1) Buy a domain name 2) Pay for hosting 3) Install WordPress, etc.

This is really great for people who don't want to deal with the complexities of hosting their own site but still want to be able to post stuff.

The problem is that with 600m users everyone's presence online starts to feel the same, cookie cutter, boring. It's like if everyone in the world had to use the same stylesheet. If you look at things like the profile image strip hack, people are dying to be unique (even if the only way they can do that is by copying other people's hacks).

I think there will always be a place for Facebook, my mom isn't going to head on over to namecheap to register a domain anytime soon. But I think that facebook is homogenization of the internet, and I think it's boring.

Although I do find it humorous you would mention profile customization as something people want or care about. I personally hated the disorganization and tacky pages on networks like MySpace.

So in a sense, it is "just" a simplified blogging platform with strong social connections between people that makes it so popular.

Why shouldn't someone be able to express themselves by having bright pink text on a bright rainbow-unicorn background? It's not my cup of tea, but I bet it makes a bunch of people happy.

The best solution, imho, would be to have user-styles enabled by default (these could be as ridiculous as people wanted), and then having a standard site-wide mechanism for reverting to the standard style (this would also shut down any background music or videos).

Works well for me. I turn off the annoying ones.

This is true of any privilege. If you take away some right to prevent misuses, you also prevent people from using it correctly. If you could style your Facebook page any way you wanted, 99% would look like crap. But 1% would be works of art. The current system prevents that 1% from ever existing.

(I could think of a million analogies for this. If cars were limited to going 35mph, then nobody would speed. But nobody would be able to drive someone having a heart attack to the hosptial as quickly as possible. 99% of the time, speeding is just some jackass in a hurry. But 1% of the time, it's essential for preserving human life. So it's allowed.)

I'd say that most people are not on Facebook to express themselves, they are on Facebook to interact socially. When people are on Facebook, they primarily are looking at other people's information -- not their own profile. With a personal site, you typically spend time customizing it and creating content, not interacting.

This leads to much different design goals. With Facebook's homogenized appearance, it is much easier to keep track of everybody.

Facebook is great (popular) because people have a blank slate for creating a public persona, then can instantly see feedback from other people reinforcing their created persona.

If Facebook starts doing this, they will be swimming in even more money.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/20/why-women-rule-the-internet... [2] http://mashable.com/2011/03/23/mobile-by-the-numbers-infogrp... [3] http://mashable.com/2011/03/30/women-facebook-survey/

So, I started talking to the women in my life about facebook. And I have a speculative theory - sorry that this is a theory based on gender and its kind of vague.. but facebook makes so much more sense to me when I look at it this way, and I find it an interesting discussion.

Basically, you have mother types and you have single women types. Single women are the early adopter social photo sharers - this is fun for them, and it strengthens reputation and attracts men. Meanwhile, mothers are off doing what they do - strengthening their family and social relationships through chat, gossip, hobbies, etc - it forms a safety net for their family.

Then there are men. Single men chase the single women. This forms a crowd. This crowd attracts married men / fathers and mothers alike (including people like me who are standing around saying 'wtf?'). Further, the crowd attracts social capitalists who leverage the crowd's attention to promote themselves, their business or their cause.

But, the average single female may have 2-7 years of her status as a single woman. Whereas the average mother will have her role for 18yrs+. So, you end up with this crowd mass, in the center is hookup activity. However, the majority of the crowd becomes family-centric and cause-centric security nets. And yea, when you look at this from a distance, its big and boring.

It's better to say "Masses are boring". Just read the comments at CNN.com or YouTube which mostly read like meaningless chatter.

However, I was not trying to imply or judge what is boring on facebook. Just trying to point out that the interaction activity around single women is more dynamic and less predictable than the interaction activity around mothers / families, and further that social security blankets are beginning to rule fb, by the numbers. Networks for the purpose of social security, by definition, are risk averse and less dynamic.

That being said, I'd love to see some analytics around unique page views of single women vs the rest of facebook users to see what facebook users on average consider interesting / boring.

We went on to talk about how there was a very low signal to noise ratio on it nowadays with too many promoters sending to many unwanted messages and how having family on it has changed things as well.

Apprently they're moving more to twitter and tumblr to a certain extent

this does not bode well for facebook

Also I think it was a big mistake to take status updates from the center of the header on profile pages. It let you broadcast more about how you are at a moment vs who in general

I've refused to join Facebook because of an inability to partition my life appropriately. I have at least three personas I don't want to just run together (family, friends, coworkers, probably an online shard as well). If people as a whole realize they can't express themselves freely with their friends because mom is online, that's going to be a big problem for Facebook. This could yet kill them if they continue to choose not to allow fragmentation.

