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The Facebook Obsession
rabidmuskrat writes "Are we too obsessed with Facebook? With 500 million users and a CNBC story about it, the answer would seem to be yes. PostRandomonium notes the media's obsession with Facebook, and how it impacts their news coverage — in particular, that of CNN. One out of every 13 Earthlings and three out of four Americans is on Facebook, and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis."
1 (or more) in 10 articles posted to the front page by CmdrTaco are related to facebook. Is the world obsessed with facebook? Probably not. Is CmdrTaco obsessed with facebook? Quite probable.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
One out of every 13 Earthlings and three out of four Americans is on Facebook, and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis."
Wow, there's a lot of losers!
Yes, lots of people are on Facebook.
But a large percentage of the "user accounts" are fake accounts.
Facebook is old news. The hip thing now is to obsess over tweets.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
When you use the word "obsessed," I was expecting a story about people losing sleep and productivity over Facebook. Or statistics showing the amount of time spent by people using Facebook. Instead, we get an article from CNN that compares Facebook to having a bellybutton, a story from CNBC that doesn't load, and some guy's personal blog. Where is the story?
The World is Yours.
The 500 million users stat always seems inflated to me. I used to work for a site that promoted itself as having 200 million users, when internally we knew that there were only about 80 million active users. The rest were either multiple accounts or long-unused accounts. Why does the media trust Facebook's numbers so blindly?
One out of every 13 Earthlings and three out of four Americans is on Facebook, and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis."
Signs in on a daily basis? I don't even log out!
Smalltalk is not dead. Part of it lives on as part of Objective-C, used to make Mac and iOS applications, including the Facebook apps for iPhone and iPad.
Facebook is for whiny wimps and grandma who want pictures of little joey. Real men use twitter.
we're obsessed with socializing
facebook is just the tool which makes the most sense to manage your social network now. will that be the case in 10 years? if you say definitely "yes" (or definitely "no") you definitely don't know what you are talking about. maybe it will be, it could be, it has the network effect on its side, that's for sure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
ps: i don't have a facebook account and i never will. egads, the tedium
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
People is ossessed by FB because media tell them that everyone else is.
You need an e-mail address to get a Facebook account, but not everyone who has an e-mail address uses Facebook. So the real question should be, Are we obsessed with E-mail?
What is this Facebook thing?
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
So how many people check email on a daily basis? And why isn't that front page news?
Good question! I think I'll post this link to my Facebook profile and make a poll on Facebook to ask my friends.
I could give two shits about facebook, its about easily seeing what friends and family are up to and communicating, not about facebook itself. Its like a very easy to use forum and blog for your life. If another website came out tomorrow that was better everyone would use it instead. Its akin the old crazes and obsessions of writing and journals, video diaries, the internet and blogs, remember how obsessed people were over those! OMG society almost didn't make it through those crazy times! The fad will fade as all do, you sign up, connect with lots of old friends, post a ton for a while, then after a while realize its all pretty meaningless and the people around you are the ones who matter most anyways, and you don't need facebook to talk with them. It will never go away though because its still great to see what distant friends are doing every once and while. Peak Facebook is coming soon though...
I had the same disdain for social networking as most of the /. crowd until a very close friend who had moved far away lost her husband and requested that her friends join Facebook so she could correspond with us. I gladly created an account and was able to "be there" for her even though I couldn't actually be there. What I found after joining was that people I had lost touch with and had tried to find using every other method I could think of were there as well. I quickly reconnected and renewed relationships that had been lost for years. I still think most of it is of questionable value but its social aspect is very much real.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I have 500 accounts, but that's because I work for the DoD.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's the media's obsession with twitter that bothers me the most. If you follow the "live coverage" of a war nowadays, you see "x tweets ..." mixed in with coverage of the actual shooting. My print newspaper never used to put "some guy down the pub thought ..." in the middle of its stories.
I am trolling
Just saying. I've no doubt there are an abundance of false identities and corporate logins, but what about dead people, people who created accounts and abandoned them, etc?
I am one of the many people who don't have Facebook. None of my friends have it so there's no reason to subscribe.
