This is borne out by my experience. A slowly increasing number of my friends are cutting down their use, and eventually leaving. This might just be due to my cohort of friends getting older, but the article claims it is a general trend.
What is definitely true, is that nobody I know feels anything positive about facebook, at all. It is seen simply as a sinister, addictive[1] necessary evil. This is the case regardless of technical expertise. They continue to use it purely because of inertia and lock in. Yet they are not interested in twitter either.
Much like smoking, many people get into it as teenagers because everyone's doing it, now in their 20s they've realised that it sucks but they can't stop.
There is definitely a market for a social network thats simpler, but still full-featured like facebook, but above all one that's less "evil." One that's vocally dedicated to your privacy, and whose every move doesn't seem so machiavellianly calculated to keep you coming back, to the point where you begin to feel like you're living in a dystopian future world.
I realise that's just a long way of saying "less profitable" or even "not profitable," but there we are.
[1] The main slang term for facebook amongst it's younger users in the UK is "facecrack." It has been called that for years.
Facebook needs to take a lesson from what has happened to Microsoft. Microsoft is making its best products ever but the reputation of Windows is so soured that it doesn't matter. People associate Windows with viruses and crashes. Now people use Windows because they have to, not because they want to.
Facebook is in danger of suffering the same thing. Like you, I have a lot of non-technical friends who feel uneasy about Facebook; they just don't trust it. They feel the games are scammy. They find that they can access their pictures when logged out. They use it any ways. But increasingly, they don't like it.
Well to be honest, what are the choices FOR Windows (this applies to Facebook as well):
1) It's ubiquitous so it's not like a statement that you like windows.
2) Main competitor is Apple/OSX which has always required a hardware upgrade/switch as the OS doesn't install on Win boxes.
3) PC manufacturers are operating on razor thin margins, so any joy you might get from the hardware is often minimal due to low quality parts... you have to be an enthusiast to have a decent experience or pay as much as the Mac users do.
Microsoft is a victim of it's own success... they forgot they actually have customers (not just consumers, businesses) and became arrogant.
> What is definitely true, is that nobody I know feels anything positive about facebook, at all. It is seen simply as a sinister, addictive[1] necessary evil.
You and your friends probably spend so much time online for work that you reproach yourselves for excesses like Facebook. (FWIW I'm no different.) The majority of the normal, non-technical users I know don't view Facebook as evil. They just think of it as something everybody uses nowadays, like e-mail. I don't think those users are going anywhere anytime soon.
Facebook has reached an inevitable point where everyone who hasn't signed up either doesn't want to, or can't (no internet access). I mean, do you know anyone who really wants to sign up for Facebook but hasn't gotten around to it yet? It's no surprise that their growth would eventually slow. I wouldn't read too much into it. They're going to be around for a long, long time.
"I mean, do you know anyone who really wants to sign up for Facebook but hasn't gotten around to it yet?"
12 year olds.
And so Facebook's customer development changes to that of cigarette manufacturers. As long as 12 year olds continue to turn 13, Facebook can replace the thirty-somethings that drop off.
Well said, and I'm seeing the same behavior and attitudes with friends and acquaintances. The high school and college students I've talked to recently have similar feelings about Facebook as well.
There are a lot of emerging social networks (Hibe, Pidder, Necter) who emphasize privacy a lot more than Facebook and don't have the baggage -- as well as the whole open source Diaspora/AppleSeed/OneSocialWeb/etc. distributed social network movement. True, right now none of them have Facebook's "everybody's there" advantage. But people's dislike for Facebook is so pervasive that I really wonder how much longer they'll continue to be so successful.
As a counterpoint, I moved to a new area five months ago, and I have found Facebook an excellent way to communicate with the new people I have met, and to keep in touch with the friends I left. For most people I know, Facebook is just another way to communicate and coordinate.
I'm surprised at how few of my friends use Twitter, or even consider it. I wish they would, but for some reason they (all non-techy people) are on facebook every day but if they have a Twitter account at all, it's little-used and dormant.
It's rather easy to 'get' facebook, since it's pretty much a mish-mash of various communication technologies that have already proved themselves, including Twitter. I think new, non-techy visitors to Twitter are confused by what it does in some ways. Twitter's interface and presentation play a large role in that.
Twitter feels less personal than Facebook. The 73x73 image is tiny compared to Facebook's profile image, and there's little info on the page about real social connections. You are limited to one type of content, tiny text messages. It seems like a social site, but doesn't feel very connected. It seems to me Twitter is a mess of missed opportunities and muddled focus right now. They've tried to push it as a way to keep up with celebrities... Apple's iTunes 'ping' hasn't worked out with that whole Pro>Consumer set up.
