A year ago Steven Levy suggested that Facebook should give us each a single “friend-list do-over.”
A lot of commenters challenged him. “Grow some balls and just unfriend people,” said one of the more even tempered readers. Another – “These comments are too constructive. Someone should just call this guy an idiot.”
Steven probably didn’t see that criticism coming, because he probably assumed people understand how difficult it is to unfriend people on Facebook at any sort of scale. You have to find the person, hover over the friend button, select unfriend and then click a confirmation.
That’s a few seconds, and when you are trying to remove hundreds, or thousands, or people you don’t know as friends, that takes Too Long. And so the friends stay, for the same reason that every clock in my house is off by an hour for half the year.
So, no, most of us aren’t going to spend the time removing friends on Facebook. Instead many of us are using new social networks, like Path (we’re an investor) and the upcoming Just.Me (we’re also investors, guess how much we like this space) to start fresh. Facebook is for thousands of people you don’t know. The start fresh new services can be finely crafted from the start to include only your actual friends. And they’re made for mobile. Update: Check out Ourspot as well.
Path and others are giving us what we want – A nice, sophisticated and diverse conversation with friends, like sitting together at a table just laughing and talking and drinking a latte. Facebook is more like the top picture above. Chaos.
I don’t like sweater vests, but I’ll take them over hordes of strangers yelling at me any day. I can politely ask that guy to take off that stupid vest anyway. Then everything would be perfect, really.
Sure, lots of people say this is our own fault for showing zero restraint on adding friends over the years. But what seemed like a fun “sure why not, this is adventurous!” in 2006 and 2007 when Facebook allowed open registrations now feels like a bad hangover.
Anyhow, Facebook today is so crowded and messy that no one ever goes there anymore. Or at least that’s what I imagine Yogi Berra would say.
So Facebook, I ask you. Give us the Steven Levy do-over. Or give it a Jack Welch twist and auto suggest we unfriend the 10% of our Facebook friends that we interact with the least once a year. Or both.
I promise, cross my heart and pinky swear, I’ll be more restrained and focused this time. I’ll realize the long term consequences of my more hasty why the hell not click yes decisions, and I won’t repeat my past sin of not saying “no” more often.
Ok, I may repeat past sins. But you can just let me start fresh again next year, right? That wouldn’t be so bad. I could live with that.
Because if you don’t, eventually Facebookers may not wanna come over to the site since it’s so crowded, and no one can stop ’em. You can observe a lot just by watching. Facebook is 90% mental, but the other half is making me insane.
You’ve come to a fork in the road, Facebook, and you should take it.
Uncrunched 
I thought Google+ was the “friend-list do-over”?
Google plus is great but they aren’t as good as Facebook for many reasons!
That’s a matter of opinion. I see it as more of an apples-and-oranges deal anyway… The engagement on Facebook and G+ couldn’t be more different.
Add a friend in “restricted list” and that friend cant see most of the things and updates on your profile.
Google+ has a lot of UI issues, but what they get is how to connect users through smart relationships. Their circle concept, while simple, is actually really smart and something Facebook could learn from. But in the same way Facebook messed up subscribe because they didn’t want to clearly be copying Google+, Google has a challenge in trying really hard to be different than FB in terms of the UI. This means that while they have a couple of neat user experience features, a lot of times it feels like they are just trying really hard to “not be Facebook.” The result is a site that feels really techy/nerdy, which doesn’t attract a female crowd which then doesn’t attract a mainstream crowd. But I’ve had much more meaningful conversations with people I don’t know on G+ than on Facebook, at least about technology!
Why not writting at least 1 of that “many” reasons……
One of those reasons being that NONE of my friends are over there. Why would I use it?
Right. Serious people use Google+ and losers use Facebook to ramble on about nonsense endlessly. (There are a lot of dumb zombies in the world with no lives, which is why Facebook does so well.. They’re the digital tobacco company.)
Arrigngton please just hire Max Woolf
I think Max Woolf will eventually get hired by TC…
I always assumed Max Woolf was Arrington
I think Mike just said none of us are his friends. :: sniffle ::
FB doesn’t need to do a thing. People LOVE using it. They just don’t want it to change. They’d be perfectly happy if it never changed. It’s us…some of us…power users who like debating how it could be “better” or what the “next best thing” will be. There won’t be a next best thing if it can’t get my friends there. FB is a beast like we’ve never seen before.
I do like Spending time with Google + than facebook,nowadays…….
http://www.StudentsCrunch.com
I believe ‘normal’ people will continue going to facebook.. Cos’ that’s where girls are @
I love Facebook because all my friends and family use it. My entire family use iPhones and they can take photos and upload easily and quickly. Also trying to move the 50+ crowd away from Facebook is not possible. Took me forever just to get my Dad to use it!
