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Researchers Claim Facebook Is 'Dead and Buried' To Many Young Users
JoeyRox writes "The recent decline in Facebook's popularity with teenagers appears to be worsening. A Global Social Media Impact study of 16 to 18 year olds found that many considered the site 'uncool' and keep their profiles alive only to keep in touch with older relatives, for whom the site remains popular. Researches say teens have switched to using WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter in place of Facebook."
Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.
And trust me, it's not because it's "uncool", its because the little shits are afraid of getting caught.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I hate it when those damn kids start playing on my lawn.
All I've ever seen contributed by teens is slang and whining and posts of crap they claim is music.
Now get off my lawn!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Unfortunately researcher is almost right. I have a teenage relative that only uses instagram and snapchat. She has a Facebook profile but that's only because myself and other "older" relatives use Facebook.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I read about this in the newspaper.
Personally I find that Facebook has too many features. It sort of reminds me of Microsoft Office with this endless parade of new tiny and mostly useless features.
I think that this is where the snapchats and twitters do so very well. With a very simple core feature set it is not hard to keep focused on what works. But with facebook it almost seems like they don't want to leave anything out just in case some competitor comes along and eats their lunch.
I think it all boils down to the question: what is Facebook? With the highly successful recent upstarts that is an easy thing to answer. But with facebook the question is actually quite complex. It is very difficult for facebook to be so much to so many.
To sum it up they have lost their 30 second elevator pitch. But maybe with this information Facebook will realize that their core audience aren't teenyboppers but adults and thus will focus their feature set in that direction.
Only old people use Facebook.
Agreed.
I'm 25, I stopped using facebook about 2 years ago (suspended my account even, email spam is annoying).
I signed up to twitter, I still have my account, but honestly I don't think I ever looked at twitter after creating an account, I'm not even sure what my username is.
Communication is personal, not "lets spam the world with my words". I have a phone, I text and call people I actually want to communicate with. I have skype and IRC for online / casual discussions with people who aren't in my immediate world. Forums and mailing lists for more technical and important things. Email covers everything else.
Needless to say, with the above tools at my, far more appropriate disposal - there's literally no need, want, or remote desire for facebook, nor twitter. Nor was there ever.
Back to MySpace we go.
I've always considered Facebook to be a little "transient", short, not for real conversation. But WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter? Is this an indication that kids today have lost the ability to have meaningful communication? If it can't be said in 140 chars or less it's not worth communicating? There is a discussion at Balloon Juice about the current way of raising kids: Apparently face-to-face social interaction is passe* with the kids these days, and school shootings are up.
*According to Google, the use of the word "passe" was really big in 1800 and again in 1900, but has steadily decreased since then.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I LOVE diesel particulates.
What the heck do these WhatsApp and Snapchat chatter programs have to do with social networking, anyways?
Just the other day, I heard an 18-year-old tell his mother that she spends too much time on Facebook.
I about fell off my chair. Maybe it gets better, after all! :)
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
The answer is obvious: Facebook should buy Twitter. Or the other way around, the way things are going...........
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Obviously teens and older people have different interests and different views, so they need different forms of expression. It is good that the separation occured by natural selection and not by advertising.
The end of Facebook is Generation Nothingness, whom are now looking for the next big thing. And we move on (well, we do but your data, if you've participated, is permanently written in stone and available to be inspected by security forces along with a few thousand twenty-something recent college grads with marketing degrees -- consume, obey, enjoy).
After spending all their money on cell phones, kids cannot afford to buy products advertised to them on Facebook.
The fact that Facebook's customer base is morphng into older folks only helps its business model of selling ads.
I don't think there's any one place - yet - that has the cachet Facebook (and MySpace before that) once had. Among my daughter's circle of friends (all in their early 20s), though, it appears Tumblr is the new Facebook. And she's told me before the only reason she has a Facebook account at all is to keep in touch with her older relatives.
Of course I like to respond that I quit Facebook before it was cool. :-P At which point she invariably rolls her eyes and says "DA-ad..."
#DeleteChrome
Funny, I just had a conversation with the same answer from my low 20-somethings sister. She never uses Facebook and chats with instagram and snapchat. Seems inefficient, but maybe that's just me!
She does have a twitter account--a marketing course in one of her college classes required all the students to open a twitter account. If THAT'S not the death knell of a social network (professors ordering students to open an account!), I don't know what is.
Perhaps they'll "get out of the door and out on the street all alone". The fresh air may kill them.
Teenagers want and need to find a place of their own, to form their own subculture. A new technology comes along, they jump on board because they are highly adaptable, their parents less, often much less, so. But after five years the teenagers are getting out of their teens and those entering the teens once again need to find their own space. Therefore, there can be no permanent place for teens unless it puts off older people joining or staying. Anyway, someone needs to beta test the new communications paradigms.
Bitter and proud of it.
Merger could result in an Axis of Drivel with disastrous consequences. Are you ready for the Tweetocalypse?
She does have a twitter account--a marketing course in one of her college classes required all the students to open a twitter account. If THAT'S not the death knell of a social network (professors ordering students to open an account!), I don't know what is.
I don't think a professor can demand that of the students. What if a student cannot accept the EULA of Twitter? Will the school refund the tuition and other expenses incurred before knowing about this requirement?
#sittingonporch
#sippinglemonade
#rollindownstreet
#sippingginjuice
WOW, full circle. welcome back to my lawn!
I think the inefficiency is part of the point, honestly. I personally dislike Facebook exactly because it has tried to be where you contact everyone you know, regardless of the context, and I simply don't want to spend the time to curate a stark divide between sharing with coworkers and friends when I don't share that much on Facebook in the first place. At this point in my life, it's like my contact list, except that it posts cat videos.
The old Facebook dismissal is that if you want share something with your real friends, you pick up the phone. I think that's the slightly wrong way to look at it, but it has a point. It's a bit of signaling, actually, that is accomplished by using the phone or any more involved means of contact. If I take the time to learn your details in a completely new or inefficient contact system, it means that messages from me are more likely to be significant because there's a greater barrier to me contacting you and I clearly put more effort into it that pulling up your profile on Facebook.
If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s, all airlines would be blended-wing, with waveriders being next year, minimum gas mileage for new cars would be 100 mpg at 100 mph, fast food would be fast (and healthy), the Tea Party would be banned by law, teenagers would have memorized everything published on the Blue Zones and ebooks would be in LuaLaTeX format, not a subset of HTML.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
1 on 1 chat for people who want to f--k around. At least with facebook there is a little bit of accountability.
Well Done. You are well on the way to becoming a grumpy old person.
So teens have 140 character and 10 second attention spans. Who would have guessed.
They'll either use Facebook as they grow up and start actually having social networks (in the sociology sense, not the "websites for chatting with friends sense), or there will be a market for a replacement method of finding people's contact info. More than anything, Facebook has become my address book for so many people that I don't have other means to contact.
The concept of "everyone" meaning just a small circle of people is in evidence here. What about the so-called "third world" where modem dial-ups in a dingy cafe still common? Sometimes in these circles, Facebook IS the Internet and is still growing rapidly. Of course, "our youths" don't chat with this rest of the world who don't count in the coolness-factor of the survey above and discussions here.
Hell, I still use IRC.
After hiding those who consistently (long-term) wouldn't participate on my posts, may it be in terms of comments or thumbs-up, I've proceeded to also hide friends who only "share" links such as those from 9gag or Youtube or Facebook pages. Problem now is that my Newsfeed looks nearly static for 24-36 hours! Facebook is indeed dead to me but that's after removing the selfish/narcissists and true time-wasters.
I'm now wondering why I even joined Facebook. It used to be ok and then one day the Newsfeed was changed to default to "Most popular" posts rather than chronological. So much for not putting a view-count on your Profile page or under your photos because somehow management didn't want Facebook to be some MySpace popularity contest sh***y website. That new Newsfeed is a true contradiction to that ancient moto.