Get out of your cave much? If you don't Tweet, you don't exist.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Seriously, you can't have a conversation that starts with, "Hey, haven't seen you for a while, what've you been up to?" Because you ALREADY KNOW. And if you don't know, you're an insensitive clod who's not reading their facebook posts.
Since Facebook is "news for you and your 300 closest friends" you should either be a better friend with more to talk about than that, or it at least gives you some topics to talk about with people who'd otherwise be almost strangers. Unless they're the kind who has to put every fart they do up on Facebook, if they both do that and get annoyed you haven't read it maybe you should revise who your friends are.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The most annoying thing about Facebook isn't that everybody expects you to have one, but that everybody and businesses are expected to have one (as well as a Twitter). What ever happened to Good Ol' RSS/Atom? My feed reader is infinitely better than using Twitter or Facebook for news, so why should I only be given the options of Twitter and Facebook to follow a company or website? Every store you walk in to, every product that you buy almost, somewhere in there is that stupid little Facebook/Twitter logo with the text "Find us on Facebook/Twitter!" Never a feed. Never. To find a good feed I have to search for it specifically and it often takes a while to find (thankfully Netflix and most modern blogs have a feed option). It's backwards, it's illogical, it's annoying, and it's centralized! When every single business in the world (pretty much) and every single person that you meet expects you to have a Facebook or Twitter and be willing to share your personal information with them, it's impossible to find peace without complying. I use Wordpress and Identica/StatusNet exclusively for my blogging needs, and my Twitter/FB accounts are merely mirrors of both solely because the general population refuses to switch to a much more secure, more flexible, and more decentralized social network.
Now get off my lawn!
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
I was already pretty disgusted with how everyone has gone so nuts for Facebook, but this weekend I saw a car commercial (Chevrolet?) where the car is somehow able to read your Facebook posts out loud. Of course the one that gets read for the commercial is "GREAT FIRST DATE!" Seriously, WTF? Do we really need this? Get over it, you don't need Facebook every second of the day.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I think we obsess too much over other things as well. I surveyed the last three weeks and 37% of Slashdot articles were about the Internet. Worse, 87% of were actually sent over the internet.
Definition: Obsession-That thing that most other people like that you hate.
I wouldn't be so bold as to say Facebook hasn't grown like wildfire, or that huge numbers of the population aren't using it, but 3/4 of Americans on Facebook? Seems like there are large portions of the population who that's simply not possible for, due to age, economic status, work constraints, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if there are 2 fake Facebook accounts for every real one.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
I don't think they're making any estimate of the number of trolling accounts there are on Facebook, and eliminating them from their statistics. I'd say they're off by at least 50%.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
And yet phone text is used far more often. I don't have the sources at hand, but a 2010 Facebook stat showed 60 million status updates per day. A 2009 stat on texting showed 5 billion sent per day. Admittedly, a lot of FB use would be messaging or chat rather than status updates. Still, news coverage tends to go to the new and hot (not to mention speculation on FB's market value). The fact that a *lot* of "social networking" happens via text seems to lie completely under the radar.
... is our obsession with our obsession with Facebook. Are the media writing too many articles about how they're writing too many articles about facebook? Are we being too public about our desire for privacy, or too private about our attention-whoring publicity?
My bicyles
How many unique users are they? What incentive does Facebook have to make sure a user has only one account, versus the powerful incentives users have to create multiple accounts (e.g. to game the social games)? I'm sure it looks good in Facebook's advertising to claim "500 million users", but that doesn't mean 500 million people are actually using Facebook. Disclaimer: I still don't have a Facebook account. but my daughter does, and my dog is currently considering signing up.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'd say both the Facebook and CNBC customer numbers are greatly exaggerated.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I'm technically signed in to Facebook 24 hours a day - I connect to FB chat via Pidgin.
I was born in the 60s
So was I; but at least that explains the "Darn kids, get offa my lawn!" attitude.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis.
Or rephrased, roughly 96% of the "users" sign in less than daily. The graph would be interesting to see. My wife checks FB at maximum interval of a couple hours. Everyone knows someone like that, but that doesn't mean they're a statistically relevant population.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Fortunately your mom has a Facebook account, so you can just go upstairs and use hers...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What's up with the open-source privacy-oriented project that was touted so fervently here awhile back? Are they producing anything useful?
