How to Take Down Facebook -- Hint: It Ain't Twitter.

http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2010/10/how-to-take-down-facebook.html

by dwynings • 16 years ago

77 68 16 years ago

500hats.typepad.com

user243• 16 years ago

I don't know how to say this without sounding self-promotional, but there are a few points here which agree with my post on why Diaspora won't kill facebook - http://www.puremango.co.uk/2010/09/why-diaspora-wont-beat-fa...

Specifically, we agree on the fact that many friends=problem. Dave doesn't really suggest a solution to that problem - I think it's something which can be solved technically. Dave also brings out a great argument as to why privacy matters to facebook, which I hadn't spotted before.

Ygor• 16 years ago

Can the "two many friends" problem be solved with more powerful personal internal groups, or better named - contact labels?

The problem is in the name "friend". Most of our facebook-friends are actually just contacts. Only a subset of those contacts are your real friends. So, the problem is with the name of the concept, not the concept itself.

It would be pretty useful if facebook expanded on the concept of labeling contacts and thus making contact subgroups. Yes, putting friends in groups is already possible, but I feel it is highly underpowered. It should rank a lot higher in the whole user experience and the facebook core itself (separate walls, photos, easier management, easier viewing, easier control).

user243• 16 years ago

The feature you're suggesting will only be used by the sort of people who like tagging and keywording and organising things. I.e. not facebook's users.

I think facebook should automatically and invisibly group your friends for you - in fact they already do filter out some of your uninteresting contacts automatically, but I feel there's more work to be done on that area.

bradgessler• 16 years ago

Dave's writing style is distracting.

jscore• 16 years ago

Strange. I find his writing style, albeit rough around the edges, very refreshing.

davemc500hats4• 16 years ago

the clarion call for revolution is not written in a soothing voice. distraction is the goal, not an impediment.

akharris2• 16 years ago

clarion calls seem to be big this weekend, jon stewart was on it too in his "moment of sincerity" http://bit.ly/axQDnW.

davemc500hats4• 16 years ago

btw, u do realize this post had no crazy fonts in it as an A/B test for u Haterz out there, right? ;)

Sukotto• 16 years ago

Yes, it was the difference between "His writing style is quirky but his point is interesting" and "I'm not reading that".

Robin_Message• 16 years ago

I think this is something the Fridge (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631684) is good for.

InclinedPlane2• 16 years ago

Yup. Facebook friends trend towards bloat, which is problematic. Twitter followers/followees can be somewhat more manageable because there's a different set of assumptions about what following means vs. "friending".

The difficulty is that this is a very deep problem, and it is "solved" only partially by a very complex, very subtle, very tricky set of societal and personal customs and behaviors. The biggest problem from a social networking service standpoint is that computers very much prefer clear, explicit data, whereas human relationships exist in varying degrees of fuzziness. Most people don't sit down and write out a complete list of everyone who they consider a friend, nor do they create a tiered set of levels of friendships or a ranked list, nor would that necessarily be helpful as such levels are often in flux as friendships change, evolve, grow, and dissolve.

This is a problem everywhere with human behavior, it's one of the reasons why google was successful, for example. Back in the day every search engine was very practical and straightforward. Searching a set of terms brought you a list of web pages that had those terms on them, ranked by whatever convenient concrete metric seemed reasonable. To improve the quality of search results people would have to manually provide cues to search engines, via meta tags for example. Google decided instead to use a more sophisticated search strategy, extracting the implicit meta data about web pages via page rank and such-like. In short, google made web search conform to human behavior, rather than trying to get human behavior to conform to the requirements of search.

I suspect the same breakthrough is waiting to happen in social networking and will have just as big an impact.

yewweitan• 16 years ago

That's interesting. I like the reference to Google. In a way though, Google could rely more so on technical innovation to drive itself forward.

That's obviously not the case with Facebook, as seen from the controversy over their privacy settings. It's gonna be interesting watching technology drive culture at the crazy rate it is today. What a time to be alive!

revorad6• 16 years ago

That's an interesting analogy but flawed because getting traction for a better search engine does not depend on network effects nearly as much as it does for a better social network.

If none of my friends use Google, it's still as valuable to me. If none of my friends use Facebook,...