I also thought so.
I personally would LOVE to take a Mullegan on the Friend’s List.
me too.
I saw what you did there Mike. Brilliant as hell.
Stop using fb maybe not a bad thing, it save you a lot of time & probably bring back your life.
Yes, you are right, if we stop using we can save lots of time!
When you leave FB, you lose everyone in your life who uses it. Even family. They simply forget you exist. I left two years ago out of privacy concerns. I am basically living alone in a world full of people married to their screens. It’s quite sad, actually.
haha
Facebook is awesome, but awesome is only getting warmed up. The world is a billion times younger than it is old.
unless a big rock slams into it and ends it rather sooner than you’re thinking.
The Lars Von Trier of tech.
woot
Facebook’s good, but not awesome. Social networking right now is too noisy for my taste. We need to turn it down a bit, make it a bit more meaningful. I haven’t looked at Path yet, but from @arringron’s description above it sounds interesting and I’ll definitely give it a look.
And we have less time than you think. The Earth is 4.4 billion years old. The sun will start exploding* in about 5-7 billion years. We’re about half-way there.
One needs to control his social networking. Friend your friends, not the acquaintances you don’t wish to hear from you. Who’s fault is that?
but social media won’t ever progress backwards. There is no dialing it down
The obvious Path & Just.Me plug aside, the basis of this post is somewhat negated by the fact that I found out about this article via your Facebook post. Furthermore, Facebook has allowed restricting users based on lists for some time now.
Meh…
Smart ans sensible response
sigh.
and i found out about it via Google + so theh peh-peh oy vey
Correct. It’s all about management. If you won’t want to manage or keep things clean, you’re not going to use anything for long. Yes, by all means, go where no one else is. That will help you keep your friend’s list “clean”. 🙂
Someone should just call this guy an Arrington 😉
I read this on Facebook
For exactly the reasons you’ve stated above, we’ve created a picture and video sharing app that shares only content you REQUEST…oh my god…. its still fun, both the requesters and fulfillers get/do exactly what they want, and it can be limited to your friends that you assign requests to. No more pictures of peoples lunch unless you ask them to share.
The kicker is we use Facebook to host the videos and pics so you’re’ still socially sharing in the process without any effort.
We’re still fine tuning… but we’re free and available in the app store… “Reqvu” drop by and check us out 🙂
Facebook not only needs to offer a do-over for friend’s lists, they need to rethink their public/private/subscribe options. The subscribe feature, which seems like it was released without enough thought to compete with Google+’s “circle” concept is broken. Case in point — my 14,000 subscribers from Indonesia, India, Iraq, et al, who have forced me to turn off “friend requests” from anyone not connected to me through an actual friend because they assume once they’ve subscribed to my account they should also “friend request” my account. That doesn’t stop them, however, from spamming my entire friend’s list with friend requests. I had to explain to my mother and random people who I went to elementary school with (and are on my friend’s list) that they is going to have to continue getting spammy friend requests from random Arabic speakers around the world unless they too wants to turn off friend requests from anyone not connected to them already.
Subscribe has a lot of potential (and potential to help us have a “friends list redo”) since you can unfriend people but they remain subscribed to you — but it breaks down when you still have two-way friends. I’m not sure how to solve for this, but it certainly is a crowded social network, and it has become less and less about friends and more about content consumption and web celebrities. It’s almost as if Facebook needs a “friends” section, and a content section, and they need to be very separate in order for the social network aspect of Facebook to work at all in a few years. Otherwise, yes, people will leave their friends and jump to Path and other upcoming social networks. Facebook needs to start paying attention to the social piece of their experience, and not just how to attract more eyeballs to their advertising. Or maybe they don’t care about being the social network anymore, they’d rather be a media distribution and consumption company.
The bigger FB gets – the more it reminds me of AOL. Not AOL today – but the original AOL with the modem screech and “bonging” to connect – and then that guy yelling “You’ve Got Mail!”
The little red notification counts do serve that purpose. FB is much more of a different beast than we’ve ever seen before.
For me, it’s not even about the sheer number of users (I recently shaved my list down to under 200), it’s the content. My feed is littered with nothing but content from external sources: games, third party applications, etc.
Sure, Facebook has a “status only” filter for your feed, but they put a strong emphasis on the other content and make it very difficult (and switch back to ‘normal’ feed after x time) to operate with just your friends’ statuses.
Path is so refreshing because it cuts through the bullshit and gets right to the point.
