Laintal
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Posts posted by Laintal
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I found this real funny and I know its the Chimp Masters Fav website
I also managed to post a U tube correctly here as well -
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I only post the articles up here as Antony might be interested in them
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<h1 class="entry-title" itemprop="headline">Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy</h1>Facebook’s history as a repeat offender on privacy, and playing loose and easy with our data means that need to be even more vigilant about privacy issues, thanks to this Home app/faux-OS.
One of the great things about attending Facebook’s events is that one gets to see Mark Zuckerberg mature as a chief executive and hone his presentation skills. And today, he didn’t disappoint in his ability to spin the media corps. It was all claps for “four colors on HTC First” and ideas “inspired” by the likes of Amazon Kindle (ads) and Path. But what he did most brilliantly was obfuscate the difference between an app (Home), the user experience layer and the operating system.
Zuckerberg did that for two reasons: First, to buy his company time to build a proper OS that will come to us in dribs and drabs and then will wash over us suddenly, like a riptide. And secondly, to convince people that ”Home” is just like any other app. Unfortunately, Facebook’s Home is not as benign as that.
In fact, Facebook Home should put privacy advocates on alert, for this application erodes any idea of privacy. If you install this, then it is very likely that Facebook is going to be able to track your every move, and every little action. It is a future I wrote about a few days ago, and let me explain using that very same context.
The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. It takes an effort to shut it down, because Home’s whole premise is to be always on and be the dashboard to your social world. It wants to be the start button for apps that are on your Android device, which in turn will give Facebook a deep insight on what is popular. And of course, it can build an app that mimics the functionality of that popular, fast-growing mobile app. I have seen it done before, both on other platforms and on Facebook.
But there is a bigger worry. The phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time.
So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the location of your home. Facebook will be able to pinpoint on a map where your home is, whether you share your personal address with the site or not. It can start to build a bigger and better profile of you on its servers. It can start to correlate all of your relationships, all of the places you shop, all of the restaurants you dine in and other such data. The data from accelerometer inside your phone could tell it if you are walking, running or driving. As Zuckerberg said — unlike the iPhone and iOS, Android allows Facebook to do whatever it wants on the platform, and that means accessing the hardware as well.
This future is going to happen – and it is too late to debate. However, the problem is that Facebook is going to use all this data — not to improve our lives — but to target better marketing and advertising messages at us. Zuckerberg made no bones about the fact that Facebook will be pushing ads on Home.
And most importantly it is Facebook, a company that is known to have played loose-and-easy with consumer privacy and data since its very inception, asking for forgiveness whenever we caught them with its hand in the cookie jar. I don’t think we can be that forgiving or reactive with Facebook on mobile.
It is time to ask for simple, granular and easy to understand privacy and data collection policies from Facebook, especially for mobile. We need to ask our legislative representatives to understand that Facebook wants to go from our desktops and browsers right into our home — the place where we need to be private.
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Plus-One This: Proof That Google Plus Will Prevail
Remember when Google Plus “flopped"? Well, it didn’t. In fact, it was, and still is, just part of Google’s plan--but everyone (including the media) has trouble seeing it as anything other than a swing and a miss for the explosive overtaking of Facebook, which is what most people believe was Google’s intention with Google Plus. Sure, I bet Google hoped in the back of its mind it would get lucky and eclipse Facebook, but Google certainly wasn’t counting on it.
99% of the people in Silicon Valley I’ve talked to about this, including some very, very bright folks with quite a bit of money and clout, will tell you that Google Plus flopped. They have, in their own minds, written it off entirely. The remaining 1%, while willing to consider that it didn’t flop, are still so tepid that they refuse to stake any credibility on saying it will be successful (which I would measure as having the same level/range of active users as the other big social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.). Articles written by that 1%, like this one, are all chock-full of “mights” and “maybes.”
But I'm willing to stake my reputation on the following statement: If Google Plus doesn’t have a staggering number of active users by the end of 2013, you can all come over to my office and pie me in the face.
Google knows when they have failed (Buzz, Wave, etc). It shoots those products in the head like zombies, and they move on.
