So unless there's a fundamental shift in its business model and allure, its trajectory will be doomed. It doesn't mean Facebook the company will fail, but it does mean that the Facebook product—what it is in its current form—has a finite shelf life.
It's because regulation increases the barrier to entry. It means less chance of some college students starting an app that can dethrone Facebook.
yups. FB users are to FB, what cows are to milk farms. main difference is that FB users are free to go, and cows are in some sort of bonded labour/slavery construction, although it is not commonly called that way.
Sure FB owns WhatsApp but I don't think they can leverage it financially nearly as much. If ads start to pop up on WhatsApp people will simply flock to different messengers with similar functionality.
Some of this dates back to their repeatedly inventing new excuses to email me that I had to go and unsubscribe from, part is that I can't look at anyone's page without LinkedIn telling them about it, part is their finagling everyone signing up to give access to their Gmail contacts similar to Facebook's harvesting of user info.
I guess they're a competitor, but if they're not as bad as Facebook is it's only because they have less reach.
Facebook profits off of our attention and engagement. Facebook’s real competition is who or whatever holds our attention. Whoever manages to make us give facebook less of our time. LinkedIn does not really have our attention like facebook does. We set up a profile and leave and maybe get on it when job hunting or when someone writes us a recommendation. There is no “LinkedIn addiction.” But you wanna know what website has been getting even more and more of our attention? Netflix lol. Netflix can take hours out of our day and during those hours we may be so absorbed in the show that we’re not really engaging with facebook. So yeah, Netflix is a bigger competitor to facebook than LinkedIn.
The competition is “socialising the pre-Facebook way”
I have no social internet accounts left except for this one. I even recently deleted my Linkedin account even though that is bad for my career (?). I just don't want to feel raped all the time. I keep getting Linkedin-ish head-hunting emails though but I'm sure that'll clear up in a year or so.
If I'm ever socializing again on the internet, give me something that doesn't rape me in the *. Otherwise I'm fine just socializing IRL.
I hope we are a void and that something new is about to happen.
Facebook's problems are caused by Facebook (website)'s design, trajectory, and business model. It doesn't have anything to do with inherent evilness in the company itself.
The Facebook site is evil and should be destroyed because of 2 reasons, in my opinion.
Firstly, the news feed is solely designed to get you to stay on the site for longer. And what that means is you get an echo chamber. So, idiot people get idiot posts that agree with them. It's not just a problem on one side of the political spectrum, it's a problem for any extreme view. Anti-vaxxers, left wing communists, and right wing fascists all get into their echo chamber and never get out.
Secondly, the advertising platform that Facebook has created is too powerful. It lets you micro-target people in a way that is absolutely perfect for political ads. You find people vulnerable to an emotional message and bombard them with your emotionally responsive ads.
Facebook ads are good for non-political things as well, but in this case, we'll have to throw the baby out with the bathwater I think.
The barrier will only be higher for potential services that want to avoid those regulations. If the market moves in a 'wants more privacy' direction, barrier to entry shouldn't be a problem.
I was born in 80 so that dates me. I've worked in music for the last 20 years and I've worked with over 60 bands most of whom are very successful now. However that number is misleading because I've toured with hundreds of bands if you count the openers and headliners over the years. It's stupid really when I look back on it. Once when I was 25 I used my network to start a music festival with no money that's been going on for the last 10 years and has never had less than 50k people attend. Anyways long story short most people don't understand marketing. But when you're touring you're living it. I remember when the words taste maker started getting thrown around. I remember when gorilla marketing became a thing... Because the marketing people would all be coming to our shows and our parties and sponsoring us. All of this to say that
We were early adopters of Friendster, when they killed the bulletin board my friends and I moved to MySpace, when MySpace got over crowded we moved to Facebook, when our families friends got on Facebook we left for Twitter and reddit, the less public of us left Twitter almost immediately but our pr teams stayed, when Obama won in 08 we left reddit. Many of us went to snapchat and we all use Instagram even though we hate it. There was a minor period when we thought google + was going to serve us but that lasted exactly one day.
What we desperately want is a decentralized encrypted locally hosted application that has exactly one killer simple feature. A bulletin board to post events. That's it. A simple way to keep in touch with each other and local ownership of our photos and videos. Sure to reduce bandwidth we'd be fine with our friends or fans hosting encrypted files on their devices but that's as far as they go. Do that, slap an easy to use interface on it, don't have advertising call it something literal like friends torrent or something and we'll never have another Facebook. If you want to monotize it... Give it a market place. But if you take anything from this rant it should be this, your tastemakers aren't faceless nameless statistics they're real people and they're friends with each other. We know who we are and we are and have been paying attention.
Also fuck Facebook freedom isn't free
I guess someone here should accept this challenge.