There was never an abundance of teenagers on Facebook. It was initially for college students, and it branched out to older users. It has never been a good tool for young people living with their parents (for obvious reasons).
My "friends" are family and friends so close to be considered family. Thats around 30 people with a few "odd ball" old friends who "found" me. That tops off around 40 folks in my "friends".
I only see about 15 in my feed (by config). So I WANT to know that little-princess 4 months old just learned to walk in THAT group.
What I don't understand is the desire to have 100, 200, 2000 friends. That is just crazy and leads to the signal overload you describe above.
I would be pretty freaked out to see people's faces. Some people have not been blessed in that way and I prefer them on their phone looking away so I can keep my lunch down. I think there are a few genres of social sites based on how a user can use them: user to user or user to group direct communication (akin to talking face to face), broadcast networking (more like terrestrial radio, you send info out and people may tune in), and stalking (whether familial research or otherwise, like a background check that you can do for free on persons of interest based on how and what they have made available) I don't know/care how most people will/do accomplish this, but for me, Google's product line covers all needs, but no one app cuts it.
i support the right to offend.
Sorry.
Not all the "older folks" use Facebook.
I for one, don't.
Yes, I do have a FB account. I signed on to FB when it was brand new (just like I sign on to /. when it was brand new) but I do not like what people do there --- they TELL EVERYBODY EVERYTHING ABOUT THEMSELVES.
I am not interested to know who eat what at where, nor interested to tell anyone what I do at what place in what time either.
I logged on to my FB account for 2 times since I signed on. Yes, exactly two times, and no more.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
She does have a twitter account--a marketing course in one of her college classes required all the students to open a twitter account. If THAT'S not the death knell of a social network (professors ordering students to open an account!), I don't know what is.
I don't think a professor can demand that of the students. What if a student cannot accept the EULA of Twitter? Will the school refund the tuition and other expenses incurred before knowing about this requirement?
No different than if an engineering student felt they couldn't accept the EULA of Matlab. These are the standard tools of the profession and if a student is unable to bring himself to use a profession's standard toolset then it is much cheaper to find out after paying for a few courses than after completing an entire degree program.
Twitter is a professional tool in some field?
I use talk.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Naw, a real grumpy old man like me wouldn't bother with skype, IRC, etc. Email is good enough for almost everything, voice phone calls covers the rest. Occasionally google+ to see what some people are up to (at least you can divide people into groups, though it still lacks the vital -1 button).
If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s ...
Of course, you realize that Unix development started in the mid 1960s.
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were developing an experimental time sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. ... On this PDP-7, in 1969, a team of Bell Labs researchers led by Thompson and Ritchie, including Rudd Canaday, developed a hierarchical file system, the concepts of computer processes and device files, a command-line interpreter, and some small utility programs.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm looking for the research and see.....none. The credentials of the researchers is impressive at first glance, but there is no research. This whole thing looks like a hypothesis without any real research. The entire premise is very interesting, and some of their ideas are worth PROVING. I can't wait to see the results.
Yes, you are too old to have avoided joining FB in the first place. You are also missing what the policies and practices are with respect to how your posts may show up on other's pages. Even if someone is not in your group to distribute 'likes' and comments to, if you are posting a comment to or 'liking' a 'public' post, that post will randomly be posted to anyone who is a friend.
I suspect it's mostly a way to 'encourage' friends to like what their friends like, but it basicly means that you don't have the control over who sees your comments and 'likes.'
You never know...
Personally I find that Facebook has too many features. It sort of reminds me of Microsoft Office with this endless parade of new tiny and mostly useless features.
It's not that Facebook is complicated. It's that most of the new features involve either advertising or collecting data about you. They have value for Facebook, not the user. Facebook is pulling a Myspace. Worse, they're doing it in the phone era, where ads are more annoying due to the limited screen real estate.
Snapchat is still in the "no ads, no revenue" phase, when it's fun to use. Originally, Google didn't have ads. Originally, Facebook didn't have ads. Until recently, Twitter did not have ads. Once the ads appear, the downward spiral begins.
It would be amusing, and perhaps useful, to create a social network system that looks to the user like Twitter/Snapchat/WhatsApp, but uses XMPP/email/IRC/SMS for transport and doesn't need servers of its own. Sell the app once for $5 or so. No ads. Phone providers usually give you a mail account and an SMS number. That's all you really need. WhatsApp comes close, but they have servers and an overreaching EULA, like everybody else. The trick is to make it spam-free, which probably means you have a friends list and only they, and maybe friends once removed, can reach you.
yeah. so she is actively using it.
it is not dead. it's her fucking email and blog replacement. so how it is dead and buried??? ICQ is dead and buried.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
To be fair the course was called "Twitter Sock Puppetry for Anti-Social Marketing"
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What if a student cannot accept the EULA of Twitter?
These services have a EULA?
I feel sorry for your kids; disadvantaged by their own parents in terms of general computer literacy by only being able to use it for an hour to do games, and use google for research.
They've lost the general computer literacy they'd get from using their PC/device daily.
They've lost the culture of their peers; how awkward it must be for them to be in a conversation and not being able to relate. Sad.
They've lost the opportunities they'd have to practice self-discipline and time management, by balancing their lives with computer use.
What happens when they don't have a parent or manager? They're in for some serious struggles in life, thanks to you.
I ignored it... and it's going away.
Whew! I don't do facebook yet if I follow a link to facebook I'm required to log in, I just skip the link.
I was afraid it would be THE place for any companies contact point, and I'd have to make a bogus account access it.
Research as your aware can read the numbers in many different ways to prove a given point, lets hope this is true the X - 21 age group is a major target group.
Dude, these are -marketers-. They are, at best, third on the list behind lawyers and bankers.
Who cares?
Kid-proof tablet..
If you support the fucking tea party, you deserve all the cheap shots you are destined for. Fuckwit.
It's all about privacy. Ironically everyone said the kids don't care about privacy while not realising they were leaving in herds because of privacy. It's just that their privacy concerns are more short term than ours. They are worried about being caught doing whatever it is they do by their parents, rather than what boring stuff like what future employers will know about them etc.
Given many (most?) major companies and organizations maintain an active Twitter presence operated by their PR or customer relations department? Yes.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Guess what, that will always be the case. MySpace died a grizly death as soon as Moms everywhere started dropping friend requests. Facebook is pretty much just the lazy person's way of sending email/IM. It's cool to be able to see what people are up to, but I find myself using it less and less as time goes on.
Totally agree.
When I was in school I saw this quite a bit (parents forcing their viewpoint to the detriment of their kids).
Trying to impart good values has to be balanced by reality. I too don't get a lot of this "phone culture" stuff. It drives me crazy to be at a restaurant with a bunch of people from _my_ generation all with their phones out instead of actually talking. That said, this is the reality we live in, it's becoming a necessary skill to fit in socially.
Robbing a kid of the ability to socialize in their generations preferred medium because the parents thinks it's rubbish is just asking for problems later in life.
Occasionally google+ to see what some people are up to (at least you can divide people into groups, though it still lacks the vital -1 button).
I have two circles, ignoramuses and smarty-pants. I haven't yet found anyone who cannot be classified thus.
Bill Hicks cared - he would have had a lot less material without marketers.
Although he did only want them to kill themselves.
The old Facebook dismissal is that if you want share something with your real friends, you pick up the phone. I think that's the slightly wrong way to look at it, but it has a point. It's a bit of signaling, actually, that is accomplished by using the phone or any more involved means of contact.
This is exactly what google+ excels at. Having circles of friends is much closer to the way we live . Of course, the circles are very small, since no one else uses google+. :(
Hmm, this is also closer to real life too
For those interested in photography though, check it out. It is worth it.
They could start using Google+, no parents there, just Google employees.
but my dad works for Google you insensitive clod!
Dude, I appreciate your efforts to restrict your children's online activity with an emphasis on interpersonal contact and physical activity, however you've gone way too far. I can assure you that this will backfire in a big way, the only thing you will achieve is to alienate yourself from your kids if you insist on your hardline position. Loosen up a bit mate, be their friend and mentor, not their "restrictions and monitoring" overseer.