So then why didn’t Google shut down Google Plus if it was purportedly such a colossal flop? Why is the team working on it the size of the contracting team building the Death Star? And why is Google integrating its other products with Google Plus at a freakish, breakneck pace? Is Google just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? No--because it wasn’t not a flop at all, and its adoption rate was what Google expected.
Google Plus never was, and will never be, only about competing directly with Facebook.
From its launch through today, everyone viewed Google Plus as "Google’s version of Facebook," because that’s the only sticky, simple headline that we can wrap our brain around. Most people believe it’s just another social networking service where all of our friends are supposed to join and share photos, status updates, and messages with each other. But it’s really not that at all.
Google Plus’s brilliant method of gaining new users is playing out right in front of our eyes, but no one recognizes it.
Sure, there’s a social networking aspect to it, but Google Plus is really Google’s version of Google. It’s the groundwork for a level of search quality difficult to fathom based on what we know today. It’s also the Borg-like hive-queen that connects all the other Google products like YouTube, Google Maps, Images, Offers, Books, and more. And Google is starting to roll these products all up into a big ball of awesome user experience by way of Google Plus, and that snowball is starting to pick up speed and mass. We all glommed onto the concept of “Google’s version of Facebook,” and focused only on comparing the similarities and differences between the two (such as number of users it had, whether “Circles” are “good,” and how “hangouts” are weird). But in reality, none of that matters. I happen to think Circles are a slightly smarter way to organize your personal connections, but it’s a “feature” that Facebook could copy with their eyes closed in a single hackathon. It is not the kind of thing that decides success or failure.
What makes Google Plus different is that it is the new backbone of a company that does search better than anyone already--something Facebook could never compete with. You use Google to search, right? Well, imagine if Google knew every piece of data about you that Facebook knew. Imagine how better equipped they would be to serve you what you are looking for. Google Plus is a way of entrenching Google’s dominance in that area, not a way of stealing Facebook users. If you are in first place, that’s the time to accelerate your lead.
Google Plus’s brilliant method of gaining new users is playing out right in front of our eyes, but no one recognizes it.
When talking to smart people (some of them technology-based venture capitalists) about Google’s method of getting new users, the same thing happens every time: First they chortle. Then, after delivering a two-minute explanation, they hem and haw for a bit… and for a fleeting moment you can feel the struggle of trying to reconcile some rock-solid logic coming from an entrepreneur whom they know is not an idiot, and their own very concrete impression of Google Plus as a widely known failure. It’s like an immovable force is meeting an unstoppable object inside the brain. The easier answer and the incumbent usually wins in this situation. Here’s that two-minute explanation for the rest of you:
Google Plus’s user acquisition strategy is to methodically absorb certain verticals using the carrot instead of the stick.
Yes, of course Google could force most of us to use Google Plus begrudgingly tomorrow if it wanted to, but that’s playing with big, big, brand fire. And that’s not really who Google is at its core anyway. It has shown the will to resist sexy, positive impacts to the bottom line in order to hold onto who it is as a company and this is a good example of that. So how does Google do this?
Step one: Corral every single blogger. Have you used Google lately and noticed faces appearing next to certain posts? That’s called Google Authorship--bloggers can link their Google Plus profile to the content they create. Guess how many online writers see that and say “Eh, I don’t need to have that.” If you said “zero” you win a prize. All you need is a Google Plus account with a headshot to glue this up to all your posts, and it adds tremendous value to bloggers who can now claim their posts instead of having Google show a “stolen” version ahead of their own. Not only a tremendous value to the person searching (who is finding the person who truly generated the content) but also the content generator who no longer has to worry about this infuriating issue. In short--huge value and a 100% adoption rate of a specific vertical.
Step two: Attract every single small business and at least one of their employees. Want your business to appear on Google Maps, Google Local, et al., so that you can tell your prospective customers where you are, what you sell, and when you are open? Yup, you guessed it--you need a Google Plus Local Business page now. But again, Google isn’t forcing your hand, it’s adding value. Reviews, hours, pics, videos, local search--all housed in one place. And this account must be managed by a real person with a real Google Plus personal account. Now you have all small businesses as well as a new person in each business using Google Plus. See where I’m going with this?