Is there a way to inform you when someone think they have an acceptable solution?
I can't see people feeling the same way about a site which is only about events, it's a different impulse... almost like tuning in to an adverts-only station. Nobody is on FB because of bands - although they're happy to find out what bands are up to when they happen to already be on the site (not knocking bands as a thing - the same applies to eg. my art page).
Some might say "it doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be as popular as FB" but at that point then why not just have a website?
What you're asking for is much more difficult than you realize.
This is why vendors such as Facebook etc. try so had to get their product to be installed on phones (and in a previous generation, cut deals with PC manufactures to be one of the crap-wares installed in their OS image). If they can't get in thru the front door, they aim for the side door or maintenance entrance.
If I could root my phone, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, would be the first things properly removed and not simply "disabled".
Indecently, I'm in the market for a rootable phone with a Samsung Note style digitizer support.
The infection runs deep.
What exactly are you trying to get out of encryption in this MinimalBook application of yours?
But you cannot prevent your peers from violating the network's privacy, either purposefully or accidentally. No amount of encryption can do that.
I assume them is a reference to state level actor? At least to me it is not immediately obvious and I think I misread it the first time.
Add to that a way to authorise people to decrypt your stuff (and, ideally, ways to revoke those rights), and you get the the whole thing.
But IIReadC you wanted to cache media on peers devices to allow them to see/listen to it.
That cannot work unless you trust your friends completely (or keep your friends under constant surveillance, and hardly even then) as once they see it on their screen they can photograph or record your media, if necessary using an external device (e.g. a camera) and store it or share it.
Also, once your friends has access to it that makes your friends a target for bad actors that might want to trick or coerce your friends into sharing.
This is just another form of digital restrictions management (aka DRM). I think you'll find that most of the engineers that are opposed in principle to the gov-tech surveillance complex are also opposed in principle to DRM.
It is at least possible to build an open-source distributed social networking application that gives you most of the features you described, and in particular, will make it impractical to vacuum up whole social network graphs.
But at some point, ordinary netizens are going to have to learn some basic information theory. Just as commando clubbing is going to lead to some paparazzi getting vagina pics, nude selfies are going to get out beyond your ability to control.
Given that market, why not charge for MinimalBook as a premium experience instead of postulating an ill-defined “marketplace”?
Can't you do this with a mailing list? That handles the notification. A big standard website can do the rest like hosting photos.
Seems to do what you need.
--Donald
I'd bet against you. The trajectory is fine and Zuckerberg is a good CEO. They have nearly a third of the earth as users and a ridiculously high percentage of internet users.
Given a long enough time horizon any company is vulnerable, but FB is here to stay for a long while.
Let's first think about the demographic that has kept Facebook afloat; Baby Boomers and Generation X. When you think about most of these individuals, they graduated high school and college without much there to remind them of individuals they were acquainted with, minus maybe their yearbooks from high school. Sure, most probably wrote or emailed their close friends, but we're talking about those afterthought individuals that they came into contact with under specific circumstances that generated that "acquaintance" classification. Then, all of a sudden, appears Facebook, a platform that allows these individuals to link their name with their school. It's a database at their fingertips with all of their classmates with up-to-date pictures, life stories, and mutual friends to explore. Facebook is that one "person" I referenced earlier; the person that brings up that name you hadn't thought about for years, except now you can actually explore what they are up to, and Facebook continuously reminds people of those afterthought names.
The question is, how long is this effect going to sustain Facebook's competitive advantage? Like people have mentioned, there was Whitepages, now there is Facebook, but what's next?
Are they? My young teenaged (age 13-17) nieces/nephews have no FB presence at all. Their older siblings were on FB all the time at that age and still have FB pages, but are no longer very active - they mainly use FB to comment on their parents and other relatives pages.
While this is purely anecdotal, FB does seem to be losing young users:
https://www.inc.com/zoe-henry/facebook-losing-users-faster-t...
If they are going to Instagram, then FB isn't really losing them, if they are going elsewhere, then it doesn't bode well for FB.
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Facebook does almost nothing useful. It’s kind irritating to actually try to do anything with the user interface, since everything is slippery funnels.
Whatever isn’t an inductive dark pattern is otherwise emotional blackmail. The options and settings provided to the user don’t make sense, and are all defaulted to the worst choices imaginable.
WhatsApp doesn't have this problem. It's hard to monetize with ads but it's a data goldmine.
Network effects are not as strong as you might think. Multiple lines of evidence point to it being O(n log(n)) in general. See https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-i... for details.
The log(n) factor does work in Facebook's favor against newcomers. It is a barrier to entry. However it is a barrier to entry that can be overcome with a better user experience.