#DamnOutOfBogPaperWhatAmIGoingToDo
Now if you were on facebook rather than twitter you could have asked your mum.
I had a "Web Design" class require me to use Dreamweaver located on a remote VM. At least in this case they are having students use something that is a professional standard.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I noticed the decline about three years ago, which was about the peak of user interaction. That was probably the point of max data, when you could use it to look up just about any classmate or former co-worker you were curious about and see pictures of their kids and where they were going to be. Then people stopped being stupid, more and more profiles became private or friends-only, facebook started requiring a login to even see content on their site, real names were required and dubious names autodeleted (including mine), and people started cancelling accounts. Then there was a movie. RIP The Facebook, you hardly knew me.
other marketers, mainly.
supposedly with customers.
a bunch of fake customers too.
with fake customers too. why? so that the twitter campaign would look effective and they would keep receiving their paycheck.
yeah, it's pretty stupid. also one way to spot a marketer is that he is using a fucking url shortening service for every fucking url. not because he couldn't fit the whole url - but because he wants clickthrough stats. fuckers.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Marketing is a professional field?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why oh why did you have to write this as AC? It's the perfect analysis of the problem: Facebook is getting less popular with teens exactly because it gets more popular with older people, i.e. their parent generation.
Not only because of the ancient "It's uncool to do what your old folks are doing". You can't share your ... less "parent-compatible" exploits anymore with your friends using Facebook. Because your parents are listening. Huh? You could make it "friends only" and not friend your parents? Yeah. Sure. You can not friend your parents.
So you could only use Facebook to post about your latest "family friendly" happenings. Which would pretty much double as the killer for your social life as a teen.
So of course teens move away from a service they can't use sensibly anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
i have nothing to hide, i use 'wall'
Facebook is creepy.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
now looking for the next big thing. And we move on (well, we do but your data, if you've participated, is permanently written in stone and available
It's such a damn shame innit? They start crazy fights for privacy rights but aren't winin' it. Keep on moving on, getting inspected, not a single elder respected -- Like the old coulda told anything about info set management or social net arrangement; Not like we're the ones inventing the tech they keep renting: token ring, cold war dialling, social engineering, or any such thing.
I recall the good ol' days, a BBS on my relays, on my own damn machine, bought by car, truck and van washing. My crew and I were the ones who invaded, berated, and sysoperated, ruling every line on your dime one at a time. We ATA'd every call since we had it all: From hiphop to funk, cyberpunk and phreaking, cracking, hacking, dumpster leaking, from robotics to erotics, sharewares and GIF scares and ANSI scrolls so thick they make your third eye sick. Through trace busting out-dials we'd drop hot fresh files, and leave notes scrawled on boards we crawled -- that's a "wall" for yall not the age to breed, or maybe "feed". Kermit and XModem had the fiends' heads explodin' from phat noise-free downloadin'. Your game's No-CD crack has chiptunes and whack splash screens thanks to zero-day smack boasting knack for Demoscenes.
That TXT speak is weak; For fast finger walking prose we had Crosstalk macros. Web clients? I ain't buyin' it. How about No Fear to Peer-to-Peer, and our homebrew free as in beer? Ours had real crypto -- symmetric; You got SSL and wrecked it: Security went down the chutes since you trust bad actors as roots. References? Romance? What's the Hong Kong Post to you? Why: Preferences, Advanced, Certificates and View. To key shit we left you HTTP-Auth; You treat it like a scruffy nerf herder on Hoth. You got images and kerned text full of bot scrimmages and defects. Let me tell you, we got viewers too, with more features than yours do; No terminals hung playing Kung to this senior's Fu. Cindy Crawford wasn't so fine coming down that line in a 16 color swimsuit, but if you think that hot dithered mess hasn't seen progress take an app dirt-nap and reboot.
The pigs don't have a clue where all that data got off to. Bit rot got mold, disk platters went cold, forgave our digital sin: ASCII pages of old never to be scrolled or softly trolled ever again... You never forgive, never forget? You're caught in the Web, not the Internet. Before shit was Y2K compliant any machine was a server or client -- Now you pay the man his business plan just to show off your furry friends or pets: From your system you can't list 'em 'less holes get cut in your nets. Forget any of that or encrypted chat, if you're found at any 3rd party site: Folks at the Hong Kong Post can just as simply roast your connection's toast with state sponsored thermite.
Your browser skids marks like hand writ perjury: You got a "Referer" Header; It's not rocket surgery. Net ended up routing out behind NAT, buffer bloated pouting and all that; You kids can flunk Hogwarts but not forward ports. Not all of yall ignored the call of the tech wild, just enough it's rough to get inbound data dialed. I tried to STUN the sense back in your fool head; Nowhere to TURN symmetric NAT left you dead.
Half the world flushed IP6 down the commode, at least back in the day I had a unique dial code. Rolled out regulators instead of mounting up switches, and ASIC instead of firmware? Keep fucking up, bitches.
Look under the hood of your wireless modem, a separate OS: To the fire let's hold 'em.
Secure like DOS show the specs, programming, namers: Oh yeah, AT commands! Stay flaming, Lamers!
B-b-but!
This line noise hero's signal ain't stopped:
+++
ATH0
CARRIER DROPPED
A Global Social Media Impact study of 16 to 18 year olds
These are people whose social network consists of persons they see just about every day of their life, i.e., their classmates and family. It's not surprising they don't find facebook useful. What is surprising is that they find any other online social network particularly useful. I imagine twitter has more to do with keeping up with celebrities/bands and snapchat/whatsapp is really not a social network so much as it is an improved texting interface which probably works well for intercommunication between small high school cliques.
The reason they use facebook to keep in touch with older relatives is because older relatives are the only people they have developed significant relationships with who are not immediately accessible. When these same students go out-of-state to various colleges, Facebook is going to be a much better way to keep track of each others lives, interact casually with new people (i.e. facebook can be very passive, it doesn't require as much direct activity as a chat program, can just go ahead and friend that guy/girl you maybe like), and keep track of clubs and related events.
But I have seen some die off in facebook popularity. People still check it but they don't post nearly as much. I personally blame privacy issues and the 'like' feature. The latter because it's makes it a popularity contest. Some people are secure enough to not care, others are going to be put off when certain friends post and get 100 likes and they get 2, or even if they do get enough likes stress about keeping it up, or whatever. Best just not to post and avoid the stress of whether your post will be well-received by the community. Any contest is ultimately only going to be participated in by people who do well at the contest, assuming there is any choice in participating.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Facebook is destined to become the Myspace of its time.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
16 to 18 year olds don't need Facebook because they have high school. They directly interact with pretty much everyone in their limited social circle in real life five days a week. I'd be willing to bet that the same high school kids who are "shunning" Facebook now will start using it more as soon as they go off to college, and even more after that. As they progress through their 20s, their casual social circle will continue to grow, while their free time to directly interact with this circle will diminish, causing Facebook to steadily become more and more attractive.
The linked article seems to contradict itself as well. It tries to make a point by saying the supposed drop off in high school users is the opposite of Facebook's heyday when it was aimed at college age users. How does that even make sense? I think a better explanation is that Facebook was never made for high school kids in the first place, so of course they're not going to use it much or think it's "cool".
Also, Facebook is never going to be replaced by apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp, as the article seems to imply. Facebook and instant messaging are two completely different types of tools. Facebook's strength is its ability to let you passively, and relatively effortlessly keep tabs on and share information with everyone in your casual social circle that you either don't have the time for or the desire to interact with actively. Instant messaging is for directly communicating with select individuals that sit much higher in your social circle. It's like claiming billboards are obsolete because the telephone was invented.
Other social networking sites and apps, such as Twitter and Tumblr will potentially draw away users from Facebook, but it won't be because of the opinions of high school kids. If Twitter and Tumblr hurt Facebook, it will be because they provide better passive social tools than Facebook for the 20s, 30s, and 40s crowd.