Step three: Convince you, because all of those other things that you already love get better. Maybe you’re addicted to that new augmented reality game Ingress. Maybe your Google Plus profile makes it way easier to win. Or maybe you want better music, movie, or book recommendations--look no further than Google Plus. Want to find a community of skiers or chefs or race car drivers with a flick of the wrist? Or perhaps that hilarious video about that thing that you once emailed to a friend but can’t quite remember enough about it to find again? When you have Google Plus, those communities and that video just appear when you search for your best guess.
The point is, once Google Plus has every blogger, every small business, lots of gamers, lots of YouTubers, etc., actively using the product, they will continue to use all that new data to make even more of their products more awesome.
I know. You are still in the “no freaking way am I joining another social network” mode. But one day soon you will wake up and find out about that one little thing and it goes something like this:
Your buddy, “Hey have you heard about this one little thing?”
You: “Oh. My. God. That’s Awesome. That’s so Awesome. How do I get that?”
Your buddy: “Oh, you need to have a Google Plus Profile or it doesn’t work.”
I’ll see you around--on Google Plus.
--Dave Llorens is a two-time entrepreneur currently running One Block Off the Grid. If you are interested in starting a business, please join his Google+ Community, "The MBA of Hard Knocks." -
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<h1 class="title" href="http://mashable.com/2012/12/21/facebook-makes-money-off-you/">This Is How Facebook Tried to Make Money Off You</h1>
http://mashable.com/2012/12/21/facebook-makes-money-off-you/
For better or worse, this will go down as the year that Facebook really put a dollar sign in front of its users.
Facebook has been under immense pressure from investors to come up with ways to monetize, which has led to a fundamental shift in how it operates. When the company first filed to go public in February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated very clearly that profit is not his or the company's first priority. "Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services," he wrote in the public filing. Eight months and plenty of bad stock trading days later, Zuckerberg revealed in an earnings call that every team at Facebook is now responsible for coming up with a revenue strategy for their product.
In the past year, we've seen Facebook try out a range of tactics to make money from its users, whether it's inserting more advertising into the News Feed or the recently announced option that lets people you don't know message your inbox for $1. Some of these efforts, like the messaging option, have been met with heavy criticism from users while others have largely been accepted as par for the course.
What matters now to Facebook from an investor standpoint is how much it can increase the money it makes from each user. Facebook generated about $1.25 per user on average in the third quarter, up from about $1.19 in the same quarter last year.To put that another way, right now you're worth about $5 a year to Facebook and the company would really like to see that number go up.
To put that another way, right now you're worth about $5 a year to Facebook and the company would really like to see that number go up.
For that reason, don't hold your breath for Facebook to stop trying out new ways to make money off you in the new year. Brian Wieser, senior research analyst at Pivotal Research Group, says that some features introduced this year like Sponsored Stories for mobile will likely stick around, while the company continues to test out others to see what works and what doesn't.
"I think you should expect just an ongoing testing and learning from an ad sales perspective about what balances near-term revenue growth with durability," Wieser said. With that in mind, here's a look back at all the ways Facebook tried to make money from you this year, as well as a glimpse at what they might do next year.
Putting Sponsored Stories in Your News Feed
Image courtesy of Facebook
Facebook launched Sponsored Stories in the beginning of 2011, in an early effort to monetize activity on the desktop website by turning users into quasi-brand promoters. This year, Facebook took that effort a step farther by placing these promotions in the user's News Feed, where they are more visible and presumably generate a higher click-through rate. This has been a big money maker for the site, bringing in more than $1 million a day, but it has also proven to be a bit of a headache. Users filed a class-action lawsuit against the company earlier this year, objecting to the having their names and pictures used in the ads.
Mobile Ads in Facebook's App
Image courtesy of Facebook
From the perspective of investors, nothing was more important for Facebook than proving it could monetize on mobile. It did just that starting in the middle of this year by introducing Sponsored Stories, app install ads and Offers into the mobile feeds of its users. In the third quarter -- just a few months after Facebook launched these mobile ads -- it generated $139 million from mobile ads, or 14% of its total ad revenue.