There was just a posting this morning from within the Twitter community questioning Twitter's claim to have 200M users -- but only 20M *active* users. People said that's unhealthy. I disagree -- natural populations tend to obey the power law: each level of organization is tenfold larger than the next higher level of organization. Cities are distributed in a power-law fashion. Media (movies, records) consumption tends to follow a power law. Wealth is distributed according to the power law. And social networks tend also to be arranged thusly: X number of people show up...X/10 actively participate...X/100 do it on a daily basis...X/1000 are heavy users, etc. We see this in Twitter...we should see it in Facebook too, yet that is not what the company wants you to believe.
When I see Facebook say they have 500M users, I see 50M active users, and probably 5M daily users. What we REALLY want to see is Facebook's daily visit count (as a count of the number of accounts that access the website daily). I am very willing to bet that it is not 500M...I'd bet its more like 5M.
Everyone who says they can't keep in touch seems to have forgotten emails and IMs.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Intertoob idea! Metabook! It's where you go and comment about what's happening on all of your other social web sites!
Wow you are a douche.
He's not cool. If he were really cool he wouldn't have a computer. He wouldn't even bother to sit next to the stinky guys in the library and use a computer. Somewhere, rolling out of bed and getting ready for the club tonight there is a really cool guy. He has no computer or phone at all and... oh crap... he's that John Travolta character from Saturday Night Fever.
OK, Let's start over. We. Are. going. to. figure. this. out--hey dummy! Yeah? Trying to figure it out isn't cool.
Dammit.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
yeah, it sings. big deal. so does a mockingbird. it is many orders of magnitude less complex than homo sapiens' communication
in terms of bandwidth, a honking goose or a hooting monkey might be a 300 bps modem, and a humpback whale or a parrot might be a 28.8kbps modem. but homo sapiens is a fiber optic trunk, far beyond any other creature on earth by many orders of magnitude in terms of richness and complexity of communication
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I wouldn't be on Facebook at all if it weren't for my fiance using it to keep in touch with her friends across states for our wedding. So, during this time I use it but post wedding I'm probably going to ditch it. I don't use it regardless. I post the occasional status update, as in maybe once every few weeks.
my fucking ear
i'm not sure why you resist the obvious. does it pierce some sort of mythology of yours? whale song is nowhere near as complex as human speech, not even remotely. this should be blindingly obvious to you if you aren't deaf
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
One thing I've noticed is that social media in general has made computer technology somehow more accessible. Remember, just a few years ago, basic computer literacy was being able to boot up your PC, drive an office application and produce "work." Social media use now appears to be the basic computer literacy unit -- the UIs are simple enough for most people to pick up and the draw of social interaction is irresistable for most people. And now that smartphones that don't suck as user input devices are out, it's even more generally available.
That said, there's a lot of hype -- tons in fact. Everyone is hailing FB, Twitter and the like as the conduit of democratic change in the Middle East. Let's be real for a sec -- it was the platform. The 80% unemployment rate among young people certainly had something to do with it, and something would have happened without FB as the organizing tool.
It's neat for sharing pictures, or posting silly status updates. I do think that people are going to come to a realization that all of their data, likes, check-ins, connections, pokes, message contents and contact lists are (a) for sale, and (b) publically searchable in some cases. Or maybe not - maybe privacy is a stupid, archaic 20th Century concept. I'm no Luddite, but I'm really not that interested in being expected to constantly interact with my social circle 24/7...people really need to unplug sometimes. Privacy may be dead, but I'm sure at least a few people (beyond the overhyped media stories on that subject) will inexplicably not be called for a second job interview, or get a promotion, etc. simply because they're a social networking blabbermouth. I'm sure there's at least someone under 30 who doesn't like the idea of always-on, forever-remembered social media content that you can't reliably scrub. That someone may have a hiring manager job someday...
