

Will 2013 be the year Facebook becomes MySpace? - dendory
http://dendory.net/?b=51312adf

======
rohern
It seems to me that Facebook has always been stuck with a damned lot: to make
their product profitable, they have make their product worse. This is exactly
the problem with "social" games. These games are lousy exactly because the
lousy features make them money. With the direction that Facebook is going, it
seems to be a service where users volunteer to receive spam. I do not think
any company in this position is setup for long-term success.

On a philosophical note, I have always felt that Facebook is just a slot
machine company. They make a fancy box that takes advantage of the weaknesses
of the human brain (obsession with novelty, gossip, and visual stimulus) to
keep users doing an activity for much longer than required to get the benefit
of that activity. I could be radical and say that I think Facebook delivers no
value to its customers and that most people end up actively regretting the
time they spend on Facebook (I think it is uncontroversial to say that no one
goes to bed wishing he had spent more of his day on Facebook), however there
is always someone with a story about reuniting with a long-lost elementary
school friend due to Facebook. Nonetheless, even if this value does exist, in
no way does it justify the amount of time most Facebook users spend on the
site nor does it describe the majority of user activity. This is not to say
that Facebook is doomed any more than Las Vegas is doomed, but maybe people
will wise up and be more careful about how they spend their time...

A bit of anecdote: I have noticed people on reddit commenting that they now
use reddit more than Facebook as all the good content on Facebook is just
copied from reddit. If reddit had some kind of social interface, it might move
aggressively into this market.

~~~
panacea
Isn't that the same phenomenon as television? It's still going strong.
(Increasingly coupled with a realtime twitter stream)

~~~
bradwestness
I think so. In the natural arc of a new medium, social media is now at the
point that television hit thirty years ago, when the "big three" networks
started losing control to a host of new cable channels.

TV is obviously still around, but it's much more of a bazaar now.

------
brianchu
1) If you read in a literal manner the reports companies file with the SEC,
_you'd think each and every one of them is going to fail_. Know that when
companies list all the "threats" they "believe" they face in SEC reports, you
have to be aware that it's basically legal-ass-covering, and doesn't really
actually reflect internal sentiment. They basically include those so that if
they get sued by shareholders they can point to those reports as legal
evidence that they informed them of all the risks. Anyone who has read
multiple SEC reports will know that this is pretty mundane stuff.

2) The OP's right about the coolness. Facebook is not seen as cool among teens
anymore. _It's seen as necessary_. You are seen as _an unusual person_ if you
don't have a Facebook. The same applies to having a cellphone - _it's assumed
you have one_ , and it's a surprise if you don't (disclosure: I'm going off
personal experience from high school).

But you're right. It's not seen as cool anymore. I think this is a great
thing: Coolness brings you users. Necessity bring you the money.

It goes without saying that Blake Ross was being sarcastic about his reason
for leaving.

------
cargo8
Don't agree 100%, but the quality of FB overall as a product has definitely
degraded as of late as they've been pushing Gifts, Commerce, and other revenue
streams onto users very strongly.

I've noticed several annoying redesigns / changes that hide convenient
functionality in order to make the user click through "No, I don't want to
give a gift"... Very annoying, definitely makes me less pleased and less
engaged with the site.

~~~
bzalasky
As obnoxious as those gift suggestions can be for some people I'd never think
of sending a gift, I've found the actual experience of sending a gift on
Facebook to be great. You can send something across the country the day of
someone's birthday (as opposed to sending something with a belated birthday
card), because a lot of them give the receiver an option between a couple of
gifts (say a bottle of red, white or rose wine).

~~~
cargo8
I'm not saying I don't like the Facebook gift product. I tried it out a few
times, and you're right - they nailed it. The virtual card and slow reveal as
the user clicks through (then it shows up unwrapped on the wall, etc) is
awesome and a great end-to-end addition to the site.

