6 ms·

Why We are Moving Away from Facebook as a Platform

105 points by fezzl 15y ago

ignifero 15y ago
Facebook platform is only good for games. No other type of app can get traction there, because facebook is an entertainment medium , no matter how hard they 've tried to become more "serious". The thing is, it has gotten increasingly off-putting for indie game developers to follow facebook's labyrinthine platform roadmap. Their platform designs and updates are notoriously amateurish and short-sighted. I believe they have changed 3 platform leads, each of whom introduced a new API. Their weekly code pushes regularly introduce bugs along with the fixes. For us, it's taking more time to adjust to facebook's everchanging APIs, policies, designs etc, than adding features to our games. The fact that facebook nonsensically banned Adsense advertising does not help either. That said, facebook is still the most efficient amplifier that can provide exposure to web apps. I would personally vouch for another provider that can offer a stable social gaming platform. There were rumors about a google game network, and i m hopeful about it
veyron 15y ago
"even though Facebook actually has 600 million active users" <-- does facebook have 600 million actual active users or 600 million accounts?
- jfarmer 15y ago
  Active users
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - DisposaBoy 15y ago
    I have several accounts on Facebook that I use for "research purposes" and I think they'd be classed as active. I sign-in to them on occasion they all have at least 50 friends, the usual. With that said my real accounts - the ones that you'd be interested in: my so-called real accounts, one for family and one for friends have last seen activity approximately 5 months and 2 months ago respectively. So I think that brings us back to the question: Are you interested in active users or active accounts? There are thousands upon thousands of active accounts on Youtube, you've most likely seen them when you go to view a movie trailer. They're the ones that provide nice helpful non-spam(no sir) comments that are as expected voted up to the top of the comments sections all the time.
- Joakal 15y ago
  I'm not sure if I can believe it since websites tend to inflate their own numbers to look bigger. Is there any independent verification of such a number?
- dendory 15y ago
  They described it once but it's definitively active accounts. I think it's something like any account that logs in at least once a week. The much more interesting number is Twitter. Only 15 millions Twitter accounts are active, out of 75 millions. src: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/01/26/15-million-active-twitter-users/ http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/01/26/15-million-acti...
  - nextparadigms 15y ago
    I think it was more like a month.
    - koko775 15y ago
      Former Facebook intern. The number they track is number of accounts with activity in the past 30 days. Logging in to Facebook or performing some other action associated with your account is sufficient to trigger this.
      - ams6110 15y ago
        So ... I ask not being a FB user myself: if I have some kind of facebook "toolbar" (I assume there is one?) installed in my browser, and it's configured to automatically log in, then I am an "active" user even though I may not be interacting with FB in any other way?
      - veyron 15y ago
        When you say "performing some other action associated with your account" does that mean: 1) you can perform actions associated with your account without having been logged in? If so, could you give an example. 2) someone else can perform an action, and that would mean you would be considered active even if you hadn't logged into Facebook in over 6 months. If so, could you give an example?
        Someone 15y ago
        I interpreted 'logging in or performing some other action' as 'we do not want to count users as active when they stop using Facebook without logging out'
- by 15y ago
  That depends on how you define 'active'. A quick Google gives me some Facebook published statistics [1] which say that more than 250 million people log on every day. Goldman Sachs seem [2] to say "600 million+ monthly active users". [1] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-has-more-than-600-million-users-goldman-tells-clients-2011-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-has-more-than-600-mi...
  - jfarmer 15y ago
    For Facebook "active users" always means "users active within the last 30 days."
gcb 15y ago
how can someone find only three?
nextparadigms 15y ago
Facebook seems ripe for disruption, or at the very least it shouldn't be that hard to compete with it as it was a while ago. Former early adopters and addicted users are getting tired of it and want something new, better, less spammy. It's also in the nature of early adopters to move on by the time a product or service becomes too mainstream. They just need to see something else that is compelling first. But I think many of them are already using it much less than they used to. I think a true distributed P2P social network would be very interesting for them, but it would also need to get the execution right. I haven't heard much about Diaspora lately, but something interesting came out a few days ago with BitTorrent trying to make a P2P social network around torrents. I think that's an intriguing idea, and it's a bit similar to what Opera tried to do with Unite. As a side note, I think all social networks so far have had one major design flaw. I've joined other