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Facebook Is a Plague That'll Burn Out In a Few Years, Says Study
Nerval's Lobster writes "Facebook will bleed the majority of its users over the next three years, according to Princeton researchers John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, who arrived at that conclusion by comparing Facebook to an infectious disease. That's sort of logical: both Facebook and viruses depend on networks of human beings to "transmit" and grow; and just as people shake off viruses, they should (according to the theory, at least) eventually stop using Facebook. But how do a bunch of determined scientists actually trace Facebook's theoretical rise and fall? Cannarella and Spechler decided to use the frequency with which "Facebook" is typed into Google as their main dataset (various other studies have also relied on Google Trends as the basis for predictions). Those search queries reached a peak in December 2012. The researchers took that dataset and plugged it into prebuilt model for the spread of infectious disease (PDF), tweaked things a bit, and found that Facebook—like any plague that's burned through a significant portion of a population—will decline before the decade is out. Seem unlikely? To be fair, the researchers ran the term 'MySpace' through their model and found it traced that social network's rise and fall with some accuracy; but Facebook is much larger than MySpace at its peak, and woven much more pervasively throughout the fabric of the Web—thousands of Websites rely on the Network That Zuckerberg Built to connect with users, advertise, sell products, and much more. That prevalence alone should slow any Facebook decline. In addition, Facebook has begun releasing standalone apps such as Messenger, as part of a broader strategy to expand the company's branding and functionality beyond its core Website. Whether or not you like this theory that Facebook will 'burn out' has any validity, it's clear the social network is trying to mutate."
..when it's finally gone /first
If anything, Facebook will contract to an identity service provider used by web sites such as Answers.com and The Huffington Post to verify that each account is associated to one real person.
Frienster > Myspace > Facebook > SpaceFace > [and so on] ...
IT Crowd FTW:
http://youtu.be/6rNgCnY1lPg
Google is a candle that will be cured in a few years.
PlanetVulkan.com
On the other hand, Facebook might be more like a cold -- something that everybody dislikes but cannot entirely avoid.
My 70 year old mother uses Facebook.
Once a technology reaches that level of integration into society, it, or at least the core product benefit, will be with us forever.
..don't panic
Kind of like how the flu season peaked in February 2013, and now there will never be big flu outbreaks again.
"Cannarella and Spechler decided to use the frequency with which "Facebook" is typed into Google as their main dataset"
This is probably too obvious of a hole to poke in a scientific work, but... How do they know that it doesn't mean that users are either a) giving up using Google or b) remembering where the fuck to find facebook.com? It would be interesting if they tried the same trick on GMail (a service that grew fast from word of mouth but is decidedly not in decline last i checked) and see what their prediction says.
Facebook is AOL without the CDs.
Social networking, or rather doing so on a particular website, is a fad; it's no different than slap bracelets, Troll dolls, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, etc., etc., etc.
Eventually, the unwashed masses will find some other new 'toy' to obsess over, and Facebook will turn into the morose, resigned version of Woody from Toy Story III*.
* I assume; to be honest, I never actually saw that one.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
While I would not be disappointed if this were true, the whole thing seems to be predicated on a dubious analogy. What is playing the role of the immune system here? In the case of MySpace, Facebook seems to have played that role.
When the parents and grandparents start using it the "kids" tend to move elsewhere. Eventually the parents and grandparents follow. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I have done a Google Trends search for reproduction, and as you can see, interest has been steadily declining. Based on my findings, I conclude that humanity is no longer interested in procreation. By extrapolating into the future, you can see that all humans will have died out around the year 2140. Mark your calendars accordingly.
cannot come soon enough. I do not have, nor will I have, any social media accounts. I absolutely refuse. Some day you will have difficulty in finding work without a LinkedIn or Facebook account. Bollocks. I've never had issue getting job interviews and it was never mentioned. No one cares, to be honest. If anything, a potential employer may look at a Facebook profile to see if the person is a complete wanker -- posting photos of public drunkenness and other sordid acts. Another thing that never came to fruition was the idea that employers and perhaps others considered one weird/awkward/dangerous/risky if they did NOT have a Facebook or other social media presence. Bollocks. Why should I give a monkey's toss what people think if I'm doing my best to lead a normal life.