Kind of an aside from the topic, but, If I am paying more for an education than a house, I AM THE ONE who had better be giving orders to professors or there will be retribution, gnashing of teeth and lamenting of the women.
Wise up people. Who is paying who and is it fucking really worth it?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Until next month when SnapChat and Instagram are considered dated. They jump from one thing to the next depending on what's deemed "cool".
I have two circles, ignoramuses and smarty-pants. I haven't yet found anyone who cannot be classified thus.
I believe that says more about you than it does about other people...
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Seems like FB's friend/non-friend division is not a good model of real life relationships! Wow! Surprise, surprise. Makes me wonder what Google did wrong with G+ to get so little popularity - the categorization of friends into separate groups and selective per-group availability of your content seemed to be among the initial assumptions (based on press releases from long time ago, I have no idea whether it works as advertised). That seems to be the right solution. Something else must have been very wrong... Without an account on either service I can't risk a guess.
The second oldest profession, yes.
Prostitutes are considered professionals, why not marketeers?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
SIX seconds? Are you kidding me? I've forgotten what I was doing after 3. A hundred and 40 chars? Get real. The next twitter will be 30 chars or less or just a weird sonar-like animal noise.
I don't think a professor can demand that of the students. What if a student cannot accept the EULA of Twitter? Will the school refund the tuition and other expenses incurred before knowing about this requirement?
Yeah, I thought the same thing when the local public school (a mandatory-attendance government-run institution) required kids to sign up for Turnitin(TM). Certainly I didn't have an option as to whether to pay my school taxes in light of this requirement.
I think it is bogus, but good luck getting the majority to go along with it. What is even more bogus is that stuff like the National Electric Code or United States Pharmacopoeia is copyrighted. It is basically illegal to tell somebody what the law is - you need to pay the appropriate corporation for the right to know the law.
Without marketing you would never have heard about Bill Hicks.
... whooshhhh
I disagree. Technically the first prostitute wasn't a prostitute until she'd done the deed, and that didn't happen until she'd marketed her wares. Marketing is the oldest profession, prostitution a very close second. ;-)
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Makes me wonder what Google did wrong with G+ to get so little popularity - the categorization of friends into separate groups and selective per-group availability of your content seemed to be among the initial assumptions (based on press releases from long time ago, I have no idea whether it works as advertised). That seems to be the right solution.
Well, being the right solution doesn't make a social network popular, automatically.
However, G+ has its flaws as well. Its main fault is that it is purely people-centric in terms of sharing information, and is blind to topics. I'm interested in reading about Linus Torvald's work on Linux. I'm not interested in his scuba-diving hobby. With G+ it is very difficult to get the one without the other. It requires that Linus use multiple accounts (something Google doesn't like), or that he not post publicly and maintain separate circles for the millions of people who are interested in his work on Linux vs his other hobbies.
Sure, for the little noise Linus generates I'll overlook it. However, the problem is that this does not scale up. When you want to communicate with hundreds of people it is really disruptive when many are "off-topic" much of the time. That's why mailing lists and forums enforce topic-adherence.
What Google+ really needs is the ability to not follow Linus, but to follow posts by Linus with the hashtag #linux or whatever.
I probably take a harsher stand on this than many, but the sentiment really is out there. A few months ago the rage on G+ was begging all your friends not to share their "+1's." It wasn't that people weren't interested in having access to that data. The problem was that the UI turned it into noise. Not only do I now have to read about Linus's scuba-diving, but if Linus +1's his sister's announcement of the birth of his nephew I get to read about that too. Such a thing only makes sense if you treat the network like most people treat Facebook - a place to interact with family and family-safe friends.
Seems like FB's friend/non-friend division is not a good model of real life relationships! Wow! Surprise, surprise. Makes me wonder what Google did wrong with G+ to get so little popularity - the categorization of friends into separate groups and selective per-group availability of your content seemed to be among the initial assumptions (based on press releases from long time ago, I have no idea whether it works as advertised). That seems to be the right solution. Something else must have been very wrong... Without an account on either service I can't risk a guess.
Google forces users to use real names.
Google tries to TRICK you into adding real information.
Then when you do, locks it up with all your other Google type service accounts; youtube. gmail, etc.
And follows it up by taking away a bunch of tools IN those service accounts.
In return for this, you get more ads related to what they think you will buy.
It's truly insidious and very likely to poison the opinion of google in any half-aware tech person.
Meanwhile, google makes it easy for the nigh-facist government to scoop up all the data. (Which, might not bother you now, but could when a different congress and a different president get in control who later decide you shouldn't be allowed to be free of IRS audits due to your beliefs on drug use.)
That's just what I picked up by reading here and other places about google+. I am never going to use it, and I instruct anybody who asks never to use it.
As long as we are being anecdotal, the young adults that I know seem to constantly be on Facebook (young being early 20's).
Wow... the horror of actually having to experience the world instead of sitting behind a keyboard.
Unfortunately researcher is almost right. I have a teenage relative that only uses instagram and snapchat. She has a Facebook profile but that's only because myself and other "older" relatives use Facebook.
Would you post your stuff to anything that has your parents and "older" relatives on it?
Houston, I think we found the problem....
No sig today...
True, but not an answer to my question. Most of the things you mention are 2013. G+ failed to take off a lot earlier, when it was not as all-encompassing as it is now. I know why it's almost universally hated now. Tell me why it failed in the beginning.
People actually still use Facebook and Twitter? Facebook's problems are well know, and Twitter is too wordy.
Facebook is its own worst enemy.
Their mule-headed instance that *everybody* sees *everything* doesn't work when teens have parents on there.
No sig today...
google FOCRES people to use real names? thats funny, I have a few google accounts, only 1 actually has my real name. Mike Ock would disagree with you
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Given many (most?) major companies and organizations maintain an active Twitter presence operated by their PR or customer relations department? Yes.
Given that it only takes one bad (or mistaken/misread) tweet from a major company that could potentially disrupt millions in revenue, or even ruin their image permanently, I'm rather surprised that the organizations own lawyers haven't recommended it to be removed due to the liability*.
We've seen things go horribly wrong. Plenty of times. Some are forgiven. Most are not. All are remembered permanently thanks to the internet.
* How long before social media liability insurance policies are written? I'll give it another 15 seconds. Watch and see. I promise you it's coming.
Twitter is a souped up alternative to an XML feed.
It used to be useful to keep track of interesting people and organisations. That is better done in Google Plus now.
It is no use for sharing photographs unless you have accounts in othersystems - like facebook or even Flickr.
I still have an account and it's useful for following some organisations that still use it only, They will either catch up or "go under".
Its IM is less useful than even Facebooks. I am obviously because I consider email to be an even more useful tool.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
FB has volume and some unique features...so, it can still survive untill some one comes up with a stunning Next Generation Idea
BBS were cool, well not really i nthe general sense. Then AOL was cool, you saw a aol keyword on everything, on all commercials etc. Than it was myspace, everyone had to be on myspace. then it was FB, everyone had to have a FB, then twitter, you see #this and #that everywhere. Looks like snapchat is next.
I know im getting old because I am behind the curve with snapchat, Ive heard of it, have no idea what it is, dont really care, every thing prior listed I remember being involved with in some way shape or form
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I was having similar thoughts. Thanks for speaking my mind so clearly.
ALL social media sites are simply fads. There is not one that will stand the test of time. Facebook selling stock? Cool - Suckerburg really got one over on all the greedy fools with money to gamble. It certainly isn't going to last as long as MS, Apple, or Google. Facebook isn't the new IBM, or even Timex. Bars, pubs, and other social meeting places come and go. Facebook offers nothing truly special, unless they start serving free beer.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I have a G+ account mostly because I use other Google services.
Quite some people added me to their circles - I didn't add them back. I don't use the G+ thing.
What they did wrong? I don't know. Timing, maybe, by releasing when Facebook was still in its prime, with users not so interested in an alternative - now G+ is one of the "old" ones, not a "cool, new thing".