social networks before Facebook and they all seem to suffer from the "too many friends" problem, which does become a problem once you start having hundreds or thousands of friends. I think there needs to be 2 categories of "friends": true Friends and Followers. When you accept a request it should make that person a Follower by default, but it should give you the option to make him a Friend also. So many people add others on Facebook now, when it's just so they can see more info about them or their private pictures, with no real intention of "befriending" them later on. That's why I think most requests should become followers by default, and only choose to make them "Friends" when you really know the person. I think Twitter's model works a bit like that. You can have thousands of followers, but only a few "friends" where you basically follow each other. Just something to think about for whoever wants to build the next social network or whatever, so they don't repeat this huge mistake that almost every social network has made so far.
- qjz 15y ago
  In the real world, someone who follows you that is not a friend is a stalker. I suggest that the "too many friends" problem might better be described as the "too many stalkers" problem. How many is too many? One. The real problem is that we want to map our existing relationships to online tools without redefining them according to some nebulous model. Nobody has offered that capability yet. Friendship is intimacy. How can you achieve that in an environment where anyone can invade your privacy to some degree?
surfingdino 15y ago
I agree. The Facebook API is a mess. It is too costly for developers to chase the changes and the API itself is too restrictive. It's like AppleScript, a great idea, pity you cannot do much with it.
perlgeek 15y ago
How about reason 0: You depend on a platform that can shut you down in an instant without any justification and without possibilities to reactivate your app?
- ignifero 15y ago
  this argument comes up over and over when talking about facebook APIs etc, but this is an inherent risk in all kinds of online and offline applications: from the electric power company to the ISPs, to browser vendors, to facebook, there are all kinds of dependencies you have to rely on. True, facebook is more likely to have conflicts of interest with your web app. But the main issue is that facebook doesn't yet have a financial interest to maintain a healthy app ecosystem.
  - nopassrecover 15y ago
    Electric companies, ISPs and browser vendors have competition. When Facebook is a dependency, it becomes one without easy alternatives.
    - ignifero 15y ago
      To be fair, facebook platform was a mess even when they had competition from myspace.
  - chopsueyar 15y ago
    I can sign contracts with electric companies and pay for SLAs from ISPs. If browser vendors simpy start disabling browsers, we have much bigger problems. Facebook's interest is in policing apps, and acquiring/crushing/copying the relevant ones.
    - perlgeek 15y ago
      > If browser vendors simpy start disabling browsers, we have much bigger problems. There is enough competition in the browser market that selectively disabling certain sites will lead to a big loss in market share, and would be an exceptionally stupid move.
tibbe 15y ago
Requests per minute!
dr_ 15y ago
Hold on a sec - replacing facebook with something else is not that simple and i'd venture probably unlikely. there's a huge network effect that facebook has in place. it is not just for games. it is starting to drive traffic to various news outlets: (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385095,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385095,00.asp) and it is probably just getting started. There is something substantial to facebook that makes people come back. And naturally as a company is growing and adding more features, the API is going to change. I personally use it a lot to share news articles with my "friends", but the ability to now share those articles with only certain friends, directly from the news website - which hasn't been implemented everywhere yet, is pretty interesting and shows that facebook realizes that there are friends and there are "friends". It would be far easier to have disrupted something like Google, which doesn't have the same network effect as Facebook - but even that has been very challenging for anyone to do.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  So you can use it like Twitter?
- ignifero 15y ago
  Their platform changes are mostly about reinventing the wheel. They dont even introduce important features, instead they strip them ( profile boxes, notifications, profile tabs etc)
pkennedy 15y ago
Reason 3 is why I am constantly advising friends not to take "promote your business on Facebook!" classes, especially when there are other, more direct avenues available to them. I've come to the conclusion that social and marketing are an awkward mix, and most people route around attempts to inject the latter into the former. On the other hand, social media is a great way for your customers to tell their friends if they've had an exceptional experience with you. So I believe making it easy for your customers to talk about you is far more valuable than building on Facebook itself.
ThomPete 15y ago
There are many more problems with FaceBook IMHO. That doesn't mean you should move away from it simply just use it to your advantage. (Shameless plug) http://000fff.org/how-to-think-like-facebook-and-twitter/ http://000fff.org/how-to-think-like-facebook-and-twitter/