So as I understand it, you want to use searches for Gmail to rule out other things that could have caused the 2013 decline in searches for Facebook. Google Trends: Gmail happens not to show this sort of decline.
I am reminded how Microsoft managed to "mature" the WinTel PC market with a steady flow of bugs, upgrades, dropped support and other frustrations. After Windows XP, people were reluctant to move to anything new. And after Vista, people were down-right pissed off. Windows 7 is livable but Microsoft had to compete with tablets so they are forcing Windows 8.x on everyone and even the device makers are getting pretty bothered.
With all the comings and goings of social networking services, people are also beginning to figure it out. When was the last time you saw anyone with MySpace? Been a while right? And before that? Geocities? (Okay, may not fully qualify is social networking but was certainly a predecessor.) People are starting to wise up enough to see beyond the novelty of it all. Perhaps it's not happening fast enough for my tastes, but I see it happening.
Interesting that the study doesn't mention too much about the access to Facebook via mobile/portable devices. Google search may be handy in determining trends but access methods have DRASTICALLY changed over the last few years since MySpace's rise/fall.
As much as I do wish this would be the case, I don't think it's going to happen.
On the other hand, ten years ago I thought myspace would be around forever, and we all know how that turned out.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
So yeah, like it or not, facebook is here to stay, probably longer than 2017
Myspace is still around too.
https://myspace.com/
Nobody really suggests facebook will be gone in 2017, merely that like myspace, nobody will care it still exists.
Fingers crossed.
I'm glad to hear that vanity, gossip, and pursuit of social status are fads that will eventually go away like skinny jeans.
Except that the vast majority of Facebook's traffic never passes through Google...
Nice try g+ marketing team!
My grandparents had AOL.My parents had AOL. Everyone I knew had at least an AIM account. Where is AOL/AIM now?
I have to return some videotapes...
This "study" is mostly bullshit. This article sums it up nicely:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
thousands of Websites rely on the Network That Zuckerberg Built to connect with users, advertise, sell products, and much more.
I'm pretty sure that will speed its decline. What user wants Facebook to help give advertisements? I dare you to go ask random people on the street about that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Assuming that Facebook is analogous to an infectious disease that will die out, Facebook will die out.
Wow! A deductive truth! They didn't even need to do the study!
There's a glaring flaw, directly related to the old phrase, "There are 3 types of lies; Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics".
They're basing the trend on the frequency of the string "facebook" being typed into Google search.
In 2012, they saw the peak.
Guess what? People use smart phones A LOT more, and they use the various facebook apps, and when one wants a facebook app, they search the relevant app store (iTunes, Google Play, etc).
My money would bet that smart phone use covers the dip on the search trend, but even if it doesn't fully cover it, it's got to play a part, which would (almost certainly) tarnish their results (maybe it still will die, but it'll just take 3x's as long as they thought due to bad assumptions made about the google trend numbers).
It'll probably still die someday, for some loose definition of die (is geocities still around?)
While I don't doubt that Facebook has already peaked and will experience some drop off, I don't think the method used here is as valid as in years past. The typical user will just type "Facebook" into the address bar of a computer and click on the first result that their search engine of choice returns. Or at least that is what they do when using a traditional computer. However, everything has been moving towards mobile apps. The only time you are going to search on your phone or tablet for Facebook is once in your app store. Even Facebook has admitted that this is the trend, so they have been pushing to monetize their mobile apps. Just a quick look at the Facebook App in the Google Play store and it says that it has been installed 500,000,000-1,000,000,000 times. One can assume the same thing for the iTunes store as well. That is a lot of people out there who aren't typing "Facebook" into a search engine that this study are not going to identify.
Nobody really suggests facebook will be gone in 2017, merely that like myspace, nobody will care it still exists.
... except pedos and the feds who love (to hunt) them.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
What if Facebook is more like stomach bacteria where we evolve to utterly depend on it?
You can manage it, but you may never be able to make it fully go away.
