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Facebook Dead & Dying


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OK, so we all snickered when the much ballyhooed Facebook IPO began with a relative thud, and went down from there. After briefily touching $45.00 on opening day, it has dropped to as low as $25.52, and currently hovers around $27.00. There are plenty of articles about the problems getting people to click on ads, and the fact that there are no revenue streams on Facebook mobile. There are lawsuits and other unwanted attention. But, here's another problem. Facebook has jumped the shark.

What do I mean? Well, for starters, the ONLY people I hear mentioning Facebook are businesses and media personalities. No regular people talk about it anymore. It is always a bad sign when corporations invade your cool place. They invariably ruin it.

What else? This much hyped 901 million users? Most are inactive accounts. Facebook claims roughly half are "active" users. But, the definition of "active" is that you logged on once in a month. Really? That is active? More like bored. Anyone who has looked at their account recently has noticed that post counts are down. Probably 80% or more of my "friends" never post anything (neither do I). Of the 20% who do post, they post less. I guess word got out that we think uber posters are losers.

Here's the worst part. Most of the posts are SPAM. Facebook insists on posting everyone else's crap on our board. Like horoscopes. Look, I don't even care what MY horoscope is! Why would I want to see yours? Or 'Photo of the Day. I get the same photo from half a dozen people. Is it a photo they took? No. Just some random pic. I don't care. Worse, to look at the picture, you have to allow Facebook to post the pics you look at on other people's boards. Nope. Not gonna happen. Video. Same thing. News Articles. Ditto. Facebook not only insists on shoving this stuff at you, it wants to shove it at others under your name. Very annoying.

What is the net result? I did a quick count of original content by Friends versus Facebook pushed crap or stuff my Friends read or looked at over the last week. An astounding 71% of the content was not originated by my friends. Of course, most of the stuff originated by my friends is also stupid, but at least it came from them. This unscientific survey, combined with the other stats I've seen led me to conclude that Facebook has peaked and will enter a declining phase. Further, I believe Zuckerburg knows this. He has to. He didn't get Facebook to this point hanging out in the company lounge playing ping pong. The IPO was initiated to cash out before the big decline.

I'm glad I didn't buy the hype. I hope you didn't, either. Facebook, figuratively, is dead.

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Twitter is alive and well.

I don't get on facebook much anymore either. I looked at my friends list last night actually and noticed a lot of blank/generic profile silhouettes. I don't know if those are people that have defriended me or deleted accounts.

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I don't have the same problems that you do (maybe its your settings?), but I agree that it has peaked in popularity in the United States market. Can't speak for international markets. For lack of a viable competitor, it is monopolistically buffered from the chilling effect of its many blunders.

The quantity of user data that Facebook has is vast. They know ridiculously too much about a huge number of people. Their largest problem is that they have so poorly deployed that data to its advertisers as a means of enhancing their value proposition. Consequently, I have recently-married friends complaining that they're overwhelmed with ads for dating websites, etc. I see the same ads, however that would be appropriate. I am the target market, not them.

Shareholders would probably do well to install a new management team. Then, inside of six to twelve months, I would expect to see a huge re-vamping of the guts of Facebook. (Or perhaps I won't notice any direct changes, merely their indirect effects.) It's about monetizing the user database, and I'm sure that it can be done.

The Facebook IPO was a great opportunity to short sell. It may still be, as confidence in its business model continues to erode. But confidence is a fickle thing. Watch for a resurgence at some point next year.

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I still use FB. I think it's fun. Think of it as a form of entertainment. That's all it is. That's pretty much what all social media is IMHO. However, I did make a few thousand on the IPO so no worries here.

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Here's the worst part. Most of the posts are SPAM. Facebook insists on posting everyone else's crap on our board. Like horoscopes. Look, I don't even care what MY horoscope is! Why would I want to see yours? Or 'Photo of the Day. I get the same photo from half a dozen people. Is it a photo they took? No. Just some random pic. I don't care. Worse, to look at the picture, you have to allow Facebook to post the pics you look at on other people's boards. Nope. Not gonna happen. Video. Same thing. News Articles. Ditto. Facebook not only insists on shoving this stuff at you, it wants to shove it at others under your name. Very annoying.

Fairly easy to fix. Click through to the application and click Block Application. After you block some of the major ones (Horoscopes, Mafia, Farmville, etc.) the feed gets much cleaner.

I do think the posts on Facebook are declining somewhat, but it's still heavily used by a lot of people. They are going to have a problem monetizing the Facebook mobile app. I noticed they're developing a phone, which may be a workaround.

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Redscare, I hope you're right as i worry what it's doing to younger generations who feel they need to validate their existence through it...

and damn, it's so impersonal, why can't people send old fashioned e'mails....the kids these days..!

ofcourse, if Facebook dies, something else will surely take it's place? google plus?

