
What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a Café - pliptvo
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/what-happens-when-the-president-sits-down-next-to-you-at-a-cafe/283074/
======
SandB0x
I swear Facebook is slowly turning into Lotus Notes. It's got the the little
messenger panel on the right. It's got the clunky mail client, it's got the
calendar and you can invite people to a meeting/party. You have to use it
because everyone else uses it and everyone else uses it because it's been
around for years.

It's not fun or simple to use any more and you have to be on your guard about
what you share and who might see it.

It's not really surprising that teenagers aren't into it.

~~~
epistasis
I'm reminded of what JWZ said to someone working on groupware around the time
that Facebook was started:

>So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old
college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

[http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html)

~~~
officemonkey
That's been fixed for a certain group of students. It's called youporn.com.

~~~
dasil003
That's the anti-solution in this case: youporn makes it easier to _not_ get
laid.

~~~
dredmorbius
I think, technically, it makes not getting laid easier.

------
mberning
Am I the only person over 30 that uses Facebook, doesn't think it sucks, and
doesn't think it is dying? In fact, for my purposes, I think it is a great
experience.

Let me explain.

I am quite involved in the automotive community. In the last year or two it
seems like almost every manufacturer, tuning shop, engineering shop etc. has
set up a GOOD Facebook page and starting posting tons of cool and relevant
stuff every day. News, project updates, pictures of upcoming work, event info
and pictures...

I feel as if life could not be better right now for the person that wants to
get plugged in to the automotive scene.

Log in to Facebook, find the page for your favorite manufacturer or shop and
like it, add all your car buddies as friends, ignore/unfollow the shit you
don't like, get invited to some private groups by your friends, etc.

I don't know, seems like for me there are quite a lot of people using Facebook
that actually like how it works and what it enables.

~~~
mattdeboard
The fact that people over 30 find Facebook cool is much of the reason why
younger people don't find it cool.

~~~
snowwrestler
Most people under 30 won't stay that way forever. Facebook does not need to be
a teen fave to succeed very well as a business.

In general, the focus on youth within the Internet industry is misplaced and
will disappear over time, basically as the wunderkinds like Zuckerberg age.

It's happened twice before in the same place--first with semiconductors, then
with personal computers.

------
hawkharris
While I want them to be true, the claims that Facebook is dying don't seem to
be supported by data.

Facebook's recent engagement report (also posted on HN) showed that the
percentage of users 25-31 has grown by 32%. The percentage of people 35-51
grew by 41%. And the percentage of those over 55 grew by 88%.

What other commenters probably mean to say is that Facebook is dying among
teenagers. Even so, the website still has over 13 million teen users. And the
users in the older groups are arguably more valuable from a financial
standpoint because they have direct access to more disposable income.

Maybe you're skeptical of the report because Facebook helped generate it.
Okay, I can understand that. But even if the numbers have been inflated to
benefit Facebook's platform, I think you'll be hard-pressed to find any
legitimate, large-scale study that _doesn 't_ show significant growth in the
25+ demographic.

Uncool? I think so, and a relatively small demographic of young people agrees
with me. Dying? Definitely not.

[http://istrategylabs.com/2014/01/3-million-teens-leave-
faceb...](http://istrategylabs.com/2014/01/3-million-teens-leave-facebook-
in-3-years-the-2014-facebook-demographic-report/)

~~~
vidarh
The problem is that their potential base of new users is rapidly diminishing,
while they've seemingly started burning the younger end. They may very well be
a very long way from irrelevance, but teens grow up. If the teens who are now
starting to turn away from Facebook keep disliking it also when it becomes
socially possible for them to totally ignore it, and younger kids does not
take it up as much, then that will have ripple effects also amongst older
users (e.g. my mother uses Facebook mostly to keep up with pictures of
grandchildren and the like).

And these things can turn _very_ quickly. I remember more social networks that
used to be cool than I care for (anyone remember sixdegrees.com from 1997?)

~~~
waterlesscloud
It's unknown, though, if the teens won't sign up when they grow up to an age
where Facebook is less of a social negative for them.