Never gained critical mass, I have no idea why it could be useful for me. As others mentioned, having it linked to so many other accounts of so many disparate services is also a drawback. At least for me, it is something that I do have in mind.
Bill Hicks said it best I think: http://youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo
And that while GP is only just out of his teens! There is still hope for the next generation!
From Wikipedia:
The Tea Party movement is an American political movement that is primarily known for advocating a reduction in the U.S. national debt and federal budget deficit by reducing U.S. government spending and taxes.[1][2] The movement has been called partly conservative,[3] partly libertarian,[4] and partly populist.[5] It has sponsored protests and supported political candidates since 2009.[6][7][8]
What is your problem with that?
It reportedly is even popular among professional politicians, one of whom now lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
When I just wake up and read something that provokes me I really should get more awake before I post something snarky, but here goes... As far as my own experience on FB goes, if the kids leave, then fine. They don't have anything to say that interests me and in many cases they outright offend. It really makes me scared for the future of the human race sometimes. And as for FB itself and their revenues, what is the buying power of teenagers versus the buying power of their parents? That's right, not much (though they do spend what they have more freely). Now get off my lawn.
You dinosaur! Trendy kids these days use ytalk!
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
Your conclusion is only a small subset of the bigger conclusion: anything which requires a large critical mass to exist and work will eventually collapse as the mass decreases and passes below the threshold. This includes social networks, but also a lot of other things. Some could argue countries make it into such a definition ;)
Pretty much the same here, though I never really caught onto facebook. I'm 24. I use Skype and forums for most of my online communication. The only reason I even have a facebook account is because I have a lot of friends who don't care to use anything else (also managing a page for a project I'm working on). I have a Twitter account, but I haven't gotten around to getting it down to a manageable state (I'm using it largely to keep track of news in my field, which works well, but I have too many subs to read everything every day).
Because prostitution can be an honest profession.
I'd hardly call referencing his name in the liner notes of one of the most popular albums of the 90s "marketing". There are some products that are so good that they need no marketing to sell.
Because prostitutes provide a valuable service that people actually WANT to get.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And exactly what does that have to do with whether someone is a "professional?"
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The early days of the Internet really were the best. There were some really awesome communities back then. I'm sure such things are still around, but damn if they don't seem to be covered in mounds of crap.
That's very funny--I think I'll have to steal it!
While I appreciate your sarcasm, I was trying to say that Facebook and Twitter are hardly old. It seems the kids of today jump from one technology to the next in an effort to remain relevant and "cool".
you're forgetting something...
1st: "wave boobies in face of passing caveman, say "ug ugg want it bb". That's Marketing.
2nd: refuse advances until ugg has handed over shiny rock. That's Sales.
3rd oldest profession happens next, and is possibly the most reputable of the 3.
Totally agree. Most of the under-20ish people I know use Facebook primaraly for games. The 20-40ish crowd may have accounts, but find themselves too busy nowadays to really use it.
I find that the thing that really seems to have killed Facebook is the "share" feature - especially on photos and videos. Now all Facebook is is people sharing comics, 6-month-old newsstories, virus hoaxes, etc. I wish there was a way to block all "shared" content - but more than that, I wish Facebook would just remove the feature. At least, if a person wants to share a website, they need to copy and paste the URL - do away with the ability to share someone else's posts and pictures.
Maybe then, Facebook may actually get back to being useful.
I have actually been thinking of jumping the Facebook ship myself, mainly because of everything I have mentioned. The only reason I haven't yet is because there really is no good alternative. At least, not in the English-speaking world. I just want to know what my friends are up to, if they are in a relationship, and see pictures and videos of their kids (and maybe vacation photos). I don't care if you joined a new team in such-and-such game, I don't need 20 of my friends to share Uncle George's picture of the day, and I don't want to see inspirational posts unless I am on an imspirational page.
Truthfully, I find Instagram to be much closer to what I am looking for in a social-networking site.
Facebook is turning off older users, and younger users don't have a need for it, and everyone in between just doesn't have time to sort through all the crap that is on Facebook now. As soon as a viable alternative comes up, people will jump ship. It happened to MySpace, which was thought to be unsinkable. It will happen to Facebook.
True, the ral companies who succeed are the ones who reach that critical mass, and then realise that they have to keep on moving and produce something else, possibly related to their original field (as that makes it easier to convert the existing userbase).
Google did this - search was popular, reached critical mass, then started doing lots of other things, and now no-one would say they will disappear.
Facebook did some crap about social communication, then spent any additional innovation "being more facebook", its hardly surprising they're on their way out.
I wonder if they do become a tiny shade of their former selves, what the knock-on effect on the silicon valley/startup scene will become. If investors lose their shirts with FB stock, will the negative publicity and "shock, horror, stocks can go down too" mean other companies will not be able to . I don't know, produce a website that rates turds, and get a billion dollars in VC funding.
And some would argue marketing is prostitution. Seen Mad Men?
But then Farcebork has been dead to me since its inception. Stillborn. Kaputski.
That millions of people can be duped into giving up their private information and be tracked and mass-marketed to death is still amazing to me. Then, I think about why we have the government we do in the US, and it all makes sense.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
echo > /dev/tty
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Internet seems to have a popular app life of about 5 years. Then something else comes along and steals peoples interest, takes a few years to get real popular (as in the media), explode with mass users, only to start declining a few years later and the youngsters & hipsters move on to the next "big app"
And I say app, because in reality, that is all the webpages really are that become popular now.
And when it comes down to it, the kids wants there own things, they don't want us older folks and parents hanging out, dampening their style. I know when I was a kid I wanted to be as far from my parents as possible in everything I did.
Be seeing you...
Bell bottoms were a fad? Crap - I thought they were a uniform. I enlisted so that I could get some. You mean, I could have just gone to K-mart and bought them?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
You mean the album that featured a song all about marketing and how you would have never heard about the band if they had not sold out to a publisher to provide marketing for them? So yes, you might have heard of hicks through liner notes and not marketing, but you would never have seen the album without marketing.
it's becoming a necessary skill to fit in socially.
If you have to be an idiot to fit in, then just don't bother.
There's a huge difference between encouraging kids to get outside and do some physical activity (which I do strongly agree with) in addition to other forms of entertainment and cutting off an entire widely used social outlet.
It's not what I would do, but it's not going to cripple their kids either. Somehow they'll survive.
Why do you want your kids to be completely unprepared for dealing with the real world after they go off to college? These are the kind of parenting techniques that produce kids who drop out of college because they're spending too much time binging on things they've never experienced before.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Facebook is destined to become the Myspace of its time.
As was Myspace the Friendster of its time...
no sarcasm intended actually I was agreeing with you. AOL had a good run from say 95-99, myspace from about 2000-2004 and myspace from about 05-2011, twitter has been gaining momentum and everything from about 2010 til ???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Yep. Facebook became less fun the second my parents friended me. And I'm in my 40s! Oh sure I could block them, along with all my uncool relatives. But c'mon, they're still my family. I don't want to do anything so drastic, even if it means I'm deluged with status updates that are less interesting than when I was connected only to my closest peer group.
Moreover, for me it was all about reconnecting with friends in distant places, people I hadn't heard from in 10 years or more. What's the appeal for a teenager? For the majority of them, their friends mostly live within a 10-mile radius. They're not so concerned with whatever happened to that boy who moved away in the second grade.
Oh, and there's Words with Friends. I think the kids are into different sorts of online gaming, however.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Better than flickr? How? Aside from the fact that Google's history is rife with services they've set up and then discontinued, and the whole Real Name thing...
flickr's got some shortcomings too -- inability to really curate groups or favorites, and the limits of galleries, for instance -- but I've not yet heard of anyone really addressing those issues elsewhere. Perhaps Google+ has?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's one I've been hearing for years - that young people don't use email anymore. That it's not cool. That it's just something older people use. But it hasn't had any effect on the daily flood in my inbox. People don't use email to be cool, they use it because it's a really useful tool that lots of people depend on every day.