Although applying the concept is interesting in theory, all trolling aside a foundational difference that makes this comparison nonsense is that *most* human's don't want the virus they contract whereas *most* Facebook users want to participate on Facebook until its usefulness expires. Facebook's usefulness has an indeterminate expiration that is subjective per individual (or group of like-minded individuals) whereas the virus is counter-useful. Now, if they were to apply disease patterns of a virus whose side effect were of varied usefulness to people, then we'd have a more productive comparison.
The summary alludes to this, but Facebook has done a much better job integrating into society than MySpace ever did at it's peak. At best, MySpace was a good place to go see about a new band. Facebook has built alliances (either officially, or just by use) with almost every major brand, and every company in the western world. This kind of branding will be held on to by corporations big and small, as they know it's a good way to reach users.
What we could see happen is that users abandon the service to connect to real people, and only use it to connect to brands, because the brands are demanding it. Over time (several more years) the brands will likely deprioritize their presence on the network, because people don't engage with them the way they used to. Go watch a commercial break on TV right now, I bet that one of the ads uses facebook.com/brandname as their website address. How insane is that? Snickers uses facebook.com/snickers instead of Snickers.com! Why would you do this? Facebook limits the opportunities that brands have to engage, and yet brands have played right into it, because the network is so powerful.
I do believe Facebook will live on as a way to authenticate and connect with other websites. It's a useful way to verify someone's real name, their social connections, and that they are a "good actor." See: many dating websites.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
That would imply to me that it doesn't need facebook or a facebook account to run. Neither of those is true.
The assumption that Facebook will decline in the medium term is challenged by the examples of other networks which became pervasive enough that they became effectively perpetual (at least until disrupted by outside forces). The telephone network, the Interstate highway system, and the power grid have all held on and show no signs of going away (even as the telephone network merges with the internet). Oh yeah: and the internet.
As for the trend of a decline in googling for "facebook", that could just as easily reflect the fact that fewer people need to search for it. Either they've bookmarked it, it's their home page, their browser is smart enough to do URL completion, or it's perpetually at the top of their history, so they never hit Google on the way to it.
Don't get me wrong: Facebook will go away at some point, just like the phone system and Interstates will fade away before humanity does. But projections that it is already in decline (or trending toward that inflection point) may be premature.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
For authentication, MS and Google can provide that, or one can use OpenID.
Google already provides OpenID. But whether OpenID can replace Facebook authentication depends on whether a particular relying party trusts a particular OpenID provider not to grant distinct identifiers to sockpuppets of one real person. With a verified Facebook account, at least you can be sure that the identifier is connected to a cell phone subscription.
For online messaging, SMS, MMS, old fashioned E-mail, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, IRC, talk, and rwall have been around. Similar with offline messages and group chats.
I was under the impression that Facebook's spam filter had more teeth than e-mail or the popular IM systems because Facebook can apply stronger penalties against spammers. SMS/MMS costs real money per message.
I can imagine there will be a drop in users, but the idea that it will go extinct in three years seems out to lunch to me. Beyond that, I'm not sure it's methodologically sound to say "MySpace went tits up, so will Facebook". Facebook has done a lot to try to increase the capabilities and services users can use, out of sheer necessity of keeping them on board. It strikes me that Facebook is trying to do the exact opposite of Myspace.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What I see as the big flaw is comparing a plague...which has no positive features to its 'users' to something that does have positive features.
;-), but unlike the plague Facebook doesn't kill it's users (could we add that?) so it's not going to go away in the same manner.
The spread may be similar to STD/STIs which obviously have a positive feature in their spread
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I went to a job fair recently.
I was told that they weren't taking resumes there, but asked if I had a LinkedIN profile.
When I expressed that I didn't because I don't like social networks, I was corrected. "LinkedIN isn't like Facebook where you get posts of cats."
And he explained that they did ALL recruiting from LinkedIN.
My head assploded wondering why THEY were at a job fair, but never the less, I created my LinkedIN profile - sweet as honey - with my Github projects. No bites. No one even looks at them even though they are listed on my profile and resume. So mush for FOSS helping with hiring! NOTE: Github shows interest in projects and there are NO - zero- nothing - records of folks looking at my FOSS projects. I mean, WTF do I have to do?"
That wasn't what I was thinking of because LinkedIN pimps out their data - EVERYTHING is sold.