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facebook is the go-to place for our family and distant friends for staying in touch. once you learn how to customize and create groups, it works much more efficiently. the evolution of social media requires a custom filtering process. if you don't know how to use the features, it will seem ridiculous. i see very few things i do not like on facebook because i've told it what and who i do not want to see. the "cool" people are rejecting facebook because it's currently "cool" to dislike it (most of the people i know who are dissing fb haven't taken the time to customize it), to them, it seems time to go on to the next big thing. facebook has to be customized to suit your relationships and your preferences. it may be premature to announce the death of facebook: "relationships rule the world". http://www.wired.com/business/2012/03/ff_hoffman/all/

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My family and I do not consider ourselves 'cool', at least not in the way you intend it. None of us uses facebook to communicate, mostly because we value our privacy. Maybe that is a concern to facebook, and maybe not. What probably should be a concern to facebook is that the 'cool' kids are ready to move on. Why? Because facebook needs revenue, and if it is no longer 'cool', or even if it is merely being used by the bachanan families of the world, its business model is in trouble. We know from MySpace that an online 'community' can crash and burn with frightening speed. And, there is competition on the horizon. If the cool kids decide to jump ship to Google+, then facebook is toast. Numerous studies show that a few cool kids dictate trends and bring their friends along. Savvy marketers target those leaders. Frankly, most people probably already think that Google is cooler than facebook. It wouldn't take much to cause a facebook earthquake.

Note to lockmat: During my short research on facebook's active users, I found an article about Twitter's active users. Twitter brags that it has 175 million followers (last year). But again, the trick is what is 'active'. The author's research found that one third of Twitter accounts followed no other accounts, and one half of Twitter accounts had no followers. Further research dound that only 32% of the accounts followed 8 or more people, and only 10% of the accounts followed 50 people or more. So, Twitter is not quite the juggernaut that they'd have you believe, either.

You can get a good feel for how these accounts work by looking at HAIF's member section. Out of 8403 total HAIF members, 3,041 have never posted once, and 4689 have one or less posts. So, 56% of HAIF members have posted only 1648 total posts. Only 633 members have posted 50 or more times. That amounts to only 7.5% of all HAIFers. I'll let Wayne tell you how valuable those lurkers are as far as clicking on ads. I know that I've never clicked on a facebook ad, though I have clicked on some here.

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I like FB still. I do not post on it much, but it lets me stay apprised of family and friend happenings.

I also dig picking up vibes from other parts of the country and world. Since I'm a yankee an Mrs P. and I went to college in the north, we have friends all over. We get hum. We get feed. I like to see pretty pics from Maine in the morning. I also like to know that my sister's dog passed away, so I don't ask about Muzzie in our next chat.

Red, the experiential part of Facebook is a bit foreign to us. Our generations don't get the high value of experience Gen Y et seq get from experiences.

Regardless of the experience factor, I look at the economic value of FB and do not understand it. The p/e ratio of the company is around 80. I cannot see how I or most people I know are making money for the company. Competition from others like Google+ will challenge it. If it required subscription with its millions of users, I'd understand it. In its current template, I do not see it as a great investment.

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I haven't experienced much of the complaints - I have a few friends that subscribe to things that churn out meaningless (usually daily) things like horoscopes or repost RSS stuff but that's the exception. I have found it more useful for events and places - in my experience a lot of bars/restaurants, groups, and organizations post updates, news, and happenings on FB faster (or exclusively).

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http://motherboard.v...y-facebook-ends

Let’s not forget everything Facebook has done for us. In leveraging our social curiosity and innate egomania, Mark Zuckerberg unleashed a social revolution, compelling us to share even the most mundane aspects of our lives. No longer anonymous trolls scouring the wild west of the web, we now had an online presence defined by our actual names, a virtual representation of ourselves with a perpetual audience. Suddenly, we were empowered, intoxicated even, by our constant connectedness.

And for the past eight years, Facebook has been the central neural network of the Internet’s link-sharing brain. But as the site has grown, so have our needs. Now that the company’s public, it’s crunch time, and the skeptics and haters are lining up to talk about how it might all end. One thing’s for certain: whether it’s a bang or a whimper, Facebook is not forever. How could it collapse? Let me count the ways.

Facebook screws up

Since Facebook’s inception, Mark Zuckerberg has had an uncanny knack for maintaining the site’s exceptional growth, despite royally pissing off the majority of its users with shady privacy practices, monetization strategies like the Beacon fiasco, and of course, its latest incarnation, Timeline. And yet, despite all the user resentment, we’re apparently using the site more than ever before. It’s this kind of fortitude in the face of user frustration that has led some to compare Zuckerberg’s forceful genius to that of Steve Jobs.