Also, much has been made of how this young generation has no desire for privacy and can't understand why anyone would want it. I've thought for a while that there is still the plausible outcome where instead of never growing a privacy sense and being unprecedentedly open, that they would instead collectively discover the ancient social reasons for privacy the hard way instead. It will never be a single event that makes good copy, but it sounds to me like we may be down this path now, though still in the early phases.

Perhaps the answer is raganwald's comment below (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2397934): people find use in it, it's just not the same use we found.

This doesn't bode well for Facebook because a huge part of their growth strategy was in getting the exclusive college crowd, then growing that circle to the early adopters, then growing THAT circle to everybody else. Even if they never lose their core demographic (which is to say, the students that made facebook popular, which have almost certainly graduated by now) -- if the exclusive college crowd moves to somewhere else, even just for one of FB's core services, it's a very bad sign.

What FB wants, rather, what it needs, is for people to rely on it for everything. If portions of its service become decentralized elsewhere, and heaven help them if they're able to integrate with each other, then they lose the power they currently have, which is in being able to get a pretty clear picture of your social circle from visiting just one site.

Losing early adopters never causes immediate loss of growth. If you play your cards right you will make them up manyfold. Neither does their loss cause immediate exposure to competitors. Early-adopters who left apple, or reddit, or google usually scattered to the winds, spreading out over lots of competing services.

Peter Drucker said the goal of a company is to create a customer. Rephrased, the goal of a company to organize a coherent market out of disparate customer needs. I imagine companies as engines that suck up diverse users one end, cause them to behave in a common manner, and emit users out the exhaust, hopefully at a far lower rate. Discarded users still have to be sucked up by a different coherent engine, which is hard.

Let me know if this comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever :)

The less precise your niche is, or the larger your demographic, the harder it is to precisely deliver anything to them. You can't possibly be all things to all people, and once you've expanded beyond a demographic that you can effectively meet the needs of, then you stop being 'kick ass' for any one person, and start being 'okay' for more people.

For services like Facebook, I think this is the death knell of their offering. What they still have, of course, is the zillions of users. So long as they have everybody, it buys them time.

What I was trying to allude to earlier though, is that if the early adopters that got them popular start going elsewhere, then eventually, so will everybody want to be.

The catch though, is that just like nobody is taking on Craigslist head-on, I don't think anybody can take on Facebook head-on. But, just as Twitter is a viable alternative for status updates, if other, really awesome little things start cropping up for other aspects of FB service, they'll eventually start to erode FB's offerings.

The best thing that FB has going for it in defense of that is their platform, which means that likely, much of what might otherwise usurp FaceBook may well end up just integrating with them instead.

That said, it first became obvious how big Facebook would become when they calmly ignored the protests of those who didn't want to be connected with their younger siblings at high school and thought newsfeeds were intrusive.

I built this app to learn Google App Engine http://hello-1-world.appspot.com/about and it will be good for people to find hot spots where people at. But I've been unable to find an initial user who would seed the network. The fact that it has no branding and there is no activity and the purpose is not clear are facts against it.

I wonder if this was an algorithmic change by Facebook in their "Top News" section. I noticed an extremely sharp decline in the number of new stories I see when I log in, starting a couple of months ago. There's plenty in "Most Recent," however, so it's just getting filtered out.

For me personally, it's made Facebook seem much less interesting and decreased my usage. I'm sure they're watching the numbers, though...

These are not real concerns I have when I'm among real friends.

Will everyone abandon Facebook en masse, just like they did AOL and Myspace? Or did Facebook really win?

Will Google finally do something interesting in the space?

Will any of these open source distributed/federated interoperative social networks catch on? All of them?

I sort of hope for a combination the last two. It doesn't look like any of the big players have an incentive to open up and become interoperable, and it doesn't look like any of the new open/distributed upstarts are getting any sort of real traction. Google's the only big player that has a history of demonstrating a willingness to push open/distributed/interoperable data because an open web is a crawlable web is an advertisable web.

Once the social networking/identity thing is more open and distributed, I imagine networks like Facebook becoming more like a place to go to hang out with certain people and share certain things, with various other places for different contexts and different appropriate activities, and different degrees of privacy, but all working from a single, centralized identity.

Maybe data portability? But data on facebook is portable enough, and even if it weren't, what are you going to import it in? Some hypothetical future rival social network? I imagine for a majority of users, simply viewing a friend's profile to remember an email address, phone number, etc, is enough.

I think you're conflating "closed" with "private." An open social networking environment can still harbor private (I would argue more private) sharing contexts.

But what about my second point? You can download your facebook data. Or is it not 'strongly portable' enough, in your opinion?

Not to mention the graph api. They're very good about giving you all the information you as a user might want (photos, links, messages, wall posts) What it doesn't give you is the kind of data that a competitor might want.

It gives you most of the data you'd be interested in as a user (photos, videos, messages, wall posts). Not so much the data that Google might want, like a easily importable graph. But for everyone else, it's really useful.