I created a profile because I need a job and as a peon, I have to conform and do what I need to do.
Of course, all these companies are looking for "out of the box thinkers" and folks who "do not conform to group think".
AND, the few recruiters who do contact me ONLY look at my current experience. They NEVER look past experience - which is ALL development. And now that I'm not working again, nothing. As soon as my profile showed an end date for my current job - and no begin date for a new one - nothing.
Unemployed means unemployable.
ANY and EVERY employer who says that they can't find qualified people is full of shit. And I'm moving on.
Payback is a bitch boys.
One day, I WILL be in a position to outsource IT (development same shit) services, and when I need IT folks, just wait. Just wait assholes. Just wait. IBM, NCR, Oracle, intel, Microsoft, EDS, Keane, .....just wait. Payback is a bitch!
Excuse me MR. Overpriced IT services corp, why should I go through you - a Third World talent reseller - and NOT hire Wipro or some other company that is actually based in the country YOU exploit? Hmmmm?!
Fuck you! That's why!
Can you GUARANTEE your date? Like Oracle DIDN'T for Oregon's Health system?! NO?! FUCK YOU! That's why!
Cock suckers! All of them!
Social networks have a life cycle. If they become cool, they grow. They grow too big, become uncool, the cool people leave, and they decline. Past top social networks include The Well, AOL, Geocities, and Myspace. Facebook's web traffic peaked in 2012.
A key problem for Facebook: they don't have a phone. Google has a phone OS, and uses it to lock users in and spy on them. Facebook doesn't have that power.
Did they really assume that a drop in people searching for Facebook equates to a drop in people using Facebook? Why not just a drop in new users trying to find Facebook???
It needs no more than being a ubiquitous water cooler. What is compelling about FB is that it's a stream of consciousness of your friends and relatives. You can leave it for a while and come back and you haven't really "missed" anything. It's the many-to-many with no programming, scripting, or other aggregator that makes it useful to everyone.
Here's what makes it special: you get to stay in touch with people you wouldn't normally stay in touch with, or even want to necessarily. WTF is that about? I have quite a few friends on FB - old (like HS) and new (just met at a class) - with whom I share enough common ground to get through half a beer in a bar before the uncomfortable silence sets in. With FB, I don't lose those friends to the physical and temporal distance which separates us - instead, I pick up bits and pieces they like to share about how their lives are going. As a result, an old 1/2 beer friend recently visited town, but we polished off an entire pitcher because we knew enough about one another - after 20 years of not seeing each other - that we had several things in common. I might keep up with 15-20 people, tops, but through facebook I actually still feel connected to a couple hundred. Not everybody journals, and of those, I'm not going to go to 200 separate pages, and even if I did, the interactive nature just isn't there.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Precisely! Nobody willingly "signs up" to get a virus and the entire time that you have a virus you are trying to get rid of it.
...is moving from one social network to the another.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
For a lot of people I think Facebook accounts really are transient ephemeral things more like colds.
Whenever when some damn website or game makes me have a Facebook account to sign up -- I make a new account with a throwaway username / password / email that I never care to remember -- and never use it again. That's why I think a lot of those "facebook has X users" or "Y% of users have abandoned facebook" are totally bogus. For just my accounts, sure I've abandoned 90% of them. But that doesn't make it fair to extrapolate that 90% of facebook accounts get abandoned. Just that some people don't want a permanent Facebook account.
TL/DR: I do get facebook accounts very much like I get mild colds. A get a new one a couple times a year; it doesn't last for more than a couple days; and they're merely mildly annoying.
But G+ does not have my friends there, nor does it have an official app for my phone (and I'm not about to enter my Google credientals on some 3rd party app). I don't see it really taking off until Google stops using it as marketing ploy.
Of course they may also shut it down any time with a warning of a few months, even if it seems a remote possibility now...
Every one of these studies seem to assume that Facebook will just stay the same. They never take into consideration that the service might actually evolve and adapt. To use the infectious disease analogy, Facebook would be more like a flu that keeps coming back year after year, adapting and changing while still being the flu.
I remember a decade ago people were saying the same thing about Google, and how it's becoming irrelevant and is just another in a long line of search engines. Except that Google didn't just sit around being a search engine. It branched out, adapted, and changed. Facebook will too, for better or for worse.