105 points by fezzl 15y ago

Facebook platform is only good for games. No other type of app can get traction there, because facebook is an entertainment medium , no matter how hard they 've tried to become more "serious". The thing is, it has gotten increasingly off-putting for indie game developers to follow facebook's labyrinthine platform roadmap. Their platform designs and updates are notoriously amateurish and short-sighted. I believe they have changed 3 platform leads, each of whom introduced a new API. Their weekly code pushes regularly introduce bugs along with the fixes. For us, it's taking more time to adjust to facebook's everchanging APIs, policies, designs etc, than adding features to our games. The fact that facebook nonsensically banned Adsense advertising does not help either. That said, facebook is still the most efficient amplifier that can provide exposure to web apps. I would personally vouch for another provider that can offer a stable social gaming platform. There were rumors about a google game network, and i m hopeful about it

veyron 15y ago

"even though Facebook actually has 600 million active users" <-- does facebook have 600 million actual active users or 600 million accounts?

jfarmer 15y ago
Active users
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- DisposaBoy 15y ago
  I have several accounts on Facebook that I use for "research purposes" and I think they'd be classed as active. I sign-in to them on occasion they all have at least 50 friends, the usual. With that said my real accounts - the ones that you'd be interested in: my so-called real accounts, one for family and one for friends have last seen activity approximately 5 months and 2 months ago respectively. So I think that brings us back to the question: Are you interested in active users or active accounts? There are thousands upon thousands of active accounts on Youtube, you've most likely seen them when you go to view a movie trailer. They're the ones that provide nice helpful non-spam(no sir) comments that are as expected voted up to the top of the comments sections all the time.
Joakal 15y ago
I'm not sure if I can believe it since websites tend to inflate their own numbers to look bigger. Is there any independent verification of such a number?
dendory 15y ago
They described it once but it's definitively active accounts. I think it's something like any account that logs in at least once a week. The much more interesting number is Twitter. Only 15 millions Twitter accounts are active, out of 75 millions. src: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/01/26/15-million-active-twitter-users/ http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2010/01/26/15-million-acti...
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  I think it was more like a month.
  - koko775 15y ago
    Former Facebook intern. The number they track is number of accounts with activity in the past 30 days. Logging in to Facebook or performing some other action associated with your account is sufficient to trigger this.
    - ams6110 15y ago
      So ... I ask not being a FB user myself: if I have some kind of facebook "toolbar" (I assume there is one?) installed in my browser, and it's configured to automatically log in, then I am an "active" user even though I may not be interacting with FB in any other way?
    - veyron 15y ago
      When you say "performing some other action associated with your account" does that mean: 1) you can perform actions associated with your account without having been logged in? If so, could you give an example. 2) someone else can perform an action, and that would mean you would be considered active even if you hadn't logged into Facebook in over 6 months. If so, could you give an example?
      - Someone 15y ago
        I interpreted 'logging in or performing some other action' as 'we do not want to count users as active when they stop using Facebook without logging out'
by 15y ago
That depends on how you define 'active'. A quick Google gives me some Facebook published statistics [1] which say that more than 250 million people log on every day. Goldman Sachs seem [2] to say "600 million+ monthly active users". [1] http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-has-more-than-600-million-users-goldman-tells-clients-2011-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-has-more-than-600-mi...
- jfarmer 15y ago
  For Facebook "active users" always means "users active within the last 30 days."

gcb 15y ago

how can someone find only three?

nextparadigms 15y ago

Facebook seems ripe for disruption, or at the very least it shouldn't be that hard to compete with it as it was a while ago. Former early adopters and addicted users are getting tired of it and want something new, better, less spammy. It's also in the nature of early adopters to move on by the time a product or service becomes too mainstream. They just need to see something else that is compelling first. But I think many of them are already using it much less than they used to. I think a true distributed P2P social network would be very interesting for them, but it would also need to get the execution right. I haven't heard much about Diaspora lately, but something interesting came out a few days ago with BitTorrent trying to make a P2P social network around torrents. I think that's an intriguing idea, and it's a bit similar to what Opera tried to do with Unite. As a side note, I think all social networks so far have had one major design flaw. I've joined other social networks before Facebook and they all seem to suffer from the "too many friends" problem, which does become a problem once you start having hundreds or thousands of friends. I think there needs to be 2 categories of "friends": true Friends and Followers. When you accept a request it should make that person a Follower by default, but it should give you the option to make him a Friend also. So many people add others on Facebook now, when it's just so they can see more info about them or their private pictures, with no real intention of "befriending" them later on. That's why I think most requests should become followers by default, and only choose to make them "Friends" when you really know the person. I think Twitter's model works a bit like that. You can have thousands of followers, but only a few "friends" where you basically follow each other. Just something to think about for whoever wants to build the next social network or whatever, so they don't repeat this huge mistake that almost every social network has made so far.

