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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.
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...
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
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
Wow, I really feel sorry for her... it's terrible that she doesn't have a phone or a skype account or an email account or a mailbox that you could use to "be there" for her!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
What ever happened to Good Ol' RSS/Atom?
It never really caught on among non-technical people.
I hope that wasn't a rhetorical question.
And that's the problem... RSS/Atom and just feeds in general are a million times more useful than adding a 140-character-limited feed on Twitter where it's mixed in with everything else (in this respect Facebook isn't as bad due to having less character restrictions). Adding a feed is just as simple as subscribing to any other type of social presence, but it's so much more useful. You don't even need an account on a centralized website to subscribe to a feed. Why has the uptake been so slow? Browsers and email clients and feed readers and feed websites are all over the place, ready to be used, yet their use pales in comparison to the obviously inferior Facebook/Twitter.
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
I doubt very much the 500 million are unique at all.
Of course not. Facebook is going to hit the public stock market and this number is just part of the hype to increase the value. The number of accounts is a meaningless figure anyway -- you can bet that the vast majority of accounts are completely unused. In violation of European privacy laws you cannot even delete your FB account, so they've probably included my own account I've canceled long ago in this number, too.
In the long run FB will likely suffer the same fate as AOL, because they don't have anything valuable to offer. They just happened to offer the right waste of time at the right time. There will be a new waste of time for the masses by another Internet bubble company soon.
The point wasn't that you shouldn't support your friend (you should). The point was that the existence of Facebook was in no way necessary for you to be able to do so. Yes, if her preferred medium for receiving consolation was Facebook, you were absolutely right to use that.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.