> “In three years of research and talking to hundreds of people and everyday users, I don’t think I heard anyone say once, ‘I love Facebook,’?”
Does anyone really buy this? Who cares what people say? It's all about what they do. People say a lot of things. It's cool to not love FB. Yet somehow, some way, it remains one of the most addictive and stickiest products for an ever-increasing and huge number of people.
Really? You think Facebook is a totally utilitarian joyless tool like a shopping bag?
People need to use shopping bags because they need to carry groceries. No one needs to use Facebook. If you decide tomorrow that you absolutely hate shopping bags, your grocery shopping is going to be a hell of a lot less convenient. If you decide tomorrow that you absolutely hate Facebook, you're just going to have more free time.
This is a ridiculous point. "No one needs to use Facebook"? That's subjective and not your call to make unless you're defining need by "things that are required in order to stay alive", in which case shopping bags aren't a need either.
Mithaldu's point, as I understood it, was that shopping bags serve a very clear function and people don't have strong feelings of love towards them. They use them because they work. Same thing with FB (apparently). What this article fails to grasp is that having billions of people feel that they need to use your service is worth way more than people saying they "like" your product.
Yes, that was my point. People don't love or hate their shopping bags because they don't think about them in the first place². Facebook is the same thing to many people. Something they use everyday without giving it a second thought. (Until the handle breaks / some ui element is redesigned. Then they get huffy and a few words later the analogy breaks down.)
²³ Just to head off any possible future complaints about that. Some people do think about shopping bags. I do. I like cloth ones and hate the rest. I'm sure there's also some people who think about facebook. We're talking about the average street person though.
³ Yes, there is no footnote 1, i have no superscript 1 on my keyboard. Please send it if you find it.
If users generally dislike facebook, but continue to use it, it's a bad situation to be in for Facebook. It indicates that people are using the product because of its network effects and despite the product itself.
It means that if anything begins to actually challenge the network effect of facebook, they will be in a very tough spot.
A telling moment that happened two nights ago for me. A friend from ~8 years ago came to visit and we wanted to send a joking message out to a few people from the old group of friends we used to hang out with.
The conversation was literally:
A: "Post it to Facebook and tag everyone."
B: "Ehhh. It would be funnier to find an old email thread and reply to it."
We went with B. It seemed like a better idea, plus we weren't sure if folks in the group checked Facebook. But everyone reads email -- and sure enough, we got life updates from the whole gang within 12 hours.
Yeah, because of its age, ubiquity, relative lack of growth etc I think people don't consider email along with the emerging sexy social networking platforms. I tend to use it in preference to Facebook if I'm communicating with specific people. I would not use it for sending everybody I know amusing pictures of cats.
> It indicates that people are using the product because of its network effects and despite the product itself.
It could mean a lot of things. Maybe it means it's cool to say you dislike FB. Maybe it means people feel badly about their addiction to social networks in general. My point is that it could mean a million things that may very well have nothing to do with FB.
Furthermore, what you're describing sounds to me like the best situation for any company to be in. Ever. You make something that is so compelling and you solve a certain problem so well that people tolerate it despite its deficiencies.
> You make something that is so compelling and you solve a certain problem so well that people tolerate it despite its deficiencies.
That's the opposite of what I'm describing. I'm describing making something that people don't find compelling, that doesn't solve their problems, but they use it because it's their only option (the network effect).
I'd liken this to the position Microsoft held in the late 90s and early 2000s. Most people had an active dislike for MS, and undoubtedly helped the meteoric rise of Apple as the MS-alternative.
FaceBook already has had companies brand themselves as the anti-FaceBook.
I agree. For me, Facebook has become more of a utility. If asked the same questions I would probably answer in a similar way. I do not 'love' Facebook the way I 'love' other products but it has its uses.
I agree that it is a utility. However unlike water or electricity, Facebook is free service subsidized by advertisements. That's a pretty horrible business model because they have to extract value from their users by reducing their privacy, controlling their information and identity, and cluttering their communication channels with noise.
Because their main costs are detached from their main revenue streams they have no way to accurately price how much a user costs them and how much value they provide. That's what makes it a horrible business model. How do you optimize what you can't accurately measure?
I think the fact that everyone uses Facebook but nobody's particularly fond of it points to three things:
1. Product stagnation. I think the monetization goals of Facebook are also starting to impact the usability and enjoyability of the site.
2. Brand issues. Why is Facebook not cool anymore? Is it simply due to ubiquity? Can they regain that credibility? Is the "youth market" a lost cause for them?
