

Can Anyone Stop Facebook? - edw519
http://www.slate.com/id/2237376/

======
mmphosis
I have one facebook account with a totally fake profile that I used once to
view someone's photos. I'm done with facebook, but I guess my once-only fake
account still counts towards the growing number of facebook users.

I am surprised by how pervasive facebook is. I insist that people post their
photos on flickr or some other service because I don't want to use facebook.
They in turn insist that I sign up to facebook just to see their photos.

No, I can't stop facebook but, I don't have to use it either.

~~~
zaidf
You're in the absolute minority with your fake profile.

I've been a heavy fb user for 5 years and can't recall the last time I saw a
fake profile.

~~~
chunkyslink
I completely disagree. I have a fake facebook profile that I use to access
useful groups / access content from organizations that use it.

I would absolutely hate to use my real profile as I find the whole 'incoming'
side of it intrusive and desperate.

The last thing is need is to have to deal with all the useless drivel people
would be expecting me to take part in with a real profile.

I would also say that at least 4 of my friends do the same.

~~~
zaidf
Don't confuse how _you_ use fb with the overwhelming majority of users. We are
not the average user.

Yes I have a few accounts too. But my mom, my sister, my hundreds of uni
friends have incredibly personal stuff on their fb profile.

------
tiffani
I have to ask of that article, though, how many people are actively using
Facebook nowadays (as in, how many login everyday and actually do something),
too. It never mentions it like a lot of articles about Facebook do (although I
suspect it's a lot). I ask this because my Facebook usage has declined greatly
since graduating from college last year and it's really gone down since they
introduced the stream and became more Twitter-like. I tend to sign onto
Facebook maybe once every three weeks now. It doesn't help that my stream is
populated by my friends' constant romps on Farmville or Mafia Wars and it just
drags down the whole experience.

I've really left Facebook more as a living, breathing address book rather than
anything else for now. I am much more likely to be on Twitter than Facebook.
It also happens that I'll talk to people on Twitter and then eventually add
them as friends on Facebook, but just continue talking to them on Twitter.
It's even the case now where most of the folks from Facebook (and school) that
I'd talk to on a daily basis have migrated over to Twitter and they're more
active on Twitter than Facebook. We can't be the only ones doing that...

~~~
henrikschroder
Well, that's highly anecdotal and as long as Facebook keeps growing your
observation does not hold true for the majority of the users.

Everything goes in waves though, it lies in human nature to grow bored with
sameness. Ten years ago there existed a community product in my country that
had managed to capture 90% of all high-school students, and they seemed
unstoppable. Now, the product is almost forgotten, they lost to other
products, similar products, but people had just gotten tired of it and wanted
something new, something cool, something different.

But ten years from now Facebook will probably be gone. It will be very
interesting to see what replaces it though.

~~~
electromagnetic
It depends if Facebook will be gone. Trust and reliance become significant
things in stopping migration, I haven't changed from Google despite it being
eternally the same because #1 I rely on it, #2 I trust it.

If facebook can get one, or both, of these from its 350 million users it has a
significant chance to stick around. You also have to consider teen markets
shift _much_ faster than adult markets. I know in my high-school a single
thing could spread throughout the whole school, but when a new grade entered
the viral spread had disappeared and they remained 'uninfected' by it. So any
trend automatically lost 1/5 of its teen market if it didn't capture the new
grade.

This happens less so with more mature crowds, who tend to be more loyal. You
don't see people buying from the same car manufacturer time after time because
it's an 'in thing', it's because they're loyal, which is in essence reliance
and trust.

~~~
forensic
Google specifically avoids changing the user experience.

Facebook-today is, for my uses, much worse than Facebook-of-years-past.

In the past it was simplistic, elegant, and did one job and did it well. Now
it is trying to be everything and is bloated, slow, and spammy. The signal-to-
noise ratio is terrible and I can't find a way to turn off "Mafia Wars" spam.

~~~
electromagnetic
> I can't find a way to turn off "Mafia Wars" spam.

On the notifications that display, hover over the top-right corner and an X
should appear. It prompts to hide all notifications from the application.

Thankfully notifications are one thing Facebook is removing. Perhaps the
signal-to-noise ratio will improve when they make the spamming more difficult.

------
ivenkys
"Perhaps one day not long from now, everything on the Web will be a mere
extension of Facebook." - a very optimistic view of the growth of FB , to put
it mildly.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Sure. But remember that there was a time in recent memory where the notion
that AOL would be a mere extension of the web was a very optimistic thought as
well, or that some young upstart would knock AltaVista from king-of-the-hill
in Search.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."

~~~
csomar
+1, may be something new come and take it! It's just a luck for facebook that
no other new startup screw them (Twitter is good, but too limited comparing to
Facebook)

------
patrickgzill
2006: Can anyone stop MySpace? 1997: Can anyone stop Netscape? 1999: Can
anyone stop Webvan?

etc. etc.

~~~
ivankirigin
The first and last example never had anything close to the scale of facebook.
Facebook is the first app of its kind to reach this scale. There was no lockin
incentive with Netscape - quite the opposite.

I'm not saying facebook will last forever - just that it is easy to poke holes
in your examples.

IBM and Microsoft are probably the best examples of decades long dominance
that eventually began to decline.

~~~
baguasquirrel
Burger King gave McDonald's a run for its money sometime back in history. The
person to "stop" Facebook will recognize that to beat Facebook, you can't me-
too Facebook, and you have to provide something that Facebook can't duplicate
either. Burger King offered a product that they touted as more sophisticated
than the kiddie-image McDonald's. When McDonald's tried to follow suit, they
fell flat on their face.