What are you talking about? It's FB marketing that modded him down to -1.
People who make those sorts of comments do not understand what Facebook is.
To understand that, you have to be aware of who funded Facebook and bankrolled all of it.
Which of course were various military types.
Facebook has never made a profit, and probably never will. But it isn't there to make a profit.
It is there to gather intelligence.
As long as it serves that purpose, it isn't going anywhere.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I wonder if there is a correlation with the rise of the Facebook mobile applications and a decline in people searching for Facebook. My previous experience has been that a big segment of people don't differentiate between searching for something and visiting the URl directly.
I wish these types of projections were accompanied with a verification that the authors shorted the stock.
the coincidences are just too many to be random...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
You would be hard pressed to finder a bigger critic of Facebook than myself and I dream of a day when it disappears forever into the forgotten history of the net, but even I scratch my head at how many articles are being written these days predicting its end. Did FB get on popular media's bad side, every day there's a new forecast by "experts" that teens are abandoning it and that it'll be gone any day now. It seems a little strong. Anyway, here's hoping.
What is your evidence that viruses never live symbiotically with humans?
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
Where is AOL/AIM now?
Moreover, the news site that AOL bought (The Huffington Post) has recently begun to require users to connect a Facebook account and get the Facebook account verified. Getting verified involves subscribing to mobile phone service, giving the number to Facebook, and replying to an SMS message sent by Facebook. A land line won't do for two reasons: 1. the number has to be unique or you'll get an error message that the number belongs to someone else in your household who has his or her own Facebook account, and 2. land lines can't receive SMS.
Other than just pure momentum, I just don't see anything FB unique that can't be duplicated by G+ or someone else. Their backend software is pretty cool, but that isn't exactly something the users see or care about.
There's nothing that Wal-mart sells that can't be bought elsewhere. But like Facebook, the reason it dominates is because it does all of that in one place, has a good back end (understatement for Wal-mart), has a well-established customer base that is content to stick with what they know despite what all the "cool" kids think, and leverages its size and reach well to keep its advantages intact.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Here's what I'm seeing.
I stopped using facebook myself when they went to mandatory unique ID and wanted my mobile number but I think I'm an outlier.
What's more common is friend's who
2) don't post anything "real" on facebook any more.
1) don't post ANYTHING on facebook and merely read other people's entries.
Many people have learned that a single facebook post can end your career. Facebook's practice of aggressively changing privacy settings to constantly "out" your private life has taught a large subgroup that safebook is unsafe. Your "likes" and "unlikes" are used to profile you- your sexual preferences- potentially illegal behavior- and certainly unwise, youthful excess.
It took a while for friends to learn to invite me some other way than facebook but now they use the phone or email again. I might sign up for it again someday but I don't feel any compelling interest. Previously my main interest was Farmville anyway.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
America Online claimed roughly 20 million paid members at its peak, plus millions more users of just AIM. I should know; I remember being one of the few people in alt.aol-sucks around 2000 who were willing to engage alleged AOL shills Andrewmatt and Illixer in reasonable discussion.
Oldsmobile is still very much with us. It's just called Buick now.
Pocket bikes still exist, but since they aren't experiencing the explosive growth they once did, you'll find there are a lot fewer companies making them today
After those firms left the market, did the price of a pocket bike increase due to the loss of economies of scale? Because that's what happened with 10" laptops after ASUS and Acer stopped making "netbooks" at the end of 2012. One had to instead buy an x86 tablet and Bluetooth keyboard at twice the price or more.
Yeah, but they all have their money now after having fleeced various investors in the IPO.
But people seek out Facebook like they sought chickenpox back before there was a vaccine. As a result, chickenpox did very well for itself.
with a Facebook app on just about every mobile device, not many people have to search for Facebook
Gmail likewise has an app that ships on every Android device with Google Play. So one might imagine that searches for Gmail would be affected the same way. Yet see replies to jeffmeden's comment.
I think that it's at least as likely that this signals a decline of Google instead. When I searched "trends" recently for things like "algebra" and "math help" it seemed liked the searches for even those fairly eternal subjects were trailing off in recent years. Comparing Google to Facebook, it seems that Google's the one that's flailing around more recently, with farts like G+, canceled projects, draconian merging of accounts, etc.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
By buying Instagram.