3. The potential for competition in the space. Building a social network seemed like a lost cause battle for many years because it is essentially "owned" by Twitter and FB - and nichely LinkedIn - (at least in the U.S.) For all its many, many (stress: many) flaws, ello showed one thing: people are clamoring for something other than Facebook. Now ello is really a bad approach at this, it feels like a weekend project rooted in one thing: to make sure it could never make money. But I get all that. Even a site with no clear or dependable direction, with atrocious design could generate a lot of interest with some false scarcity. To me that says if you can create "the next social network" and it's actually beautiful and usable and you don't position yourself on some dumb morality issue then there are people who will jump ship.
So while nobody loving Facebook and still using it might seem like all's well, to me it points to a lack of real competition and is - I'm sure - something discussed often at FB & Twitter.
Normally I would agree with this, but the recent example of Ello makes me wonder if FB's edge here isn't softer than it might look. I encountered a lot of non-technical people who desperately wanted Ello to be something they could use in place of Facebook. It didn't turn out to be that, of course, but you could almost taste how badly they wanted it to be that.
That kind of user desperation is a bad long-term sign for a brand.
Facebook, the product, is no longer this super sexy app that college kids are checking out. Looking for Facebook to be that, you will probably predict its future demise.
But that's not what Facebook is anymore. Facebook is the social graph expressed in Internet form, and is so interwoven with the fabric of the Internet that it's difficult to avoid, even if you're intentionally doing so.
Some products phase in and out, that's for sure. I think Zuck's realized the potential for that to happen, and once he got on the top of the totem pole began preparing for it. He turned FB from an app into a social graph and API that is everywhere, and now he's paying from $1B (Instagram) to $19B (WhatsApp) to get some of his biggest would-be enemies to join him. He does not screw around with the Innovator's Dilemma.
I'll be the first to admit I despise my current Facebook feed. It's full of clickbait articles mingled with the occasional update from someone whom I may or may not care about. That being said, I have tried to delete Facebook multiple times, and to no avail. I still have my hopes that they'll change the algorithm a bit and kill the effectiveness of the clickbait to the same extent they killed the spamminess of those social games and widgets. (Although they still exist and are annoying, they're an order of magnitude less annoying than they used to be.) But, despite my best efforts to avoid it, I still check my Facebook feed at least daily.
What pulled me back? At first, it was that Facebook was integrated with Spotify. I had to create a new account and build up all of my playlists, songs, etc. from scratch. That was kind of a pain. Then I deleted Facebook again. I ended up missing a party that was only planned on Facebook. Then I missed the news that a friend was engaged, and another friend was pregnant. Then I couldn't log into my Kiva account to redistribute the repayments I had received because I had used Facebook to sign up. Facebook is just an incredibly, incredibly sticky product. Network effects are a bitch.
Sure, hackers will say, "Well your friends should have called you instead of putting it on Facebook." But they didn't. Even though I'm not in college, if I'm not on Facebook I'm missing the party. (Even though "the party" is now simply knowing that my friend finished med school and is moving to Michigan.)
Facebook isn't as sexy as it used to be, but it has become increasingly difficult to avoid. Think about that - we have to figure out ways and work hard to avoid a product. That's why a significant proportion of the Internet's users log in to Facebook every day. Unless some major shift takes place, Facebook isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
>Facebook, the product, is no longer this super sexy app that college kids are checking out. Looking for Facebook to be that, you will probably predict its future demise.
Been hearing this line from the hn crowd for at least three years. Stopped holding my breath a while ago.
> I ended up missing a party that was only planned on Facebook ... Sure, hackers will say, "Well your friends should have called you instead of putting it on Facebook." But they didn't.
I am a Facebook hater, and I am also guilty of this. If I'm organizing or promoting an event or social occasion I'll go through my list of Facebook friends and invite the ones that seem appropriate. People who are not on that list don't get an invite unless I happen to think of them specifically. I guess some people would say that if they're not at the forefront of my mind then I'm a lousy friend anyway, but it doesn't mean I wouldn't like them to come to my party, or that they wouldn't like to be invited.
This is pretty much why I'm so confused that Facebook didn't go through with the whole 'facebook as a platform' plan.
I remember being excited about all the ways I could use Facebook as the 'social' backend to a whole bunch of apps I considered building. I also remember eventually giving up on that idea because clearly Facebook had decided that being the 'social API' was not their goal anymore.