Facebook now makes $3 million a day inserting promotional content into your mobile News Feed and, as Zuckerberg noted during a conference call with analysts, "We're just getting started."
Mobile Ads in Third-Party Apps
Image courtesy of Flickr, Jason A. Howie
Even after you leave Facebook, the company can still find ways to make money off you. In September, Facebook began testing placing mobile ads in third-party applications. The ad exchange allowed certain websites and apps to use Facebook information to better target users with ads promoting a website or providing a link to download an app. Facebook recently put this ad product on hold, but that doesn't mean it's going away for good. As a Facebook rep told Mashable, "We have learned a lot from this test that will be useful in the future."
Promoted Posts
Image courtesy of Facebook
As the social network gets more crowded with posts from users and advertisers, some of your updates may get lost in the clutter. So Facebook decided to give users a new option in October to ensure that their posts are seen by more people. For the low, low price of just $7, Facebook allows users to "promote" their posts in their friends News Feeds. As Mashable's Matt Silverman wrote at the time, Facebook is now applying the "freemium" model for its service.
Facebook Gifts
Image courtesy of Facebook
After trying and failing to operate a gift shop two years ago, Facebook decided to give the gifts idea another shot. In September, the company launched Facebook Gifts, helped by its acquisition of the gift-giving app Karma earlier in the year, in an effort to create another revenue stream. As mentioned, Facebook currently makes just $5 on average per user per year. If every user makes just one small purchase through Gifts, that amount will skyrocket in the coming year. That's why you've likely seen more than a few prompts on the site to buy someone a gift for a particular occasion.
Paid Messages
Image courtesy of Facebook
Facebook decided to squeeze in one more money-making attempt before the end of the year, announcing this week that it is testing a new option that lets users pay $1 to ensure that a message is delivered to someone's inbox, even if it's not someone he or she is connected to on the network. Until now, messages are only delivered to your Facebook inbox if it is sent by someone you are friends with, or who you share mutual connections with. Otherwise, the message goes to a subsection of your inbox called Other, which essentially serves as a spam folder.
Facebook is billing the option as an effort to crack down on spam by seeing if imposing a financial cost on users stops them from messaging people they don't know. But it seems just as likely that this could lead to an influx of spam from marketers and others who may be eager to get access to your Facebook inbox. While the plan is subject to change, a Facebook rep told Mashable that as of right now, a user could pay a one-time fee of $1 to message your inbox an unlimited number of times until you decide to mark it as spam.
Video Ads in the News Feed
The next big attempt from Facebook to make money may be placing video ads in News Feed. <a href="http://mashable.com/2012/12/18/facebook-video-ads-n/" data-crackerjax="#post-slider">Advertising Age recently reported hearing from "several industry executives" that Facebook is planning to let advertisers place 15-second ads in users' News Feeds on desktop and mobile by April, 2013. Worse still, the ads will reportedly be on autoplay, meaning they will start playing once you open up the page, whether you want them to or not.
Welcome to the new era of Facebook.
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Human Intelligence Secrets Revealed by Chimp Brains
Despite sharing 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, humans have much bigger brains and are, as a species, much more intelligent. Now a new study sheds light on why: Unlike chimps, humans undergo a massive explosion in white matter growth, or the connections between brain cells, in the first two years of life.
The new results, published today (Dec. 18) in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, partly explain why humans are so much brainier than our nearest living relatives. But they also reveal why the first two years of life play such a key role in human development.
"What's really unique about us is that our brains experience rapid establishment of connectivity in the first two years of life," said Chet Sherwood, an evolutionary neuroscientist at George Washington University, who was not involved in the study. "That probably helps to explain why those first few years of human life are so critical to set us on the course to language acquisition, cultural knowledge and all those things that make us human."
Chimpanzees
While past studies have shown that human brains go through a rapid expansion in connectivity, it wasn't clear that was unique amongst great apes (a group that includes chimps, gorillas, orangutans and humans). To prove it was the signature of humanity's superior intelligence, researchers would need to prove it was different from that in our closest living relatives.
