[patrickk]

Facebook's increasing focus on business customers will be at the detriment of regular users, who will be demoted to the rank of mere 'consumers'. It's a subtle - but important - distinction.

Facebook's decision-making will increasingly be driven by thinking like "how can we monetize all this wealth of consumer data" or "how can we introduce tiered fanpage packages to business customers as a revenue stream" rather than focusing on what makes a great user experience.

Currently, knowing that my friend has achieved another 'badge' in Mafia Wars adds zero value to my life. It only gets worse as Facebook focuses more and more on business brands. What do I care if my friend 'likes' Apple or Nike? How does that improve my relationship with that person? People I am really friends with in real life don't care what brands I like, or what isotonic sports drink I drink. The like me because of me. Much as businesses would like to think that people define their lives by the products they buy (this is like the opening scenes in 'Fight Club' where Edward Norton's character tries to pick out stuff from an Ikea catalogue that defines himself) that's not a basis for a relationship. And Facebook used to be all about relationships. Now I look at my Live Stream...and it's got all this random flotsam floating downstream. I care about none of it.

The reason I love HN, incidentally, is because it's the polar opposite of MySpace and what Facebook is gradually becoming. Real people, that I share a lot in common with, expressing their real opinions, no auto-generated crap, and zero bling.

You see comments like "What could cause FB to die?" here on HN. They're so big at this stage, with the power of network effects and lock-in, that external competition is no threat to them realistically. The only way they will die is if they continue exactly the way they are now, making people's experience ever-more spam choked, till people realize "hey this experience is actually quite shit, even if I do have 500 online friends" and start looking for alternatives. We're not quite there yet though.

[glhaynes]

Do you hide the spammy stuff? I'm interested in nearly none of the apps on Facebook, but I really enjoy status updates and comments. So whenever I see something in the feed from an app I'm not interested in, I click the Hide button then choose to hide everything from that app. Two clicks, it's gone forever. Used to have to do that quite a bit, but now I've got most things blocked, so only about once or twice a week do I have to block a new app. Compared to dealing with spam in my email, it's no big deal at all.

[luxative]

I didn't fully get your point earlier, but it's clearer now. You raise valid points. By the way, two points that may interest you: (1) I personally filter my facebook stream to weed out all the "spammy auto-updates" you've mentioned - so it feels a lot more 'human' to me. I get exactly what you mean (mafia wars is a pet peeve) (2) The whole thing about the Dunbar number-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

[patrickk]

(1) I personally filter my facebook stream to weed out all the "spammy auto-updates..."

Forcing users to 'prune' their status updates is in fact a symptom of something broken in the user experience. I check into Facebook every now and again, and I shouldn't to have to act like a gardener who has ignored his back yard for a month. A lot of status updates are incredibly frivolous too - Facebook's culture is not suited to my taste I guess. Virtually all of my (Facebook) friends are not hacker types and will post "I'm bored" or "feeling tired" or something equally awe-inspiring. Granted, this is something that Facebook would have never solved as they are trying to appeal to the mainstream, not early adopters. I love the fact that by logging onto HN I often learn something new, and quickly learn to a) write well and b) only talk about stuff you are knowledgeable about. Anything else and you will get caught out pretty quickly.

(2) The whole thing about the Dunbar number

This had occurred to me also when writing the original comment, but I didn't mention it as I don't see a decline as inevitable as an online community grows in size - I believe HN is proof of that. By deliberately appealing only to a narrow segment of the internet population through a strict, human-enforced culture (see HN guidelines), and allowing users to only maintain very loose ties if any with each other (contact info in your HN profile for example), it's possible to have meaningful, no-spam interaction on an online community. Pg mentioned recently that HN now gets something like 60k uniques per day. I've been on HN for quite a while and I think the quality of article and comments has been consistent over time. I think the Paul Buchheit philosophy of building something that a small number of people love, and that most people would hate (HN), rather than something that tries to appeal to everyone (Facebook) comes into play here. See my below comment on the 'tribes' concept for a possible solution to this problem in a social networking context. I believe it would work as it models how people organise themselves into groups in real life.

