It was also becoming clear that, unlike many other internet sensations, MySpace could earn its keep. Within 15 months of the acquisition, revenues had leapt from about $1m a month to $50m a month: half came from advertising sold by the new sales team that News Corp had installed, the rest from the Google deal. As advertisers rushed to target the site’s rapidly expanding audience, offices were opened in Japan, South Korea, China, while a free music service was launched at considerable expense.
But by the beginning of 2008, things began to sour. Facebook, a rival social network that was simpler and easier to use, was gaining momentum and starting to grow more quickly than MySpace. Murdoch confidently told the world that MySpace would make $1bn in advertising revenues in 2008 – but the company missed its target. Users began to desert the site, which had become cluttered with unappealing ads for teeth straightening and weight-loss products. News Corp executives could hardly hide their displeasure, and in April this year, DeWolfe left, closely followed by most of his senior management team.
Alas and alack! What are we social media aficionados to do?
Apparently our passions are curbing our potential – heavy Facebook use translates into a grade level drop at the college level.
We knew that, though. After all, if you’re taking your attention away from your studies, or work, something is going to suffer.
Here’s the best part of the article:
If you use Facebook, you are probably driven by the inane status updates that spew out of your friends across your pages. The joy of a muffin, the pictures of a party where everyone got drunk and dressed up like a slutty leprechaun, and the obligatory question that hopes to solicit a comment because you want to make sure someone in your network is reading your pathetic attempts at making the minutiae of your existence seem interesting. It is the equivalent of Vogon poetry, odes to green putty found in one’s arm putty.
To understand the Vogon poetry bit, you’d have to read some Douglas Adams. But anyone can enjoy the “pathetic attempts at making the minutiae of your existence seem interesting.” Love it!
Facebook continues to grow at a torrid rate. Reunion.com is growing almost as fast. Ning, Tagged, and Multiply are also all growing at over 100% annually.
However, Twitter is the runaway winner in unbelievable growth rates. While it’s growing from a smaller base, and therefore it’s easier to get a higher multiple, a growth rate of almost 1400% annually is just astounding.
This is a getting to be a more and more common story …
My wife just came back from her work, where a co-worker who was off “sick” was busted for actually spending the week in Cancun. Naturally, it was discovered because she was posting on Facebook the entire time. Now as a result of her duplicity, she’s out of a job.
Somehow people still seem to think that they can separate various facets of their lives. What we’re actually seeing, for good or ill, is that work/life/career/leisure and everything else is getting mixed up in one big bowl. And, courtesy of Google, data that is somewhere … quickly becomes data that is everywhere.
You would think by now people would start to have realized this …
When things are mashable, they will be mashed. Unfortunately, that means that users sometimes have mashed potatoes instead of baked.
Which isn’t a problem, of course, if you like mashed. But sometimes – and this is an example – mashed leads to issues. Notice the multiple duplicate posts:
I like Friendfeed, but mostly feed it on autopilot from Twitter and other services.. So, apparently, do others. When multiple services have the same information, and they’re all reporting it in … there’s a problem. I’ve seen the same problem on FaceBook … multiple feeds of the same event, leading to a low signal-to-noise ratio.
Social networks are going to need to be more careful about what they consume as feeds and inputs. Some kind of duplication filter would be an excellent idea. Obviously, the trick would be not getting any false positives and deleting important data.
The reality of the social media landscape today is that there are hundreds of networks, many interconnected in complex ways via APIs, RSS, and other protocols. While there will be some degree of consolidation in social networks, people are going to continue to join multiple networks in an attempt to be where the action is.
Networks like Friendfeed and Facebook, therefore, will have to find ways to filter the duplicates.
He’s hardly an unbiased source, but I like how the new CEO of LinkedIn defines three of social networking’s heavyweights:
“LinkedIn is the office, Facebook is the barbecue in the backyard, and MySpace is the bar,” says Hoffman, referring to the three major social-networking sites battling it out for millions of consumers and billions of dollars in online ads.
Rings true with me.
LinkedIn is where I connect with business professionals, contacts, co-workers, and partners. Facebook is for friends, acquaintances, and old classmates. MySpace … I’m not sure if I remember my MySpace login information. (Perhaps that says something about me as a married 30-something with kids!)
By the way, if you’d like to connect with me on LinkedIn … please feel free!
I would like someone to create a new Facebook app, based on the myriads of Likeness quizzes. But instead of likenesses based on fruits, movies, books, cars, friends, or anything else, it would be based on the degree to which you dislike likeness quizzes.
The entire purpose of this post is to publish a post while having set up Wordpress (the software that runs this blog) to ping (notify) flog blog (the software application that updates Facebook with my new posts when I post them here) every time I publish a post.
. . .
. . .
Err, jargon often sucks, but I think we can all agree it can have a wonderful brevity to it.
. . .
. . .
Bleh, flog blog often sucks. It very rarely picks up my new posts, which is annoying. And it still has not picked up my ping, which was sent 15 minutes ago.
