Poll: Facebook usage

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034871

by veyron • 15 years ago

70 107 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

sidcool• 15 years ago

Results are surprising so far. The intersection of Facebook and Hacker news readers is pretty less. Probably that's why HN readers are so productive?

dfischer• 15 years ago

We just browse HN instead of Facebook. :)

bfe• 15 years ago

That's a good observation. Facebook is becoming like TV in that lots of people spend a ton of time with it even though almost all of its content is trivial, while really productive people tend to spend relatively little if any time with it.

skeptical• 15 years ago

That was a really good comparison.

I never signed up for facebook. But today I'm pretty much the black sheep.

Email, telephone, webpages, those existed long before Facebook. It feels like millions of people think that they are enlighten about internet communications when then become regular Facebook users. I don't like to base my social interaction on a private closed network/service. I prefer distributed and open technologies.

r00fus• 15 years ago

There is selection bias and timing.

This story posts on a Saturday night. Also pro-facebookers aren't likely to care so much about yet another usage poll. The ultimate poll is Facebook's site stats.

veyron17• 15 years ago

I'd like to hope people continue to respond into the work week, so we'd get a better pool of people. Should I just ask again later on?

tsm• 15 years ago

I check it every day, but don't spend an hour doing so...where does that put me?

jaxn• 15 years ago

Are you sure? Do you use RescueTime? It is pretty interesting to see where my time actually goes.

methodin• 15 years ago

I cannot actually determine an answer. On one hand I might have spent an hour or two a week fudging around on it in the past but since Google+ I've found it has left a sour taste in my mouth and do not really go on that much - even if I don't really go on Google+ that much either. Especially since they've upgraded to a popup nightmare of garbage.

Vivtek3• 15 years ago

Since G+ started, on the one hand it threw a harsh light on the people I've friended on FB, but on the other it put me more in the habit of checking on updates from people, so I've actually probably spent more time on FB.

But now that FB would post every site I visit to my friends, I've logged off and may just not log back on. I'm not sure I want my sister knowing my porn site visit habits, or my Tea Partier high school friends knowing just how liberal I've turned out.

There's a reason I don't just move into everybody's house when I get to know them. Zuckerberg may or may not understand that; it's difficult to say - but it's safe to say he understands where to get the next dollar. I don't think Facebook's really the place I want to be any more.

jamesaguilar• 15 years ago

> now that FB would post every site I visit to my friends

Pretty sure it does not do that.

kposehn3• 15 years ago

I'm still baffled as to how people have decided it does that.

ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)

Vivtek3• 15 years ago

That's what I understand from the press I'm seeing: if the site has a Like button on it, I no longer have to actually click that to "share" it with my friends - it's just automatically posted to my timeline.

Either way, Facebook is a soul-deadening waste of time except for a couple of people I don't see any other way. I should probably just write a tool to ensure I'm always logged out when not using it. And delete its cookie, I suppose.

Update: Ah, apparently this is just an app that has this behavior, not basic Facebook functionality - that's what I get for just scanning Winer's article and not checking the article he was talking about.

My point about the soul-deadening waste of time stands, though.

nostrademons• 15 years ago

One of my friends observed yesterday that "Ever since G+ came out, jdtang has been spending a lot more time on Facebook." Which is kinda ironic, since I work a little bit on G+.

His observation is true, but complete correlation, not causation. Around the time G+ came out, I started seeing a girl who lives an hour away, so I can't see her during the week. I already had her friended on Facebook. She is not willing to move to G+ (understandable, all her friends are on Facebook). All my friends on G+, I get to see in person every day anyway. Therefore, I'm on Facebook a whole lot more.

Funny how one person can make the difference for adoption, if it's the right person.

cubicle67• 15 years ago

I'm in the "don't have" bucket. at first it was just because I never felt the need, but lately (last 6 months or so) it's become more of a resolve

Pieater31412• 15 years ago

I found a fun way to use facebook. I change my birthday once a month to the upcoming calendar month and then wait for the same "friends" to wish me another generic "happy birthday".