Facebook either will or won't survive in exactly the same way. If it's a valuable tool, people will keep using it and coolness will be irrelevant. If they decide other tools meet their needs better, they'll abandon it. Being cool is, at best, a short term way to bootstrap a service. It's not what matters long term.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
...Do we really need to know when an ex-coworker you had 5 years ago, is AFK to go to the bathroom?
Wait - they can't text from the can?
Luddites.
You can even get them at K-Mart in colors other than blue and white.
I think you have 2 and 3 mixed up. I always thought you paid the prostitute to leave, not to sleep with you.
I love the smell of diesel particulates in the morning; it smells like victory!!
I think you're spot on. You should be able to subscribe to the posts of a person which have a certain hashtag. And now it would be really simple and convenient since Google implemented autohashtagging of posts in G+ some time ago
This shot was in the name of comedy so grow a thicker skin.
If you replace "Tea Party" with "NAACP", "Greenpeace", or "NOW", is the joke still funny?
Oh, because it's impossible that a man would initiate that sexual encounter?
Without a time machine or some kind of wormhole device to view the past, we'll never know for sure.
Or that monkeys do the same thing, no marketers involved:
You're obviously a racist. Just because someone's not human doesn't mean they aren't doing marketing.
Don't forget that Google may capriciously deny you access to your online data and services any time it chooses and for whatever reason or no reason, and you have no recourse.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
google FOCRES people to use real names?
They tried and failed. They will regroup, dream up some more effective technical means of cohersion and try again.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
[Citation needed]
I got an IRC client running on one desktop and a browser on another and I haven't notice a change in IQ when switching desktop.
Easy, when you switch to the browser you also switch to your browser persona, which is too stupid to notice the IQ drop.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Kind of an aside from the topic, but, If I am paying more for an education than a house, I AM THE ONE who had better be giving orders to professors
Actually this is on topic as long as you view your professors as prostitutes (discussed upthread).
Anyway, I'd worry less about your professor ordering you to use a free service than your university ordering your professor to choose course materials which return the greatest revenue to the university, and ordering you to buy them from the school bookstore or Amazon affiliate link in order to stay registered in your classes.
By the time Facebook figures out how to monetize Instagram that one will be passe as well.
Instagram: a business unit of Facebook
They lack moral fibre.
Requiem for the American Dream
I keep telling people millenials might be the generation to save us all.
looks like it. This generation has more taste than mine
ALL social media sites are simply fads.
Fads are precisely what you need to get involved in for marketing/PR.
Google plus screwed the pooch with forcing real names and trying to do too much creating excessive complexity. Then of course really being privacy invasive and forcing the google plus real indentity across their whole portal offering was just that bitter sour cherry on top and pretty much the end of google plus.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
BBS were cool, well not really i nthe general sense. Then AOL was cool, you saw a aol keyword on everything, on all commercials etc. Than it was myspace, everyone had to be on myspace. then it was FB, everyone had to have a FB, then twitter, you see #this and #that everywhere. Looks like snapchat is next. I know im getting old because I am behind the curve with snapchat, Ive heard of it, have no idea what it is, dont really care, every thing prior listed I remember being involved with in some way shape or form
I did enjoy BBSes but at the time I didn't know anyone who had heard of them (other than those I introduced). I suppose "obscure" is the word I would use, rather than gauging how cool they were. I never used AOL or any other "online service" beyond a "dumb pipe" ISP, and I thought AOL sucked back when they vigorously competed with the likes of Compuserve and Prodigy (I think that was its name) for dial-up users. I have a learned disdain of anything that needs to be promoted so hard that I run out of files to put on their floppies and pieces of furniture that needed their CDs as coasters. I simply never cared for fads. I'm not anti-fad, because they aren't important enough to me to justify my active opposition of them. I simply don't care for them.
I was aware of the problems with MySpace and then Facebook when they came around because I had tried to give Google a hard time tracking me before that. Other than a few of their web bugs that I saw before I blocked those, no machine I own has ever sent a packet to or received a packet from any Facebook-owned domain. I'm less hostile to Twitter but I have no use for it and I also recognize its own faddish nature. I simply don't care what random strangers ate for breakfast last week and there are better news feeds for anything important.
The difference is, BBSes were something I discovered on my own. I didn't need a marketer or a mob of people to try to shove them down my throat. It was, in a word, organic. That made them easy for me to appreciate. At the time I was something of a newbie in terms of technical skill, and it was like a new little world full of things I could discover. I just don't find that kind of sense of wonder with the modern fads. There's nothing technically interesting there and no real meaning to be found in them, just a whole lot of empty banter and attempts to make sales.
Let's say I probably sound a lot older than I actually am (get off my lawn!), but at any rate, I agree with you about Snapchat and I wonder how many fads we have to witness before the average user starts questioning why they bother with the hype. This is the main thing I have never fully understood about most people: how can they experience so many instances and iterations of an abstract theme and still fail to grasp the principle, let alone even realize that there is, in fact, a theme or a template?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I disagree. Technically the first prostitute wasn't a prostitute until she'd done the deed, and that didn't happen until she'd marketed her wares. Marketing is the oldest profession, prostitution a very close second. ;-)
Only if he or she advertised first. But if he or she was solicited, which seems more likely, then prostitution was the oldest.
I keep hearing how prostitution is the oldest profession, but I was under the impression that hunting was the oldest profession!
Just wait for College to start. Of the social media tools available, there's nothing better for calendar and social event management.
How do you quickly invite tens, dozens, hundreds of people to a party, rally, debate, play, show, election orsports event and keep them in the loop for time, location, theme updates? What tool do you use to maintain membership to a dozen groups, academic, social, or otherwise?
There's a lot of fluff to Facebook, but for certain use cases, it is untouched.
Not only would that remove what little logic is in the joke, it would offer too many options and include too many acronyms. Some jokes work only when provoking a thin-skinned group of near illiterate tools of Koch Industries.
Has no one noticed in this thread that the revenue model of WhatsApp is to charge after the first year of use? It's not surprising that it would be popular while it is free, especially with no advertising. How many of these young users will start to pay after the first year of use?
Young vapid adults mostly.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Google did this - search was popular, reached critical mass, then started doing lots of other things, and now no-one would say they will disappear.
I will say it. They will disappear when something newer and shinier catches people's interest.
People said the same thing about Yahoo! and Altavista too - they were too big to ever disappear. Where are they now? Heck, where is DEC now?
No one is too big to fall, unless the government owes them money.
this is funniest because I think in the Snowden documents Facebook sold out to the NSA way before google did, and of course, runs on the exact same business model except with far more intrusive and annoying ads.
Facebook is its own worst enemy.
Their mule-headed instance that *everybody* sees *everything* doesn't work when teens have parents on there.
Actually Google had the right idea in dividing your friends into different groups ('circles') and only allow certain groups to see any given update. That solves the parents or boss issue. I'm not FB friends with my boss, nor any of my previous bosses, for that very reason. If I want to take a sick day and later feel better and go out and get tagged or do my own update, I'd not want my boss to see it and thus end up with completely unnecessary questions.
But FB is not dying. Apart from the initial burst I've never added that many new friends as I do now. Sure, I don't have that many new 20-something friends but people my own age (mid 40's) are jumping on FB as never before.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
so basically ew can replace all you wrote about google with Facebook, except Facebook also tries to link your account to other accounts you have with totally unrelated services (create an account, OR log in with Facebook for ease)
All online companies doing things for free are in the business of trying to build up as extensive of an online profile of you, so they can sell targeted ads to companies at the highest price (why pay much for a targeted ad if the company only has sparse, and limited profiles?)
We've seen things go horribly wrong. Plenty of times. Some are forgiven. Most are not. All are remembered permanently thanks to the internet.
Nah, these petty things are often forgotten in practice; internet or no internet. The next "scandal" that comes along erases them from most people's radar. I know they can be looked up again on the internet, but there's so much of this shit out there that it often (of course not always) gets naturally buried.