However, a U.S. moratorium on acquiring new chimpanzees for medical research meant that people like Sherwood, who is trying to understand chimpanzee brain development, had to study decades-old baby chimpanzee brains that were lying around in veterinary pathologists' labs, Sherwood told LiveScience. [Images: Baby Chimpanzees Welcomed]
But in Japan, those limitations didn't go into place till later, allowing the researchers to do live magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans of three baby chimps as they grew to 6 years of age. They then compared the data with existing brain-imaging scans for six macaques and 28 Japanese children.
The researchers found that chimpanzees and humans both had much more brain development in early life than macaques.
"The increase in total cerebral volume during early infancy and the juvenile stage in chimpanzees and humans was approximately three times greater than that in macaques," the researchers wrote in the journal article.
But human brains expanded much more dramatically than chimpanzee brains during the first few years of life; most of that human-brain expansion was driven by explosive growth in the connections between brain cells, which manifests itself in an expansion in white matter. Chimpanzee brain volumes ballooned about half that of humans' expansion during that time period.
The findings, while not unexpected, are unique because the researchers followed the same individual chimpanzees over time; past studies have instead pieced together brain development from scans on several apes of different ages, Sherwood said.
The explosion in white matter may also explain why experiences during the first few years of life can greatly affect children's IQ, social life and long-term response to stress.
"That opens an opportunity for environment and social experience to influence the molding of connectivity," Sherwood said. -
Yes it just a Copy and paste
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Instagram's New Rules
http://news.discovery.com/tech/instagram-p...l#mkcpgn=emnws1
Has a popular social network finally done the hitherto impossible: revise its privacy rules so drastically that a large chunk of its users flees? The situation is still developing at Instagram, but the free photo-sharing service that Facebook recently bought for $715 million in cash and stock may yet pull that off. Instagram announced its new privacy policy and terms of service, both of which go into effect Jan. 16, in a low-key blog post on Monday. "Nothing has changed about your photos’ ownership or who can see them," it reassured users.
That's true in a way that can look false. The new "ToS" document -- at over 6,000 words, it runs about six times longer than the old policy -- hides two inflammatory bits about a third of the way down.
One requires users to "agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos [...] in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you." There's no opt-out provision and no exception for users under 18.
Photos on Instagram are public by default, and the old terms gave Instagram arguably even more leeway to monetize those images.
But now it looks more blatant.
The new terms' next clause warns Instagrammers that "we may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such." The Federal Trade Commission, which frowns on ads that aren't labeled as such, may not be amused.
The new privacy policy, only slightly more verbose than the old, appears innocuous in comparison.
The perception that your photo could get sucked into somebody else's ad--without a chance to rake in the proceeds -- had upset enough Instagram users to jam the service's one endorsed photo-export option, a third-party site called Instaport.me.
Tuesday afternoon, co-founder Kevin Systrom posted a much longer follow-up that said Instagram would update the new terms to clarify that it would not sell photos to advertisers.
A service like Instagram -- with iOS and Android apps to update and servers to run--has to cover its costs somehow. But selling ads isn't the only way to underwrite a free product; one common alternative is to charge a minority of users for added features or capacity, as Yahoo's Flickr service does.
ANALYSIS: Is Internet Destroying Privacy?
(Disclosure: While I have a Flickr Pro account, I have done little with my Instagram account beyond the above images. Applying canned filters to smartphone photos to fake the appearance of age never excited me.)
And posting sweeping, jargon-saturated terms of service and pretending they're no big deal is a monetization strategy Instagram should have definitely known to avoid. Its new corporate overlords could have told it all about that; in some ways, Facebook now looks good in comparison.- Since the summer of 2009, Facebook has been posting "redline" documents showing what language it will add or delete from its policies.
- For all the grief I've given Facebook about its privacy interface, it doesn't hide its privacy controls in its apps while keeping them off its site.
- Facebook lets advertisers highlight your interactions as "Sponsored Stories"--Systrom's follow-up identified that as a model Instagram is working towards--but those only cover designated types of user data and remain bound by your privacy settings.
- Two years ago, Facebook added a way for users to download all their data (Twitter is only just now catching up).