Essentially, I’ve put my Facebook profile on autopilot using applications that suck in all my data from around the web. But I hardly ever go there myself.
Why?
Well, first of all, my employer blocks Facebook. While I certainly wouldn’t spend a long time there anyways during the work day, it’s annoying to get little email notifications during the day about something a friend did on Facebook, and then having to think about that later if I want to check it out.
Secondly, and much more importantly, while the application infrastructure of Facebook is amazing, it’s also fingernails-on-blackboard perky-happy-chirpy-people-on-Monday-mornings annoying.
Let me say that again: ANNOYING.
Everytime anyone does anything, Facebook feels like it needs to notify me. So-and-so is playing Scrabulous, someone else took a picture of a cup of coffee, someone else is super-poking me, and his dog is joining some stupid corporate fan club because they happen to like Tim Hortons coffee.
I love to know when someone has posted a new blog entry.
But I don’t need the minutiae of their every footstep on Facebook. There’s a massive annoyance factor in being sent some kind of message that actually isn’t a message. It’s not a real message … not a note, or email, or IM, or actual communication … but a piece of digital flotsam, tossed off randomly from some interaction with a Facebook application, sent easily and spammishly and automatably to tens or hundreds of “friends.”
But that’s not the worst part.
The worst part is that half the time, when you get this piece of digital flotsam, if you actually care to see the picture of the cup of coffee, you have to install the application that the “friend” used when adding it to Facebook. And then you have to sell your soul to the devil and allow the application to know the most intimate details of your online life.
Friends are great. Invites to events from friends are fine. Notifications that friends have updated photos or blogs are wonderful.
But, with apologies, since I turned 15 some time ago, I really don’t need invites to a million “likeness” quizzes based on movies I like or don’t like, personality tests based on chocolate flavors I prefer, fan clubs, “presents” that aren’t really presents and certainly can’t be unwrapped, and invites to be “best friends” with someone that I’m already “friends” with on Facebook.
Arrgghhh!
Are we not satisfied with robbing children of childishness by incessantly driving adult tastes in everything to younger and younger ages, so that we must now also perform the inverse and infantalize ourselves with giggly fluffy pink nothings and superpokes and other such nonsense?
Social networking is cool and wonderful. It’s helped me reconnect with friends I’ve lost track of years ago.
But that doesn’t mean I want to act like a pubescent Japanese schoolgirl.
PS:
Since I’m already up in high dudgeon, here’s one more thing that bugs me. I’m not going to add 50 Facebook apps to my account every day, giving them and their creators access to any and all information about me.
What with the insane euphoria of the web 2.0 crowd having found something slightly less web 1.0ish than MySpace in the social networking space and the insane euphoria of the VC crowd having found a new poster child for massively inflated valuations, I’ve been trying to maintain sort of a cool distance from Facebook.
(While, naturally, having a profile that I hardly touch.)
But this morning an old buddy from school sent me a message. By old buddy from school, I don’t mean university or even high school. I’m talking elementary school.
Wow. I hadn’t even remembered his last name, but I had remembered Jaimie.
Reconnecting with someone you haven’t seen in maybe 20 years is pretty cool.
So I got an account on Facebook a couple of weeks ago.
It’s protection – in the personal SEO era, you need to lock up accounts on popular services with your actual name. Amazingly enough, I’m John Koetsier on Facebook.
After being on the service for all of about 25 days, I’ve already formed some conclusions:
Facebook is the anti-MySpace
MySpace is gaudy and busy; Facebook is boring
MySpace is full of ads; haven’t seen many on Facebook
MySpace is web 1.0; Facebook is web 1.0 too. Only difference: it’s designers weren’t on LSD
(I know, I know Facebook is doing all kinds of API deals, I know, I know, it’s a platform now … blah, blah, blah. I’m talking about the visual feel, the scent you get from using it. It’s all been done so, so, so many times, and it’s all very 1.0)
MySpace was programmed by Hammy, the hyperactive squirrel in Over the Hedge, and few things work as advertised; Facebook actually works, which is good, but still does stupid stuff.
Case in point: check out this screenshot from the homepage of Facebook …
Facebook wants me to give it access to my online email so that it can check if any people that I sent messages to and from are also on Facebook … it’s an auto-friend feature.
Cool? Uncool.
I don’t have a Hotmail address. Or a Yahoo, MSN, AOL address. I don’t know too many self-respecting technically-proficient over-20 people do. (I have a Gmail account, but that’s mostly for subscriptions and possibly spammy stuff.)
So the feature is useless to me. But can I get rid of it? Can I edit it? Can I dismiss it? No, no, no.
So every visit to the boring uninspired homepage of Facebook is punctuated by the uselessness to me of the largest element on the page.
And that’s just annoying.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
But that’s not the worst part.
But, with apologies, since I turned 15 some time ago, I really don’t need invites to a million “likeness” quizzes based on movies I like or don’t like, personality tests based on chocolate flavors I prefer, fan clubs, “presents” that aren’t really presents and certainly can’t be unwrapped, and invites to be “best friends” with someone that I’m already “friends” with on Facebook.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
