Slashdot Mirror
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.
Yes, lots of people are on Facebook.
But a large percentage of the "user accounts" are fake accounts.
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.
Can we tell these social network scenes to slow down a bit? I haven't even caught up to friendster yet!
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
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.
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?
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
So how many people check email on a daily basis? And why isn't that front page news?
There was a time when that was front page news, yes. I remember getting email for the first time ('89, so it had already been going for what - 20 years?) and being astounded. Then discovered newsgroups, saw the web get built etc..
All this stuff was news, but it's happened. The Facebook thing is new, so it's news today.
Cheers,
Ian
Actually, all of the cool kids are on fljarn now. Only total loses haven't heard of it and are still using Twitter or Facebook.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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 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!
...he said, socializing on a web 2.0 style ajax site
you're a giant hypocrite
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage 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
My print newspaper never used to put "some guy down the pub thought ..." in the middle of its stories.
They just didn't attribute it. The stereotype of the hard drinking reporter didn't come out of thin air.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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
Real men never have any sentiment that requires more than 140 characters to express!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
All the really cool kids are using fnord now!
Just great... now you've got me pining for the fnords...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I'm inclined to agree with elrous0 on this one. Back to you, Xelios.
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.