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Facebook managed to beat out it's competitors to the top spot, and maintain that spot long enough to the point where it has just become a constant in people's m

Facebook managed to beat out it's competitors to the top spot, and maintain that spot long enough to the point where it has just become a constant in people's minds now. Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think. There was that Diaspora that gave users privacy, only to find people didn't care about that (the majority). Then there was Google+, who again introduced a whole lot of lingo and looked complicated to use and why bother? Everyone's on Facebook after all, and Google = Search, everything else is just riff raff! 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.

anonymousguy 10y ago
> Everyone's on Facebook after all 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.
- vadym909 10y ago
  >waste their time with Facebook That's a bold statement. People like me use it as a lightweight option to stay abreast with whats going on with friends and family without having to invest in a long call or email. You may think I don't care, but I do- but its hard and time consuming to call 50 people and ask 'Did you go somewhere this summer? How was it? What did you see?'. Instead I just 'like' when I see a cool picture they share and when I call them I can start by saying 'Wow- you had such a good time in Paris- why don't you visit us next year?'
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- goldenkey 10y ago
  LinkedIn is a spammer paradise and a cancer for everybody else though. LinkedIn is designed decently but just as full of spam and overflow as Myspace was. Pretty much only worth using between jobs - but otherwise, I think there are much better platforms. They've become all about upselling: "Buy our premium membership and see the people who've seen your profile!" And they of course, sell your data and viewing habits without care. http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/09/03/has-linkedin-crossed-an-ethical-line/#99b9d64468cc http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/09/03/has-linked...
  - _bojan 10y ago
    Absolutely agree!
- woah 10y ago
  Wasn't expecting to see someone promote LinkedIn as a better alternative to Facebook!
- Retra 10y ago
  I have a Facebook account and it waste's approximately 0% of my time. I check it for about 15 seconds every two days. I never post anything.
  - Trundle 10y ago
    It seems very common to me for people to act like there's no middle ground between not having a Facebook account and scrolling up and down the feed for hours a day. Personally, I use it for chat and events and that's basically it. Those two features however are very useful tools for me. 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.
- paulpauper 10y ago
  I don't use it either but a lot of people apparently do . It's like the iphone....never bought one but a lot of people have.
  - hydromet 10y ago
    Yeah. Apple announced today they've sold 1 billion iPhones: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/27/apple-has-sold-1-billion-iphones/ http://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/27/apple-has-sold-1-billion...
prostoalex 10y ago
> Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think. 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.
- hacker_9 10y ago
  You mistake what I mean, I meant that the sites that came after appeared more technical to the end user. Also those examples you give came before Facebook (mostly? Haven't even heard of some), which Facebook beat by providing a better service. That includes performance sure, also by restricting user customisation the UI always looked cleaner and more appealing, and it had far better social tools, providing a better experience all round.
  - hammock 10y ago
    Facebook always did and still looks super technical to me. It's not as visual as the average website. It has so many different windows/sections on every screen. And the settings portal has like 100 layers.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    There's probably a lot of people on here who don't remember MySpace and Geocities, but restriction of UI customization was a huge FB advantage. The former proved that users cannot be trusted with foreground and background color control. Not to mention autoplaying music applets.
  - kristianc 10y ago
    I'm not sure MySpace ever really knew what it wanted to achieve, other than providing a lot of inventory for ads. 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.
ryanlm 10y ago
> 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'. I can confirm. My parents aren't technical at all. They were confused when I told them people work at Facebook.
- kochthesecond 10y ago
  My parents were also confused that Facebook has some 15k employees.
  - Arnt 10y ago
    I'm your parents. What do those 15k do?
    - zdkl 10y ago
      Move fast and break things?
      - cvs268 10y ago
        > Move fast and break things? you mean like trying to cross a speeding-bus and breaking a leg?...
    - ddorian43 10y ago
      Scalability to keep/get users & extract as much value from them.
    - pvdebbe 10y ago
      Censor trending topics, for instance.
    - raverbashing 10y ago
      Look at their jobs page ;) 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)
chatmasta 10y ago
Your (and my) problem with Facebook is with one subset of their produt: the newsfeed. Surely the newsfeed may be losing relevant and may "die" at some point, but the company has sufficiently diversified so that the death of the newsfeed won't be a problem.
melvinmt 10y ago
> Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think. 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_adaptive_challenges.pdf http://www.sgaumc.org/files/files_library/technical_vs_adapt...
heavenlyhash 10y ago
> that Diaspora that gave users privacy, 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.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Diaspora had (has) exceptionally poor technical execution. That from a guy who really wanted them to succeed. 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....

