journalists invent to point fingers
at and justify ad impressions.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_In 20 years I'll have detailed memories and archives of most of my past_

Or Facebook will, anyway. Assuming they're still in business.

If you think the idea of Facebook eventually going bankrupt and deleting their
archives, or selling those archives to a recycler in a fire sale, is somehow
ridiculous I invite you to contemplate the fate of Geocities. Or Netscape, or
Sun Microsystems, or the decline of Yahoo.

Is there anything in Facebook's terms of service where they even promise to
preserve any of your data, let alone allow you to download it free of charge
in perpetuity? Perhaps the ultimate fallback Facebook business model will be
to erect a firewall and charge folks tolls for admission to their own
cherished memories.

~~~
MartinCron
I wonder if both Facebook and Google have become essentially too big to fail.
That is, the collateral harm caused by them going down would hurt so many
other people and organizations that not propping them up would be considered a
policy failure.

------
veyron
Is there anyone trying a new type of social (not just aol++ or myspace++ or
facebook++)?

------
michaelochurch
Facebook jumped the shark when all those horrible, ugly apps started polluting
the thing with idiocy. The editorial incompetence and general awfulness of the
ecosystem was astonishing. Farmville was the end of the beginning of the end.

In 2004, Facebook wasn't garbage. It was simple, it served a purpose very
well. It changed the social experience of being in college, a sharp contrast
against "social" today which is largely irrelevant to having real social
experiences. Facebook is what it is today because of the momentum it
established while a social networking site for colleges, in a time when it
actually served its purpose very well.

At any rate, I agree that "social" is a very boring space right now. I find
most of it anti-social. It's an excuse for _not_ being social: if you put
everyone you meet in your Facebook "friends" list, you have an excuse for not
keeping in touch with people.

~~~
RandallBrown
I think Facebook has mostly corrected the app garbage problem. I'm no longer
bombarded with invitations to Ninjas vs. Pirates and my news feed is very
rarely invaded by Farmville.

I lost most of my interest (although I still use it daily) when they added the
news feed. It took away the importance of profiles and took away the fun of
"stalking". It used to be a regular problem that people would spend too much
time poring over profiles. Now I hardly ever get past the first 20 posts on my
news feed. Maybe I just grew up. Of course the news feed is what turned
Facebook into what it is today.

~~~
smokinn
It's definitely an age thing. I've been through both your and the GP's
situations since I've graduated university and thought that Facebook jumped
the shark... Until I talked to both of my younger brothers that still use
facebook the same way I did when I was in university.

So facebook definitely has a narrow age range appeal but it hasn't gotten
better or worse.. It's just that people outgrow it while others grow into it.

~~~
enjo
My experience is so very different. I'm 31 years old and my life is managed by
Facebook. When my someone in my social circle wants to host an event?
Facebook. When someone needs help with something? Facebook. When someone wants
to show me something? Facebook. When my sister wants to brag about my nephew?
Facebook.

It's the most important tool in my digital life and it's not even close (sorry
gmail:>).

I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm simply raising a counterpoint.