------
bloat
Why should it be cool? Why can't it just be useful?

There are many, many uncool people in the world, or people who couldn't care
less what is cool, and who just want to keep in touch with some mates, or find
out when the next meeting of their local cycling club is, or find out what was
played on the most recent podcast they listened to, or, or, or, a hundred
other _uses_.

~~~
basicallydan
Good point.

The truth is, it's fun for journalists and, well, the rest of us, to point out
that Facebook isn't cool. Maybe you don't find it fun, and maybe some others
do.

It's the same reason "hipsters" feel pride for finding the latest band cool
before anybody else does - it's just some vague social currency. By pointing
out that something which was once cool is no longer cool, you are distancing
yourself from it and gaining some of that currency, thus making yourself
cooler. So, that's why it should be cool. To help it's users be cool.

I'm not saying this is in any way a useful point of view to take, or that it
in any way affects how useful Facebook is, but I'm fairly sure that this is
what is going on. Plain old-fashioned shallow trend-setting and trend-
following. Playground economics.

------
r0h1n
>> Facebook is so uncool even the president of the United States knows it.

I'm trying to parse the actual meaning of this editorialized headline (the
actual headline is "What Happens When the President Sits Down Next to You at a
Cafe").

Does this equate the President of the United States to being one of the least
clued-in/laggard Internet users? Otherwise what does "even the President of
the US" mean?

~~~
mwill
To be fair to the headline, that line is a direct quote from the article. It
also seems to be the section most relevant to HN. I feel like a post that only
contained the text under the 'Failure' subheading, with a little intro would
have made it to the top of HN as well.

As for what "even the President of the US" means, to me there's this image of
big organizations (governments included) the world over being clunky and
clueless when it comes to social media and the internet, not being able to
innovate or adapt new methods of interaction, or even understand what the
public is doing, and just generally being one or two steps behind the young
internet savvy crowd.

It may not be true, especially for individuals within the organization, but
it's still certainly the expectation these days.

------
zaidf
This is actually a great milestone. It is hard to build a sustainable billion
dollar business on "being cool" because any minute society might decide you're
no longer cool and move on to the next shiny object. Just ask myspace.

Facebook isn't a billion dollar business because it is the new shiny object on
the block. it is used because it delivers good old value of helping you stay
in touch with your friends.

~~~
wavefunction
>>Facebook isn't a billion dollar business because it is the new shiny object
on the block. it is used because it delivers good old value of helping you
stay in touch with your friends.

Not much of a defensible competitive advantage imo.

------
bqpro1
I case of such companies like Facebook there is no point to say that they are
dead. In fact there are 2 Facebooks: Facebook as a company and FACEBOOK as a
presence in modern culture. The second is much more important, then the first
one. For many people FACEBOOK is the way they act on the web and communicate
with others. Even if Facebook is not growing any more (or even shrinking) it
still the only medium that has a digital picture of relations between 1
billion people and that makes is something more then just a company. Of course
if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age you have a
lot of things that you wish to keep in secret. But still Facebook is one of
first app we install on a new mobile device. I do not see any comparison
between Fb and Microsoft or Fb and Apple. Facebook do not produce any goods
etc. It just mapping relations and other features of people into digital data.

~~~
TarpitCarnivore
>Of course if I were 16 now, I would not be on Facebook, because in this age
you have a lot of things that you wish to keep in secret.

