4 ms·

Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At s

by evgen 15y ago

Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. At some point they may come up with a way to easily and intuitively allow users to expose different facets of their interests and persona to different groups; if they figure this out the niche sites (even HN) are toast.

rhizome 15y ago
They just changed all Facebook Groups to a more-simplified version just a month or two ago so I doubt they're going to get any more sophisticated on that level. What do you imagine they would do otherwise? More to the point, what's the business case for doing what you describe? They could require FGroups to self-categorize in order to narrow and aid their advertising sales, but that's not foolproof and lots of groups would just as soon choose "Other."
tokenadult 15y ago
Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. Facebook private groups https://www.facebook.com/groups https://www.facebook.com/groups are working quite well among my circle of friends to provide a focused view of one or another niche community that forms a natural subset of my friends. There is a particular Facebook secret group that I visit absolutely every time I'm on Facebook, which is several times a day. That's a practical place for me to ask focused informational questions, and also a place where I can share a lot of camaraderie with dear friends who have had similar--and yet very diverse--life experiences. Because of the stronger filtering abilities of Facebook, I can indeed see how it could supplant many niche sites. (Thus far, HN gets the second share of my attention after Facebook, among all websites, and it will be interesting to see what the consensus here is about the overall community experience in the next year or so.)
- Leynos 15y ago
  One problem with Facebook Groups I find is that you can't have wall posts from your groups appearing in your primary timeline/newsfeed. Because of this, you have to make a concious effort to visit the group to catch up. Since none of the groups I joined have the same level of activity I'm used to on specialized forums for those subjects, I never bother to check up on them - which of course lends itself to a vicious circle of inactivity.
  - agscala 15y ago
    Posts from groups that I'm a part of do show up in my main feed. Maybe you need to tweak some settings here or there?
    - Leynos 15y ago
      Do posts made by others to the group wall show up?
neilk 15y ago
If they are really smart they'll make it even easier for niche communities to use their social graph, or to create custom data records within it. For a lot of site owners it makes sense to outsource account and user info management to someone else. FB has had trouble being reliable enough for that kind of service in the past, but it's not like they don't have the talent and money to do this. If you look at the Like button, and their other endeavors, I don't think Facebook's ambitions are limited to just getting visits and clicks. They want to become a utility as indispensable as HTTP. And Facebook are really smart. Keep in mind that if there is a drop, they've probably known about it for months and months, and we're just finding out it about now indirectly. That said, I hope they don't succeed and a distributed system does succeed.
possibilistic 15y ago
Not if they can't get us to join. Personally, I'll always be a little too paranoid about what they're doing with their data. Their past missteps gave us all an indication of what they really want to do. I'm really hoping for decentalized peer to peer communities that are elastically created from locally computed interest profiles. Not a distributed facebook per se, but more like a user-centroid HN that aggregates similar people and interests... that would really make my academic life soar. In the end, I don't think Facebook would fight for the long tail of user demographics. What they have is quite profitable enough. Why expend 90% more effort to convince all of the tinfoil hat wearers to join?

by evgen 15y ago

rhizome 15y ago

They just changed all Facebook Groups to a more-simplified version just a month or two ago so I doubt they're going to get any more sophisticated on that level. What do you imagine they would do otherwise? More to the point, what's the business case for doing what you describe? They could require FGroups to self-categorize in order to narrow and aid their advertising sales, but that's not foolproof and lots of groups would just as soon choose "Other."

tokenadult 15y ago

Unless of course Facebook figures out a useful and effective way to provide the same focused view of a niche community within the larger Facebook expanse. Facebook private groups https://www.facebook.com/groups https://www.facebook.com/groups are working quite well among my circle of friends to provide a focused view of one or another niche community that forms a natural subset of my friends. There is a particular Facebook secret group that I visit absolutely every time I'm on Facebook, which is several times a day. That's a practical place for me to ask focused informational questions, and also a place where I can share a lot of camaraderie with dear friends who have had similar--and yet very diverse--life experiences. Because of the stronger filtering abilities of Facebook, I can indeed see how it could supplant many niche sites. (Thus far, HN gets the second share of my attention after Facebook, among all websites, and it will be interesting to see what the consensus here is about the overall community experience in the next year or so.)

Leynos 15y ago
One problem with Facebook Groups I find is that you can't have wall posts from your groups appearing in your primary timeline/newsfeed. Because of this, you have to make a concious effort to visit the group to catch up. Since none of the groups I joined have the same level of activity I'm used to on specialized forums for those subjects, I never bother to check up on them - which of course lends itself to a vicious circle of inactivity.
- agscala 15y ago
  Posts from groups that I'm a part of do show up in my main feed. Maybe you need to tweak some settings here or there?
  - Leynos 15y ago
    Do posts made by others to the group wall show up?

neilk 15y ago

If they are really smart they'll make it even easier for niche communities to use their social graph, or to create custom data records within it. For a lot of site owners it makes sense to outsource account and user info management to someone else. FB has had trouble being reliable enough for that kind of service in the past, but it's not like they don't have the talent and money to do this. If you look at the Like button, and their other endeavors, I don't think Facebook's ambitions are limited to just getting visits and clicks. They want to become a utility as indispensable as HTTP. And Facebook are really smart. Keep in mind that if there is a drop, they've probably known about it for months and months, and we're just finding out it about now indirectly. That said, I hope they don't succeed and a distributed system does succeed.

possibilistic 15y ago

Not if they can't get us to join. Personally, I'll always be a little too paranoid about what they're doing with their data. Their past missteps gave us all an indication of what they really want to do. I'm really hoping for decentalized peer to peer communities that are elastically created from locally computed interest profiles. Not a distributed facebook per se, but more like a user-centroid HN that aggregates similar people and interests... that would really make my academic life soar. In the end, I don't think Facebook would fight for the long tail of user demographics. What they have is quite profitable enough. Why expend 90% more effort to convince all of the tinfoil hat wearers to join?