For a disease to do that, e.g. the plague they mention would have to be able to take over say... common cold.
In such a way that when you get a common cold - you instantly get the plague too.
They should try using their disease model on dieting.
One could be eating as much as one wanted and still end up with negative weight by 2017, becoming lighter than air.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
plugged it into prebuilt model for the spread of infectious disease (PDF), tweaked things a bit
Tweaked it how? And why?
and found that Facebook—like any plague that's burned through a significant portion of a population—will decline before the decade is out.
And did they find that because that's what they wanted to find, and they tweaked the model until it came out with an interesting story?
Seem unlikely? To be fair, the researchers ran the term 'MySpace' through their model and found it traced that social network's rise and fall with some accuracy
And how much tweaking happened there?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
yeah this research is virtually worthless...they make an increasingly common mistake of taking an analogy that indicates correlation, namely: "humans usage of networks is similar to viral infection of cells" and treat it as if it is some sort of physics law that is applicable in all ways. It's lazy research!
besides their bad analogy resulting in a bad research question, they didn't gather any data, they just ran some crosstabs on an existing data set...THIS data set, FTA:
to see if usage of 'facebook.com' "dies" like viruses die, you examine numbers of people who close their accounts. the worst is the part in parenthesis...sure there are times when number of google searches correlates well with popularity or usage, but its such a ridiculously tenuous connection & it doesn't matter how many other studies have used similar data sets.
facebook.com is not like a plague in one key way, people *want* its functionality just not its privacy invasion and lack of control.
to properly do this study, they can still let it 'spread' virally...but the virus analogy breaks down there...they need to have another factor that is a **REPLACEMENT NETWORK** that spreads in its place
Thank you Dave Raggett
Facebook will turn into a 30 year and older demographic, which then the dumb retarded animal children of today will go to the next popular thing they are dick-sucking on.
Young people are abandoning Facebook, it would appear:
http://socialmediatoday.com/rt...
What I think is going to happen is that just like computers maturing, people are going to lose their attraction to places like Facebook, Twitter et al. They will find out what they are good for, and get bored.
Certainly anything that relies on young people for it's popularity will end up being abandoned. Young people live in a world where what is "cool" becomes something to stay away from after the "non-cool" people start using it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
\dot? Isn't that the pro-Windows/DOS site where everyone complains endlessly about Linu$ the Locutus, they all say that Gnome shell and Ubuntu Unity are improvements because they comes closer to Windows 8's superior interface, they complain that piracy is undermining creativity, they say that DRM's are the way of the future, and everyone wears a goatee.
The fundamental problem is the assumption that one gets over the infection. For example, that's not true with HIV or Hepatitis C, viruses that tend to stick around for life once one gets infected. Second, Facebook has the distinction that the "infection" has value (including network effects). So Facebook has to burden the user enough to negate that value. If they don't do that, then the incentive to get "cured" doesn't exist.
Myspace is more centered around music and bands which is a niche, I'm not so sure you can use it as a model for facebook's rise and eventual fall.
In another study, a group of climate scientists decided to do something similar and found that Facebook would sport 27 billion users by the year 2020. And all of the polar bears will be dead.
I'd like to "like" this story.
http://slashdot.org/submission...
In case someone missed it, FB admitted a month ago that teens are leaving in droves. Their belief however, is those users will come back when they age to re-connect with lost friends and family. Big words from a company that that has yet to exist through even 1 partial generation. My 17 year old daughter says – and I quote – “nobody uses facebook but old people and ghetto kids”. As far as using FB as a login verification, I doubt it. I refuse to use it and won’t post to sites that require FB log in. I detest their cannibalizing everything I do online for marketing and profitability.
but let's not compare it to smallpox.
Google+ is DOA
Poe's Law. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. There is no telling whether the poster was serious or sarcastic.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Nice try Facebook marketing team!
Nope. Just paying attention to the real world instead of slashthink.
You type the www for hostnames that don't need it? Get off my slashdot, luser.