qjz 15y ago
In the real world, someone who follows you that is not a friend is a stalker. I suggest that the "too many friends" problem might better be described as the "too many stalkers" problem. How many is too many? One. The real problem is that we want to map our existing relationships to online tools without redefining them according to some nebulous model. Nobody has offered that capability yet. Friendship is intimacy. How can you achieve that in an environment where anyone can invade your privacy to some degree?

surfingdino 15y ago

I agree. The Facebook API is a mess. It is too costly for developers to chase the changes and the API itself is too restrictive. It's like AppleScript, a great idea, pity you cannot do much with it.

perlgeek 15y ago

How about reason 0: You depend on a platform that can shut you down in an instant without any justification and without possibilities to reactivate your app?

ignifero 15y ago
this argument comes up over and over when talking about facebook APIs etc, but this is an inherent risk in all kinds of online and offline applications: from the electric power company to the ISPs, to browser vendors, to facebook, there are all kinds of dependencies you have to rely on. True, facebook is more likely to have conflicts of interest with your web app. But the main issue is that facebook doesn't yet have a financial interest to maintain a healthy app ecosystem.
- nopassrecover 15y ago
  Electric companies, ISPs and browser vendors have competition. When Facebook is a dependency, it becomes one without easy alternatives.
  - ignifero 15y ago
    To be fair, facebook platform was a mess even when they had competition from myspace.
- chopsueyar 15y ago
  I can sign contracts with electric companies and pay for SLAs from ISPs. If browser vendors simpy start disabling browsers, we have much bigger problems. Facebook's interest is in policing apps, and acquiring/crushing/copying the relevant ones.
  - perlgeek 15y ago
    > If browser vendors simpy start disabling browsers, we have much bigger problems. There is enough competition in the browser market that selectively disabling certain sites will lead to a big loss in market share, and would be an exceptionally stupid move.

tibbe 15y ago

Requests per minute!

dr_ 15y ago

Hold on a sec - replacing facebook with something else is not that simple and i'd venture probably unlikely. there's a huge network effect that facebook has in place. it is not just for games. it is starting to drive traffic to various news outlets: (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385095,00.asp http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385095,00.asp) and it is probably just getting started. There is something substantial to facebook that makes people come back. And naturally as a company is growing and adding more features, the API is going to change. I personally use it a lot to share news articles with my "friends", but the ability to now share those articles with only certain friends, directly from the news website - which hasn't been implemented everywhere yet, is pretty interesting and shows that facebook realizes that there are friends and there are "friends". It would be far easier to have disrupted something like Google, which doesn't have the same network effect as Facebook - but even that has been very challenging for anyone to do.

chopsueyar 15y ago
So you can use it like Twitter?
ignifero 15y ago
Their platform changes are mostly about reinventing the wheel. They dont even introduce important features, instead they strip them ( profile boxes, notifications, profile tabs etc)

pkennedy 15y ago

Reason 3 is why I am constantly advising friends not to take "promote your business on Facebook!" classes, especially when there are other, more direct avenues available to them. I've come to the conclusion that social and marketing are an awkward mix, and most people route around attempts to inject the latter into the former. On the other hand, social media is a great way for your customers to tell their friends if they've had an exceptional experience with you. So I believe making it easy for your customers to talk about you is far more valuable than building on Facebook itself.

ThomPete 15y ago

There are many more problems with FaceBook IMHO. That doesn't mean you should move away from it simply just use it to your advantage. (Shameless plug) http://000fff.org/how-to-think-like-facebook-and-twitter/ http://000fff.org/how-to-think-like-facebook-and-twitter/