My desired experience is that I want to see what my friends have to say, and don't want to see random commercial spam. My Facebook feed includes crap from any time I liked a viral link, and DOES NOT include a significant fraction of what my friends had to say. It is very far from my desired experience.
I already see people trying out alternatives like Mastadon. Existing chat applications like Slack and Discord could be turned into social networks. And properties like Instagram and Whatsapp stand as demonstrations that social networks are more easily started than you might think. Facebook can only keep buying up its potential competitors for so long until it runs across one that dreams of something bigger than Facebook can offer.
Short term I believe that there is an overreaction to news. But long-term, I would not want to bet on Facebook. Not over the next 20 years.
Have you tried Facebook recently? These days 90% of my feed is posts from my friends.
However my other complaint remains. Clicking on my main feed, then clicking on a random friend, I'm not seeing most of what that friend posts in my feed.
Watch, Facebook will be the new Yahoo! Enough successful products to keep them alive, but with its vision destroyed and it’s mandate revoked, it will be a shadow of its former self. Influencers have already started moving away.
That company has a market value somewhere greater than zero but certainly less than even Facebook’s current market cap. The question is not “will it drop?” but “how low will it go?”
Which is why all it will take is a compelling competitor to start the great migration. This is sort of the corollary to the network effect — as soon as there is a better alternative that people really move to, a vast amount of people will move spontaneously.
Imagine if Instagram started right now. Do you think they would accept any offer to be bought by Facebook?
But don't hold on to those shares for too long.
The mesh/decentralized/p2p networking movement is really interesting, and given the ever increasing power of user devices, the balance for a shift to those models is compelling.
There are huge existing challenges, but I'm seeing really smart ideas in the space, and I think it's only a matter of years before we start to see mainstream p2p networks (still over the Internet) replacing a server model for some successful widespread apps or services. Facebook style social networking is the PERFECT use case for such a topology.
Facebook's time is coming to an end. Not now (like some are reacting), and not in the next year or so, but soon enough. Their paradigm isn't as good as the alternative. The alternative simply has implementation issues that need to be worked out, but they aren't insurmountable, and different groups of people are solving them in novel ways constantly.
There isn't a single lasting mass consumer adoption example of decentralized anything in the modern history of technology (eg post WW2). That's due to a rigid reason: human nature. It's not going to change.
The only thing that will change here, is privacy laws will force behavior changes on centralized platforms.
I can name dozens of massive technology & platform adoptions by consumers, every single one of them is centralized. Now, name the dozens of vast decentralized examples... crickets.
Decentralized as a mass consumer adoption thing will perpetually be fantasy. Only (some) tech people want it.
By the way, the sun is decentralized, its center of gravity does not coincide with the galaxy's center of gravity!
Good comment anyway. I didn't even think of e-mail.
But it has to stay stronger than it's bad reputation. If the only thing you have is a network effect you are in a very bad place. Everyone I know used to be on MSN and then within a week everyone had WhatsApp and MSN was practically dead.
> this is also not even including their other assets (Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus)
True Instagram is strong especially since they can show a shitton of ads there. But Instagram isn't Facebooks vision of what the world should be.
Do people really want that? Or do they just want good VR games and experiences? I'm not sure what kind of personal data would get added to a VR experience but it sounds...creepier than most people would want.
I mean I deactictivated FB long ago. So did most of my friends (from my school, from college, from my past companies etc. ) Even those who still have accounts never post anything. They don't even update their current city/companies etc.
Although I also noticed a trend of older people joining FB and being fairly active on it. But overall FB is definitely losing its appeal.
Sadly, people have ditched FB in favor of Whatsapp which belongs to FB.
But a double-digit drop in a week's span is a pretty strong message
Yeah people said the same thing about MySpace and look what happened
I suspect the same people will be saying the same thing next week when another $50b have been shed, another scandal or two has come to light, and more users and advertisers flee the platform. I wonder at what point it’s going to sink in that between Trump’s election and a general backlash against tech, this is the tip of a very large iceberg?
FB lost a few months of profits and has a set of issues. All the rest are hunches, it could be the beginning of the end, or just shedding a bunch of investors that just want to cash in and have nothing to do with the drama. It could also be the time that the government step in, regulate the shit out of social network, locking anyone but the richest companies from competing and basically cementing Facebook as de-facto standard with a license to print money.
In other words you're anticipating the share price to decline further. This sort of supports the OPs first assertion.
I also believe that we've barely scratched the surface in terms of insight into their internal surveillance and identity-tokenizing machinery. I believe that if we get to see those details in full glory (e.g. as the result of an investigation) we will be HORRIFIED. This applies to Google as well (or more).
I'm buying FB call options.
Facebook's network effect is extremely strong - this is also not even including their other assets (Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus).
The API access was in violation of terms of service and the ability to access data through friends via the FB graph has already been closed.