Honestly, I kinda hope you're right, though.

In fact, I think that it is so rare for any kind of organisation to get so big as to dominate (say) 90% of its market that there has never really been much chance to pass on knowledge about how to handle problems at that extreme scale. It might even make you more likely to fail if you get too big.

Maybe I should wait a few years and then write "The History of the Decline and Fall of Facebook" in the spirit of Gibbon :-)

There must be some sort of law that the internet's signal to noise ratio drops proportionately to the growth of social networks.

Here it is: "The signal is highly concentrated in the early adopters of every publishing technology."

That is to say, the people most likely to have something interesting to share are the ones busy trying to find new ways to share it. Thus, when the Internet first became available to the masses, the early adopters were people with things to say but no easy way to share their ideas with people interested in what they had to say. So they put up home pages and essays.

Then the masses came on board and businesses catered to them and we got FrontPage and GeoCities and the signal dropped to zero. We can see the same thing in every forum, in Slashdot, in Reddit, and here. Early adopters are invariably chagrined to see the laggards driving the signal to noise down, some leave in search of new media with an opportunity to enjoy the high signal of halcyon days. Eventually the older media have an Eternal September, and the combination of high signal early adopters leaving and a sudden wave of new laggards joining the signal down to nearly zero, and suddenly everyone is dissatisfied.

While not every early adopter has something interesting to say and not every laggard is taciturn, the proportion of writers to readers is higher amongst the early adopters of any communication medium than it is amongst the laggards, which creates the phenomenon you observed.

That can't be entirely right, can it? A medium's early adopters are really the most likely to have interesting things to say? How can the two possibly be correlated? I agree that there's an obvious pattern between signal:noise ratio and community size, but my gut tells me the reason is likely more than "the early adopters were more interesting."

I can't find the source now, but I recall reading an article that posed another explanation: communities start out small, and the members know the rules/mores/norms and abide them. When a newb steps out of line, the graybeard:newb ratio is small enough that it's not hard for the community's graybeards to reinforce the rules with the him. As the community grows, the definition of what's interesting to it gets more vague and distorted, like a drawing on a balloon that's continually inflated. And if it grows quickly, the graybeard:newb ratio drops. Both factors make it harder to enforce the interesting-ness norms.

Since you are asking for a possible explanation, and not a provable one:

People with lots of good things to say naturally seek out places where what they say is not drowned out by meaningless noise. This means that whenever a new publishing medium is established, they jump on it in order to say their good things before Zynga figures out how to use it to broadcast pleas for help milking virtual cows or whatever.

I think this is a version of (or at least, related to) the concept of Eternal September.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Or, more generalized: "For any consumer, signal is highly concentrated in the publishers who share your adoption speed of a publishing technology"

I guess the ease and ubiquity of Facebook has lowered the barrier of entry to publishing content to the Internet. Consequently the average quality level of content decreases, despite its added value of being personalized.

Note: I write this post from my own experience as a college student. It may very well be different from how others use facebook.

To be honest, I'm surprised I'm still on it, but I am. It's the best way for me to send media bits to people I like. It's easier than email for me.

However, I'm a sharer, and many people I know aren't. I don't really have a clue why they're on Facebook then (if they are). It does seem kind of dry.

In college, it was awesome because it was a community setting where you could find out about acquaintances (i.e. stalking) in a trusted network setting. It was OPEN within a CLOSED off system. I could see that still being the case to a certain degree in some social groups or large companies.

But the stripping down, deemphasis and normalization of the profile, turning it from a 'face book' into a social news tool was the inflection point for me. Facebook was great when you could surf people, not news. The funny thing is, Facebook was catalyzed tremendously by their decision to go into social news (i.e. news posted by people you know), and it'd be weird to see it causing their downfall (like a huge investment that looks great at first).

I doubt that's going to be the case, as the social graph infiltrates through the internet and 'like' buttons show up on every e-commerce site in innovative ways. I don't think Facebook truly has much to worry about as they're basically becoming the ID gatekeeper to the internet. I just don't think social news is something particularly interesting, and I'd like to see them deemphasize that part of their business. I think they should focus on making the news feed less of a potpourri of news (Twitter, HN, microforums, NY times, CNN, and so on own that already) and try to innovate ways to emphasize microcommunities on Facebook. The groups feature was an attempt, but didn't really strike gold. I'd like to see them try out more things like that.

I could be way off. I suspect Facebook is just losing touch with nerdy people who are more interested in things, not people. It's probably doing well with people who generally like smalltalk.

After all thanks to Zynga we now all got our mothers, relatives and what not as facebook friends. And like the article says, who has time to setup lists?!

Of course, I know many people who practically live on Facebook, but I suppose that is mainly due to boring desk jobs instead of actual gossip addiction.

