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.
The transformation won't be complete until they make it so F5 clears your credentials and logs you out of Facebook.
That was always my favorite Lotus Notes feature. Nothing like trying to refresh your email in a hurry when someone has just sent you something and having to enter your stupid credentials again.
"Further, as groups of characters are typed, the images on the dialog change to distract the would-be onlooker from observing the number of (extraneous) characters typed. "
Actually, the hieroglyphics are just another dubious security feature. The theory is that you know what the hieroglyphics are for the correct password, and if they aren't shown, the login box is being spoofed. In reality, this is dumb, since any regular Notes user just tunes out that part of the login box.
Presumably the hieroglyphics are generated based off a hash of what you're typing, so there will not be a one-to-one mapping of hieroglyphics back to data typed. Also, since the hieroglyphics are nonsensical and change quickly, you would probably find it easier to watch their physical keystrokes then trying to memorizing a stream of symbols.
That said, all logical bets are off when analyzing a hare-brained feature like this.
I remember I had to use Lotusnotes with its main language set as Hebrew.
That meant everything on the screen was "flipped" and since I was not 100% up to speed on the language- for the first little while it was nearly incomprehensible. Even as I improved reading, the software still seemed clunky and it was a pain to perform basic tasks.
I always imagine that someone who can't read the language on the screen could muscle their way through and "figure it out" and become proficient on a product with a well designed ui/ux.
Could not disagree more. As someone who has been on facebook since 2005, I'm using it more every year than I've ever used before. I think the facebook product is extremely well thought out. For example, I make extensive use of the post-level privacy features which allows me to post items that I don't want certain people to see.
You alone, most likely. The majority of people don't care to dive that deep, and as such these useful features you use simply don't exist for the majority.
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?
This. Got too many friends of my parents on Facebook and then one of them started talking about things I had shared (or friends had shared, I don't know) to my mother, which upset her. So rather than censor myself all the time, I took a good hard look at what value Facebook produced for me, realized it's just a waste of time, and deleted it. Don't miss it all.
It's not lotus notes until they seriously screw up the ui. It's actually almost inconceivable that facebook's ui could become that screwed up, regardless of how much you despise facebook.
It's not that inconceivable. What do people want out of Facebook? To communicate with people, the way they want to communicate with them. Facebook has made several changes over the past few years (Timeline, for example) that alter how users get information from FB - and the result has been bad. So, yes, if FB continues to make changes that alter how people interact with FB, then the UI has been screwed up.
I don't hate FB at all, but I rarely use it. I never really was a heavy user but over the past year or so it's gotten to the point where I log in and it seems like I can't really find anything, so I log out. I can only imagine that the experience is the same for others.
It isn't like Facebook doesn't "revamp" the UI all the time and confuse everyone while making it a worse experience. I can see it getting there eventually. Facebook used to be rather simple, now it is a convoluted mess. Not only is it a convoluted mess, but ever different "version" of it is different. The mobile app is much different from m.facebook.com which is much different from facebook.com and the iOS app is probably different too. Remember lite.facebook.com? I MISS IT SO MUCH!! :( Oh yeah sometimes the picture viewing interface is different depending on what you clicked on. Ever try to find a video someone uploaded? Go ahead. It's under Photos > [Name's] Photo's > Videos. Yeah...
What's with all the needless JavaScript? And more importantly, all the JavaScript ERRORS?
My company still uses Lotus Notes for email. Is this common? I've talked to an IBM employee who vehemently defended it as a great piece of enterprise software. As did the IT folks in my company. Conceivably folks trying to keep in touch with old friends and relatives will use Facebook no matter what. Just like companies using Lotus Notes because it's too expensive to change.
It does often require a lot less overhead to maintain for an enterprise. However, there are certain... synergies... that are attainable when deeply integrating your entire communication portfolio on Exchange / MS products that using the Redmond stack is hard to say no to.
I'm not a FB fan, nor have I developed Notes apps in a good 8+ years, but Facebook might be like notes in another way: Both seem to do what they do, in their time, better than anything else out there.
When I saw Notes being mentioned, flashbacks of LotusScript, NotesSQL and came, especially it's non-relational DB (nosql a decade earlier than the rage it became later).
Notes incredibly clunky mail and document system did a few things well before anything else -- great two way replication of data for online and offline work. Domino took Notes apps and rendered them for the web, allowing complex web apps to be built in a time where there was little like it.
I didn't hesitate to leave Notes, but it wasn't for lack of respect, it was just one of the half dozen or so stacks I worked in at the time. Every line of code we write will be crap in 5 years. Every stack we use will be crap in 5 years. Everything's new, but everything's the same too.
You can't be serious. Facebook is used daily by hundreds of millions of people. The interface is heavily data driven and widely understood.
