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I was just thinking this morning, way back in the dial-up internet days, I used to go around helping people setup web pages on their free 5MB of space the compa
by bane 11y ago
I was just thinking this morning, way back in the dial-up internet days, I used to go around helping people setup web pages on their free 5MB of space the company I worked for offered. A surprising number of our customers, even elderly ones, went out of their way to learn basic html and put something up there.
Over time we got geocities and various CMSs and such to fill that, but the function of what most of those people were putting up is just their facebook wall these days, only it's a bit more transitory.
I remember one old gentleman, a WW2 vet, who spent hours every day building a page about his dog so that he could share it with his friends and family. It was a bit odd, but my FB wall is full of similar kinds of things.
So I guess it also comes down to "what's the end goal the person is trying to achieve?" if it's just to keep people updated on their dog, FB more or less fills that function. Most people actually weren't interested in building random webpages, it was in communicating something to people.
- jacquesm 11y agoA friend of mine said: people have an unlimited capacity for wanting to communicate. And I guess facebook is the end-result of following through on that desire. Which answers what will replace facebook: something that makes it even easier to continuously communicate. Definitely not something federated but something even more siloed.
- bane 11y agoSomething that's frustrating with FB is that it is so temporary and continuous. This is fine for most day-to-day updates (news, gossip, etc.). But it's not great for long-term reference material. You might notice that people don't really write long FB posts, part of it is likely that it just isn't worth it as it it'll be off everybody's walls in the next 24 hours. If FB added some kind of "archive this post" so people could save particularly great posts or conversations, it would fill this gap. But I have a feeling somebody else will get to it first.
- jacquesm 11y agoI think you (finally!) nailed why twitter is successful. Updates are short by nature, real content requires more space and has a much longer 'best before date' and so does not fit either facebook or twitter. That should have been the thing that google+ aimed at rather than doing the same thing all over again. The content would eventually achieve critical mass all by itself.
- e12e 11y agoMaybe the world is ready for Google Wave now.