I can confirm. My parents aren't technical at all. They were confused when I told them people work at Facebook.
What do those 15k do?
But it can be explained as:
- Development/Ops (the technical side, from developing the services, supporting those services to debugging network problems and support of API users, it's a huge area)
- Sales/Commercial affairs/Customer support
- Localization/Editorial production
- Growth/Product management/UX and everything that goes in designing the product
- Corporate support functions (HR/Legal etc)
you mean like trying to cross a speeding-bus and breaking a leg?...
You've just triggered a favorite quote of mine:
"The single biggest failure of leadership is to treat adaptive challenges like technical problems." - Heifetz & Linsky [1]
In this context, technical problems are not technical in the sense that we might think of (software/hardware bound), it's in fact any problem that can be solved with a certain process, given enough resources and time. However technically intimidating they might be, those problems are the easy ones. The hardest challenges however are not technical but adaptive in nature where one of the biggest hurdles is to convince people to change their behavior.
[1] A better summary: http://www.sgaumc.org/files/files_library/technical_vs_adapt...
I know of several people who choose to not waste their time with Facebook. Seriously, why? Any time I need to nudge somebody, that I don't care enough to bother with in the real world, there is Linked In. Everybody else either has my phone number, email address, or they are people I don't know.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/09/03/has-linked...
I just checked and the last thing I posted on my wall was a year ago. The thing before that 6 months before. Hardly a time sink.
MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, LiveJournal, Tsu, Yahoo! 360, StudiVZ and Xanga weren't terribly technical, and yet still under-performed. For a while Facebook's success story was how highly technical and performance-oriented it was when compared with Twitter's fail whales and MySpace's enter-URL-and-go-get-some-lunch-while-it's-loading site speed.
Very little effort went into ever evolving the user experience beyond a v1, the backend underpinning it all was legendarily bad, and there was no concept of ad personalization whatsoever.
MySpace kind of stumbled across Music as a product direction, and developed something that was a bit like an ahead of its time version of Soundcloud, but discovery was still horrible and by then people were migrating to Facebook anyway.
This created strong network effects, accelerated by seeding in universities (places with lots of friends).
The tech stuff allowed them to maintain their platform, it didn't differentiate the fundamental proposition.
I'm enjoying some parts of Ello now (yay! Markdown, embeds, and images), but also find it frustrating for long-lived fails: missing markdown entities (blockquotes), a very glitchy editor, and low-quality search.
Where's that Usenet discussion we were having a day or so back....
Honestly, let's not give them that much credence, nor take them as any sort of proof that people don't care about privacy.
Diaspora was screwing up basics -- like, serving mixed HTTP content -- years into its development. Regardless of how it was marketed: Privacy first it was not.
Once you stop talking to developers and programmers, you find that people don't give a shit about things remotely technical, and just use stuff because 'everyone else is using it'.
Saying all that, these days my FB feed has gone advert mad, and I find I mainly use it for event organisation instead. I do get the feeling it is slowly dying though despite being profitable, but whether it will be replaced by a new social networking site, or a set of separate apps with specific functions instead, remains to be seen.