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Is Mark Zuckerberg the Next Steve Case?
theodp writes "With all signs for Facebook pointing up, author Douglas Rushkoff goes contra, arguing that Facebook hype will fade. 'Appearances can be deceiving,' says Rushkoff. 'In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren't the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.' Rushkoff, who made a similar argument about AOL eleven years ago in a quashed NY Times op-ed, reminds us that AOL was also once considered ubiquitous and invincible, and former AOL CEO Steve Case was deemed no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg. 'So it's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won,' concludes Rushkoff. 'It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order.'"
In my network, posts are getting sparser and sparser. Just like the end of Freindser, or Orkut, or any other social network system. People get bored and stop. It the infusion of new users that drives their survival, and Facebook my be nearing the end of people willing to sign up.
People are already getting bored of Facebook. It's just there and taken for granted now.
What has been lost with Facebook is the spirit of social networking. It's more a site where you add all your friends or people you have met in real life. Other sites allowed you to make new connections with people you didn't know.
I put this down to Facebook's ability to enter all your details, name, address, phone number and so on. It was pretty obvious once your profile allows you to add some very specific information that is valuable for ID theft that people would then lock down their profiles and no longer be networking outside of their group of friends.
There are 3 stages.
Early adopters: It is the new hip thing to do. Also this is where the zealots and the big fans come in. This was the area when face book was considered a social network for college kids.
Middle adopters: This is where the product gets it's name recognition. And big envesters come in. This is where it really grows. you don't need to be hip to use it it is mostly expected.
Late adopters: Ok it isn't a fad. That is when grandma gets an account. It is big and the early adopters start leaving to the next big thing.
So even when you go from stage 2-3 you are still growing. But you are approaching the end.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Does anyone remember it? Even real companies were spending money to build their spaces there. How long ago was that? And now? Just tumbleweed...
Comparing Zuckerberg to Case is an insult to Case. AOL wasn't the best internet service - what with being a kind of walled garden - but it was built on providing internet services to novice customers. Zuckerberg on the other hand built a service based on selling profiling data to advertisers. Zuckerberg would be lucky to be compared to John Sculley (or if you want scumbags, try Kenneth Lay), let alone Steve Case.
I'd really like to see the demographic of the msot active accounts. Just from my own anecdotal evidence. the vast majority of facebook users seem to be teen girls. Most adults I know use Facebook as a specific tool; to get name recognition for an election, to spread word of an art show, etc.
The teen girls seem to use it for social networking the most.
Teen girls grow up, get boyfriends, move on. Adults, with few exceptions, don't really use facebook in a way markedly different from a blog or even an email newsletter.
So a demographic would really be instructive.
It's not so much companies as communication models. Initially, any new form of communication is dominated by incompatible proprietary systems. Then these give way to some form of standard and the market is either filled by government monopolies that interoperate at a national level or by smaller companies that interoperate at a smaller scale. We've seen this with postal systems, telephones, electronic mail, computer networks, and instant messaging. Social networking might be the one that breaks the trend, but it seems unlikely.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The info FB has collected on EU citizens may be valuable to marketers, however they won't get their hands on it. Thus the value of it to FB's bottom line is very nearly zero.
Basically FB and similar huge online sites collecting personal info, like Amazon and eBay, would run afoul of EU's Data protection Directive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive if they start sharing their databases with third parties. FB has specifically been told by the EU that they, FB, will be blocked in most EU member states at the firewall level if they do this.
The background is that the data FB is likely to have, in many cases will include particularly sensitive information relating to gender, sexuality, political observation and more. This type of data are especially sensitive in the view of EU law and subject to extremely strict restrictions on how it can be used and shared. In particular some kind of click-through EULA absolutely isn't sufficient to consider the user to have given consent to sharing of data. Please see this page for more info: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/policies/privacy/index_en.htm
Also check the last paragraph in the section marked 'Scope' if you wish to argue that FB isn't based in the EU. The short answer is that - as far as EU law is concerned - this doesn't matter. The service provider, FB in this case, will by definition need to use electronic equipment, IE. networking equipment, inside the EU to reach their users.
So now you know why the info collected by, say, eBay isn't already used for marketing purposes by third parties.
All this was made clear to FB in no uncertain terms not too long ago, and may be one reason why people try to cash in on FB. Once the market realizes the collected EU info is worthless, then things may change a bit on the valuation front...
Well, I guess if by "popular" you mean to include non-computer users, you are correct. On the other hand, there was once a time when people used their real names on Usenet (in fact, some still do), and people would meet each other using Usenet.
Palm trees and 8
as someone who has half a dozen accounts under various 'names' I can tell you for a fact that there are lots of accounts that aren't under real names. I wonder how many of the 500 million accounts are genuine and how many are accounts like mine.
...nobody could complain that they weren't "told first" (something that happened when we announced our wedding)
I have a strict policy for people who do this to my wife and I. They get told *last* if they get told at all from that point on until we receive an apology. This applies to parents, siblings, and everyone else. I have no time for anyone who thinks they "deserve" priority in how I disclose facts about my life.
Usually I just designate someone I trust to be the point person and I relay all information to them if I don't have time to relay important information myself. They get it to the people who need/want to know. Most of the people I deal with do not use Facebook or Twitter (myself included) so if I used those services I would be de-facto prioritizing those few who use those services. Nothing wrong with doing it through Facebook if that fits nicely into your social network. Doesn't work for me though.
That's just what mothers do. They talk endlessly about their kids and take every chance to show you a picture. I find it weird that people on slashdot Blame normal human interactions on facebook. It's like fb is the first thing to actually bridge the gap between us and them and we are terrified of what's on the other side.