InclinedPlane2• 16 years ago

Sure, network effect is a big deal for sites like facebook, but it's not everything. Network effect didn't save myspace. If something much better than facebook came out people would start switching to it, and quite rapidly the network effect bonus would vanish. My point is that there is every reason to believe that the possibility there could be a social networking site significantly better than facebook is very high. Precisely because the problems in play are incredibly hard problems and nobody has solved them very well yet.

notahacker2• 16 years ago

Facebook could start by realising that I'm not interested in Farmville updates from people I have never interacted with beyond accepting their initial friend request, and am very interested in updates from the people whose events I attend and messages I reply to. They have a wealth of data on how I intentionally interact with other Facebook users.

But most of the manual features for managing friends are already in place - you can update particular lists of people through groups, events and private messages. It's really not that tricky to decide who you want to invite to that awesome house party or on the cheap trip to Vegas.

Other features, such as the "how do you know them?" and focus on work/school/city networks seem to have actually been removed due to lack of use despite offering very intuitive and automatic categorisation of friends. Facebook's trajectory towards openness probably reflects a lack of desire towards using it in a structured way. A hypothetical startup whose main strength is removing the spam in the newsfeed and adding in the features they chose to remove probably isn't going to keep Zuck awake at night. I preferred Facebook before Zynga and gratuitous "liking", but I'm not going to persuade my closest friends to move to a clone to get rid of the bloat.

FWIW I think Dave's example of friend bloat is probably more a reflection of his social circle than underlying changes in Facebook itself. He'd have had a lot more friends in 2006 if he'd been attending university, and considerably fewer now if he was working 9-5 for an unglamorous small business and nobody read his blog. The number of friends I had grew far faster in early 2006 than in any subsequent period, and people I shared fleeting conversation whilst waiting for lectures with were arguably far more tangentially connected to me than, say, my sister.

smackfu• 16 years ago

"Facebook could start by realising that I'm not interested in Farmville updates "

OTOH, should Facebook be "smart" about this, or should they just provide a button to hide all Farmville updates? In fact, they try to do the first, and also do the second, so I don't know why people still complain about this.

noverloop• 16 years ago

Facebook groups solve this problem. However I don't think you want to manage your closest friends on one platform.

I communicate with the people I care about through all communication methods available, restricting this to one method would be a distraction.

al_james3• 16 years ago

All they need to add is the ability to star (or favourite) a friend. Then you can view just your newsfeed from your favourite friends. Perfect.

edanm3• 16 years ago

Facebook already lets you choose to ignore some people and view more of others. I personally don't use it, but my more serious Facebook-using friends do.

al_james3• 16 years ago

Yeah, I use that. However, once you block someone they are gone until you unblock them. All I want to do if be able to see a newsfeed from my 'top' friends and another from the 'rest'.

swombat• 16 years ago

That doesn't resolve the context problem. Your close friends from school aren't your close friends from work. The two are not necessarily going to intersect. Starring is to one-dimensional, hence groups. But groups are a pain to manage. Pick your poison...

al_james3• 16 years ago

To me, starring captures enough of the functionality without being a pain to manage. But I see your point.

schlichtm2• 16 years ago

Starring will not work. In a week you are going to be asking for a gold star as well so you can differentiate between your close friends and your really close friends. This will continue and quickly become unmanageable.

I don't think groups is the solution either. It is a solution but most likely not the best due to the fact that there are a million combinations of groups I can put together using my friends. Ideally these groups would not be long lasting and I could create them on the fly.

jim_h• 16 years ago

I think Facebook will be hard to replace until something else has enough mass. The problem is the FB is continuing to gain mass.

FB has enough gravity to pull most users back in. To break free, the user will need will power to ignore all their friends trying to drag them back.

kamechan• 16 years ago

right, i mean 500 million users all making a constant investment in their profiles, connections, photo uploads, etc. the seemingly endless chain of privacy concerns (and i've learned recently through first hand experience there are many) aren't dissuading users from spending much of their precious time on the site...and since all your friends are on it, or connections you want to keep, how are you ever supposed to leave? and when you try, you get what amounts to a guilt trip that your most bestest friends will miss your increasingly valueless contributions to the site.

of course, that's because all your pithiness is going into 140 characters or less to what amounts to almost total strangers.

facebook, where did your allure go? after the last round of privacy banter, i've kept my facebook material almost completely personality free.

akharris2• 16 years ago

People said the same thing about myspace a few years back. It was king of the social internets. Clearly, it wasn't quite as big as Facebook, but it's all a question of giving users what they want. If someone can identify the discontents and innovate on them faster than Facebook can, then we'll see a new, legitimate, challenger.