[mmacaulay]

Great post. I've been "bored" of Facebook for some time now (as I suspect many are). There's another thread on the main page where people are discussing whether or not Facebook is on the way out - I think it is, we're just waiting for something to replace it with. Twitter? Nope. My less technical and/or web savvy friends are never going to be interested in it. Diaspora? Maybe. But it seems like the purpose of Diaspora was to replace Facebook from the outset - that's just not how these things happen. More likely is that it will be something completely out of left field.

[patrickk]

Thanks. I'm genuinely curious what people think of this, so I reposted it there.

I think the early-adopter types - like you, me and the typical HN user see real value when it prevents itself, and Facebook ain't it. Mainstream users will hop onto Facebook because their friends are there, not necessarily because it's the best social network out there, whereas early adopters will jump onto Facebook in it's early days because

a) it's cool

b) it's useful - for users - not businesses

c) it's not MySpace.

They will continue to stick around as long as these are still true. Whether a) is still true is debatable, b) is fading and c) is becoming more of a reality by the day.

[luxative]

Patrickk, some thoughts on your points:

a) Yes, it's not 'as cool' as before. But, thanks to the 'friends of friends' effect ypu've mentioned, it has achieved remarkable numbers while it 'was cool' - and at this time, that's all that matters.

b) I think businesses are starting to see value in facebook. Facebook Places (with the automatic creation of a facebook page too) will only catalyze this.

And...with a single destination site seeing 500mn+ users, we're in unchartered territory - history won't help us here.

[patrickk]

On a) - cool is very subjective, so perhaps there's no point in even mentioning it. It depends on the person you ask.

On point b) - Facebook is focusing on making it's services more useful to business, at the detriment of it's core users. Facebook became popular in Harvard because you could scope out that cute undergrad you spotted around campus. The people in your network were tied to your friends and classmates in the real world. The more Facebook grows, the more it devalues it's definition of 'friend' (Facebook's definition of friend that is. Having 300 Mafia Wars friends might make me spend more time on Facebook for a while - increasing Facebook's stickiness, hence it's value to brand advertisers, but it doesn't mean I'll ever have a meaningful interaction with the members of my "Mafia").

Do I want to get notifications every time a 'friend' of mine 'likes' Xbox Live? No. That's not a real interaction - it's just spam. Do I want a notification every time a friend of mine logs into their account in a Starbucks (this is how I'd imagine their location-based feature working)? No. Of course I don't. I want my social network to only give me message that aren't auto-generated, i.e. those that are real messages from real people. Like HN comments.

I think Facebook has forgotten about what made it popular in the first place, and now because of it's size and self-sustaining growth, will implement features that are useless to it's core user base. There will be no telltale indicators (at least externally) of this growing dissatisfaction because any attrition of it's user base will be compensated by new, incoming users. And of course many people who don't like the service will hang around because they don't want to be out of the loop.

What I envision as the ideal would be social networks to emulate email and SMS. I can send a Gmail email to my Hotmail based friend. If I don't like Gmail, I can switch email providers and take my contacts with me. Social networks should organise in 'tribes'. You associate with whatever tribe you feel describes you best. Tribes can interact with each other. If I don't like my tribe (perhaps because it's becoming MySpace-like) I can move easily to another. There could be a tribe that appeals to HN type users, and another for 12 year old girls, and another for retirees. Each have their own identity and values. What I'm describing is an open protocol for social networks, which forces "tribes" (individual networks) to compete on how good they are, rather than how many of your friends are on that particular network. This will keep them honest as they can't depend on user lock-in. In an ideal world, Diaspora and Facebook would be on an open protocol and users could switch easily and painlessly.

[GBKS]

I actually think Facebook has a decent grip of this spam problem. Your news feed doesn't show you all the events that happen, only a limited set. They figure out which people you interact with more, which updates get more attention, etc and only show you the ones that they think matters to you.

Their goal is to capture as much data as possible (updates, likes, places, pages) and to find the connections between things. With enough data and number crunching, they can figure out if you're interested in xbox or Mafia Wars updates or now and adjust accordingly.