What's clunky about the "mail client"? And compared to it's supposed competitor - Snapchat? Really? I doubt you've actually used Lotus Notes. And perhaps you have some suggestion on how they could improve the messaging interface, but I doubt you could point out anything terribly clunky.
98% of people I know use facebook and are not confused by the interface nor do they complain about the interface. Personally I find it very well designed. Almost everything I need to do is easy to find and features are discoverable. The only significant confusion I have sometimes is around user list management.
> I swear Facebook is slowly turning into Lotus Notes.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Things like electrical power, indoor plumbing, etc., used to be viewed as very sexy new innovations and are now "boring", yet they have been massively successful.
I think FB is struggling to provide a platform for others to build on that doesn't turn into a spam inbox. "Lotus Notes" represents the pendulum swinging away from the 30 farmville viral invites per day that was the recent past.
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.
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.
No, you're not. The reason is that Facebook doesn't suck, almost everyone uses it, it isn't dying, and it is a great user experience.
What you are describing is what the vast majority of Facebook users feel. However, that's not very interesting, nor does it get read when you put it in a headline.
I'm over 40 and quite like Facebook. Everyone I know is on there from my boss to my grandmother, and I hear that in mind when I post. It's the main channel with which I discover what my family are up to, since I have emigrated. That said I can see why young people would hate it.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
>> 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?
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
>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.
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.
Or maybe in fact something completely opposite is the case: relations between teenagers’ social circles are so difficult to map (there is so plenty of inclusions, exclusion, intersections and other Boolean staff) that Facebook is not able to manage it ;-)
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.
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?”
But Facebook is not electricity. At best they're a type of light source. The alternative is to Facebook is not living in the dark, but switching to another type of light bulb. It might take some time before something comes along you like well enough (heavens knows finding a LED bulb I don't hate have taken a few attempts, as the 10 different makes of LED bulbs presently in my living room proves), but the change from one type of electrical bulb to another is a whole lot less problematic than going back to candles.
The threshold is far lower.
For starters, the population in general is vastly more internet savvy. And contenders for all or part of their space is shooting up all over the place. And parts of their audience wants to be different and stand out from their parents or others.
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.
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.
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?
Oh the nostalgia. My experience with web rings is most of the sites in them are turds. Maybe Google could build a machine learned web ring where you can shuffle through similar sites.
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.
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).
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.
> 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
What is reassuring is that these companies where unable to make anything become completely dominant forever. We tend to obsess over one part of the stack for a few years and forget the necessity of other parts. Another part of the stack will reassert itself and allow someone to challenge dominance. For example, html5 replacing flash is heavily driven by mobile browsers which depended on an evolution in hardware (touch) for them to become prominent. Yet Microsoft pushed silverlight.
Even without becoming perpetually dominant, many of them exercised a huge amount of control over a large area for a long time. IBM from the 1930s through the 1990s, Microsoft from the 1980s through the 2010s, AT&T from the 1910s through the 1980s, etc.
There are cases to be made for these reigns being useful: AT&T spawned Unix and (in part) TCP/IP and the Internet, IBM spawned much IC development, Microsoft proliferated cheap and standardized x86 CPUs. But each also quashed competition in the form of both other firms and competing technologies: AT&T, despite the role UNIX came to play in packet-switched networks, explicitly rejected them for its own network recognizing that this would undermine its own dedicated-circuit switching. Microsoft's treatment of competitors is legion, but it's IBM we have to thank for the term "FUD".
Agreed. I think the AOL:Facebook comparison makes the most sense.
All of those ads prompting you to visit a company's Facebook page are today's version of the "find us at AOL keyword So-and-so" that you used to see all the time in the late 90s.
I agree - AOL didn't mature in tandem with the way users engaged with the internet. I think the same is happening to Facebook. People are fickle so there will come a point where the way people engage with social media changes and Facebook are powerless to stop that. They also don't really have a particularly unique offering. Ok Google doesn't either but it does have the engineering power and infrastructure to put itself so far ahead of the competition that it is able to keep its place at the top of the industry (yes it has many faults but...)...
Yeah, well, I wasn't going to do a full industry history. AOL is pretty epic, though, particularly counting the spectacular disaster of the AOL - Time-Warner merger.
"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."
Agreed, and to add to your point, group identity is also a strong motivator for close-knit networks.
Forums are a good example of this. It's partly why I think communities (and the software they use) centred around a specific interest or activity will, for certain kinds of community, ultimately win over what we now call social networks.
It's the tools that are lacking: at the moment it seems far easier to set up a facebook group than work out what a community needs and provide it without technical knowledge.
(I have an interest in this area because tools for communities are what I left my job to work on: http://microco.sm).
The online communities I've seen work best generally:
⚫ Are selective. Actual or de-facto barriers to casual participation exist.
