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amazing, 300 million people can see something I can't. Am I the only person working in the tech field not to have facebook? Congratulations indeed, what an ama
by sfphotoarts 17y ago
amazing, 300 million people can see something I can't. Am I the only person working in the tech field not to have facebook?
Congratulations indeed, what an amazing scaling success story. Every statistic I read about them is staggering.
- unalone 17y agoFacebook is most likely least popular in the tech industry, where people are more into "cutting-edge" sites or rely on older tools like email. That's why there's such an oft-lopsided view of them on HN.
- makeee 17y agoThere's nothing all that special about it. If all your friends/acquaintances are on it then it's great, otherwise it's not that useful. If all my friends were on twitter then I'd probably be using that instead.
- unalone 17y agoI know that in this thread I'm playing the part of the outspoken Facebook fanboy, but: They entered a market competing against a site that was at a time the fourth-most used site on the planet, and in three years usurped its position, introduced an entirely new paradigm to how web sites worked, swiftly and mercilessly eliminated the trend towards theme personalization, redefined their design three times, added a slew of features that were ripped off by every site around them, and did it all without compromising its theme of "We know what we're doing, fuck you" and generally being right.
- blasdel 17y agoThey did make the theme-personalization mistake with the initial apps implementation, but they reeled it back in fairly well.
- Shooter 17y ago"added a slew of features that were ripped off by every site around them" Yeah...that knife cuts both ways, doesn't it?
- codexon 17y agoFor the most part I think Facebook's success can be attributed to these factors rather than any groundbreaking inventions. 1. Ivy League beginnings. It was easy to scrape together an audience due to the Ivy league exclusivity at the beginning. This solved the chicken and egg problem in a field dominated by MySpace, LJ, Friendster, Xanga, et al. 2. Harvard background: its easier to raise funding just because of the name. 3. MySpace's utter lack of progress especially by the time it was bought out by Murdoch.
- unalone 17y agoI couldn't disagree more. Facebook did several incredible things.
- codexon 17y agoI will have to disagree with you. Their biggest technological achievement was the Facebook app platform. While this was indeed an "incredible" thing, the question is, did this help make Facebook what it is today, or even attract a sizable audience? The answer is most resoundingly no. Facebook was already very popular by the time most of these unique things were made, and in the case of Facebook apps, it even put off some users who were annoyed by its spammy nature.
- unalone 17y agoThey haven't done things perfectly (apps), but they did a few things that were enormous, not technologically but conceptually. They had a few incredibly brilliant ideas that made them as lasting and as sticky are they are.
- Retric 17y agoFace book is going to be "dead" (ok, shrinking) in 10 years. If you look at social networks they are only sticky in the short term. Facebook's growth has hidden the fact that the average user does not stick around for 2 years and at 300 million users they just can't keep replacing people. And as people stop showing up it becomes less useful to those who stick around. The pattern is simple, a new site shows up that let's you exchange info with people you have not talked to in a while. So you sign up and chat for a while, but you don't really care about those people so after a while going to the site becomes an annoying time sink and so you drop it. For a site that just has your core friends. But then you don't talk to people for a while and... The only long term niche is to become the psudo holiday site, where people occupationally show up to chat with their extended social graph, but you don't really spend much time there. So, lot's of people, few page views. PS: The people that "love" social sites and want to keep up with all their friends will jump ship as soon as something else becomes popular with most of their friends.
- FreeRadical 17y agoWith the aid of some $700m
- axod 17y agoPosting links, photos, videos, are all painful with twitter. Not to mention the ridiculous 140 char limit. Doing so requires other startups! twitpic twitvid bit.ly etc etc Startups, to add features to twitter that should already be there :/ madness I tell you.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- j_b_f 17y agoCheck out Posterous if you haven't already for a good solution to posting basically any file format to Twitter.
- chris11 17y agoIt's not that great for deep personal conversations. But it is good for easily finding out whats going on in your friends and acquaintances lives. It keeps me connected to people I don't see a lot. It has usually been how I have found out about old classmates engagements and other major events.
- unalone 17y agoI keep only 22 friends, and treat Facebook like an almost-private journal. Deep personal conversations work if you use Facebook like that. It's up to the user.
- bk 17y agoPersonally, I would never trust facebook with my deep personal conversations.
- unalone 17y agoWhat're they going to do? Tell my future kids what their dad wrote online? Publish a collection of Swear Words Unalone Invented Talking To His Friends?
- murrayh 17y agoMaybe after World War 3 the new global government will search through the 25 year old database and exterminate all past and present believers of <some religion>. (Yes, I know, plain text emails to hotmail/gmail recipients would probably be just as bad as plain text private messaging on facebook. Protecting privacy is so bothersome that my efforts are pretty token. But I do try... because I don't comprehend the ramifications of releasing so much information.)
- unalone 17y agoI try and live life a bit happier, under the assumptions that most things won't go wrong and the things that do go wrong will be recoverable.
- cglee 17y agoIt's basically the only way I maintain online relationship with most of my non-technical friends. Most of them just use email and FB. If your only circle is tech savvy folks, then FB's value is probably not very high.
- j_b_f 17y agoThere's something sort of sad about this statement. Actually, now that I think about it, it was less sad when the site was feed-based. Important stuff bubbled to the top and I felt connected. Now that it's stream-based, it's just a flood of minutiae and the important stuff gets lost in the noise. My FB-connected relationships feel less weighty as a result. Weird!
- c00p3r 17y agoWhich means you're either refuse to use the way of communication your friends like or did not have many friends. Facebook is not for communicate with a people in next block. It for links between countries and cultures (excuse me for this pathos =).