Someone on here the other day made a comment about the whole teenager thing
and it was a pretty good one. It was to the affect of: teenagers don't need to
be on Facebook yet because they still see all their friends and social
circles, that becomes more difficult to manage you as move away for college.
So perhaps that's when they may turn to Facebook when they need a more
centralized way to do chat, pictures, statuses, etc.

~~~
rzt
I have a 16 year old sister. She was on Facebook and then deleted her profile.
She deleted her profile at about the same time she went from being semi-
awkward early teenager still shaking off her Russian accent (we adopted her)
and became one of (what I am guessing based on her friends and the things she
does) the coolest kids in her school.

She is probably doing lots of things that I don't want to know about. That's
cool and Facebook gets in the way of doing that.

------
the_watcher
The "Facebook is uncool and dying" story trend is getting so old. It's not
dying. The only metric that anyone ever cites is that young teens aren't
signing up as often anymore, but they don't mention that user growth on
Facebook is still strong, or that most of those young teens will sign up once
they hit an age where its utility for them is higher (so an age where they
don't interact with 90% of their social circle every day). They are still
rolling out really cool new features (Graph search, user-specific trending
topics). They are way ahead of the game in mobile (already moving to having
multiple specialized apps for different functionalities that deeplink to each
other, rather than a single app that tries to pack all of the desktop
functionality into it).

Facebook is not dead, dying, or sick. It's in fantastic shape.

------
k-mcgrady
Even Zuckerberg doesn't care if Facebook is 'uncool':

“Maybe electricity was cool when it first came out, but pretty quickly people
stopped talking about it because it’s not the new thing, the real question you
want to track at that point is are fewer people turning on their lights
because it’s less cool?”

~~~
PavlovsCat
That strikes me as hybris. Facebook is not some kind of radical new discovery,
it's not even a radical new invention. That's like pretending Elvis Presley or
The Beatles invented music because they had a huge market share.

~~~
k-mcgrady
The point is that Facebook has become or is becoming a utility. People don't
get excited about email anymore or think it's cool but they use it daily.
Facebook is no longer this cool new site with interesting new features - it's
an easy way for people to message and share photos.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Like many, many sites with those features before and after it. I still think
adoption is the only thing "special" about it.

------
ck2
Facebook is dying? Best news I've heard this year so far.

Is having your own website cool again yet? Wake me up when we're there.

~~~
smackfu
> Is having your own website cool again yet? Wake me up when we're there.

Yes, it's cool, but the only way to get people to visit it are to post it to
Twitter, Facebook, Hacker News, Reddit, etc.

~~~
shiftpgdn
Let's bring back web rings.

~~~
JonnieCache
We should totally do that! Can we snazzify them with some kind of javascript
gimmickry please? Maybe some kind of websockets-based visualisation of other
users whizzing round the ring?

------
dredmorbius
The question's been asked "can a company die without an obvious challenger?"
Yes, it can.

A company, platform, or technology can "die" in the sense that it loses the
initiative, and more importantly, the ability to drive an industry and/or
conversation, even though it hasn't yet died.

Apple was "dead" through most of the 1990s. It simply didn't matter, outside
of the graphics and design areas, and for a very small cadre of fervent fans.
The turnaround shocked me.

IBM very nearly died in the early 1990s, as its place as the center of the
business computing world was shaken by anti-trust actions, Microsoft, and the
upsurge in Unix vendors. The company's never fully regained its former
footing, though it did recover largely.

Microsoft has been in the process of dying for most of the past decade. A
highly symbolic moment for me was when _The Economist_ newspaper ran a cover
showing the leaders in tech: Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Microsoft
wasn't even mentioned (it reminds me of an earlier revealing moment when the
CEO of Visa International named the company's biggest rivals: MasterCard,
AmEx, and Microsoft -- I guess it didn't pay to Discover...).

Sun Microsystems was fingered for the walking dead as Linux became ascendant,
with its acquisition by Oracle (a panic response of both companies, coming at
least five years too late to do either any good) coming long after it was
obvious the company had not only staggered but was mortally wounded.

One thing to realize is that a fading icon is often not replaced by a direct
competitor, but by one which addresses short

Facebook has dominated Silicon Valley for the past 5 years, stealing
initiative from Google (who seems to be somewhat winning it back). Part of the
situation is that "traditional" social networking is becoming passe, in part
because it's become too Byzantine, and too intrusive. Social networks --
_real_ social networks, not the online instantiations of them -- work best
when the groups are relatively small, Dunbar's number is respected, and
there's a level of insularity around any given group. TheFacebook at Harvard
had those features. Facebook, Inc., 1 billion served, doesn't, and cannot.
Another secret is that one of the secret sauces of social is photo sharing
(still hard if you don't have your own dedicated server), and that services
are sprouting up to offer this (Imgur, Snapchat, etc.), which is essentially
disrupting the former Social glue much the way Craigslist gutted classified
newspaper advertising in the late 1990s.