If Facebook starts winding down, it will be interesting to see how all those millions of sites relying on FB for their social features and authentication cope.

View a friend's profile and FB will know you show interest in that person, putting that person's stream on a higher rank to show up on your feed. The feed becomes more relevant the more you use it I suppose.

There may be a lot of small talk on Facebook, but for me that normally leads to longer discussions in person.

I might be the only one in here who can't stand viral-app-spam, but in my social circle there's a sharp division between people who can and who can't stand it, and I think this is in part responsible to the huge drop in interaction in facebook.

* There doesn't seem to be a way to explicity follow all the updates of a person

* If I manage to get my friends into a group, their updates still don't show up in the group

* The current News Feed algorithm is weighed a little too tightly to the people I interact with often

Hmm .. maybe I should try writing a client with these features ;)

Facebook et al. will not be the end of connecting with people online. Now that everyone's been pressed into a one-size-fits-all and the lowest common denominator has been found (satisfying your curiosity what your hs buddies are up to, who got fatter last year etc.), the game will start anew for the new shiny thing - connecting people while at the same time bringing out their best sides.

So it's just like in real life, the way you have good friends with whom you talk a lot, and just friends you talk to every once in a while, FB does the same thing.

Facebook like its predecessors Myspace, Friendster et al., is not the destination but rather the current milestone in the evolution of the Internet, the real Social Network.

Instead, it's another "I don't like using Facebook" post.

Joy.

Facebook is stupid because it has become a social obligation to "friend" people on it, and like you pointed out, way too hard to set up effective privacy measures.

Normal people are scared of public speaking.

My english professor this semester has this crusade against facebook. There have been very few classes go by where he doesn't connect what we're reading about with how facebook is causing the decline of civilization.

1) "Not with friends like mine!"

2) no

3) "Not yet."

I find Facebook interesting, because I take care to put interesting people on my friends list. (I have removed one person from my friends list for only participating in online games with total strangers and never interacting with anyone he actually knows in real life. I have blocked three other persons from my home page feed, but still allow them to comment on things I post, for similar overuse of online games.)

To comment on some of the issues brought up in the interesting comments here, one good use case on Facebook is a group of friends with a defined commonality forming a "private group."

(Again, I try to Google up the page on Facebook's help about creating private groups, and again Facebook has an epic fail of making that link prominent. But here it is,

https://www.facebook.com/groups

found after I drilled into Facebook's Help Center a bit. The Help Center page about groups features

https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=414

is perhaps even more helpful.) I have a THRIVING private group including a whole bunch of friends who are currently or were formerly subscribers to the national email list of a membership organization we have all been part of. The official email lists of the organization have gone increasingly quiet, as everyone moves over to Facebook, where the atmosphere is at once more fun (more light-hearted topics) and more serious (gut-wrenching intimate topics that are easier to share to a specific group of friends than to all subscribers to an email list).

Facebook is also working very well in reconnecting me with old classmates whom I have not seen in more than thirty years but whom I look forward to seeing in a massive multi-class reunions this summer that has mostly been organized on Facebook. That has been very enjoyable.

I have to agree that it's a bit odd that status updates are no longer prominent even on people's own profiles, but I think Facebook has figured out by analysis of user behavior that most Facebook readers are even more interested in links (my favorite thing to post, which brings me a big readership on Facebook and elicits many fun discussions) or photos (some of some of my friends' favorite things to post).

P.S. I have to agree with the comments below that if you want to post on a site without a "house style," Geocities used to have that market covered, and MySpace still does. It does improve usability of Facebook that some of the basic page design decisions are made by a small group of evidently professional designers rather than by the whole population of Facebook users. Profiles pages show individuality by the actual content posted by each Facebook user, and that is good enough for me.

P.P.S. By the time I finished typing this, two more friends had replied to my question:

4) "I agree - with the right friends, how could it be boring?"

5) "I believe it was Samuel Johnson who said, "When a man is tired of Facebook, he is tired of life."

Also, they should make some sort of more visual method to sort people into lists. Maybe like a venn-diagram.

We are still seeing the rippling effects that this form of social interaction brings to people's lives. I don't think that's boring at all.

Often, these kinds of articles are met with the "Well YOU build something and then you can talk" responses. This kind of response is an attack on the person making the argument (or at least their qualifications) and not on the argument itself.

I strongly disagree, obviously, and find it disconcerting that you've gotten upvotes. This is a community of makers, and apparently it's becoming a community of bitchers and whiners. The OP's argument is the equivalent of Beavis and Butthead: "this place used to be cool, but now it sucks." It's useless and unhelpful.

Thinking of joining Jacques in going silent.

This kind of response is an attack on the person

No, this is not argumentum ad hominem. I'm not attacking the person, just suggesting that if she feels that strongly, she she should go build something. Bitching is useless.