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Facebook sneaks in fees to promote posts
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-...o-promote-posts
Facebook is being accused of an underhanded bait and switch, with brands and even personal users now forced to pay for "promoted posts" to reach all of their "likers" and friends.
Evidence suggests that the algorithm that determines which posts appear in your News Feed, called EdgeRank, has been tweaked so that posts are visible for under 15 per cent of your connections unless you pay. For individuals the cost to promote a status update is US$7.20 and for brands the cost depends on how many fans or "likers" they have, but is around US$20 per post to reach 3000 fans and US$200 to reach 50,000 fans.
Catherine Cincotta, 33, from Melbourne, runs hair accessory firm Dazzle Strands, which has about 4000 likes on Facebook.
"I was getting at least 800 to 1000 post views and then July hit and then all of a sudden it started going progressively down so I was starting to see 300, 200 and now it's at about 90 on average," she said. "I find this to be underhanded ... all of a sudden the posts are being suppressed and you're getting bombarded with requests to advertise with them."
Lisa Dale, 32, runs an online gift hamper business, Signed Sealed Delivered, and Facebook is one of her main avenues for promotion. She also has about 3000 fans and has noticed her post views have likewise trailed off significantly, despite her fan base growing.
"They've sucked me in. I've worked so hard to build up this great page and now the only way I can maintain it now is to pay. If they were going to do it, they probably should've done it at the start," said Dale.
Mashable journalist Matt Silverman wrote in a recent column that Facebook's EdgeRank was creating artificial scarcity by "rigging the game and then asking users to pay to level the playing field". The New York Observer wrote that "Facebook is broke, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users".
Last week blog Dangerous Minds wrote a post titled "Facebook: I want my friends back", accusing the company of turning down the volume on users' Facebook reach. To reach the blog's entire 50,000 fan base Facebook charges US$200 per post.
"We post seven days a week, that would be about $14,000 per week, $56,000 per month ... a grand total of $672,000 for what we got for free before Facebook started turning the traffic spigot down in Spring of this year - wouldn't you know it - right around the time of their badly managed IPO."
Earlier this week Simon Dell, director of Brisbane-based marketing firm TwoCents Group, said for his firm's page the average "reach" over the past 10 posts was 195 or 16 per cent, but at times it dropped to just 94 views.
One of Dell's clients had an average reach of just 12 per cent of their 5400 fans and another was 19 per cent.
"Facebook isn't seeing fans as a community anymore, they're seeing them as numbers," he wrote on MarketingMag.com.au. "Being able to reach just 15 per cent of your brand advocates who have opted in to receive your communication isn't a great ROI for your time and effort."
Facebook has been under significant pressure to turn its huge user numbers into revenue and the company is now worth a bit over half as much as it was when the company went public. Its shares are worth $US21.94 down from the offer price of US$38 . In a recent blog post Facebook ads engineer Philip Zigoris wrote that any changes Facebook makes to its news feed algorithm were more to do with offering users more relevant posts than making money.
"Regardless of whether you're paying to promote a story or just posting one to your Page, the news feed will always optimise for stories that generate high levels of user engagement and filter out ones that don't," he wrote. The response from readers was mostly negative with most complaining that they shouldn't have to pay in order for their posts to be visible by their friends.
"So tell me, how are people meant to engage with the content if they're not being shown the content in the first place?" wrote one.
Another said: "I have to tell you the vast majority of my friends really hate this, find it very frustrating, and the only thing that keeps them from leaving Facebook is all their friends are here and there is no real option ... yet."
Facebook declined to comment for this story. -
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If we don't get a timeline on here soon I'm thinking of joining up on facebook,
if not this following article might be of interest
Facebook's Timeline: We Are All Historians Now
http://news.discovery.com/tech/facebook-ti...l#mkcpgn=emnws1 -
Great news, might see you 4 over the holidays
Cheers Edwin -
<h1 class="entry-title">The Beginning of the End for Facebook?</h1>
http://techland.time.com/2011/12/05/the-be...d-for-facebook/
My friends at comScore shared with me that, in September 2011 in the U.S., the average number of minutes that each Facebook user spent on the site was 410. Last year, that month’s average was 287, signaling a 42% increase. Also during September 2011, Facebook commanded 14.7% of total U.S. consumer Internet-usage minutes, the most of any website. Given that the site is still on a growth trend, how could I be crazy enough to ask if it’s the beginning of the end for Facebook? Let’s explore.