I'd like to think that the constant drumbeat of surveillance state revelations
we can thank heros and patriots Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and Glen
Greenwald for are having an effect, though I think that may be giving the
general public a bit too much credit. Not totally sure of that though.

~~~
jballanc
You've forgotten one of the best and, in this situation, most appropriate
examples of a company effectively dying without an obvious challenger: AOL.

When dial-up was the only option to get "on-line", AOL was dominant. Those
discs (and later CDs) were _everywhere_. The problem was, even though
providing a dial-up connection is what made AOL into the behemoth it had
become, I'd argue the real value proposition of AOL in the mid-to-late 90s was
the "walled garden" version of the internet that they had created.

So, instead of bolstering their offerings in the "walled garden" arena, they
fretted over the death-grip they had on their dial-up subscribers long, _long_
after it became apparent than DSL/Cable had won the battle for your
connection. (No seriously, they still have that death-grip...have you tried
canceling a free AOL trial account recently?)

AOL "died", as most oversized companies do, by failing to pivot toward an
emerging market in favor of holding on to their "sure thing". Look at your
other examples: IBM failed to pivot away from mainframes (their sure thing) to
PCs (the emerging market). Microsoft has failed to pivot from OS/Office
software to Cloud/distributed computing. Apple, eventually, _did_ manage to
pivot from graphics and design to mobile devices. Google...well, Google pivots
so frequently I'm surprised they don't collectively vomit from dizziness
(though, they do still have a worrying dependence on search advertising for
"real" revenue).

The reason I think AOL is probably the most apt example for Facebook to
consider, though, is that Facebook was the primary beneficiary of AOL's
failure to capitalize on the "walled garden" internet. Now, Facebook dominates
this realm, but the question is for how long? You're idea that they should
pivot towards photo sharing is interesting...but I couldn't say for sure (or,
if I could I'm making waaay less money than I should be).

~~~
abrahamsen
It is kind of fun how the failures didn't have to be.

IBM did successfully enter and even define the PC market.

Microsoft saw the threat of the Internet, and reacted swiftly to own it with
Windows 95. Internet Explorer demolished Netscape, with illegal methods, but
most people at the time also recognized IE as the better browser. Microsoft
also got a strong foothold on mobile with WinCE/PocketPC/Windows Mobile.

Google was an early entrance in social with Orkut, dominating some important
emerging markets (Brazil, India).

In each case the companies seemed to lose interest and refocus on their
moneymaker divisions. It might be intrinsic to large companies: If you want to
advance, you should work where the money is made. So the best and most
ambitious people would go there, leaving the forward looking parts of the
company to die of negligence.

~~~
phaemon
> Microsoft saw the threat of the Internet, and reacted swiftly to own it with
> Windows 95.

No they didn't. The original release of Windows 95 didn't come with Internet
Explorer. Microsoft were still trying to push their own Microsoft Network
(MSN), similar to Compuserve and AOL. They were late to the party - which is
why Netscape managed to dominate for so long - and were heavily criticised for
it at the time.

Thankfully, they failed. Even though IE dominated the web for far too long,
that's a lot less scary than the thought that everyone might be using the MS
Network right now while the Internet remained an academic curiosity! _shudder_

~~~
JonnieCache
Also: the Active Desktop. Plus ça change...

------
wanda
The parts the author did not hear:

    
    
      We're watching all FB activity and we're stumped
    
      What social networks should the NSA target?
    
      How can the NSA deal with the impermanence of snapchat content?
    
      "They" being the 18-35s, prime hacker demographic, main target of surveillance.

~~~
mjolk
Yes, because that can be the only subtext. Because the President can only be
concerned with the NSA, bitcoin, and tor. It's not like he's a person or
father that could be having a conversation about social network applications
like a normal person.

