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Comment by jordan0day | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have any good guesses as to what the "next" Facebook will be? I mean, in my experience, it basically went Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook. While Facebook is certainly in the drivers seat to a much greater extent than MySpace was five or six years ago, history indicates they'll eventually be knocked off their throne. However, I haven't seen or heard of any serious newcomers in that space. I've personally seen enthusiasm for Facebook diminishing over the past year or two, but will Facebook be end up being the ultimate "social network"? Is that basically settled?

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My sense is that Facebook is really well made, and isn't going anywhere (i.e., Facebook is to social networking what Google is to search). I could see LinkedIn getting destroyed, though. They fill a very real need, but don't seem to do it very well. This is all very qualitative, but I never feel like I have a pleasant experience on LinkedIn.

Facebook is absolutely fabulously done (complaints about it concern privacy and abuse potential but the interface is top-notch).

The thing about Facebook though, is A) The interface requires lots of care and feeding to stay clean and appealing - Facebook has stayed nice through it small number of very talented engineers. B) Facebook's economics and its supply of topnotch talent has been leverage from its constant growth and its quality as the thing that's happening.

If it instead is faced with a slow decrease in users and a feeling that it's "jumped the shark(tm)", it will have a lot of trouble keeping its economics, its talent and thus the quality of the interface. So I imagine that FB could fall apart in some medium-scale time frame. Oddly enough, I think the end of Facebook wouldn't be good news for those plots "alternatives" to it.

I actually hope Facebook IPOs soon, might postpone some problems...

Are we talking about the same service? The User experience is horrible. I am not just talking from a hacker perspective, as most of the people I know that complain about facebook are very NON technical people. They just complain about the same things that I also hate: That facebook makes it impossible ( by design ) to hide the endless stream of inane auto-generated SPAM that fills your news stream. The worst is that this spam is directly from facebook. My news stream is now 90% "X is now friends with 10 new people", "Y and 15 other friends changed their profile pic", "That book you [Liked] has a fun factoid to blather about".

The iPhone app is worse. You can't even see your own lists at this point, and clicking on youtube links doesn't just play the video, it opens an embedded browser that gleefully suggests that you try adding youtube to your Home screen.

The iPad optimized site is so useless for reading anything a friend links to that I don't even bother clicking anymore, I just wait until I am at a PC.

The message viewer makes it impossible to quickly mark as-read or delete the vast numbers of messages that I never open because the popup notification on my phone contained enough information to never need to open the full message.

The reason that facebook is still going strong is not good user interface or experience, it is that it is incredibly sticky. They managed to become the new email for a lot of people, and that utility is enough to force a lot of people to grind their teeth and ignore the horrible parts.

I suspect the streams are optimized for people whose "friends" are actually their friends. My friends list contains 30 of my real friends that I care about, so these notifications you mention aren't actually Spam to me.

The problem is that a lot of people have turned number of friends into a high score, but when your friends list is 500 people you barely know, it seems like you are basically using Facebook for the wrong thing.

Let's see, 349 friends today. I personally know every single one of them. Do you really care when one of your friends adds someone they met last night at a bar? Or when they change their profile pic, again?

I would say it's a combination of caring a little bit and having those events be so rare with only 30 friends that the signal to noise ratio is still really high.

25 millions ipads sold and still no way to get a decent user experience on the iPad. And i have tried a lot of apps...

There is no facebook ipad app. Just a poorly implemented mobile site. It would be perfectly easy for them to have done it right.

> Y and 15 other friends changed their profile pic > X is now friends with 10 new people

It might be just me, but isn't this the main use of FB, i.e. stalking? Of course I want to know when my friends have changed their profile pictures, how else would I assess their happiness and fulfillment in life if not by looking at their latest photos?

Yes, a new profile picture is either a statement about how they're doing or a clever enough little image that it's interesting.

You can disable/block a lot of those types of updates. I get very few automated updates, and it's very easy to block automated updates from apps people might use. I only say this because I don't see "X is now friends with 10 new people" or notifications that "X changed their profile pic." You can disable a lot of these notifications by clicking the little X on each post, and blocking the specific item you want to block.

If you click the X it removes the specific story you clicked on. It does not (at least in the fb version I am being served) block all stories of the same type, nor do I see any option to do so.

I click on the X, and it gives me the option to block all stories coming form an App (as well as other options).

That being said, I remember the first time I discovered that. For the longest time, I just assumed it would remove only the post.

Odd.

From an App. You have no option to remove such stories that Facebook generates itself, without any apps.

Is your newsfeed literally 90% "x is friends with 10 new people" stories? If so that's very likely a bug (I work at FB am incidentally a pretty active user and have never seen that).