So I know I use facebook precisely once per month.

veyron17• 15 years ago

a sort of birthday arbitrage?

I wonder, do you have numbers on what percentage of your real friends are tripped up by this (wishing happy birthday on a fake day)?

Pieater31412• 15 years ago

Almost to a one, every close friend and family member on Facebook called me out the first time either by PM, email or on my wall. Despite even these public posts (which I did not remove), for 4 straight months the same dozen or so distant friends continue to wish a happy birthday. And another 40-50 other distant friends have posted at least once. This coincides pretty well with my previous real birthday stats if you add the close friends/family numbers with the average number per fake month of distant friend well-wishers.

kalleboo• 15 years ago

Hah, I've long been considering writing a daily cron script that changes my Facebook birthday to the current date. This post may be what gets me off my lazy ass to do it

kposehn3• 15 years ago

I voted how I use it for personal use. I probably spend at least 60 hours a week on Facebook in the Ads platform.

I've got a rather stupid-large number of people sharing with me on Google+, but only one person actually shares anything. I've checked it once in the last week and still see nothing outside his stuff (and I'd rather just read his blog).

I'm not saying G+ is a failure, just that for me, it isn't compelling. I still enjoy FB and staying connected with my family through it...and it make me a metric-ass-ton of money :)

veyron17• 15 years ago

"Let me add one carveout: for those who work at startups that write facebook apps, that time is NOT counted."

I specifically added that to make sure that people voted based on personal use. I suspect a lot of people work at startups or jobs that require use of facebook

kposehn3• 15 years ago

I actually wonder what that sort of statistic would show then. Would be interesting to see if there's a burn-out based on how much people use it due to work.

hrktb2• 15 years ago

I had to create a facebook account to allow my wife to have a 'married' status (not allowed to be set alone). Felt pretty much like a damned if you do damned if you don't situation

dsmith_hacker• 15 years ago

Same here. However, after a few months of not using it, she didn't care when I deleted it :)

veyron17• 15 years ago

I was going to opine that the stupid facebook firewalls (you have to login to use a service) were the worst things I've seen, but definitely marital pressure takes the cake

hrktb2• 15 years ago

There's some pressure, yes. But she mostly uses facebook to network, and having a very clear and "official" statement about her familial status seems to avoid her a lot of sterile interactions and facilitate first contact.

These are half private/half professional relations, and I expect Google+ to fit a lot more than facebook, but whe're not there yet.

nbm• 15 years ago

You can set your relationship status to "married" (or "in a relationship") without linking it to a particular person. My mother does exactly that - my father isn't much of an online sort of person.

DiabloD3• 15 years ago

I can most proudly state that I have never used Facebook. Screw social networking.

msluyter2• 15 years ago

My worked started blocking it, which totally pisse me off at first. And when I get home, there are so many status updates I can barely follow them. So I mostly stopped using it, and you know what? I hardly notice.

linuxhansl• 15 years ago

I know this is off topic, but your "work" is stupid. Not only is motivation more important than some time "lost" due to FB usage. If you cannot get some of your private stuff during work hours, chances are you are going to leave earlier or come in later. Lastly it is ineffective, you can always "stunnel" via port 443; they would be none the wiser.

vasco• 15 years ago

He says he hardly notices it so I doubt it is somehow affecting his productivity...

msluyter2• 15 years ago

First, unfortunately it's too late for me to go back and fix the typos above (HN + iPhone = errors), so my apologies for that.

And second, I agree with you. It's not that I checked it that often in any event (if they really wanted to prevent time wasting distractions, they'd block HN ;)), and if I want to, I can always check it via my iPhone/iPad, etc...

I suppose my overall point was that, even though the no-Facebook policy is inane, it ended up with a result that for me was fairly benign, which suggests that Facebook's value in my life was fairly low.

m0nastic2• 15 years ago

I spend a good portion of time logged into Facebook (in Chrome, which I don't use for anything else, and is the only place Flash is installed on my system).

