"Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"

I mean I guess it had to be a slow developing thing, but it could have started long before it did

comparing fb and myspace is misleading because myspace was, even at its peak, a tiny % of the world

― iatee, Monday, January 3, 2011 2:39 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

myspace had over 100m users, besides the entire point of my comparison was to point out that fbs ubiquity is an incredibly recent phenomenon

also the rise in fb's success is pretty correlate to the rise of smartphones, no?

its really amazing how quickly people have accepted social networking as this regular static thing thats essential to their lives

― ice cr?m, Monday, 3 January 2011 18:40 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

It's still possible to exist without social networking atm though. Not that I'm countering your point, I just think we're not there yet. btw I am not looking forward to the day when having a fb account is as essential as having an email address.

I sorta consider them two different phenomenons, but I still have a $30 phone xp

myspace had over 100m users, besides the entire point of my comparison was to point out that fbs ubiquity is an incredibly recent phenomenon

― ice cr?m, Monday, January 3, 2011 3:43 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah but how many of those 100m were returning users or regular users

Livejournal was similar in a lot of ways to FB - your own group of 'friends', personalised profile etc. I'm kind of surprised fb and myspace took as long as they did to get where they did - but then it wasn't long ago that doing anything 'on the internet' was kind of a niche thing. My group of friends all had Myspaces but no-one in my office did, for example.

fb is well ahead of smartphones, but yeah obvs thats a huge factor in this whole thing

my fb account more already essential than my email for most communication, email mostly just for formal stuff or sending files xp

myspace had over 100m users, besides the entire point of my comparison was to point out that fbs ubiquity is an incredibly recent phenomenon

― ice cr?m, Monday, January 3, 2011 3:43 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah but how many of those 100m were returning users or regular users

― dayo, Monday, January 3, 2011 2:46 AM (48 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i dont know myspace was huge, not as huge as facebook, p shitty site overall tbh

there are a lot of shitty bands out there

I find it more amazing that they didn't catch on in 2003 or something, considering how simple the technology is

― iatee, Monday, 3 January 2011 07:42 (3 minutes ago)

^^^^^^^^

this was why i was rmde a bit at the hyping of zuckybro as a 'programming genius'....i mean he might be but facebook is insufficient evidence, his talents lie elsewhere

i think fbook's initial success was based on a sense of 'solidity' contra the fly-by-night tackiness of myspace et al, and short of a major fuckup they should be able to stay afloat that way

it's just the maximizing revenue that's difficult but yeah taking that raw data and reselling it is def a challenge

Facebook places/locations (?) is where the fb/smartphone thing melds properly imo.

myspace was totally on some 'in my world of young ppl' shit and pretty exclusionary, also almost actively user-unfriendly

also I don't wanna come off as college bro after a bowl hit but it seems that once something has attained 'critical mass' it just kind of has so much inertia that its pretty much unstoppable/unchangeable? look at the English measuring system ffs lol

Myspace was revolting, all the on-screen junk and flashing shit everywhere. Dunno who in that org thought such a design ethic was going to have longevity.

myspace was totally on some 'in my world of young ppl' shit and pretty exclusionary, also almost actively user-unfriendly

yeah nobody called myspace 'exclusionary' at the time - when facebook was very explicitly exclusionary. but that's a really good point - myspace's home page never ever attempted to look like a site that everyone on the world would join.

also I don't wanna come off as college bro after a bowl hit but it seems that once something has attained 'critical mass' it just kind of has so much inertia that its pretty much unstoppable/unchangeable? look at the English measuring system ffs lol

― dayo, Monday, 3 January 2011 18:51 (28 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Everything changes though. All it takes is for the playing field to shake and for fb to be looking the other way for a few minutes.

hah those are two different uses of exclusionary - for myspace I meant like, if you weren't part of that world of young ppl you didn't feel 'cool' enough to join

facebook was just basic exclusionary

when you consider what myspace had done (seemingly took what friendster "invented" and turned it more mainstream and corporate and successful for a time), they blew it even more than friendster did, which was i think to focus on a demo that would eventually outgrow it, and facebook decided to make a site that was friendly to everyone of any age. quite possibly zero people i know use myspace now. facebook could go that route too, i know a lot of people who are pretty much over it. i think it can be quite exhausting to feel the need to have a particular website to return to all the time (lol?)

be curious to see how going public will affect facebooks mojo - agility and freedom has been a big part of their success - everything becomes a lot more constrained once you have to deal w/hitting quarterly targets regulators new bord members etc

i don't think it's a challop to suggest that in five years facebook may be as relevant as myspace is today.

i don't think it's a challop if it's subjunctive

lol u guyz faccebook in 2k16 will be like a fuckin juggalo4lyfe myspace page not updated in three years, just a sad clown face crying into the ether of indifference

^^

challop

the downfall of fb will probably be a refusal to adequately integrated animated gif support into the newsfeed

facebook was just basic exclusionary

I feel like the slowwww roll out among colleges was easily the most genius thing fb's done, the movie hits on this theme but maybe doesn't even explore it enough. I remember when my friends who weren't at a facebook college were waiting super eagerly to join.