One of the things you learn living in Silicon Valley your whole life is how fast things can change. Big companies can come and go in extremely short periods of time. Yahoo! was once what Google is today. MySpace was once what Facebook is today. Innovation happens everywhere and waits for no company.
(PHOTOS: Life Inside Facebook’s Headquarters)
Rightly or wrongly, what’s caused me to start to evaluate whether Facebook has peaked is my own declining use of the site. I find myself using it less and less each day, sometimes going days or weeks without checking it. Interestingly, I have also observed that many in my network are posting less often. What may be happening is that consumers are experiencing Facebook fatigue.
I recently polled almost 500 high school students in San Jose, and shockingly, not all of them were on Facebook. But perhaps not surprisingly, nearly all who were said they were basically bored with the site and had been using it significantly less.
Now, depending on how heavy of a technology user you are, you may find the idea of Facebook on its way out surprising or not surprising. For example, many of the young people I surveyed conveyed that they were ready for something else. Call me crazy, but I firmly believe that Facebook has either peaked or is on the cusp of peaking.
All of my thinking on this comes, of course, on the heels of news reports about Facebook’s preparing its IPO. But it also comes at a time when Facebook has to overcome negative press due to a settlement with the FTC over privacy issues. Those events are on opposite sides of the spectrum and could potentially be used to argue for or against Facebook’s long-term staying power.
(PHOTOS: Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year 2010)
If you’ve been using Facebook for more than a few years and think back to how you used it in the beginning, you’ll most likely remember using it quite frequently for long periods of time. Much of this initial time spent connecting with friends and family or rediscovering old friends was what made Facebook great. Even many who are new to Facebook may still find themselves using it heavily by doing some of those same things.
But at some point, Facebook usage becomes more about profile management and quick checkups than heavy usage. Now, although this isn’t bad, it’s not what Facebook wants as it looks to maintain a large, healthy business.
Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/12/05/the-be.../#ixzz1h4GPfogo
I’m not entirely sure why a consumer’s usage of Facebook starts out heavy, then gradually declines, but I believe it has something to do with the size of that person’s network of friends, brands, family members, colleagues, acquaintances and brand fan pages. As those numbers go up, Facebook becomes overloaded with information and cluttered with content that’s not that interesting or relevant.
And some recent experiences with apps that are taking a different approach to social networking are slowly convincing me that Facebook may be in trouble. One of those is called Path. Path has been around for about a year but has just received a major update that makes it much more compelling.
(LIST: Top 10 Technology Bans)
The basic concept of Path is that it limits the amount of people you can be friends with, which means you connect only with those you’re genuinely close to. This, in my opinion, is quite compelling, because it’s a case of less being more. The app is designed around the social sharing of life with those closest to you, and the experience delivers on that promise.
Even something like Xbox Live, a social network for Xbox gamers, gives a preview of how people may spend their time engaging with others of like-minded interests.
Pinterest, something I’m hearing is taking quite a bit of time away from Facebook, is another site that’s growing extremely fast. It brings a completely unique approach to interests by wrapping a social experience around it.
(MORE: Techland’s 2011 Tech Buyers’ Guide)
What these services all have in common is a focus on something specific, rather than an attempt to try to please everyone. That’s something that may ultimately be disruptive for Facebook. In fact, I suspect that just the idea of managing hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends alone is off-putting to many. So services like the ones I have mentioned may be more appealing and, in turn, draw people away from Facebook.
When I survey the landscape and look at trends, which is one of my jobs as an industry analyst, I see declining usage of Facebook as a significant trend. Taking that into context and combining it with the unique new offerings coming up daily, you can see why I’m asking the question. Facebook may have run its course.
Of course, it’s too early to tell, and Facebook can still innovate and, in essence, disrupt itself. But the social networks that are more focused may turn out to be more interesting to consumers in the future.
Read more: http://techland.time.com/2011/12/05/the-be.../#ixzz1h4GyT85b
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