Meanwhile, the vast, vast majority of my network (ages generally around 25-35, Dutch, tech-savvy) only use Facebook for chat, internal groups, and the occasional silly post, which is much less than our use a few years ago (we'd upload vacation photos and actually 'write'), and a significant number of us would leave if it wouldn't be so inconvenient. And the vast majority of teens seem to not really be into Facebook.
Basically, had FB continued with their 'social layer of the web' approach, it'd have been perfect for us, and it seems, to me, for FB too. And yet for some reason they decided to stay the old course and tend their increasingly less-cool walled garden. I am usually capable of understanding the behavior of a company even if it acts in ways that I don't like, but I don't see how this benefits them.
The only plausible theory I can come up with is that FB suffers from groupthink. It would explain this issue, but also many of their tone-deaf actions concerning privacy and the timeline. Perhaps they are really mostly building for themselves, and not realizing that their audience is slowly eroding. But then analysis of user behavior should make this clear... it confuses me!
The problem with Facebook is that your contacts are there. I'd have left a long time ago if it was a similar service for a dedicated crowd of hobbyists or for work colleagues but everyone's there from my neighbours to my relatives to my friends' kids.
But even that is dwindling.
What I would like to do if follow people, what happens and what they post. But Facebook only gives me a fraction of what my friends publish. I'd basically have to dig up each friend by myself to see everything they've posted. So I don't even know how they are doing, except when I chat with the closest ones.
But disconnecting is hard for a human being.
I happen to know it would feel good, too. When Facebook suspended my account I wondered if this is it, then. Things got arranged back to where they were but before that I felt a wave of relief. I wouldn't have minded being free either.
I used Facebook for a few years, and deleted my account last summer. What I have observed is that, while indeed I have other means of contacting nearly everyone that I was connected with on Facebook, Facebook was (and I presume still is) their preferred means of staying in touch with people.
Sure I can call them. Sure I can send them email, or paper letters, or text messages. And for specific communications, that's fine. But for just sharing what you're up to from day to day, or week to week, many people appear to prefer using Facebook, and find other methods inconvenient.
I don't agree. I'm going back to school. You have a lab partner and need to communicate? He's probably on Facebook. You want to invite those other guys to the party but no one has their number? Easy to find on Facebook. I have many contacts on Facebook that I don't have anywhere else because there isn't a need to have them anywhere else. Facebook basically makes it easier for me to maintain social contact with more people than I would otherwise. Sending someone a message on Facebook is "softer" than sending someone a text or email or making a phone call.
It's also much easier for me to keep in touch with relatives in remote places. I get a little of their life every day, but don't have to spend hours on the phone with everyone to do it.
Can I get rid of Facebook? Of course. Facebook didn't even exist for the first three decades of my life. I think people who have a Facebook "problem" really have mild "internet addiction" and Facebook just happens to be their poison.
FWIW, the best part about Facebook is grandma doesn't send me 43 emails a day containing jokes about the weather anymore. :)
What made people sick of Facebook was pages upon pages of Farmville, Mafiaville and other games. And still, I get new game invitations by the day from relatives and work colleagues which I unfortunately cannot unfriend.
Yes, but it's like with the underground markets... ban one, another appears :/ I'd like a "Make FB useful, ban all notifications from all apps tagged 'game'" option.
I haven't received an invite for a game in months. Yes, months. Facebook also does a really good job of filing them under Games folder/label which I don't visit since I don't play any of the games.
What made people sick of Facebook was pages upon pages of Farmville, Mafiaville and other games. And still, I get new game invitations by the day from relatives and work colleagues which I unfortunately cannot unfriend.
1960 "The Fall of Bershire Hathaway" -- the problem is that the textile business has been in decline after WW2, the overseas manufacturers are undercutting on price, and Egyptian cotton is more highly coveted than Alabama cotton. (Unforseen: The company stopped dealing with fabrics and became a holding company for investments.)
1980 "The Fall of Microsoft" -- the problem is that 100% of their revenue is programming tools such as MS BASIC and MS COBOL. These are not the high growth areas. There's a new breed of "productivity" software such as Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc spreadsheet introduced last year and WordPerfect word processor introduced this year. Microsoft is in serious trouble. (Unforseen: They saw explosive growth in MS Office and Windows o/s.)
1983 "The Fall of Intel" -- the problem is that they can't compete with cut throat memory prices from Japan. It's a low margin business. (Unforseen: They emphasized CPUs and got out of the RAM business.)