What I really hate is that because this great new feature makes money, as
opposed to the previous goal of driving growth, engagement, what have you, it
is pushed first and foremost and hides many more useful features behind
additional clicks to first say "No, I don't want to buy a gift". For example,
the one-click write-on-everyone-whos-birthday-it-is-in-one-dialogue feature
was unbelievably useful. Now you have to click twice for each person to write
on their wall (once on the thing that says "Buy a gift", then once on "Write
on their timeline").

------
arasmussen
> "Then we have the recent departure of Blake Ross, the company's Director of
> Products. In his now removed goodbye letter he mentioned that he did an
> informal survey and found that teenagers would actually answer 'no' to the
> question of whether they still viewed Facebook as 'cool', and this
> influenced his decision to leave the company."

Blake Ross was being sarcastic.

~~~
endtime
I agree that he was being sarcastic about whether this was a realistic reason
for him leaving. But I still think it's telling that he made the joke - it
seems to me to indicate that there's some perception, internally, that
teenagers no longer view them as cool.

For example, if I were to leave Google, and had the same sense of humor as
Blake Ross, I might say something like "I'm leaving Google because my mom and
her friends don't use Google+. But seriously..." I wouldn't actually leave
Google for that reason, but it doesn't make it an untrue statement.

~~~
pz
its more likely he was mocking doomsayer articles like this one

~~~
saraid216
Mockery only functions one way. If a customer mocks a company representative,
it's an accusation. If a company representative mocks a customer, it's an
acknowledgement.

------
Mahn
As usual, the title is a little bit sensationalist. According to the company,
Facebook is curently being used _actively_ by 1 billion users. For Facebook to
go the MySpace way (let alone in single year), something incredibly
extraordinary would have to happen, akin of Google as a search engine becoming
irrelevant. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it's a bit naive to
suggest such thing because teenagers engage less with the site these days.

~~~
firefoxman1
I notice my teenage sister using Facebook as something like an appliance: like
email or SMS...it's just a little tool. When I was in highschool, it was a
platform; a destination.

With un-monitized mobile apps and notifications on every device, it's just a
communication tool nowadays. Instagram and Pinterest are what I notice teens
using the same way I used Facebook in highschool.

So my predicion: it either becomes like Google and Email...or it dies. But
nothing can bring back its coolness factor.

~~~
MrBra
Am I the only one who finds that email other than beeing much more appropriate
to send .. emails is also way more romantic?

~~~
saraid216
I actually prefer handwritten letters, if I'm being romantic.

~~~
MrBra
comparison was between facebook messages and email.

------
Zimahl
Facebook is the World of Warcraft of social networks.

\- Previous competitors were big, but only about 10% of what they've become.

\- They struck a nerve somewhere and didn't fill just a niche, they fulfilled
what everyone wanted at the same time.

\- Made changes to satisfy the masses.

\- Made changes to satisfy the bottom line.

\- They will (or already have) reach a saturation point where they are losing
people at the same clip as they are gaining them.

\- They will very, very slowly degrade, being eaten by many competitors but
probably not just one.

\- Reach a lower equilibrium, nowhere near their peak, where they can continue
for a very long and profitable future.

The last one is how WoW is doing right now. I don't know if Facebook has a
'very profitable' future for how big they are, although I do think they will
be a portion of their current selves and sustain that for a very long time.

As a side note, I think the reason people are so pessimistic about Facebook's
future (and has been discussed on HN before) is that if it was completely
abandoned tomorrow, all of it's content is irrelevant. It's not really a
blogging platform, it's not really an image archive, all that is there is
connections - and even those might not be all that significant.

EDIT: formatting.

------
bzalasky
Nope. Here's a difference: My parents never signed up for MySpace. It takes a
lot of momentum to stop a beast as big as Facebook. MySpace was never even
close.