Of course, in order to do that, you have to think that FB won't innovate quickly enough to sit on whoever tries. It's the classic startup v. big company challenge.

dave1619• 16 years ago

I agree with Dave. Facebook is like your public social network, and you don't want to post private things on your wall. The question is can Facebook address this or is Facebook just fundamentally too public?

Estragon• 16 years ago

I don't understand why people don't have multiple facebook accounts reflecting different levels of privacy. I facebook-suicided because I didn't want to mix my personal and professional lives, and when I contemplate going back to it (mainly for professional reasons) I always have a two-account system in mind. Obviously, I don't use facebook much, so I might be missing something, though.

edanm3• 16 years ago

It took me a long time to understand why Facebook limits your friends to 5000, but I get it now. Facebook is very explicitly not like Twitter, in that you want to connect to as many people as possible.

Facebook is a direct map of your real-life social circle, to the internet. It's just a way of taking your friends in real life and interacting with them more easily (much easier than emailing everyone, for example.) Of course, lots of people don't really use Facebook that way, but that's the behavior that is encouraged, and most people more-or-less follow that pattern.

In that case, I don't think having 500 friends is that big a problem. Sure, for most people, 300 of those friends will be people you aren't very close with, but so what? Other than the news feed, it shouldn't matter to you who these people are, except in terms of privacy. And you know what? With matters of privacy, I think the world is moving towards Robert Scoble's view - just assume everything is public anyway.

rmc• 16 years ago

5,000 is still a very large number of real life friends. It would be interesting if they limited it to a small number, maybe 20, forcing you to choose your closest.

joelg87• 16 years ago

I'm not sure that 5000 number is so deliberately chosen. Take the Tweet from Mark Zuckerberg in March 2009: "I find it funny that it's on Digg that I'm here. I'm looking forward to when people can have unlimited connections on Facebook soon!" - http://twitter.com/#!/finkd/status/1297171671. Then again, it's not happened yet, so maybe they changed their mind :)

edanm3• 16 years ago

I'm not sure it's so deliberate either - but I think that's what their strategy should be, at least.

By the way, the number 5,000 is a great number: it doesn't really matter what the number is, as long as there is a ceiling, it's pretty clear that you're not supposed to add anyone and everyone. On the other hand, 5,000 is large enough that most users won't realistically hit it.

prawn2• 16 years ago

Twitter capped the length of a post. The upstart he's talking about might cap the number of people in a clique. Let's say 12 which could give rise to a domain with "dozen" in it. Like Twitter, it won't be built because it ticks boxes or has a great business plan, but just because. Rather than Twitter's asymmetric following or Facebook's friending, all members of a clique may need to approve any new member, and it won't be done lightly. "Is this person Sponge-worthy?" [1]

It could be simplified to its core. Picture New Twitter now but even simpler, and flipped horizontally. Post/item on the left side, and then banter on the right. Maybe one of the crew posts a jacket they're thinking of buying, or the result of a game, or a new movie trailer. Chit-chat fills the right hand side until people lose interest and move on to other posts.

Editing to add: I run a basketball forum which is a free-for-all. Anonymous posting, etc. And I often wonder how my experience of it would change if I just locked it down to the best 12-20 contributors - might miss a few challenging viewpoints, but there'd be no spam, griefers, brainless posts, etc. Perhaps picture the aforementioned concept as a micro-forum based around a particular niche rather than necessarily a particular group of friends?