It started with old friends from high school, which was sort of nice, but obviously if I'd have really wanted to keep up with these people, I would have made more of an effort to do so.

But now it's the only way that the majority of my friends communicate. None of them use email anymore, almost none of them have blogs, or websites.

I can totally understand why nerds find Facebook's popularity confounding (as they were already doing all of the things that it facilitates in a more customizable fashion without the lockin of one company), but for every single normal person I know, it's the de-facto way they use the internet.

veyron17• 15 years ago

I'm surprised and somewhat saddened to hear that most of your friends only communicate through facebook.

In my case, we still mostly contact via phone calls, resorting to text messages for less urgent messages and email for longer and more persistent messages

m0nastic2• 15 years ago

Most of them were never big on phone calls (which suits me fine, as I absolutely never answer my phone), but would occasionally use text messages for something temporal (like: "Hey, I'm at the bar, where are you guys?").

I never had much luck getting most of them using email. When we all left high school, I made the futile attempt to set up an IRC channel for them to use and spent months talking them through it. This was back in 97, so our other options were limited.

Thankfully, AIM came on the scene, and that became the way that the majority of us stayed in touch.

I have no idea why email never clicked for any of my friends, but it's been true of everyone I've met as an adult. It could just be that they associate email with "work", and therefore never took to the medium.

I'm not, however, saddened by the fact that they've all standardized on Facebook. I'm actually glad that they've all picked one thing and use it. If it'd been something else, that would have been fine too, but Facebook is ridiculously well-suited to everyone I know, so I'm not surprised it's become so popular.

mak120• 15 years ago

That is exactly the way almost every non-tech/nerd I know uses Facebook. Setting up a website is too much work. And I can understand that for them having to remember several logins and unconnected accounts (one for photo sharing, another for email, yet others for IM, blog etc.) is a lot less attractive than one site that lets them do all of the above (albeit with much less control and privacy, neither of these cause them to lose any sleep).

As for me, since most of my non-tech friends are on facebook anyway I have to keep my presence there to keep in touch. I have to admit, facebook is a pretty effective way of keeping in touch. I know I can call/email or meet in person - which I do for my inner circle of close friends. But the fact of the matter is a lot of my friends live abroad and international calls are expensive. Also, we seldom feel the need to make a call or send an email unless there is something specific we want to talk about (but that could be just me). OTOH, placing a small comment on Facebook seems a lot more effortless. The other party can also not feel compelled to answer. And there are a lot of friends I have on facebook who I don't want to lose contact with but don't want to have a day to day relationship with either (i.e. saying hi or meeting up once in a while - but not hanging out every weekend or constantly IM-ing every day).

Another thing is, apart from facebook chat, all interactions on facebook are semi-live at best. I can post a comment and the reply does not have to instant. This is good, especially if the other party lives in a very different time zone.

I am also on G+, but unfortunately most of my non-tech friends find it rather confusing, empty or just ignore it altogether. Which is a shame because liked it from the start.

steve8918• 15 years ago

Their privacy issues are really starting to bother me, enough for me to consider deactivating my account.

The one that has really gotten my goat is when you tag a photo with your friend on it. Even if you have privacy set so that only your friends can view your photos, if you tag your friend in one of your photos, ALL OF THEIR FRIENDS CAN NOW SEE IT.

You can't change this setting. It's called something like "Friend of friends can see tagged photos." You have no control over this, and the only one who can change this is your friend that you tagged.

This is now forcing me to never tag any of my friends, because I don't want strangers seeing my photos. It means effectively that I've lost control of my privacy on my photos, and that's something that is enough to drive me away from Facebook permanently.

dreamux• 15 years ago

You're right that sucks. But if you think about it it's probably more of a technical issue than evil policy, just imagine the permission graph for visiting one of your friend's profiles -- FB would have to do a reverse lookup of all of you friend's friends and filter ones with closed photo sharing (or what if you are a friend common to both?). Further, scaling that out to 750M people is non-trivial.