Social media really does look poised to be the second Internet bubble. Businesses of every kind, including the stodgiest of stodgy companies are hiring high-dollar consultants to plug them into the social network. Replace that phrase with "get on the Internet" and you've got the makings of a huge stock run based on vaporware IPOs...oh wait, that's happening! ;-) And just like the last bubble, things will improve. There's plenty of good stuff that came out of the dotcom boom, and these social media properties will remain...they just won't be as pervasive and inserted into every single casual conversation.
Every time I see a life insurance salesman, car repair shop or scrap metal dealer tell me to "join them on Facebook and Twitter", I have two thoughts -- (1) that's pretty dumb, and (2) maybe I should just jump in and make some money off this while it lasts. :-)
I've lived in the USA all my life. I don't know all that many people, but I'd be surprised if ONE in four of them is on facebook, at least based on those I communicate with regularly. Or many of them are lying (oh wait -- isn't that a common prerequisite for a Facebook account?)
I think the stats came from a CNN page, but I had trouble finding a news story hidden between all of the advertisements on the page. And the CNN page contains exactly ZERO source references for the stats. So who decided (and how) that 3/4 of Americans were on Facebook? Hopefully they first eliminated all of the non-Americans and business accounts first, then they need to eliminate all of the folks with multiple accounts (which should be easy, with Facebook's stance on [lack of] privacy). After all that, I find it difficult to believe the numbers.
But the obsession is quite real. More so than the Cult of Apple since it isn't limited to the rich. Oh wait, poor people with increidbly poor prioritization of life choices also belong to Apple's Cult, don't they?
But I obsess... um, I mean digress.
Bye
Tell ya what happened to me. I had some colleagues at work. People I had known for 13 years at the time of this happening, and always gotten along with. Until some day one of them divorces his Russian wife, gets a wee alcohol problem and a midlife crisis to boot. Now these guys were a couple of flavours of Scandinavian, FYI. So this jackass starts insulting Russians on Facebook, and I comment on that. My wife is Israeli, but from Ukranian descent. So I tell 'm to chill out with his statements about eastern European and Russian "whores" (to mention one of the more palatable things the guy wrote, picture a drunken Mel Gibson if you will) because he's getting on my nerve. Some other guy pitches in and before you know it I've gained 3 people I won't speak to again in this life time.
On top of that FaceBook is a ridiculous place that fuels pettiness, jealousy and generally doesn't really contribute to my life in any tangible way. So, my wife and I removed our accounts and never looked back. For those that want to find me, there's a professional profile on LinkedIn. This is enough. I don't want to see what my boss did with the neighbour's dog at the Christmas party in 2008, I don't want to see my old shag buddies and my wife's old shag buddies mingle in all kinds of lists, I am uninterested in my teenage nephews' dumb friends and their void messages and I certainly don't want to get reunited with anyone from high school.
So yes. When I speak to my friends, we have something to talk about beyond the colour of their toilet paper this morning, and it's all good. My friends will be my friends long after Facebook has croaked.
One out of every 13 Earthlings is on Facebook
Woot!!
1 of 12!!! 1 of 12!!! 1 of 12!!!!
$ grep facebook /etc/hosts
0.0.0.3 www.static.ak.facebook.com www.static.ak.fbcdn.net www.static.ak.connect.facebook.com www.api.ak.facebook.com
0.0.0.3 www.facebook.com
0.0.0.3 facebook.com
0.0.0.3 static.ak.connect.facebook.com
0.0.0.3 connect.facebook.net
0.0.0.3 graph.facebook.com
I don't know, you tell me.
I have a hard time believing that 1 out of 13 people on this planet has a Facebook account, most of the world doesn't even have internet access.
In late 1999 when going out with friends every conversation seemed to focus on "Napster". Peer-to-peer was new, to some extent everyone listed to music, so everyone was fascinated by it.
You care so little about this article that you just wasted 10 minutes of your life posting a reply to it to explain just how little you care about it???
No, I posted a reply to explain why I think facebook is a waste, and it didn't even take me 10 minutes. I think facebook is a problem, and the going assumption (at least where I live) is that people assume you have a) a facebook account and b) that you spend your day on your phone checking it. The PTO at my kids' school puts announcements on facebook and expect that in order to know what's going on, you've "friended" them. Countless other examples I won't go into. And the willingness for people to share so much personal information with the world blows my mind. At first I thought "who cares?!" but apparently I'm in the minority, because it's become so huge. And yeah, I'll comment on stories here... that's what this site is for.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
But I noticed an ad on the tv last night for toothpaste and they were touting "Recommended by dentists".