anonymousguy 10y ago

> Everyone's on Facebook after all 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.

vadym909 10y ago
>waste their time with Facebook That's a bold statement. People like me use it as a lightweight option to stay abreast with whats going on with friends and family without having to invest in a long call or email. You may think I don't care, but I do- but its hard and time consuming to call 50 people and ask 'Did you go somewhere this summer? How was it? What did you see?'. Instead I just 'like' when I see a cool picture they share and when I call them I can start by saying 'Wow- you had such a good time in Paris- why don't you visit us next year?'
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
goldenkey 10y ago
LinkedIn is a spammer paradise and a cancer for everybody else though. LinkedIn is designed decently but just as full of spam and overflow as Myspace was. Pretty much only worth using between jobs - but otherwise, I think there are much better platforms. They've become all about upselling: "Buy our premium membership and see the people who've seen your profile!" And they of course, sell your data and viewing habits without care. http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/09/03/has-linkedin-crossed-an-ethical-line/#99b9d64468cc http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/09/03/has-linked...
- _bojan 10y ago
  Absolutely agree!
woah 10y ago
Wasn't expecting to see someone promote LinkedIn as a better alternative to Facebook!
Retra 10y ago
I have a Facebook account and it waste's approximately 0% of my time. I check it for about 15 seconds every two days. I never post anything.
- Trundle 10y ago
  It seems very common to me for people to act like there's no middle ground between not having a Facebook account and scrolling up and down the feed for hours a day. Personally, I use it for chat and events and that's basically it. Those two features however are very useful tools for me. 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.
paulpauper 10y ago
I don't use it either but a lot of people apparently do . It's like the iphone....never bought one but a lot of people have.
- hydromet 10y ago
  Yeah. Apple announced today they've sold 1 billion iPhones: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/27/apple-has-sold-1-billion-iphones/ http://www.macrumors.com/2016/07/27/apple-has-sold-1-billion...

prostoalex 10y ago

> Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think. 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.

hacker_9 10y ago
You mistake what I mean, I meant that the sites that came after appeared more technical to the end user. Also those examples you give came before Facebook (mostly? Haven't even heard of some), which Facebook beat by providing a better service. That includes performance sure, also by restricting user customisation the UI always looked cleaner and more appealing, and it had far better social tools, providing a better experience all round.
- hammock 10y ago
  Facebook always did and still looks super technical to me. It's not as visual as the average website. It has so many different windows/sections on every screen. And the settings portal has like 100 layers.
- ethbro 10y ago
  There's probably a lot of people on here who don't remember MySpace and Geocities, but restriction of UI customization was a huge FB advantage. The former proved that users cannot be trusted with foreground and background color control. Not to mention autoplaying music applets.
- kristianc 10y ago
  I'm not sure MySpace ever really knew what it wanted to achieve, other than providing a lot of inventory for ads. 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.

ryanlm 10y ago

> 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'. I can confirm. My parents aren't technical at all. They were confused when I told them people work at Facebook.

kochthesecond 10y ago
My parents were also confused that Facebook has some 15k employees.
- Arnt 10y ago
  I'm your parents. What do those 15k do?
  - zdkl 10y ago
    Move fast and break things?
    - cvs268 10y ago
      > Move fast and break things? you mean like trying to cross a speeding-bus and breaking a leg?...
  - ddorian43 10y ago
    Scalability to keep/get users & extract as much value from them.
  - pvdebbe 10y ago
    Censor trending topics, for instance.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Look at their jobs page ;) 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)

chatmasta 10y ago

Your (and my) problem with Facebook is with one subset of their produt: the newsfeed. Surely the newsfeed may be losing relevant and may "die" at some point, but the company has sufficiently diversified so that the death of the newsfeed won't be a problem.

melvinmt 10y ago

> Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think. 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_adaptive_challenges.pdf http://www.sgaumc.org/files/files_library/technical_vs_adapt...

heavenlyhash 10y ago

> that Diaspora that gave users privacy, 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.

dredmorbius 10y ago

Diaspora had (has) exceptionally poor technical execution. That from a guy who really wanted them to succeed. 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....