~~~
wanda
Yes, because we can't make jokes on HN. Because HN is all business, in-depth
analysis, serious adult talk. It's not like the users are people, even
professionals off-the-clock, that could be enjoying (or at least successfully
identifying) a joke together like normal people.

~~~
skwirl
The joke wasn't funny. When something isn't funny people can't tell if it is a
joke or not.

------
sdfjkl
> His hands grasp mine. They feel like the rough surface of your favorite
> baseball.

What's with this president cult. He's just another human being.

~~~
logfromblammo
"And when I licked those hands, they tasted like sweet apples and flaky
pastry, just the way Mom used to make her pies."

I can't stand seeing the political shams where the VIP comes in and pretends
to be an ordinary person talking to other ordinary people. Of course, there is
also that schadenfreude when they utterly fail to pull it off.

But I don't blame the politician; that's just what they're made to do: I blame
the journalist. Rather than summarize the meaningless show of a politician
gladhanding and baby-kissing his way through an audience, his hands felt like
a baseball--your _favorite_ baseball, because a true American would own
several. Really? Are you sure it wasn't more like the soft leather from well-
worn bootstraps, lightly marked by salt stains acquired while walking the
wintry streets of Chicago's south side? Ridiculous.

It's just as bad as Bush Jr. trying to pull the Texas good ol' boy schtick and
the media egging him on. I want my watchdog back, even if he's jingo yellow,
not a toothless yappy lapdog.

------
vincie
Facebook has always been uncool. The uncool people are just saying this now to
sound cool.

------
triangleman
>According to White House background, provided to me after he left, they met
to discuss how to get more 18-34 year-olds to sign up for the coverage under
the Affordable Care Act. (The law depends on 18-34 year-olds signing up for
healthcare.)

Doesn't the law _compel_ 18-34 year-olds to sign up for health insurance?

~~~
smacktoward
No, it requires them to pay a fine if they don't have health insurance (see
[https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-someone-doesnt-have-
healt...](https://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-someone-doesnt-have-health-
coverage-in-2014/)).

The amount of the fine is fairly modest compared to the cost of most health
insurance plans, though, so the worry is that 18-34s will choose to just pay
the fine instead of joining the insurance risk pool.

~~~
jmccree
Not a fine of course, but a "tax". A fine would be unconstitutional. My state
rejected expanded medicaid, which leaves anyone in that gap between ~$2k and
~$11k with the option of paying the penalty tax or just stop working. There's
a lot of the 18-30 year olds in that income bracket here.

~~~
chrisro
There are a whole host of exemptions from the tax, including:

"You were determined ineligible for Medicaid because your state didn’t expand
eligibility for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act."

[https://www.healthcare.gov/exemptions/](https://www.healthcare.gov/exemptions/)

~~~
jmccree
Thanks for that! I was unaware of that exemption, apparently that was added in
Jun 13. It doesn't seem to be a widely published exemption.

~~~
chrisro
You're welcome! I have friends in college who would've qualified for expanded
Medicaid but my state didn't expand either. They were talking about this
exemption which is how I learned of it.

------
jgreen10
Things that were once cool either fade or become normal. Facebook has become
normal.

------
betawolf33
"one of our agents will be coming around to swipe you" <\- I honestly don't
know what this means.

~~~
leephillips
It means a secret service agent will feel you up with a metal detector to
ensure that you're not armed. (I enjoyed the style and pacing of this article:
fairly entertaining.)

~~~
BlackDeath3
And _if_ you are (legally) armed?

~~~
jmccree
You'd likely have to leave or face a felony with 10 years prison sentence.
(Per H.R. 347, it's 10 years for entering a secret service permanent or
temporary restricted area without permission with a firearm.)

~~~
BlackDeath3
So, if I was there before anybody who had anything to do with the President
showed up, and I had a legal firearm on me, and SS shows up and decides that
I'm suddenly in a restricted area, I'm immediately a felon?

Am I missing something here?

~~~
leephillips
A couple of things: first, where the commenter you're replying to said "leave
_or_ face a felony" (emphasis added), and, second, where you happen to know
that the author lives in DC, where there is no "had a legal firearm on me"
unless he happens to be a law enforcement agent himself, which seems not to be
the case.

~~~
BlackDeath3
I missed that important bit, my apologies. Though it seems a little fucked up
that public places can just sort of be snatched up as restricted zones.

Also, I didn't realize that DC doesn't allow carrying of legal weapons. That's
unfortunate. What if this had happened somewhere else?