For this claim to be correct, they would only need 2 dentists to avoid truth in advertising complaints.
I immediately felt sorry for the marketing department of that company having their budgets cut by at least half so instead of paying off 4 dentists - they could now only afford two.
Tough times.
. .
Do people really just friend random people to puff their numbers? Seems insane to me, just increases the noise ratio, and I get enough of that from people I do know who are driven to post every time they have a bowel movement.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Malda could make a huge improvement in this sorry site with very little effort.
He could EDIT THE FUCKING SUBMISSIONS. You know, check out the links to make sure they're not broken? Find better links to the story's source rather than some douche's blog? Make even a half-hearted stab at correcting the spelling and grammar? Make sure the article isn't a dupe? Stop with the pathetic ignorant editorializing?
BANG. Better Slashdot.
Like $ and anonymity and so many other things, online mechanisms like FB don't destroy character. They just sometimes reveal it -- in your case, a bit too coarsely.
Divorced coworker raged against ex wife. Overgeneralized. Said something he might regret. Meh, it happens. If he's unrepentant, it's like the guy that trashed your apartment while drunk at a party: you just exclude him from those circumstances and consider it an expensive lesson learned. Or inexpensive, in your case. Cheap as hell.
FB's value is in rekindling friendships with people who seemed cool years ago and who've stayed the course -- it's fun to rediscover kindred spirits. Alas, we've also all learned stuff we can't unlearn about others. And we all keep hoping FB or something else will let us keep tabs without enduring the fluff-- Life narratives need a freakin' editor.
Edit, don't delete.
Yeah, we're still here.
Palm trees and 8
I'm not entirely sure facebook can be considered a stand-alone piece of technology. I mean sure its impressive and pretty and has half a billion users, but its just PHP, javascript, HTML. It's a webpage. Sure, its built on some cool technology and it is a pretty impressive use of that technology, but its not really technology itself.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
I agree. I imagine someone in fb marketing asked a programmer "how many accounts do we have?". The programmer, taking that literally, probably did something like SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users in the database and said "we have 500 million."
It would be interesting to see how many users have logged on in the last six months.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Too late, over it, burning out ...
Trying to not look like I'm abandoning everyone but I've grown weary.
Lurking in the desert
I could care less about Facebook really. I'd rather not use it at all but because others use it I have to use it to keep in touch with many of them. Otherwise I don't really bother with it much. Most of the crap you'll ever see me post on Facebook otherwise is stuff automatically generated from linked services or posted to several services at once using programs like Gwibber.
That's pretty much exactly how I use FB: I'm on it under my real name, so people who I've lost touch with can find and ping me. When that happens, we exchange emails/phone numbers and continue contact through those or in RL. I have no personal info there except name, city of residence, and one or two boring photographs. I never post anything except to answer pings - and since those pings generate email alerts, I only ever log in when I know there's a personal message waiting, which is every couple of months or so. Never read any of the inane posts either, who cares if one of my friends' cat is feeling blue today.
;)
So yes, it's a great way to get in touch with people who you lost touch with and who are not on LinkedIn, but that's pretty much the only use I see
The freaking real problem it's not facecrapbook although fb is the most obnoxious thing ever created, the real problem here it's called human stupidity/futility, as I kindly refer to fb as a wh0re "phone book" and with 99% of people that uses facebook that I know agreeing with that I rest my case, is it really needed to say anything for someone who has a little bit of encephalic mass left? I quit.. Go ahead and post this marvellous discussion on fb, and btw tell everyone that You have haemorrhoids on YOUR BRAIN, since anything fb related is crap!! Now I just wish so hard that the first transistor was never invented and we still have to be creative to get everything done.. Peace, but not for fb users/defenders/obsessed/garbage people There, I said it, yey, Cyber slowly walks towards the closet pulls a gun and shoot himself in the face..