Anyways, I'm not excusing their policy, but I expect they'll fix it whenever it is technically possible to do so.

eftpotrm• 15 years ago

No, it's not significantly more difficult than the existing case.

You have one permissions set - my permissions on my photos. And another permissions set - my friends' visibility sets on their tagging. The display set is the interaction between these two sets, which any database developer should be trivially able to calculate.

I don't for one minute dispute that the scaling issues for calculating these interactions for 750m users are significant, but the core task definitely isn't.

pandaassembly• 15 years ago

In my opinion we have seen quiete a positive development on FB in regards to the control and usability of the privacy options recenttly, most likely triggered through the appearence of Google+.

Most, if not all the people I know, have long restricted their profile to a minimum visibility level for non-fiends and non real friends.

At the moment I do not see the privacy problem as big as it used to be 12 months ago.

mhlakhani• 15 years ago

A lot of people in my network had restricted their profiles as well. However, due to some change (I guess around two weeks ago), most of those profiles are somewhat open again, and I can access information that was blocked before. I really dislike having to lock down my profile again everytime Facebook changes this stuff.

hrabago• 15 years ago

I barely used it before, logging in once every two or three months. But with the new Lists feature, I can log in and view just the posts of family members I'm not in constant contact with. I plan to log on more often now to keep up with them.

carnival• 15 years ago

I deactivated my account after hearing about the latest changes. Now I'm very inclined to make a fake account.

meatmanek• 15 years ago

What's the value of a fake account?

veyron17• 15 years ago

The dreaded Facebook firewalls. I can recall 5 startups I couldn't even see because the first thing they ask is for you to log into Facebook. Its a nonstarter.

knieveltech3• 15 years ago

My facebook usage has always been intermittent, but this Timeline thing was the last straw for me. I shut down my facebook account this evening.

bherms3• 15 years ago

Just curious, but what about the timeline made it the "last straw" for you?

knieveltech3• 15 years ago

The entire concept, really. It's grotesquely invasive, opt in or no, and it speaks to a culture of blatant disregard for privacy as a concept.

On a more minor note I really don't want to know this much about my acquaintances' collective browsing habits.

Now that there's a viable alternative with google+ all I have to do is scrape my photo galleries and that's a wrap.

lukejduncan3• 15 years ago

The only time I use facebook:

For some reason my Nexus One comes pre-installed with Facebook and it can't be uninstalled without rooting (which for laziness sake I don't want to do). I don't have a Facebook account. The Facebook app periodically tries to authenticate and obviously can't. Instead of gracefully giving up (or allowing me to uninstall) it brings a Facebook login page to the foreground.

So every day, two to three times a day, I have to exit out of Facebook which has given itself focus. To me this defines the Facebook experience and their focus on quality software.

I dislike Facebook not for all their privacy concerns (which are annoying), but because I was always genuinely frustrated using the site.

veyron17• 15 years ago

Is that documented somewhere? I was completely unaware of that "feature" of the Nexus One (granted I use an iPhone anyway)

bermanoid• 15 years ago

This was most certainly not the case on the Nexus One that I'm using.

Did gp get it from Google, or elsewhere? The Facebook for Android app was barely even out for most of the time the N1 was on the market, from what I remember...

RK• 15 years ago

Never seen this on my Nexus One. Also no Facebook account.

buro9• 15 years ago

I rooted mine just to get rid of two things:

  Facebook app
  Amazon MP3 Store app

Was worth it.

felixc• 15 years ago

It sounds like the app has some credentials set up in it that are just not correct. You could try checking your account manager (under Settings) to see if you have a Facebook account listed there, which you can then delete.