Anecdote: Our CEO (who is very famous) said some very dumb things a few years ago. What was said was reported internationally, a big scandal ensued, and it was very worrisome for the organisation. It was so big that all (>500) employees were invited to a large round-table to give their opinions on how the incident should be handled. The organisation did three things: distanced itself from the comments, issued a wrist-slapping, and hunkered down to weather the storm. A few months to a year later it was as if nothing had happened. People on the outside had either forgotten what was said or no longer cared, and the person who caused the shit-storm essentially remained in the same role. On occasion I still get questions about the event when people hear where I work, but they're not judgemental or angry questions. People just want to know what happened.
soylentnews.org
ah, but my point is they've diversified so much that they, as a whole entity, cannot disappear.
DuckDuckGo has taken over as my search engine, and openstreetmaps as my mapping views, but I still use Android. Even if Android goes away and is replaced by .. Jolla, say, then they'll still have advertising and all the other bits n bobs that'll keep them in the game while they come up with something new.
DEC, Yahoo, IBM, even Microsoft to a large extent, are all 1-trick ponies. They may have had huge tricks, but it was still 1 trick.
PS. You're only too big to fail if *you* owe the government money .. they'll want it back before letting you fail :-)
True, but I've also seen times when a company's Twitter presence gives some great customer service in a very public manner. I've even had it happen to myself at times. One example: My annual deal with my cable company (Time Warner Cable) was coming due. I called their customer service number and was offered a new "deal": Pay $10 more a month and get slower Internet speeds. Yes, that was the best they could offer. If I wanted to keep what I had, I'd have to have paid about $30 more a month. My wife complained on Twitter (more venting than looking for a reply) as we considered cutting cable. The people behind the TWC Twitter account gave us a number to call and we were offered a much better deal which saved us some money.
Obviously, YMMV. It's not guaranteed that complaining on Twitter will lower your bills, but this turned a potentially bad PR situation (customer's "deal" is to pay more for less service) into a good one (customer happy with new deal) and kept a customer who could have easily just cut out cable entirely. (Not that that's not an option anymore, but they've delayed it for a year or two.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I used Google+ for awhile and my main problems with it were:
- Real Name Policy: I rarely use my real name online. My Slashdot account is one of a few from my earlier days on the Internet when I did. On social media, I use a pseudonym. I'm known by that pseudonym when I blog so why would I want to use my real name on some social networks and my pseudonym on another? They eventually added a "nickname" field but only let people display it in a form like "Jason Levine (Pseudonym)". Why couldn't I give Google my real name but opt to have only my pseudonym show up?
- Pages Following: Google did give a place where you could use your Pseudonym only, but it involved extra steps every time to post there. In addition, you could only follow people on Pages if they followed you first. So I couldn't use that as my main screen, I had to use my real-name area to read G+ posts and then go to my Pseudonym screen to reply (if it let me).
- No third party app access: I believe this has changed, but for awhile there was no third party access to Google+. I couldn't compose a message and send it to both Twitter and Google+. However, I could use one tool to post to both Twitter and Facebook (were I on Facebook). This meant I had to use two tools to essentially post the same thing. I have limited social media time so this contributed to my decision to ax Google+. Like I said, this may have changed, but it turned me off the service at the time. You want to make your new service easy to use, not cumbersome.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Why not use GNU Octave? I can accept the EULA of Matlab but not the price.
Well, actually, I object to the EULA too. It's not open source.
It took some backtracking, but I think what the Telegraph article was referring to was this: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking/2013/11/24/what-will-we-learn-from-the-fall-of-facebook/
For starters, unless I'm mistaken about which article they're talking about, the study wasn't conducted in 8 countries, but one: namely, the UK.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the small bubble where I live, my friends and I still regularly use Facebook as a means of interaction (I'm currently 16). Sure, we also use Instagram and Tumblr and Snapchat - those are all there (but for the life of me I have yet to figure out why Snapchat is as popular as it is...). But Facebook is still the primary method of chatting, sharing information, posting pictures, whatever. And yeah, we have Twitter accounts, but Twitter is more for public broadcasting, whereas Facebook has the ability for targeted posting... kind of. In any case, I wouldn't say Facebook is DEAD. My friends all across the country (US) do say that they use Facebook more than other methods of communication out of sheer ease of use.
As one who makes his living in digital interactive software development... you might stop to think that digital marketing has created a huge number of programming jobs over the last ten years. Facebook has been a major boon to millions of developers, and continues to do so.
What you've also failed to take into account is that there are more hot chicks in the marketing department... than anywhere else in the company.
Murphy was an optimist
Can you tell me how you ensure how no information gets sent to Facebook across all the computing platforms you use?
Be careful of jokes. Men who are under the armpit of a dominant female will react violently, as told, when you attack NOW, Greenpeace, or any like Facist organization. And, many men who post here can only get the attention of such a female.
Whether you like it or not. most of the public Internet is about marketing. Love these posters comparing marketing to used car salesmen and lawyers. How, I wonder, did they decide to drive X brand of car, or drink Z brand of soda pop, or choose one computer over another... They consumed marketing. To those who believe that all business is inherently evil, please don't reply.
The most coveted demographic is not teenagers - it's people in their early twenties. At that point in their lives, they are making brand decisions that will remain unchanged for most of their lives. Yes, there are exceptions, but for the most part once people develop brand affinity in their early twenties they don't switch horses.
Given the proliferation of aggressive endless marketing techniques when they were growing up, most of these folks are completely immune to traditional advertising. They Tivo/DVR. They listen to downloaded/streaming music on their mobile devices, not FM radio. When they surf the web, 60% of them are mobile, and they ignore the ads at the bottom of the screen, hardly noticing them. So if you're selling ANYTHING how do you reach these people? Any way you can, that's how.
To those of us that make a living building this stuff, Twitter offers nothing, Tumblr will keep a slicer busy for a week but that's it, Instagram and pInterest are simple API's, similar to Twitter just a little more buggy and unstable... Whereas Facebook is a fairly decent platform to build apps on (after years of instability and an utter lack of Q/A) - and it offers remarkable demographics on the participants compared to everyone else.
So once again we read the story about the death of Facebook, and laugh. Because the clients who write the checks keep spending money there. And the contests, given a halfway decent acquisition strategy, return large numbers of engaged brand fans who stay engaged after the contest is over. Conversions (that's sales to you non Digital Interactive Folks) can be measured from Facebook outbound click traffic and married with the customer's key demographics. That's golden, nobody else has that.
Murphy was an optimist
At least your data can be downloaded anytime you want
This is a UDP joke, I don't care if you get it or not...
Google did this - search was popular, reached critical mass, then started doing lots of other things, and now no-one would say they will disappear.
I will say it. They will disappear when something newer and shinier catches people's interest. People said the same thing about Yahoo! and Altavista too - they were too big to ever disappear. Where are they now?
Funny you should ask Search atavista, click on the link, and up comes a Yahoo search window. Go to http://www.yahoo.com/ and up pops a strikingly active looking web page for your "Where are they now?" question. The answer is "Pretty much where it's always been.
It's something I've noticed in a lot of slashdotters. Unless a business is number 1, it somehow doesn't exist. Yahoo such as it is, has branched out into sports, with it's own ESPN'ish people. It has subcategories like entertainment, food, health, and other stuff. It has a very active groups section. And as a search engine, it's actually better than Google in many respects. I used to use Google a lot, until my searches just brought up sites that figured out how to game Google, and the first page of links were just other business search engines, that often had what I was looking for only in the meta crap.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Well put. And why does the conversation lead to the profitability of some business? Who cares? If Social Media is a Marketing tool and what people use it for is incidental for marketers to spy on them as the business model for the corporations, Google, Facebook, etc. etc. in the business. then why should we care that that business model succeeds? I argue that it would be good for it to fail and the lot of them to go out of business. The reason is that to get that Big data application they have crippled communication and stiefled conversation in favor of shallow ephemera and fads. And I hardly care that marketers need fads, what they need is push back and criticism and to be challenged for being stupid and fallaceous, so does the whole industry.