⚫ Are focused around a specific interest. Usually topical, occasionally by geography.
⚫ Are based around discussion from people interested in receiving as well as transmitting. The traditional exceptions to these are trolls and spammers, but I had a brief experience on mailing list that was heavily subscribed by people in the entertainment industry some years back. It was horrible. For, several reasons: people in love with the sound of their own voice, top-post/forward style messages (3 lines on top of 3000 wasn't uncommon), and ultimately far too many participants for the forum. Even though it wasn't spam / trolling / SEO, it was about the worst and most useless forum I'd ever seen.
Having well-established formatting and quoting styles matters. That's one of the things I enjoy about reddit, especially as compared with G+: the richer markdown, and inclusion of blockquote syntax, helps hugely. One idiot on G+ (who I finally blocked, for various reasons) had the habit of using an inline quote/response format, but his marking syntax (python-style quote tagging, I think), was all but impossible to follow. Dealing with his BS and difficult-to-follow style really weren't worth it. Oh, and it'd be nice if HN had a proper blockquote markdown as well ...
Also from G+: I noticed that without a proper "plaza", what you tended to end up with were, effectively, cocktail parties: hosts (users) who has a sufficient level of followers that they'd kick off conversations, as well as a good seed, and policing of guests to keep everything in line. Discussion nucleated around posts and specific users. Not communities, not topics, not pages.
Communities were and are effectively dead outside a very few exceptions, largely due to the inability to filter out crap. And even with the cocktail-party mode, there was a very narrow goldilocks zone: too few followers and discussions wouldn't get off the ground, too many and it rapidly got inane (effectively somewhere between a college kegger and a street brawl), and hosts who were either uninspiring or absentee would (respectively) garner similarly inane commentary and/or have largely directionless commentary.
I find the dynamics of discussions fascinating.
Hrm. I'll take a look at your project, but that website gives a horrible first impression. Try to make your text text. Not some kind of art statement.
Great that you touched on photo sharing. It's 2014 and it's still difficult to get photos from a camera to your computer to your friends. Publishing a simple web page is still deemed too difficult, discovering and managing contacts, and mass mailing them is hard.
Facebook basically stepped into the niche above. It adds instant messenging, and some automated feed organisation.
To some extent Email, IM and a little web space would suffice as well as some photo resizing tools! OSs, file managers and browsers could really help here, and if these tasks had been far easier to do in the first place Facebook wouldn't have even become what it is. Privacy and authentication for dummies is the other thing that has to be made and integrated into a solution.
With a little work Facebook could be decentralised, and having your Mum as a contact wouldn't make your social network toolset uncool.
I've been using photobucket (for a couple of years) and Imgur (past month or so) for quick shares. Imgur does offer some editing capabilities. Neither allows you to limit access best that I know, though I could be wrong on that. Most of the need I've got is for hosting images related to blog posts.
And yes, having played a bit in social space, photo is the killer app. Google knows this as well.
It's not just photo. It's as simple as people just wanting to be able to do things intuitively and easily. Hey I took a great photo at the weekend, let me share it with you, here you go, done. Or you must hear this song, or read this etc. Sharing has to be very easy.
I have an Aunt with an iPad full of photos, that she's pretty clueless as to how to backup or share. She's given up trying and just takes her iPad to her friends.
I have another Aunt who can't for the life her, get photos from her camera to her laptop. It's a trial.
So if you have a phone with a camera, that lets you seamlessly share photos, even if it's through imgur, facebook, or whatever, it's probably going to be easier than connecting up cables, trying to traverse file systems etc.
My brother wanted to sell a motorbike, and wanted to send the buyer a couple of photos. He was absolutely dumbfounded by the process because his SLR took big photos that his email provider rejected. He's not that web savvy. In the end I said it might be easier for you to just install Dropbox, and it was. How arse about face is that?
Even copying files onto some people's computers doesn't help that much, if their file management skills don't exist.
OSs (desktop) haven't functionally changed that much in the last decade on the face of it. And even the simple problems haven't been solved, which is laughable when you have an insight into the complexity of some of the work arounds.
Used to be we had email and MIME attachments. Which is to say: you simply attached whatever media you wanted to share to the email.
Mind: that could clog up systems with massive files moving around (though what was once considered massive for servers is now minuscule on handhelds).
With a website you control yourself, and URLs you can distribut to whom you choose, you can still use the email method, but distribute a link. Or RSS. Or a host of other tools. The problem isn't so much the technology as the incentives for people to create sharing platforms based on them, and the inclination for those platforms to be proprietary, silos, and highly monetized.
From the perspective of a nontechnical person looking to share things, you've got the challenge of comprehending technology (that's a longer rant), which is a challenge. But really. "Take picture, share privately to list of friends" isn't particularly difficult conceptually _or_ technically.