To get several Facebook accounts verified, you have to have several active mobile phone numbers, all of which can receive SMS from Facebook.
They might think the curve looks like the life of a virus but social sites are killed by spam. They start with very low levels of spam as the membership grown spam is attracted. A critical point is reached where the site is no longer useful because it is overwhelmed with info you don't want. A cleaner spam fee solution comes along and everyone migrates. Saw this with usenet then myspace and FB is getting there.
is geocities still around?
There are third party archives (both archive.org and dedicated archiving products) of at least some of the content but geocities itself has closed down.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
A key problem for Facebook: they don't have a phone.
I beg to differ. This was tried at least twice that I'm aware of, once with the HTC Status (it had a dedicated Facebook button and a hardware keyboard; the Salsa was the touch-only variant), and again with the HTC First. Both of these phones failed. HARD.
Facebook doesn't need a phone, because choosing the Facebook phone means not having the latest Galaxy unit or the latest iPhone. I would dare attribute a part of Facebook's earlier success to the fact that they didn't have a phone...but they made it a point to be EVERYWHERE. It was possible to text a status from a dumbphone. They've had amongst the best mobile sites for a very long time. They integrated with Windows Mobile 6.5. They have apps for WP7, WP8, W8. They have Blackberry apps, both old-style and new-style, and they of course have iOS and Android flavors...and, again, a well-designed mobile browser interface.On Android specifically, they ask for literally every permission available (except root, I believe), so they can spy on users just as efficiently as Google can.
It's foolish to compete with the other vendors, when you can simply ensure that you're present on their devices. Remember the immortal adage: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Facebook = Syphilis!
Ha ha
People need more substance in their social interaction than what is provided to them by using facebook. Eventually many facebook users will do what this user did and close their facebook account in favor of real conversations and face-to-face meetings.
They also work as viruses and they are still here after thousands of years.
Facebook is really just an improved BBS and just like all the previous effors, it will eventually go the way of the Dodo. I think that is obvious. The real question is how long will it still last and this epidemiology model is probably a good estimator.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I don't think FB will vanish in a few years.
But it will become a commodity. Instead of being the hip thing to go to, it'll just be there. It's part address book, part blog, part photo collection, part event manager, but with the excitement gone.
I'm sure when the first supermarket opened, it was a huge event and everyone was excited for a few weeks. All that stuff! In one place! wow!
And then the excitement went away and today we go to the supermarket and don't even actually look at it anymore.
And that last is the crucial part. When people stop spending half their life on FB and just use it for this and that, ad revenue is going to come crashing down. That, rather than everyone leaving, is probably going to seal its fate.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I use Android, and I can barely get away from G+-tied official apps. You are a lucky person.
So exactly is the "core product benefit" of Facebook? Its a social media aggregation site that originally was designed to allow students in colleges to communicate without being physically present. Now its still a bloated social media aggregation site that vacuums meta data of its users who communicate and game with each other without being physically present. However, there are at least 12 others who perform the social media aggregation function like twitter, pinterest, google plus etc.
Facebook can very well vanish just like AOL has done and no one would notice except internet historians.
Diseases tend to burn out because they either kill or immunize their victims. I don't see how Facebook does that.
Absolutely the first thought I had regarding this. It just means more people use bookmarks, shortcut and their browser history to access the site. Not many people need to search Google for Facebook.
Sure people can complain about people taking pictures of their oatmeal, cat, or putting whatever mundane status they like. However I don't think that is the point of the article (which I didn't read, so I am kind of guessing). If a particular friend is too annoying I have the option to mute or unfriend them.
I agree with much of your assessment, particularly since I live about 2000km away from my home town, high school, family, etc...
What I do see as the point is Facebook in the beginning was all about what you mention, being a useful tool (with some quirks already mentioned). However now, since the 70 Billion IPO or whatever, and so many users, the quest has been to monetize everything so it can actually make a lot of money (other than the owners making off like bandits with overpriced stock). This means selling your data to whoever (advertisers mostly), ad placement, and anything else that can make a buck. From my own perspective the reality is now for every "tool" I scroll through, I am getting served up ads, and a lot of them. There is a balance between too annoying to be useful, and just enough not to care. In addition, they REALLY need to change it so people cannot make money off page hits. As the whole mess is turning into one great big chain email letter from the 1990's. You will never guess what this dog did, click to find out? My mom said she would kill my bunny unless I get a million likes! Learn this one little trick moms use to burn belly fat... etc...