I have the Nexus One, with the Facebook app, and can confirm that this is not supposed to happen.

lukejduncan3• 15 years ago

Well that did it =). I HAD a facebook account. Once I got rid of it I started getting this issue and couldn't uninstall. Thanks

crag• 15 years ago

I check in weekly. And only because ever member of my family (except for the kids, oddly enough) are on it. I"d love to ditch it. But I kind of want them to stay on FB. So I can be on Google + without the family and their drama. :)

godarderik2• 15 years ago

As a high schooler, it has become a mandatory part of the social experience. I can count on one hand the people in my grade without a Facebook, and many real life conversations will start with "so did you see X on Facebook last night?" Although its for the most part a large waste of time and I don't really want one, I use it because I would like to have a social life. Its sad, however, that many of my friends fail to see how superficial it is.

veyron17• 15 years ago

Do your classmates see facebook as a replacement for a social life or an addition to the social lfie?

godarderik2• 15 years ago

I wouldn't say that it's seen as a replacement, but I definitely think it's become and integral part of the social life. For example, a lot of the time if someone is hanging out with another person, they will make a status announcing it. There's really no real reason for this, other than to boost social currency by saying "I was with Person X." I don't think its really replacing hanging out and doing stuff with people, but its making it so much more real-time, since all of your friends know what you're doing literally as you're doing it.

However, one thing that Facebook is good for is coordinating groups. I'm in a class council group as well as groups for a few AP classes. Since everyone is always on Facebook, it makes setting up and coordinating things while getting feedback super easy. For example, a couple days ago, someone posted after school in the AP Stats group about getting together for a study session. A few hours later, around seven of us got together at Barnes and Nobles.

jaredsohn• 15 years ago

I use Facebook regularly.

Facebook usage can be helpful to entrepreneurship in that it can make it easier to understand people outside of Silicon Valley. I have nontechnical Facebook friends from high school, college, and my local area and by following their lives on Facebook I can regularly put myself into different peoples' mindsets to think about how they use technology, what things are problems to them, how they perceive things, etc.

It is also great if you are involved in a hobby where Facebook usage is high such as dancing argentine tango in the Bay Area. All of the instructors are on Facebook, lots of dancers friend each other, and event listings and photos can be found there.

MartinCron• 15 years ago

it can make it easier to understand people outside of Silicon Valley.

That's part of the value for me, getting small reminders that people exist outside of my urban liberal bubble, and that while I might not agree with those people on a whole host of things, I can at least respect them and their perspective.

akkartik• 15 years ago

I spend maybe five minutes a month on facebook (usually for debugging some oauth integration). When I do I logout as quickly as I can. Now I find out that even that's not enough to keep them from snooping on me (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3033475)

AzAngel• 15 years ago

I left FB long ago and never looked back.

jonsterling• 15 years ago

You seem to be using “carveout” as though it’s a word. I think you meant “caveat”.

veyron17• 15 years ago

carveout is a real word. In contract law and in financial regulations, it refers to a specific exception to a general rule.

I have seen many organizational bodies, like the IFRS, use carveout as a word rather than carve-out.

Unfortunately I spent way too much time this week dealing with legal issues :/

sanxiyn• 15 years ago

IRC channel I founded is an integral part of my life, not Facebook. But I can understand that for some Facebook is like my IRC channel.

eliasmacpherson• 15 years ago

Your experience matches mine, it seems to me that gchat, msn, facebook and twitter are quite similar in practice to a big IRC server than the man and woman in the street can use. A lot of the same issues crop up, spammers, impersonation, security, who controls the logs. I can appreciate how people use it to keep in touch with remote friends, but I think rather than handing over so much often boring and useless, othertimes damagingly revealing info to facebook they'd be better served by infrequent international calls to each other.

estacado• 15 years ago

I check it every day, but I spend about 1 minute each day. I just go there to see what my friends are saying, then move on to other things.

ha4702• 15 years ago

I have to say - my time on facebook fluctuates heavily based on whether I'm single at the time...

veyron17• 15 years ago

Does it increase or decrease as a function of relationship status? Maybe there is some sort of correlation with number of partners ...

ha4702• 15 years ago

*Decreases when I'm in a relationship. Less of a reason to socialize heavily.

spiffworks• 15 years ago

Maybe I'm just odd, but social networks don't really bring me any value. I have a few close friends who I stay in touch with no matter where we are, and I do it on a medium that is a little more personal than the digital equivalent of an announcement to all your friends. I thought maybe I just didn't like Facebook, but I saw the same thing with Google+. Sometimes I wonder how many people on HN are the same way.

bitops• 15 years ago

Likewise. I don't have a million friends, just a few that really matter to me.