And again (still thinking): You pick niches of interest and are randomly lumped with 12-20 others for as long as the group lasts. As with online gaming, you can privately kick out griefers or passengers. Perhaps you can only commit to 3 groups (wine, NBA, travel) to ensure you don't spread too thin. Elevator spiel is: Chatroulette + microforum + group decisions.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sponge

revorad6• 16 years ago

If you cap the number of people in a network in any way, all you are doing is limiting its growth. A social network without growth is not a social network.

prawn2• 16 years ago

Good point, but I do wonder if there would be viral opportunities that arise because of the limitation, through value of invitations, etc. Picking and choosing the people for your group rather than seeing if they'll join so you can find and friend them.

chunkbot• 16 years ago

Actually, a social network without 1) growth and 2) preferential attachment is not a scale-free social network.

anthony_franco• 16 years ago

The basic problem is that FB models the social graph with a rigid, undirected graph when in fact we live in multiple, constantly-evolving, weighted graphs of social connections.

The newsfeed-ranking algorithm, privacy controls, friend lists, and latest groups incarnation are all simply hacks to try to shoehorn it's flawed social schema into what we actually experience in the real world.

revorad6• 16 years ago

I think Dave is dreaming up too complex a proposition.

If a social network has all these complexities, how will it grow? If FB had all these complexities, it would never grow so big. Now that it is big, it can experiment with groups, although even that is a second attempt because lists didn't work. People hate settings. FB is like an online version of a bar. People just want to hang out.

The intimate alternative he is imagining is email. People already use it and it works fine.

Before Facebook came along, was anyone writing blog posts about how nice it will be if a website let me share photos of my last holiday with my random old school buddies who I haven't spoken to in 20 years?

These things are quite random. So, in as far as something will take down Facebook, it will simply be something which is equally or more viral and fun. It does not matter what its specific form or function will be. Intimacy is not essential.

dfield• 16 years ago

Dave isn't giving you a solution. He's pointing out a number of problems that need to be solved. Just because technology works fine doesn't mean it's the optimal solution. Tech develops incrementally.

Stack Overflow has a search feature and it works fine. But wouldn't it be cool if someone aggregated results from different programming websites? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1854731)

Check out Union Square Venture's blogpost from May: http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2010/05/stackoverflow.php. In addition to describing their investment, the post describes problems in the space. If you had never heard of Stack Overflow and you only read about the problems in that post, would you say the solution was too complex?

revorad6• 16 years ago

The headline suggests he is proposing a solution: a social network which beats FB by prioritising intimacy.

I think it's pretty much like dating sites. Before you solve the chicken-and-egg problem, it's meaningless to talk about how you add value. And the proposed value-add here (intimacy) makes the chicken-and-egg problem even more difficult (a dating site only for Mac lovers, anyone?).

Edited for clarity

smiler• 16 years ago

He's only got himself to blame - he clicked 'Accept' on every single one of those 2000+ friends. If he didn't want that many, he shouldn't have added them.

davemc500hats4• 16 years ago

good point.

but I'm probably not the only one that didn't realize what I was doing by being "too friendly".

schlichtm2• 16 years ago

The total number of friends does not matter. It comes down to the fact that there is simply information you want to share with only your close friends.

You're not going to tell everyone that the VC you just met with is a tool - but I bet you anything there are a handful of people you do want to tell and discuss it with.

This issue needs to be solved from both angles. An experience that encourages the sharing of content with dynamic lists of connections + an interface that organizes content based on conversations and not strictly a news feed of interactions taking place within your personal network.

bd• 16 years ago

There was an excellent presentation about real life social networks by Paul Adams from Google making similar observations:

http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...

peterwwillis• 16 years ago

Am I the only one who was just inspired to reduce his 'friends list' from 145 to 38?

revorad6• 16 years ago

No, I did it too. But I'm a nerd who has a love-hate relationship with FB. Most of my friends just gave me a "why would you do that?" look when I told them.

Tyrannosaurs2• 16 years ago

This really isn't an issue for anyone who has used any sort of sensible definition of "friend" when making and accepting requests. If you go with "anyone who asks" as your definition then you really shouldn't be surprised at a lack of intimacy.

Feels like a case of "people misuse software, blame software".

aswanson2• 16 years ago

I disagree. All friends aren't created equal, and I don't want certain people hearing certain statements I make. Not that I distrust them, its just where our relationship is. I find it incredibly annoying to see older family "liking" status comments I make on pages of people they don't even know. After I delete the link to the comment on my page. fb facilitates this with their "so and so did so and so" in the feed. Too invasive.