Nothing will discredit tech more than this, because when the 80% of people see that their livelihoods have been threatened by a digital revolution whose visibility to them is fraud by banks allowed to speculate in markets, and marketing fraud in social media, they will begin to doubt the idea that tech was meant to benefit everyone, and they will begin to seek restrictions on the applications computers are being used for. If they will simply not use or will boycott abusive technology or seek direct remedies in the courts against companies, I do not know, but I think that the reputations of tech companies and tech people is now tarnished in a way that we have never seen before.
I don't think a professor can demand that of the students. What if a student cannot accept the EULA of Twitter? Will the school refund the tuition and other expenses incurred before knowing about this requirement?
Yeah, I thought the same thing when the local public school (a mandatory-attendance government-run institution) required kids to sign up for Turnitin(TM). Certainly I didn't have an option as to whether to pay my school taxes in light of this requirement.
I think it is bogus, but good luck getting the majority to go along with it.
And if you didn't want to buy the textbook the course demanded? Of course, there is the conundrum of what happens if you disagree with something the Professor says. Can you retroactively refuse to pay for that textbook? or sue the university for the damage that a Twitter account caused you?
My only advice is that people realize that if they are going to have extremely stong convictions that will not allow them to participate in requirements of various courses, or even professions, they will need the courage of those convictions. Blind people cannot demand to be issued drivers licenses, even if it is discriminator,p>y. People who have such an objection to using Twitter need to resign themselves to the fruits of that refusal. Twitter isn't an illegal or immoral service, only a stupid one. What is even more bogus is that stuff like the National Electric Code or United States Pharmacopoeia is copyrighted. It is basically illegal to tell somebody what the law is - you need to pay the appropriate corporation for the right to know the law.
I don't think you meant what you wrote. What you wrote is saying that you can't discuss the NEC with anyone unless they buy a copy.
And you can always try this link to pdfs
https://bulk.resource.org/codes.gov/
Pardon the tiny url, the website is the nfpa
http://tinyurl.com/n6hvw8v
That is for online viewing only.
Much ado about not a whole awful lot.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Hell, If I was teaching Web Design, I'd make the students code the HTML, CSS, and scripting by hand. Using a templating environment is fine for the small business person who hasn't the time to learn the nuts and bolts, but if that is going to be your profession, I'd make you code by hand and you'd do it from the command-line. Go look at Koding. That gives you a virtualized Linux, a command tool and a web server and browser.
I'm required, although it's not checked, to tweet and retweet stuff at least 10 minutes everyday related to the company while at work and I'm a logic designer. It's funny seeing the marketing speak come out.
Surprised that they think this type of twitter marketing actually works. Most people unfollow accounts that do this.
If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s, all airlines would be blended-wing, with waveriders being next year, minimum gas mileage for new cars would be 100 mpg at 100 mph, fast food would be fast (and healthy), the Tea Party would be banned by law, teenagers would have memorized everything published on the Blue Zones and ebooks would be in LuaLaTeX format, not a subset of HTML.
But of course we all know that adoption of standards is shaped by businesses trying to create captive markets. A very good example is Google Docs. That is a dumbed down environment that supports no widely used standards and is no more sophisticated than Word 2000. The web tools is particular are very like Front Page 2000, in fact I think that some old Grey Beard form Microsoft of that vintage designed it.
Make text-only USENET groups available for free on the web! What is old is new again, and a decent answer to social media. C'mon you venture capitalists. Are you afraid to have a debate?
OMFG! Can't believe it!
Can you imagine?
The times when the internet was ours, when all the stuff was nerdy and interesting, when we used mailing lists, IRC and newsgroups....
I think I'm going to install Xirc right now! And script the fuck out of it!!!
%F YEAH MATES!!!! %F
-- 29A the number of the Beast
The article wasn't written by Daniel Miller, rather a journalist that rewrote it to make it seem more interesting. If you want to see what he really wrote, and his thoughts about the whole thing, here: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking/2013/12/30/scholarship-integrity-and-going-viral/
The Tea Party doesn't stand for reducing the national debt or budget deficit any more. It started out as a populist movement with those goals, but it was hijacked by religious nuts and far-right politicians. Do you hear any TP politicians calling for a massive reduction in military spending? Of course not. You can't be simultaneously in favor of reducing the budget and maintaining military spending.
It's "dead" in the same sense that MySpace and AOL are "dead", it just hasn't gotten as far-gone as those two, yet. It's headed there. All the teens and early 20-somethings have abandoned it, and that means it's going to go the way of AOL in the future. The question is, how quickly? These young people aren't going to change their mind in 5-10 years and come back to it in droves.
It also has burned a lot of working people, when their employer saw something on FB they didn't like and fired them. I know at least one person this happened to.
No, that's lawyering.
Blind people cannot demand to be issued drivers licenses, even if it is discriminatory.
The only reason blind people cannot get a drivers license is because it isn't possible to safely operate a vehicle (today) without being able to see. That really isn't discriminatory (at least not in the commons sense of the word), and neither is refusing to hire a blind person to translate ordinary print books into braille or refusing to hire a quadriplegic as a ditch digger.
On the other hand, requiring somebody to pass a multiple choice test is discriminatory, because there are people who have the knowledge to drive safely who couldn't pass a multiple choice test (I know one firsthand - took about 30 tries to pass though she could have discussed any driving law in conversation or by drawing diagrams and was perfectly able to follow the rules of the road when driving). But, that's another topic...
I don't think you meant what you wrote. What you wrote is saying that you can't discuss the NEC with anyone unless they buy a copy.
I didn't say that you couldn't discuss the NEC - only that you couldn't tell somebody what it is (as in, verbatim). If you posted a copy of it on your website without permission you'd get in trouble for it, despite it having the force of law in many communities.
And you can always try this link to pdfs.
Thanks - useful, though I don't see a copy of the NEC or USP in there.
Pardon the tiny url, the website is the nfpa...
That is for online viewing only.
That's my point. Sure, some of these organizations may provide copies for limited public use, but they're still copyrighted and the example you just linked isn't even visible unless you register for an account.
Governments should not be able to incorporate copyrighted outside standards into law by reference. They should be free to directly incorporate them if they wish, but they would need to republish them in the body of the law and putting them into the public domain in the process. You shouldn't need to pay somebody for the right to access the law. Sure, I'm fine with administrative fees if you want them to print you a bound copy, but anybody should be free to copy and distribute anything that has the force of law.
Facebook greatly helped scientific research and scientists in better communicating each other. We have formed a team of over 900 scientists in interacting over the Latest Physics Discoveries in 2013 in X-ray Physics, Nuclear Physics, Atomic Spectroscopy, Solar Physics and Special Theory of Relativity etc. And the strength of our team is rapidly growing because of encouragement from Facebook team. Google's Page Rank is 9 for M.A.Padmanabha Rao's Six Fundamental Physics - Facebook Path: /BharatRadiation/timeline
http://www.webstatschecker.net/stats/keyword/six_fundamental_physics_discoveries
On searching for "Physics Dscoveries" in Google Search Window, Facebook also projects the following in first 10-20:
M.A.Padmanabha Rao's Six Fundamental Physics Discoveries ...
https://www.facebook.com/BharatRadiation
M.A.Padmanabha Rao's Six Fundamental Physics Discoveries. 42 likes. Two more emissions from radioisotopes and XRF sources reported in 2010 ..
Facebook project the following pages:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002083039913
https://www.facebook.com/NewSolarEmission?ref=hl
https://www.facebook.com/SuperluminaVvelocities?ref=hl
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Research-Papers-on-Physics-Discoveries-by-MA-Padmanabha-Rao/397232083690288?ref=hl
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Latest-Indian-Physics-Discoveries-Press-Reports/490532954303217?ref=hl
M.A.Padmanabha Rao, PhD (AIIMS)
That's just ugly.