The friends that I really care about require no electronic mediums for meaningful interaction. If I didnt hear from them for a year, it would only take 60 seconds to get back into the comfort zone.

Technology is no substitute for heart. : )

dropshopsa• 15 years ago

amen

veyron17• 15 years ago

Given the number of people who don't have or don't use Facebook, I think there are a lot of people who don't derive social value from social networking.

herval• 15 years ago

or a lot of people using other social networks. Or a lot of people that don't know they "need" social networks. Or a lot of people that can't use social networks (eg grammas and grandpas, 12-year-olds, people in countries where FB is blocked...)

juanipis• 15 years ago

seems to me people who use facebook a lot do it bec it's a status thing: they have to be in on the latest trend, they have to be in on the latest tech. just the same with people who just have to have the latest gadgets... it's all very superficial

bherms3• 15 years ago

It's interesting to consider "spending" an hour a day on the service. What if I pop in like 10-15 times a day to check notifications. I feel like it's a lot of usage, but total time is actually quite minimal. In addition, I have Adium signed into Facebook chat 24/7. Being a developer by trade, I'm online nearly every waking hour, so usage may seem even higher than it really is.

veyron17• 15 years ago

I thought about it, but I think anyone who says they spend "five minutes a day" in reality spend much more time. Years ago I thought I spent 5 minutes a day on aim until I really started clocking myself (old school way, with a stopwatch). That 5 minutes was actually an hour :(. That being said I highly recommend timing

barrkel• 15 years ago

I use Google Reader with Facebook RSS feeds (which are desperately hard to discover) to avoid visiting the website. I am not logged in to Facebook on my primary browser, and every reference to a Facebook domain is adblocked. If I really must visit a status update or shared link, then it'll fire up in a secondary browser, but that only happens a couple of times a month.

So I spend perhaps 5 minutes on average every month, or one hour a year. But it may be multiple times a month.

tyler_ball• 15 years ago

Other than working on a Facebook app via my job, Facebook serves as a pretty accurate inverse metric of my productivity.

If I've been on Facebook a lot during a given week, I know that I haven't been that productive.

If I sign on, see a bunch of notifications and realize that I haven't been on in a while, I know that I've been busy, and feel good.

Unfortunately, though, it's how just about everybody I know communicates and shares their photos.

clark-kent• 15 years ago

I have a facebook tab open on my browser all the time, just like I have tweetdeck and gmail always open. Facebook for me is just a fun communication and entertainment tool. I can do without it.

MrScruff• 15 years ago

Missing poll option:

I'm on facebook everyday, but for no more than 5 minutes total.

There's really no need to be on facebook all the time to get the major benefits (messaging, event invites). The iPhone app alerts you when anything happens that involves you so I don't see the need to waste any time browsing the site.

AD7863• 15 years ago

Yeah, I visit Facebook a couple (maybe more) times a day for 1-2 minutes to check if I have any notifications and quickly scroll through the feed to see if there's anything interesting, there usually isn't.

When I'm out, I just rely on my phone vibrating when I've got a notification.

I don't see how people can spend hours everyday on it.

sek• 15 years ago

This is exactly my behavior. If i need a little distraction i go to Reddit or Google+.

veyron17• 15 years ago

I thought about it, but I found that most people who say that actually spend more time than they think. Its like instant messaging insofar as it's easy to think you spend a few minutes but in reality you are spending hours. I'd recommend you time yourself (and confirm you really are only spending a few minutes a day)

dw2d• 15 years ago

Maybe I am old fashioned or know too much about information security, so I really only use it only once or twice and for development of apps.

blendergasket• 15 years ago

I had a facebook acct and got rid of it but then realized that for RSVPing for things and adding facebook integration to websites I needed one so now I have a facebook acct that has no friends and is only used when there is no other way to accomplish the task at hand.