DeusExMachina• 16 years ago

But this thing is customizable, albeit not very easily. An example on how I use Facebook: I created a list of friends that are able to see my wall. It is a sort of a whitelist. If you ask me for friendship and I grant it to you, you just see some albums and the generic info page. I have to put you explicitly in the whitelist to let you see my wall.

Even if you are in the whitelist, I still can select what you see: I have a list of people from work, close friends, people who speak a particular language and so on. Everytime I post something to my wall I can decide to which lists it's visible and to which it's not. It takes a little to set up but after that it's easy to manage.

Tyrannosaurs2• 16 years ago

It's a matter of practicality though. Most people don't want to spend their life managing groups and preferences, dictating whether a particular update or photo is suitable for this audience or that - the return just isn't worth it. I'll also suggest that inevitably you're going to mess up and publish things to the wrong group and that you're safer with it as it is.

I'm curious about things that you'd not want someone you profess to trust and call a friend to see, but are willing to put on a website which is outside your control which has a history of changing privacy settings with no warning and has shown few signs of interest in personal confidentiality.

madmaze• 16 years ago

I completely agree with Dave. Especially on his points about how many friends people have. I really dont want to share everything with everyone. I want a feeling of community not a feeling of exploitation. Its been driving me nuts that every page I visit has a facebook "like" or comment option. This is why I have been supporting Diaspora, I want to jump ship, but there is nothing viable to jump to, yet.

mayutana• 16 years ago

The reason for Facebook's popularity is its simpleness. Now that it is popular, it can experiment with additional features such as groups and more intimate group settings. Orkut, on the other hand attempted to do it the other way around. I am not sure how does it work now, but 2-3 years back, when one adds a friend, he is expected to rate the closeness in a scale of 1-5. This was to improve friend of friend suggestions as well as who is allowed to see what. The problem with this approach was that it was confusing for the users. This might be a stumbling block for new applications that try to foster a private group structure. But I do agree with Dave that there is a need for such applications.

dchs• 16 years ago

Facebook's NEW groups feature solves this (the old one didn't):

http://facebook.com/groups/

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

There's a contextual problem that's been around for 50 years that FB is just making worse.

Human communications depend largely on context. We weren't made to blurt out every one of our feelings and observations to the community at large. Instead, we share this piece of information with this person, ask this other person for advice, listen in on these other folks when they talk about X, etc.

The is the natural way of being human -- to use a phrase from the movie, it's the social experience.

Every technical solution I've seen so far fails to include this contextual nature of communication. It's too much of a pain for folks to pick certain people for certain kinds of talk, and it's all so much a pain in the ass (compared with the old way of physically moving from one group to another)

Oddly enough, this was first noticed with TV back in the 1950s. Up until then, conversations were small and cliquish -- the natural order. TV brought in the idea of "universal" communicating in a way that radio, plays, or newspapers didn't. Suddenly everybody in the family was in the room when Lucy got pregnant, or when Opie killed the bird with the slingshot.

Of course, nobody bothered much complaining back then, because, after all, back in the 1950s what kind of radical information was going to be on TV? And nobody complained (much) when TV got into a lot more controversial issues in the last couple of decades.

But now it's not TV -- it's us. It's our lives, our pregnancies, our sorrows, etc.

I think people need the contextual nature of communication -- it makes society function. But I don't see any technology solution on the horizon that easily and naturally facilitates this. And yes, if it happens it might just be the next FB killer. But that's a big "if". Lots of folks have went down the road of trying to add context, including FB itself, and so far nobody has been successful.

wolfrom• 16 years ago

I think context is intertwined with occasional mindset. Sometimes I'm in "work mode", and I want to consume data related to that, while other times I'm in more interested in family, or friends, or (rarely) political chatter. I believe that a service that can create context based on specific mindsets coupled with basic group management can be achieved.

callmeed• 16 years ago

"But I don't see any technology solution on the horizon that easily and naturally facilitates this."

chrysb• 16 years ago

There is something very important that hasn't been addressed in all of this fascinating discussion:

Social dynamics are different for every age group. I believe people fall in to four (4) different categories, all relative to when the WWW was first publicly available.