I'm well beyond convinced that a huge part of the reason that local filesystem management tools (for Windows, Mac, and Android) are so difficult to grasp is because the vendors prefer it that way. They can sell "enterprise server solutions" or "cloud social services" instead.
> "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."
I don't think that it's that. How many people do you know who have really changed their online behaviour as a response to those revelations? How many people have started consistently using GPG for e-mail and OTR for chats, have stopped using cloud services like G-Mail, Dropbox etc.? I don't think it's that many even among the tech-savvy crowd let alone the general public.
What I do think about FB is that younger people always have a tendency of trying to distinguish themselves from their elder siblings and more importantly their parents. Both of those groups are on FB which makes it less attractive for them due to the aforementioned point and the fact that they're no longer among themselves when their parents are watching their timeline.
But I have the impression that there may be second change underway in that existing users are starting to experience sharing fatigue. Unfortunately, there are no numbers yet to back this up, it's based on anecdotal evidence and my own experience. What I mean by that is that people are getting tired of constantly putting thought into what to publicly share on their profile and try to maintain the image they're trying to project.
I personally rarely if ever share anything anymore. The two things I still do use FB for are messaging and reading about news and events from local venues like bars and clubs. The messaging component could be easily replaced by another solution like WhatsApp and I think FB knows that. This is probably why the released the standalone messenger app to be able to better compete on that front, but Snapchat is still eating FB's lunch with certain demographics. In fact, I think Zuckerberg is aware of this whole problem. He went on record yesterday saying that they plan to release more mobile standalone apps in the future thereby unbundling FB's different functionalities. In my opinion this is a move to adapt to a changing market where there is a diminished interest in having one unified platform like FB.
How many people do you know who have really changed their online behaviour as a response to those revelations?
I'm really not even keeping tabs on that. What I do know is that I'm constantly hearing Snowden discussions in places I wouldn't ordinarily expect to, particularly in mainstream news and business coverage. More than the stories themselves, there's the incidental commentary, that that's definitely slanting toward the "ewww ... creepy" direction rather than "oh! That's so cool!" Look at the response to the Nest acquisition by Google -- a lot of that was negative, based on privacy.
Sharing fatigue (and feed fatigue) is another matter. I never really did the former -- what I post is stuff of intellectual interest (or occasionally things that tickle my funny bone). I've largely rejected social feeds as significant, and have been turning increasingly to RSS, having found some really useful tools: newsbeuter, rsstail, and multitail, all console/terminal utilities, along with Slick RSS (a Chrome extension):
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.
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.
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.
"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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
The ACA does mandate insurance, but the point here is that the law depends on healthy 18-34-year-olds signing up on the new public exchanges such as Healthcare.gov and state-by-state sites. Right now a higher-than-expected percentage of people using Healthcare.gov are elderly or chronically ill people who had difficulty getting private insurance. If the insurance pool is full of people using the insurance, the premiums will go up, the insurance will be considered expensive, and fewer healthy people will choose public insurance, kicking off a vicious cycle.
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.)
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
And I have no particular desire to be armed near the President, but I may have a desire to be armed in public without being shooed away all of a sudden.
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
>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.
I can understand the importance of keeping up with people, but I think Facebook lets you do it at such scale that it becomes meaningless. I care what's going on in the life of the best man at my wedding. I care less what's going on in the life of my lab partner in chemistry all those years ago. Facebook makes it trivial to track both which from a technical side is pretty amazing. However I have limited attention and tracking the lives of that many people is just not sustainable.
About a year ago, I deleted every "friend" I had not physically seen and spent time with in the last 18 months. This might not work for everyone, but for me it was incredibly refreshing. Fewer, higher quality relationships was far better. (and yes, I took this to the logical conclusion and just stopped using Facebook. I have not missed it)
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.
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.
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
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.
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 ...)
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)
It's easy to bemoan the incumbent, but it's not easy to get rid of them.
Remember Myspace, it was huge. A no-frills more personal alternative to it was born in Facebook. They are different products granted. But the early adopters chose to champion Facebook. Just like Google was the new cool Yahoo. Later Facebook grew into the huge monster that it is.
I have political reservations and worries about a silo like Facebook, but I have to respect it being a work of epic proportions.
A new kid on the block might be able to quickly grab the lime-light if they play their cards right, but there's the worry that they'll become the future uncool incumbent.
Some companies amazingly hang in there as the competition just isn't strong enough, good enough or wealthy enough to remove them.
As others have said a good product doesn't have to be cool. My bread board is brilliant, but it's not cool. The worry with I'd have with a well established web app, is that it might become a bloated behemoth.
People are happy to moan about Facebook right now, currently I don't really see a good alternative, but where there's a will there's a way.
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.
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.
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.
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.