Facebook places/locations (?) is where the fb/smartphone thing melds properly imo.

― Bentley Rhythm Trayce (Autumn Almanac), Monday, January 3, 2011 2:49 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah see this for instance - theres no particular evidence fb is gonna get location right - which when it blows up in conjunction w/the internet of things is gonna make the social networking boom look like a mere puff of smoke - of course social is gonna be tied into that too - but will fb be the boss of this shit or just a cog - maybe being a cog will be enough to justify $50b - maybe theyll end up the biggest company in the world - maybe they will die

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsnMGVJRE6g

theres no particular evidence fb is gonna get location right

As long as fb's advertisers think/believe fb has got location right, it will pay money for the souls of fb users and the actual accuracy/worth of location will mean sod-all.

so I mean there's every reason in the world to believe fb will fail on location but when you've got friends volunteering the location of their friends (against their will) you've basically got a massive spread of active location data that gives advertisers wet dreams.

until location has to do actual things like interact w/rfid tags xp

there's still got to be an incentive for giving your location, impressing your friends isn't enough for most people

dayo just checked in to the Mandarin Oriental!

giving yr location to yr friends isnt really the thing, giving it to walmart so they can offer you a special deal is

If it's the default on smartphones, the only incentive that matters is the one that rouses people to prevent fb using their phone's GPS function.

xp to iatee

that would be pretty rad, if wal-mart gave me a discount on magnums because it knew from facebook that I go through a lot of magnums

BRAGGIN 2011

fb already has form in fucking over its users for its own means so I don't see how location will be any different. Seems obvious to me that a controversial but effective opt-out future for location data is on the cards.

I'd rather faceless companies that wanted to give me deals knew my location than my friends, so I guess I'm fine w/ this

all the location services now are basically just trying to build out their technology so when every box of cereal has an ip adress theyll be ready to cash in - they dont currently resemble the actual function they will one day serve

There will always be people who are fine with it, especially if people are getting free goods out of it and nothing bad happens. That's where I think fb will go from being ubiquitous to down our pants.

xp

I feel like the slowwww roll out among colleges was easily the most genius thing fb's done, the movie hits on this theme but maybe doesn't even explore it enough. I remember when my friends who weren't at a facebook college were waiting super eagerly to join.

Last week I was explaining to my dad why Facebook became so successful and I told him it was because, since it started with ivy league colleges getting people to authenticate their real selves before using the site, it moved the internet away from anonymity and towards people admitting who they really were IRL: which was a milestone. It shifted incentives away from masking your identity to showing it off, and it had a legitimate authentication process early on that would snowball as third parties, of other people using real names, confirmed friendships.

My dad caught the gist of it when he said "Well of course, everyone wants to show off that they went to Harvard,"

I'm dead tired so if that sounds meandering I'm sorry, but I think FB's ability to authenticate who people really were and what that meant for how people went online was the secret ingredient.

"everybody wants to show off that they went to harvard" is my own sleepy error, not my dad being Yogi Berra.

since it started with ivy league colleges getting people to authenticate their real selves before using the site, it moved the internet away from anonymity and towards people admitting who they really were IRL: which was a milestone

This is a damn good point actually.

fbook will exist but geocities 'exists' iirc

No, it doesn't.

Why would someone with a beard need to be told about a razor?

'doesn't know about the existence of razors' is the only real excuse for a beard

oh boy

you wait til I next wdyll

will do.

No, it doesn't.

― Christine Green Leafy Dragon Indigo, Monday, 3 January 2011 14:37 (36 minutes ago)

it exists in all our hearts

Can see FB being about for a decade easy, but it's still as vulnerable as MySpace to ppl moving en masse.

It'll be young and early adopters that move, so what FB will be left with will be old and slow. There's still a load of money in that (this is the Farmville crowd), but it's the same sort of money that Yahoo! is now getting, low-end crap.

The £30bn valuation is still based on this absurd Altavista-era premise of total lock-in, which I don't think even Google truly has. In 10 years I see FB potentially raking in a tonne, but not AOLing the Internet as ppl fear.

Jho OTM re "Internet of things", too.