1. Those who were already established adults and working on their careers (our parents) (25-35+)

2. Those who were still developing and learning (probably everyone here) (~5-25)

3. Those who are usually stuck in their ways, less likely to learn (our gradparents) (60+)

4. Those who were born with the internet already extremely developed (kids in high school now, etc)

* note: the ages above are at the time the WWW launched, not ages today.

Each of these groups were subjected to different paradigms of social connection and privacy and therefore have different concerns or interests about privacy.

Group 1: Our parents are first were interested in using the internet to research, shop, and other non-social activities. Facebook was ours for a long time until eventually everyone's parents started joining, and now they are reaping the benefits and finding old connections with old friends, but they don't face the same issues of privacy, because they didn't develop a social life through Facebook like we (Group 2) have. Although, if your parents were like mine, they had initial reservations about putting their CC info online, or being searchable online, or having websites track their behaviors, while we (Group 2) were less concerned about it.

Group 2: Our group is the most sensitive to privacy, because we're the only group that knew what it was like before and after Facebook. We were also at an extremely social point of our lives when Facebook came out, and we still are now, even more so because of the addition of Facebook to our lives. We are mixing friends with coworkers with family and acquaintances. Our social lives grew side by side with Facebook. For us, Facebook is engrained in our lives and is part of the fabric of our lives. This wasn't the case for our parents.

Group 3: Our grandparents generally had no interest in learning to use the internet (with some exceptions, of course), let alone be on Facebook. This group is out of the realm of social networking online.

Group 4: The youth. They have grown up with social networks present and a part of their lives from the beginning. And just like our parents were apprehensive about things that we (Group 2) didn't care about, this group is less sensitive to the same privacy concerns that we are. The world is more open for them, and they are less likely to care about their privacy settings beyond hiding stuff from their parents. When you are in high school, you only have one group of people you know… kids in your high school. As you get older, you start to have multiple groups of friends from different stages, you high school friends, college friends, soccer team friends, work friends, and that is when privacy became a concern for us (Group 2).

The point is, it's going to be very hard to make one blanket solution that addresses every demographic, as privacy is not as much of a problem for anyone but Group 2, us. So, this is probably what Mark Zuckerberg sees, that the world is inevitably heading towards total openness, and that privacy is dead. I tend to agree that privacy is dead, and that people's lives in the future are going to be far more open than they ever were before. Instead of resisting it and trying to create all of these blanket private social networks (which all fail), we should embrace it.

blr_hack• 16 years ago

Think it may go in cycles, for both search engines and social networks.

For search engines: First we had specific directories (Yahoo, others), then a single search engine (Google), followed by need of vertical search engines

For social: First we had all those nice forums; then (now) Facebook; again we could go to context specific verticals (e.g. HN a hacker vertical version of FB, which has the context for hackers)

greglockwood• 16 years ago

>>> in each case above, there's a specific tight circle of connections I'd like to draw on, but they aren't always the same

Which, presumably, does not include Ron Conway or Michael Arrington.

davemc500hats4• 16 years ago

LOL +1

(but strangely, I would choose them not, in diff situations...)

p01nd3xt3r• 16 years ago

FB treats friendship like its bimodal when in fact its not. People have many levels of friendship and FB does not take that into account. IMHO that is the main weakness w/ their site right now.

shadowsun7• 16 years ago

This may be a tiny blip in a larger trend, actually. Jonathan Harris wrote an essay sometime back called World Building in a Crazy World (http://www.number27.org/worldbuilding.html) where he argues, approximately, that social connection over the Internet has been moving towards the short and superficial for some time now, and has found an end-point in Twitter.

I believe he's right - when you've hit Twitter, the only way to go is to swing right back to intimacy - to meaningful, private digital connections. The whole essay is well worth a read.

Edit: Also, isn't the things that McClure is arguing for essentially what http://www.frid.ge/ is doing?

stevenj• 16 years ago

currently, my cell phone (non-smartphone) provides me with more meaning and intimacy than fb.

i get information quickly; it's fast, efficient, and effective; i don't have to sign in to anything (except for voicemails, which i very rarely check); it's pretty much with me wherever i go; it's relevantly actionable -- i get timely invites to go do stuff with people that i care about and want to do (because people with my # know what i'm interested in); i can actually talk to people, which is something i enjoyed doing a lot growing up.

How to Take Down Facebook -- Hint: It Ain't Twitter.

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