That said, I think there's more to be done in the social networking space than
mere marketing differences. Twitter was just the first and probably simplest
example of what you can do once you get away from the traditional count-my-
friends social networking model.

~~~
ivankirigin
Good points - but I have to say that the follower-count dynamic on twitter is
totally uninteresting and unsustainable as a motivator for new users. It
should have been hidden long ago.

------
figital
Look at Facebook ... look at ChromeOS .... it's the same thing (only Facebook
is further along). The business is data mining and advertising.

The issue will be who do you distrust the least.

Who is going to make it easiest to export my personal data to use somewhere
else? Hopefully us geeks will keep pushing for this and then help everyone
else follow.

Until then I feel like I'm just toying around with the flavor-of-the-month.

~~~
ams6110
I don't trust any of them. That's why I don't have a Facebook page, I don't
have a MySpace page, I don't use gmail or any of Google's services. I don't
have a Twitter account. I do have an account on LinkedIn because my boss at my
last job asked me to set one up, but I never update it.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I understand where you are coming from re: privacy issues, but aren't you also
missing some real value?

I check Facebook 2 or 3 times a week to see what family and friends have been
doing. With Twitter, I follow people into the same technologies that I am
interested in, and I get a lot of interesting links.

re: gmail: I have never bought anything from a sponsored search link, but I do
occasionally buy things from advertisement links on my email - also, sometimes
I get an email from a customer asking me to help them with a problem and a
useful link is on the right side of the customer email.

Sure, privacy issues are huge, but I think that people need to make a personal
calculation of benefits vs. potential problems.

~~~
jonathansizz
I have a very basic Facebook page, with just enough personal information so
that people I've lost contact with over the years can find me if they wish to.

But I prefer to keep up with friends and family either in person, or via phone
or email, and I don't update my own page more than once every few weeks.

I found Twitter to be far too expensive (in terms of wasted time) to be worth
bothering with. It's not just the necessarily regular checking for new tweets,
but the fact that this distracts me and breaks the flow of whatever I am
supposed to be doing. I would guess that twitter users waste many hours per
week (and possibly per day for heavy users) like this, in exchange for
relatively few insightful comments or useful links.

I think it plays off people's desire for instant gratification, but the
opportunity cost of using it is very high.

------
nathanb
As history teaches us, the answer is 'yes'. Personally, I think it most likely
that Facebook will end up stopping Facebook, by failing to ameliorate ways
that it currently annoys its users (or allows its users to annoy each-other)
and by coming up with new and creative ways to annoy its users in the future.
With one eye on recent history and the other on my crystal ball, I find it
probably that future annoyances will come primarily in the form of privacy
breaches.

Either that or I'll be the first up against the wall when Facebook becomes
SKYNET.

------
forensic
Seems to me the services facebook provides would be better provided on the
operating system. It would have to be built in though - people don't want to
download anything.

If Apple got into the business of social networking, they could fracture the
community.

I stopped using facebook much when it got bloated and slow. This tends to be
what always kills these massive sites. Someone will figure out a way to do
better than them and the internet elite will jump shit and eventually there
will be more than one facebook.

------
marltod
Facebook's business model is busted. Costs are higher than revenue per user.
The model has to change, become a search gateway, start selling products
people want to buy, or cut costs features and charge high bandwidth users.

~~~
electromagnetic
Facebook should be cornering its games market with online payments. Charge $5
for 450 'game points', basically you charge $5 for 450 real-world equivalent
'cents' that you can spend arcade style in whatever game you want.

No facebook game will ever get a payment from me while they're relying on
third party providers. There's a slim chance they'll get my money through
paypal (since I've had a paypal account longer than I've had a facebook
account), but as the money you pay goes into solely one game there's no
interoperability. Every developer is stuck developing their own way to
implement credits using companies that have no reason to care.

People are going to trust facebook, but they're not going to trust 'cherry
credits' or whatever suckass companies you know nothing about that you're
signing your credit card information over to. Facebook is already trusted by
its users (or they wouldn't be users), which gives them an unbelievable edge
without them having to play unfairly against the other game credit providers.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_People are going to trust facebook, but they're not going to trust 'cherry
credits' or whatever suckass companies you know nothing about that you're
signing your credit card information over to._

Judging by the ridiculous amounts of money that social gaming companies are
hauling in, this is clearly not true.

~~~
electromagnetic
Actually the social gaming companies that are actually hauling any real money
in (IE Zynga) sell their credits themselves. You either pay Zynga directly by
credit card, or you can pay indirectly through paypal. Those are the only two
options, but as for games on facebook the points are still only going into a
single game and cannot be used in different games by one developer, or in
games by different developers, like a facebook controlled 'currency' could.

Essentially, it would be if Apple didn't allow you to put money onto your
account. You instead have to use your credit card to make a transaction on
_every single song purchase_. It would be stupid, and Apple wouldn't make
nearly as much money as it could.

> We’ve found once you get into these digital-only goods and services there’s
> massive opportunity for fraud. We couldn’t find a single company that could
> manage or solve that problem for us. We had to build the whole
> infrastructure in-house. We had to go out and get relationships with credit-
> card processing companies. \- Mark Pincus

Facebook would have a unique opportunity to step in and dominate this market.
If Zynga cannot control these transaction companies, how can smaller
developers? Like I said, tapping into this market could mean Facebook could
not only boost revenues to many of these social gaming companies, but it could
be taking profits off of every transaction. 5/6ths of Zynga's users are from
social networking sites, meaning Facebook could easily take profits from
5/6ths of Zynga's users by being trustworthy. There are then plenty of other
developers in the market, especially thousands of smaller developers, who
could make Facebook hundreds of millions that they're not tapping.