1997 "The Fall of Apple" -- ... we all know this story, yada yada yada
(The following quotes were made up but I hope people get the point.)
The problem with typical journalists predicting the "fall" of a company is that they base it on publicly known information. They base it on what the company has done in the past. The journalists don't sit in boardroom meetings outlining future plans that are unrelated to their current core revenue generators. The journalists also aren't privy to the secret skunkworks projects in the R&D pipeline. It's understandable that they don't have this information but they almost never make disclaimers of their blind spots which makes their predictions sound more convincing.
That's not to say that companies do fail to evolve. Kodak, Myspace, Atari, etc.
What's hard to say from the outside looking in is if Facebook is a 1980-Microsoft/1983-Intel or is it Kodak/Atari?
I think Zuckerberg and his team are well aware of the precarious and fickle nature of "social networking" and that's why they're exploring other channels such as payments, virtual reality, etc. Maybe they'll even get in on the health care monitoring game as well. If a journalist has some credible educated guesses or grabs an insider's scoop on these unknowns, that's much more interesting than predicting a companies death with incomplete information.
The journalist in the article was also writing about Facebook-the-Company while citing examples of Facebook-the-social-network-thing to determine its strengths.
Notice that the following excerpts from the article talk about Facebook-the-Company actions and its future:
>Then it scooped up WhatsApp, which had garnered hundreds of millions of users with a simple, solid messaging application. That cost Facebook $21.8 billion.
>It’s all enough to make you wonder whether Facebook, unlike AOL or MySpace, really might be forever—or at least as forever as anything American capitalism is capable of producing.
Survivorship bias. What about all the other companies that were the size of Berkshire Hathaway in the 60s, Microsoft in the 80s, Apple in the 90s, etc. that didn't develop into massive successes?
It's also worth noting that Berkshire Hathaway the textile company no longer exists. The mill was shut down long ago and it's essentially the same company in name only. In fact it's hardly what you would consider a business in the typical sense of the word. BH has something like 30 employees (at Berkshire Hathaway itself, the rest are all employed by companies Berkshire owns, which it handles in a very hands off way).
So citing these companies as evidence that criticism of Facebook is unfounded is of dubious validity.
I'm aware of that which is why I already listed counterexamples such as Myspace, Kodak that didn't make a successful transition to a new revenue growth.
>So citing these companies as evidence that criticism of Facebook is unfounded is of dubious validity.
Personally I despise Facebook and enjoy reading any criticisms about it. My point regarding this particular article was that the journalist (like every other journalist that's not "in the know") has to base his prediction on what Facebook is doing now. They don't volunteer their blind spot, therefore we as readers have to be aware of it.
I recently discovered that there is no way to traverse the Facebook graph API without a logged in user or using <app id>|<app secret> in place of a token. This seems strange to me, because public posts can be readily seen with a browser.
I think that it's the amalgam of many small, seemingly innocuous design decisions like this that slowly undermine a company's credibility.
I just mean, if even the most basic features cause users grief, then I don't have confidence in anything beyond that. The same goes for issues with Netflix (closing API), Twitter (throttling), even Google (too much power over a site's livelihood, no support) and Apple (constant deprecation of APIs and broken documentation links).
I'm not sure anymore how these companies will be able to stand against free and open competitors, which is why I see us soon entering a brave new world where openness will be crushed by legislation from lobbyists. If anything, behemoths like Facebook will only grow larger and more powerful, at all our expense. That said, I still goof off for hours on Facebook, what can I say..
The last two years I've had times were I went "Social media" free and did nothing on my social media accounts for 30 days at a time.
Last time I did it (about a year ago), I got lots of retweets on Twitter and tons of people asking about it on FB. This year, when I announced what I was doing, nobody said anything on FB. I asked a few people if they saw my post and their response?
"Um yeah, my newsfeed is so full, when did you send it?"
"About a day ago."
"Yeah, I probably didn't see it."
Not only has social media completely bogged down people's lives, they can't even sort through their own newsfeeds to get stuff which might actually be important. For me, it was the last straw. As an occasional FB user, I finally realized if I wasn't posting every 5 minutes, the likelihood someone saw my post and could or would respond to it was almost zero.
Two weeks ago, I deleted my FB account and haven't missed a thing since.
Does anyone really buy this? Who cares what people say? It's all about what they do. People say a lot of things. It's cool to not love FB. Yet somehow, some way, it remains one of the most addictive and stickiest products for an ever-increasing and huge number of people.
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