Millions of Bored Users Quit Facebook [???]
June 21st, 2011Quantcast and Alexa both show Facebook as the #2 destination on the Internet in the U.S., behind Google, so…
Via: CNN:
There’s no denying the cultural impact of Facebook. It has united almost 700 million people, including most of you reading this, becoming the greatest social introduction platform the world has ever seen.
But there are also some recent signs of “Facebook fatigue.” There is only so much you can do to socialize online, especially after you’ve exhausted your friend list. Some people also complain they’re spending so much time on Facebook that they’re short-changing the rest of their lives.
Evidence suggests a small but increasing number of users — at least in North America, where Facebook use is especially saturated — may be shunning the site. The site lost more than 7 million active users in the United States and Canada last month, according to data from the blog Inside Facebook, although Facebook disputes those figures.
Others are consciously reducing the time they spend on the site.
“I figured out that I wouldn’t look back as an old man and wish I had spent more time on Facebook,” says David Cole, an IT manager from Boston. Cole said he believes the popular social-networking site is a useful tool, but not a replacement for what he calls “realbook” experiences.
Hands up as one of those who use it (in full knowledge of what the bugger is). It’s of more use to me for what I get out of it (maintaining a farflung network of personal and professional contacts) than what it gets out of me.
The recent development that’s probably pushing people away is their editing of who sees your posts. Formerly, any friend would see a status update (“hey, I’ll be in town X next week if anyone wants to meet up”). Now, only those friends that FB decides you interact with will see said posts.
You have no way of knowing. See, Zuckerberg knows you and your personal life better than you do, apparently.
So, it’s now about as useful as frigging email – at least you know your email had a reasonable chance of being seen – but an FB post? 1 in 10, at best.
Saddest sight is to see people posting news stories, and links, when they’re probably only being seen by a tiny fraction of their contacts. As pure a waste of time and energy as you could want.
When modding a forum a couple of years ago, I found a wicked app that some forums have for dealing with trolls: “caving”. The idea was that the troll could be “caved” – only they could see their posts, but nobody else would. The dumber trolls would post their bile, and, the idea was, be unaware yet increasingly frustrated that nobody was reading their poison.
Funny to see FB essentially doing the same to their users. Then again, given that the company was founded by a sociopath…
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Much the same has been happening with google’s personalised search results, the subject of a recent book. They build a profile of you, your habits, and reflect back to you the world that they think you want to see…your own personal, commodified reality tunnel.
Suffice to say, I’m spending more time in bricks n mortar book stores than reading online. At least in the store you don’t have a computer nerd following you around, recording every title you pick off the shelf, and waving suggestions under your nose.
interesting.
the FB software is a piece of sh_t.
in Japan, the popular pre-FB SNS, mixi, is committing hara-kiri as we write. they have spent the last year trying to mimic FB and twitter and now they are, for no comprehensible reason, destroying all the good features they’ve had since day one. frigging idiots. roll on the open-source peer-to-peer sns that is useful.
The open-source diaspora FB alternative is still ticking over, but not usable yet.
techcrunch.com/2010/05/12/diaspora-open-facebook-project/
I got on their wait list for an invite about a year ago, and am still waiting.
Yeah, Diaspora, one of these years a beta might come out. 😉
I find status.net is fine for a personal social network. It’s more Twitter-like than Facebook like. The only problem with anything that isn’t Facebook is convincing mom to use it.
I’m not personally on Facebook. I’ve never had a problem staying in touch with email, myself. I still find email the most useful tool on the ‘net. Especially with a good layer of encryption on top. 🙂
Regarding the story, if there’s a mass exodus from Facebook, it probably just means they’re moving over to Google+ or something. Or that there are enough new ways to play Farmville.