At a certain point you hit a threshold where the annoyance out weighs the usefulness of the tool, at which point you will start to bleed users. If the progression is anything, it is only going to get worse. This doesn't even look at generational usage, or newer technology, social media trends, etc...
I eat butter, whats wrong with that?
In moderation it is probably heaps healthier than margarine. It was developed as livestock feed!
I also listen to CD's, though only occasional, and only in the car.
As for bed warmers... can you even buy those anymore? I would imagine the liability prevents it nowadays. I would be too afraid of immolating myself one night. Though I do remember them being cozy when I was a kid (and getting in trouble for forgetting to turn off).
If it is there to gather intelligence, it isn't doing a very good job of it... :p
I can see the validity of the criticism of the Princeton study's methodology, using Google search as a metric for interest in Facebook, and the numerous people here have pointed out that Facebook is accessed in ways that use Google, directly. That is indicative unless Google analytics, which is deployed many places, DOES count visits to Facebook.
Even if the research stands up, the notion that Facebook can adapt to ecosystem changes does complicate the measure. Even if visits to ones's newfeed goes down, the use of other interfaces to use Facebook as a chat or messaging service might keep the use rate up.
I did see a graph that showed the growth of Facebook account numbers, a few months ago, I cannot now give a link, but that chart showed a zero change in slope with the potential to flatten out. Maybe that is the first clue that the current set-up had reached its maximum potential.
More of an impression is that the News Feed has limited potential to take more advertising before it starts to become too disruptive. Facebook is adding automatically run sponsored video this year and that could cause a large back lash if it isn't done right. Facebook has a huge risk to fail right there, and if thye cannot grow their revenues, their economic failure could be fast and furious.
I dislike the structure of Facebook communication and of social media generally. I think that the blog is too unstructured for any kind of meaningful discussion. That is not central to the economic viability of social media directly. If Social media is regarded merely as a commercial tool that people use to find products and services, the blog form is adequate, but if people really want more than that they might lose interest in social media generally, and Facebook in particular. People try to push ideas and causes on Facebook and other social media but unless the appeal has fairly immediate knee-jerk appeal it goes not where. I am not suggesting that such impulsive behavior has no place, just that social media as a dominant force in Internet communication restricts the range of ideas quite a bit. I'd like to see that change, not so much that people use Facebook less or for what it is good at, but that they use it and Social Media less for what they are not good at. In this regard, Google+ is more like LinkedIn as a venue for rather shameless attention-getting and promotion than Facebook and is even less adequate as a forum for discussion. Slashdot fits that need much better, so does reddit, but even these two lack the structure needed for an effective focused discussion. The USENET had what is needed. I'd like to see a re-emergance of that style of discourse, especially in the election season.
One area in which Facebook, the blog, and Social Media are very weak is in dealing with bullying and trolling. If for no other reason, threading and context reply on Facebook would really help to manage abuse, and that includes topic drift and hijacking, which are a normal and expected part of most conversations, but which are particularly poorly handled by the strictly chronoogical form of a blog. I believe that the Big Data application of marketers and the scale of the backend prevents the introduction of the needed structure of a forum, and so I have no hope that the return of these features, that have existed in e-mail and newsgroups long before there were web browsers. Facebook users and other blog users can be very intolerant of the normal distractions people throw into conversations, and the reason is not that people are rude but that the technology doesn't correctly model how people want to communicate. What is preventing this is the commercial uses and the cost of doing searches for the Big Data application.
What Facebook does could be done much cheaper and offer much more flexibility if the CMS application were made more regionally. The claim that Facebook serves 1 Billion users at a time is for the benefit of Facebook's business partners. You and I as users have at most a few hundred friends, and I am p
Many phenomena in many spheres (especially social) can be modelled using the pattern of an infectious disease. That doesn't have any bearing on their quality, good or bad. I guess it's okay that OP chose such biased phrasing since it's not one of those big, important issues. But it still bugs me.