Search and social networking are very different in their ability to persist, IMO.

While switching costs are low with search, the ability to offer a better product is difficult. Momentum gives you little advantage in search. For example, Bing is not marginally better positioned with 14% market share vs when it had 9%.

Social networks are almost the polar opposite. It's hard to get any traction at all in social because switching costs are high. But if Facebook sees a competitor get 5% of its user base and then a few months later have 10% they should be scared to death. It probably means Facebook is already dead and just don't know it yet.

My hope is that people have simply tired of the concept. The privacy implications are staggering.

I don't see anything wrong with a general social network that supports sharing information with people you know. Regardless of how far people have stretched and abused the concept of "people you know" (and "information"), the infrastructure seems useful. So I don't want to see social networking go away; I want to see it entirely decentralized, such that each person's social network goes through that person's personal site.

By their very nature, centralized social networking sites like Facebook force you to share information not only with the people you know, but also with the owners of site.

Some people don't mind this, but I for one don't want Facebook, MySpace, or any other social networking site knowing who my friend are or what I'm sharing with them. It's simply none of their business.

The only hope I see for a truly privacy-respecting social network is a distributed, peer-to-peer network. That way you'd be communicating only with those you know, at least in principle.

But even there there are major problems, such as the need for information to travel over untrusted hops to get to its destination. Encryption can help with some of it, but would still be subject to traffic analysis. Maybe a social network could be created over TOR. I don't know.

Encrypted, peer-to-peer social networks are prohibitively difficult. More likely, we'll see node-to-node social networks first.

There is a social network called Sone on top of Freenet http://new-wiki.freenetproject.org/Sone

Still experimental though.

I think FB has another 2-3yrs before a newcomer comes along. FB will eventually be the 'old' site and uncool to be there. Speaking of privacy, there's a huge privacy hole on the site right now. Currently if I request to add certain people, their data feed starts to populate my wall before they've even accepted the friend request. I think it's because they're part of a group or network I'm already in.

Facebook pulls in anything a user you've requested to be a friend of shares publicly. It's not because you're part of a group, it's because of the privacy settings on their status updates.

Ahhhh. That explains it. Thanks.

How many Facebook users care about privacy? I agree that there are considerable issues with regard to Facebook and privacy, but I'm not sure that most of their users are proactive in caring about it as much.

It is probably more likely that people are tired of Facebook, and aren't using it as much.

That's my point -- we know that people aren't proactive about their privacy, yet we also know that there are "considerable issues with regard to Facebook and privacy." So what can we do but hope that the fickleness of public interest eventually steers the culture away from this danger?

My (admittedly biased) hope is that a distributed social ecosystem will emerge.

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org

I agree that a distributed ecosystem would seem the way forward, do you have any pointers to the main features of the Appleseed project, particularly:

- What shortcomings in current approaches it is addressing

- What technical approaches are being used

- Why these are better than what we currently have

It would be great to have some description of how the distributed part of the system will actually work.

Although I do not want to come across as being biased (due to me working on a multi-live social concept), however I do believe Live interaction both on mobile devices or web app is where the next legion of 'Social networking' is headed.

Whether i'm right or wrong, only time will tell. On the subject of de-throning facebook, that will be hard. Though it is do-able but for the moment, let's not kid ourselves, Facebook will remain the beast and king of Social media for while.

They are just to big and efficiently run to go down like myspace.

"With" from Path. I think Path is not going to get critical mass. "With" or a copy of it, however, is going to be big. The service essentially lets you say who you are with in the moment by snapping a picture. It's like checking in Time with a picture.

I think it's settled for the next decade or so at least.

With 687 million users if each user spent 15 minutes switching to an alternative it would take a combined time investment of about 20,000 years for Facebook to disappear.

Of course they don't have to lose all their users to become irrelevant..

If Facebook's growth stopped today and they began to lose users at a rate of about 90,000 per day it would take 10 years to lose 50% of their users.

By that logic, MySpace is also unchallengeable.

There's a class of kids out there who are 12 right now; by the time they're 16 or 18 are you sure they're going to want Facebook accounts? According to researcher danah boyd, these kids will probably have created and disposed of many different social networking accounts by that time.

I'm not suggesting Facebook is unchallengeable just that it will take much longer due to the enormous number of users. The exodus from MySpace took several years with about 1/4th less users. So a 10 year timeframe seems completely reasonable to me when you're talking about almost 700 million users. I just can't see how that happens in 4-6 years as you suggest. Facebook would have to stop growing entirely and begin losing hundreds of thousands of users per day to a competitor.

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