~~~
leephillips
I lived in DC for a while. You have to deal with motorcades, not just for the
president, but anyone the SS thinks needs protection. As a pedestrian I've
been forced to stop and wait on the sidewalk for ~20 minutes while the street
was prepared for the motorcade, then while it passed by. This is part of life
in DC. As a driver I've had a DC metro policeman, clearing the street for a
motorcade, sideswipe my car in his motorcycle and just keep on going.

As to weapons, after DC vs. Heller some of the unconstitutional restrictions
were nullified, but the prohibitions against carrying are still in place. It
took decades of activism for DC residents to even regain basic civil rights,
such as the right to keep handguns in the home.

If this had happened somewhere else (a place that allows concealed carry, I
presume you're thinking), then I guess you would just be invited to leave the
area before the president entered. Or maybe let an SS agent hold your gun for
you.

~~~
dhugiaskmak

      It took decades of activism for DC residents to even regain basic civil rights, such as the right to keep handguns in the home.
    

I've lived in DC since 1999. I'll be charitable and say that this comment is
misleading at best. It might be very narrowly and technically correct to say
that there have been "decades of activism" on the subject, but it's about on
the level of that one guy who sits in a tent in front of the White House every
day. The overwhelming majority of DC residents were in favor of the law.

------
canvia
I think this is in part due to people realizing how much data FB is keeping on
them, and then selling. Educated people don't want to be a commodity. Older
people are slower to learn/change, but young people are already done with FB.

FB is bloated and appeals to the lowest common denominator. They created a set
of easy tools that make the internet more accessible to people that are not
technologically knowledgeable. Skype and photobucket and twitter are far too
complicated for someone who thinks Outlook is email and Yahoo is the internet.
Once people master how to use the tools on FB many will realize that there are
better alternatives, some that aren't going to track them all across the
internet.

However, there is no single alternative that aggregates these tools in a
better fashion.

I was just writing a proposal last night for a new social site to replace
FB/g+ that is freemium subscription based with a key selling point that there
is no tracking, no ads, and a high level of privacy. It would have a base set
of features and that's it. No bloat. No expansion. Just sharing with friends.

It doesn't need to be a billion dollar company. Profit margins don't have to
be huge. It just needs to be profitable and deliver a needed service to the
niche of people that care about privacy. The rest will follow with network
effects. If the tool is effective people will use it forever even without
feature creep, i.e. usenet, IRC, HN

------
KVFinn
>None of this kept me from experiencing immediate, full-on, feverish anxiety.
>And then—for the first time in nearly an hour—I could work. I found that I
was so accustomed to his voice, how he holds his body, his aura, that ignoring
him in person is as easy as ignoring a TV. Easier, in fact. He stops being the
president and starts being That Guy Who You See In Tweets, That Guy Who Gives
Speeches, That Guy.

Interesting how your mind can put the president into the same bucket as
leaving the news on in the background.

------
unethical_ban
Meta-comment: I read this article with the real title on HN, and it mentioned
almost nothing about Facebook. I assume the mods changed the title, which
steered the early conversation about the piece. Therefore, due to "title
activism" taken too long after the post, I was thoroughly confused for a
while.

------
wambotron
I always see the "everyone else uses it so I have to" argument when it comes
to facebook. I don't use FB at all, and neither do my core group of friends.
None of us have run into any issues with this. Want to hang out? Call, email,
text. Want to have a get-together? You need to notify me way in advance
anyway, and I'll add it to my own calendar.

The whole thing just seems to me that people LOVE facebook-stalking other
people, and THAT is why they use it. So many people I work with check facebook
for people before interviews or even just meeting a new person. It's creepy.

I don't care what someone puts on their facebook profile. I don't want to or
need to know.

------
Gaurav322
Robinson Meyer, I think that may be he talked about Facebook?? But, as you
said in your blog-post that you missed out so many things due to noise and you
clearly listened only two words "Instagram" and "Snapchat" from the president
of USA... So, all are you doing is just guessing that If he doesn't talk or
you don't listen about Facebook from his mouth, then Facebook sucks... That's
not cool... man

------
poopsintub
Facebook's dead based on half a conversation someone might have heard. Keep
the journalistic gold coming this way, The Atlantic.

------
puranjay
When you talk about Facebook dying, do remember that Facebook owns Instagram
where all the cool kids hangout these days.

------
wtvanhest
Mark my words. There is a place I'm the market for an event manager and
digital rollidex to replace Facebook for adults. I don't know how someone will
get people to use it, but there is absolutely a place for it. I would leave
Facebook immediately if I wasn't going to lose all my contacts.

------
rwmj
Is it supposed to be satire? Anyway, I don't think Facebook can be dead
without an obvious challenger. There's presumably still a need for people to
chat with each other in the way that Facebook does.

(Also can't believe I'm defending Facebook here ...)