The best thing about facebook is that we're all essentially the products being sold to the advertisers and whoever else.

gmantastic• 15 years ago

I use it most days, but spend little time there. It's just a nice way to share a few pictures with fairly computer illiterate friends/family, and engage in a bit of schoolboy banter with my mates.

It's useless for any meaningful debate, and the constant copy-paste status updates from some people, which basically amount to scare-mongering/grief-porn chain-letters, annoy the hell out of me.

6ren• 15 years ago

Bias: people not interested in facebook probably won't click on this story...

veyron17• 15 years ago

I'd hope the fact that it's a poll would draw people not interested in Facebook :)

elliottcarlson• 15 years ago

I have family all over the world, as well as old friends whom are residing in different countries that I like to keep up with. To be able to stay in touch with these people is very important to me, so because of this I spend perhaps an hour a week with no interest to increase that usage. If they were to live closer by I probably wouldn't bother with a Facebook account.

veyron17• 15 years ago

To everyone who thinks he or she spends five minutes a day or some other short burst of time per day: please time yourself. Please! I insist because, as I mentioned a few times in a few replies, I found that people who say they spend 5 minutes actually average about 1 hour, be it on aim Facebook or blogging or slashdot or HN. If there are enough people who truly spend 5 minutes a day, I'll add an option in the next poll (which I will ask during the work week to control for the time of day)

jerhewet• 15 years ago

> Missing poll option:

Missing poll option: I've never been a member of Facebook, and will never be a member of Facebook or any other "social networking" site.

FTFY.

veyron17• 15 years ago

Next time. I would say it counts toward the last option, but I definitely will explicitly add it for the next poll

nakkiel• 15 years ago

As far as I'm concerned, I check it every other day and spend little time on the website but I'm connected almost all the time to the chat (as I have set up my account in Pidgin).

rhizome31• 15 years ago

In 2007 I created an account and used it for a few months but it wasn't very interesting so I closed it. I found that it was maintaining artificial relationships with people I wouldn't be in contact with otherwise. It creates an illusion of connection, not real connection.

About a year ago I had to create an account for development that I use when clients require Facebook integration. I found the API to be slightly annoying to work with.

My view on social features is that they can add a lot of value to sites that have a real purpose beyond just being social: Delicious, StackOverflow, Lang-8, SoundCloud, GitHub, etc. are great.

Mz• 15 years ago

I recently deleted my FB account, after having not logged in for apparently over a year. I think I only set one up because it is popular on some of the health lists I used to frequent -- lists where "please pray for me"/handholding bs was also very popular and where I routinely got attacked for trying to talk about things that were actually helpful with health issues. Someone who was openly hostile to me on some other unrelat listed tracked down my FB account and added me as a friend. Um, yeah, not what I consider a friend. My impression of and experience with Facebook has been rather negative. I finally decided to simply delete it. I don't understand what the appeal is at all. (FWIW: I'm online constantly and most of my friends are online friends. But FB and me did not hit it off.)

stfu• 15 years ago

I occasionally create fake profiles when I need access to a feature that is otherwise inaccessible. Hated the site from the first minute and doing my best to spread the message about its negative aspects.

mithaler• 15 years ago

I have a Facebook account. I never use it for communication; I only use it for keeping my Android contacts up to date, for which I have yet to discover a better tool. If not for that I'd have deleted my account and /etc/hosts blocked it months ago.

techhome• 15 years ago

I am not having a facebook account. But I feel very bad regarding the same as the opportunities to get exposed of your knowledge is very much in Facebook. If you use it wisely, it will be a great benifit for the user. Never use facebook just for chatting with or keeping in touch with friends. Try to be more professional by utilising the facebook as your resume!!

Poll: Facebook usage

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