I think Twitter's strength is in being a messaging system. People could use it to replace SMS, free, with a better interface - or does it have a better interface? Twitter's DM capabilities leave a bit to be desired. The web interface is rather feature-free, and aren't they cutting off API/OAuth access to DMs soon or something? Anyhow, look what the NYT did with Twitter's service recently - that is the sort of building on Twitter I see occurring, but I'm not even sure if Twitter themselves understand the potential for Twitter to become infrastructure, not just a way for people broadcast how much you hate traffic or like a sandwich.
A slowly increasing number of my friends are cutting down their use, and eventually leaving.
I know what they say about the plural of antidote, but I've personally noticed the same. I use it less, and when I do use it, I notice the people I care about on facebook are using it less too. Everything you say mirrors the response to facebook I've been seeing. Its no longer a toy, its just that thing you have and slowly working towards being a burden.
I think a post I saw about facebook email says it the best: "Facebook, you're giving me email? You're now one ugly paintjob away from being aol". Its initially funny, but the parallels you can draw between AOL and Facebook are huge and I wouldn't be surprised if facebook followed a similar trajectory.
Facebook, to me (others may use features of Facebook I simply don't care about, like the games and apps), is just email done badly, with a big contact list that tells me who my contacts have as contacts, public message board type thing with a little photo hosting mixed in.
Using gmail as an example, nothing facebook does couldn't be done either just as well or better with email: the gmail contact list could be augmented to be a social network - it already almost is and Google have been trying something like this with Buzz. Email is already better as a messaging system than what Facebook could ever hope to do. Mass emails, mailing lists and services like fiesta.cc and we've covered almost all of Facebooks messaging usecases (private, public, mass/event messages). Tack on a Buzz-like public notice board and an RSVP system for events and everything (plus some stuff Facebook is bad at) is covered. Throw flickr or picasa into the mix (or just a more convenient way to email photos to people) and that use case is covered too.
Except that with email, mailing lists, mass email, bcc etc I am put in control of who gets access to what - privacy is under my control.
I agree, but it's interesting that Google is doing so much more than just search today and they're not inviting the same response. Is it because the main search service has stayed the same without suffering from feature bloat?
Google never tried to change its core product the way Facebook has. Facebook started as a private network of close friends and they've changed it to an open network of friends, family, and the world. As much as they've changed about the product, they cannot change users' perceptions, which have remained the same throughout. They've basically caused their users to suffer from cognitive dissonance about what Facebook is vs. what they expect it to be.
I wonder if this is true of each company's management style too - I don't know anyone in Google or Facebook personally but it does seem to me that Google values engineer autonomy more than any other company (and that is one reason for its huge success, trusting its engineers).
Google makes lots of products that you can use however you please. Facebook makes one product, and when you want to use one aspect of it, you get lots of baggage that you don't necessarily care about.
Its an interesting comparison, but I think at least part of the difference lies in the fact many of google's main services -- search, maps, shopping, news -- are about getting you what you want and away from google. The faster you're done using google, the less time you spend there, the better they're doing. Gmail and apps are more time consuming but I think a certain level of "well, I have no choice to do the this work or not, I might as well have a nice interface" comes into play when using those.
Google's tools seem more about facilitating accomplishing something else as fast as possible, while facebook is the ends in and of itself. How long you spend on facebook is the metric of how well facebook is doing.
This is what I do when I see a personal or corporate link to a Facebook page: I don't click on it. Because I know I can't access it.
The same as I used to do with Scientific American links, and other properties that were inside AOL's walled garden. The difference today is that corporations are smart enough to exist both inside and outside. Since they're already outside, I don't worry at all about what's inside; I'm not missing anything.
As for personal pages, I have the email and blog addresses of all my friends.
We need to look at the type of social groups interacting and using it though. Most people on HN I think would use Facebook less, so we can't be the demographic to base it on. The News Stream is really a gossip magazine just for people you know.
But it's the social party goers that use it. I have a few in my stream, like little sisters. It's used heaps if you're a party goer. Photos, events, global shout outs. It looks like less people use it because you cull a lot of the noisy users.
What is definitely true, is that nobody I know feels anything positive about facebook, at all. It is seen simply as a sinister, addictive[1] necessary evil. This is the case regardless of technical expertise. They continue to use it purely because of inertia and lock in. Yet they are not interested in twitter either.
Much like smoking, many people get into it as teenagers because everyone's doing it, now in their 20s they've realised that it sucks but they can't stop.
There is definitely a market for a social network thats simpler, but still full-featured like facebook, but above all one that's less "evil." One that's vocally dedicated to your privacy, and whose every move doesn't seem so machiavellianly calculated to keep you coming back, to the point where you begin to feel like you're living in a dystopian future world.
I realise that's just a long way of saying "less profitable" or even "not profitable," but there we are.
[1] The main slang term for facebook amongst it's younger users in the UK is "facecrack." It has been called that for years.