But while Jobs always had his doubters, vocal critics, and fair share of questionable philosophies, he commanded the kind of respect that’s made Mac fanboys some of the most annoying self-described geeks around the world. His death was felt internationally, as the world mourned the passing of its greatest tech rockstar.

Zuck doesn’t have the same kind of cult following. He’s been ridiculed all over the Internet and in a million-dollar Hollywood movie. Many simply don’t trust him. Beyond the anodyne hacking talk and his “keep shipping” motto, oracle readers have had to rely on chat transcripts from years of legal cases to learn about his thinking and intentions (for instance, that he once thought of his users as “dumb thousand dollarss.")

G7tKG.jpg

As net neutrality guru Tim Wu noted, Facebook has a lot of bad karma. “No one really loves the company,” he tweeted the other day. “We just feel stuck with it.” Really, we’re waiting for a good enough reason. At some point, Zuckerberg will push too hard — a new setting you can’t turn off, a “frictionless” feature that shares too much, a product that simply pisses you off too hard — and users will ragequit for good. The company’s controversial IPO and the simultaneous pressure to build up ad revenue will only accelerate this process.

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My family and I do not consider ourselves 'cool', at least not in the way you intend it. None of us uses facebook to communicate, mostly because we value our privacy. Maybe that is a concern to facebook, and maybe not. What probably should be a concern to facebook is that the 'cool' kids are ready to move on. Why? Because facebook needs revenue, and if it is no longer 'cool', or even if it is merely being used by the bachanan families of the world, its business model is in trouble. We know from MySpace that an online 'community' can crash and burn with frightening speed. And, there is competition on the horizon. If the cool kids decide to jump ship to Google+, then facebook is toast. Numerous studies show that a few cool kids dictate trends and bring their friends along. Savvy marketers target those leaders. Frankly, most people probably already think that Google is cooler than facebook. It wouldn't take much to cause a facebook earthquake.

Note to lockmat: During my short research on facebook's active users, I found an article about Twitter's active users. Twitter brags that it has 175 million followers (last year). But again, the trick is what is 'active'. The author's research found that one third of Twitter accounts followed no other accounts, and one half of Twitter accounts had no followers. Further research dound that only 32% of the accounts followed 8 or more people, and only 10% of the accounts followed 50 people or more. So, Twitter is not quite the juggernaut that they'd have you believe, either.

You can get a good feel for how these accounts work by looking at HAIF's member section. Out of 8403 total HAIF members, 3,041 have never posted once, and 4689 have one or less posts. So, 56% of HAIF members have posted only 1648 total posts. Only 633 members have posted 50 or more times. That amounts to only 7.5% of all HAIFers. I'll let Wayne tell you how valuable those lurkers are as far as clicking on ads. I know that I've never clicked on a facebook ad, though I have clicked on some here.

just a note: some of my more tech savvy friends are on google+, but they never post anything. it seems people on google+ are on google+ just to check it out. very little movement. privacy isn't an issue if you set facebook up to NOT be public. of course, if you don't trust facebook to protect the privacy settings you've set or to hold your information, then no you shouldn't put anything online or shared. i'm not interesting enough to be worried about my privacy, nor do i expect i'll ever be a public figure.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Facebook was awesome five years ago. Then, somewhere in late 2008 or early 2009, they "Twitterized" it, and all went downhill from there.

Actually, the figurative "death" of Good Facebook was when Scrabulous got sued out of business and was taken by "ZyngaVille" games.

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just a note: some of my more tech savvy friends are on google+, but they never post anything. it seems people on google+ are on google+ just to check it out. very little movement. privacy isn't an issue if you set facebook up to NOT be public. of course, if you don't trust facebook to protect the privacy settings you've set or to hold your information, then no you shouldn't put anything online or shared. i'm not interesting enough to be worried about my privacy, nor do i expect i'll ever be a public figure.

Privacy is always an issue, no matter what your settings are or how secure the website claims to be.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-06-14/linkedin-s-stolen-passwords-spell-profit-for-gemalto

Not to mention the fact that companies can and are subpoenaed on a reqular basis for user information.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/06/heres-what-a-facebook-response-to-a-user-data-subpoena-looks-like/

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  • 4 years later...

I know security is a big issue for everyone, but I've always been of the belief that if you don't want the world to know it, don't put it online. That goes for Facebook as well.  I know no matter how safe they tell us our information is, there is always a risk and so I am very selective about the information that I post there. 

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I am totally with you on that one UtterlyUrban. I'm just glad that I learnt this early on and I didn't splash my personal life all over facebook for the whole world to see. And people need to remember that the stuff they display there is out there forever and ever so they should be more careful about what they advertise. 

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