~~~
arethuza
Aren't dead/alive and cool/uncool orthogonal?

e.g. Microsoft is pretty much alive even though it is uncool.

Quick thought: couldn't we replace Gartner's quadrant thing with this?

I would estimate that for Facebook dAlive/dt > 0 and dCool/dt < 0

Edit: I need to make a list of which companies fall into each Quadrant - I
initially thought that nobody was "cool & dead" and, after thinking about it
for a bit, realised that a _lot_ of companies fall into this area:

\- Symbolics

\- SGI

\- Cray

\- Sun (undead as part of the seriously uncool Oracle)

\- Harlequin (Lisp/PostScript vendor)

~~~
annnnd
Interesting poing - but in case of FB one could argue that staying alive
depends on being cool.

~~~
arethuza
I think it was important initially, but I think they might have outgrown that
and become a part of standard infrastructure - the social dial tone.

------
jokoon
I think facebook failed to diversify itself. It stagnated. No local events, no
job searching, no tools or ways to search for new people to meet like meetup,
no true dating functionality (and god knows there would be a lot of
potential).

To make things worse, there were many stories that tainted facebook
reputations: the ad system, the privacy settings, the first suspicions of CIA
links, and then the Snowden leaks.

It's no surprise. I'm still amazed there are people actually complaining about
google+ and making fun of it.

Zuckerberg is not even leading it like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Google
founders would.

Facebook is just a startup success story, but that ends here. It makes money,
people use it like an easy-to-use internet forum and chat applications, but
it's as much social as everything else that existed before it. It's just user
friendly, and money making.

~~~
randomdata
_> No local events_

While that may have never been an explicit feature, I remember the events
interface (circa the 2008 timeframe, if I recall correctly) doing a fairly
good job of allowing you to find local events. It was my goto place to
discover things to do for a while. Then they changed the behaviour, making
them virtually impossible to find unless your friends were invited.

------
chainlink
Lotus Notes. It Still Sucks
[http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776...](http://codinghorror.typepad.com/.a/6a0120a85dcdae970b0128776fca5d970c-pi)

------
desmondrd
HN used to be full of things that mattered. This belongs on Reddit.com.

~~~
noonespecial
The top story right now is "Decide which init system to default to in Debian".
This doesn't matter much to an awful lot of people, but matters a lot to folks
around here. I'd say we're not so bad off yet...

HN used to be _more_ full of things that mattered _to us_. I agree that I used
to go to reddit to look for stories like this. But the _us_ here has changed
some over the years.

Just upvote the stories you like and flag the worst of it and take it in
stride. The whole thing is just a great big Ouija board of geek culture.

------
JacksonGariety
> "Facebook is so uncool even the president of the United States knows it."

Shouldn't he know better than anyone, since his job depends so heavily on
social media?

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farinasa
Is it really surprising that the guy with access to all internet traffic has
knowledge about internet traffic?

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gress
Another attack piece against Facebook. I wonder who is paying for the current
media onslaught?

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shmerl
Facebook was never cool. As well as any other centralized social network.

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yaph
I suspect Mr. Obama knows more than you like about Faceboook et al.

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julien_c
Funny piece.