~~~
mitchty
While true, is this just the first example of a social site that has gotten
big enough to attract your parents? Or is this the first site your parents
will, for lack of a better term, abandon just like others did with myspace?

~~~
bzalasky
I think it's the case that Facebook has just gotten that big. Also, it doesn't
have terrible custom backgrounds like MySpace. To the extent that they can
avoid that, I think they'll be ok. There's probably a few other things they
should focus on too...

------
paganel
> We believe that some of our users, particularly our younger users, are aware
> of and actively engaging with other products and services similar to, or as
> a substitute for, Facebook. For example, we believe that some of our users
> have reduced their engagement with Facebook in favor of increased engagement
> with other products and services such as Instagram.

Anecdotal evidence that happens to be confirmed by this FB press release: one
of my younger colleagues (she's in her early 20s) just told me a couple of
days ago: "I almost don't use FB anymore, I'm only using Instgram". She's the
only person I know face to face who had a MySpace account (I live in Europe,
where MySpace wasn't really that big of a thing anyway) and she has generally
been among the first to experiment with new social thingies.

I'm not saying FB will "be dead" anytime soon, but is good that they've chosen
not to bury their head in the sand like Google does with Google+. Of course,
it just happens that Instagram is now owned by FB.

------
bradwestness
It already has, in the sense that early adopters and content creators have
largely abandoned it in favor of other services (mostly Twitter, Tumblr,
Instagram and now Vine). Facebook is now mainly the realm of corporate-
sponsored pages and gossip among non-technical folk, so basically MySpace
circa 2004.

Granted, it's much less aggressively bad than MySpace was at that time, since
people can't arbitrarily embed HTML/CSS/JavaScript wherever they want, but its
stock prices are absurdly over valued and it has never found a way to monetize
its audience, and it has totally lost the trust of its users.

The main thing Facebook has going for it is that everyone is on it. But most
high-profile people only use it as a place to link to their profiles on the
services they actually use, and people will follow the people they "follow" on
to new services, if you follow me.

I think it's safe to say that it will become more and more of a ghost town
over the coming year or two.

------
davidmspi
fb is the premier social product in a world going social. they have a great
foundation. everybody needs to take a step back and allow them to make some
mistakes as they build a better product. think about some of the most
revolutionary companies out there. everyone of them has a hiccup or two.

~~~
mehrzad
Why not use something better in the meantime?

------
thenomad
I wonder how much the "we no longer show all your posts to all your friends"
issue is going to hurt Facebook?

I have limited data on this - but I know it's the reason I've stopped
bothering to post anything on Facebook. I'll post on Google+, Livejournal or
one of many blogs or forums where 100% of my friends can see what I'm saying,
thanks, rather than have Facebook decide how my social interactions work and
which 15% of my friends it'll show my posts to.

In my experience, when the "Facebook chooses who sees your posts, and it's
never everyone" rule is demonstrated to other semi-"normal" Facebook users,
they react very negatively.

------
d0gsbody
I miss being able to unsubscribe from my annoying acquaintances. It's too
socially awkward to defriend some people who post 15 inspirational messages a
day.

~~~
darrylb42
You can still do that they just changed the name. Where the unsubscribe thing
was there is now a drop down that you can uncheck put posts in your your feed.

~~~
Mahn
Found it, that's a pretty odd design choice actually, that button doesn't look
like it's going to trigger a dropdown, in fact it looks like it would unfriend
the person if clicked.

------
aeturnum
I think it's a poor metaphor. But I do think Facebook's future is going to
more as a platform for connecting third party services. Few users are going to
be on just one of these other services, and there's value in creating the best
space to share content from disparate services.

------
kjackson2012
Facebook can lose 50% of its users and still have more users than basically
anything else on the Internet. All they need to do is figure out how to
monetize these users consistently, and they will be fine.

------
malkia
For a minute I've misread it as "overcomes" and thought the article is from
the past....

------
mattryanharris
No, the site itself hasn't done anything too drastic to suggest anything of
that sort.

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rikacomet
Hmm, if so and so is going to happen, it will take someone to actually do it,
so the real question is who will do it, and how? Anyone up for it ? Anyone?

10 bucks says, it will be 2014, not 2013, given how much time it will take at
minimum to catch up to FB

------
durbin
No.