Well, the only thing facebook need to do is allow unfriend api (maybe they already have, have to go check again), and there are tons of “your best fb friends calculator” apps out there, so just reverse the connection strength order + the unfriend api + bulk action = the ultimate unfriend app you want
Certainly that would be desirable for a fair number of users, but I’d imagine friend count is a metric that facebook closely monitors and actively strives to retain high numbers. Don’t get me wrong, I think they should make it easy to unfriend folks and an API would be awesome (although rogue apps might make that risky), but facebook doesn’t seem like the kind of company that would actively provide a means to make it easier to reduce the eyeball reach for fb users who share 3rd party brand/advertiser content while also reducing the perceived socialness of their product, even if it would strengthen relationships in the long run.
I too feel the same nowadays. I can’t every person on Facebook and want to have friends as many as possible.
I am right now happy with my GMAIL account and SKYPE.
facebook doesn’t have to mental it’s how you manage it and your privacy settings. you can start a fresh facebook account 😉
please only reply with Yogi Berra quotes. You can definitely get your message across with something he’s already said. Anyway, I never answer anonymous letters. Thank you.
what’s Yogi Berra quotes?
‘”Smarter than the average berra'” they are triple quotes.
You can observe a lot just by watching.
Great point, love the post. I think Facebook may have tried to tackle this with the way they don’t show you posts from many people you don’t interact with, and don’t show many of your posts to them. You visit their profile often or comment or send them a message, and this changes. This allows you to “keep in touch” with people you don’t interact with often, while still not putting you in front of either person’s face all the time.
This is a great example of an emergent phenomenon. Something not necessarily predictable at first, but rather something that emerges later on and has serious consequences.
Agree. My Facebook feed is generally more useful than my G+ feed because of that feature. At least for me Facebook does a good job of filtering the clutter.
Why would you want to un-friend them? You can just remove them from your feed, and then the relation becomes one way. This is how I keep my space from getting crowded.
Interesting that i saw this post on my Over crowded Facebook feed where nobody goes.
right. because it’s so crowded nobody goes there any more. Please, please, show a spark. The literal web cannot win here tonight. Not this time.
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
It was impossible to get a conversation going; everybody was talking too much.
Duh…FB has become so competitive and commercial that it may discourage people who just wanna share things with their friends cuz they don’t bother liking or even checking out their (real) friends’ contents.
If you post something, and no one likes it or comment on it, you are obliged to feel very much like a loser, virtually. Yes, I’ll admit I felt that way sometimes.
The reason why you are getting so many boneheaded responses is because you came up with a boneheaded title. Of course people go to Facebook, it’s more popular than ever (like 1/6th the world population popular).
You just want a mass-friend removal tool, which is sensible and a feature Facebook should add. Ditto for removing fans from pages.
“Of course people go to Facebook, it’s more popular than ever (like 1/6th the world population popular).”
Woosh! …as the kids say.
It’s an American popular culture reference:
“Yogiisms very often take the form of either an apparently obvious tautology, or a paradoxical contradiction.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Berra#Quotations
As someone who has watched this movie with AOL and Yahoo Geo Cities in the 90s, My Space in the early 00s and Facebook for the past several years – all that comes to mind about this post and the problem referenced is:-
“This is like deja vu all over again.” Yogi Berra
I really think that hopping around from social network to social network because the new network is so nice and clean and empty is kinda silly. It’s only clean and empty until everyone finds it and joins in.
And if they don’t join in, the company will fail and you will have wasted your time investment and likely all your data that you gave them.
Also, FB is not a social network, it’s a social utility. This means It is deeply embedded into the rest of the web so like it or not – just like with G+ which is embedded with your Google apps and Android phone – you’re going to have to curate that friends list sooner or later 😉
I too would love a WAY better UI to unfriend people. It’s painful as all hell. I’ve taken to unfriending people as they pop up in my news feed and I don’t know who they are and stopped accepting new friend requests. Thank heavens they finally shipped the subscribe feature.
“It’s only clean and empty until everyone finds it and joins in.” – that isn’t my point. It’s that Facebook could, for me, be clean and empty again too. If they just let me start over with the friends list. The whole world can type away all day on facebook, but all I want to do is chat with you, my 200 closest friends. 🙂
I guess I was talking about the Path and Just.me investments rather than the FB feature request 🙂
If the bet is that people will flock to new social networks because their social graph needs pruning then I’m just a little skeptical.
Also, I get that Path has capped the friend count to try to address this, but I think that also caps its viral growth. With FB Timeline becoming an amazing auto-journal with deep hardcoded links to all the apps you use with ‘Open’ graph, Path’s journal pivot might be DOA before it gets anywhere near the mainstream.
Also remember most mainstream users are not internet famous so they don’t have the same same scale problem a few of us social media douchbags (I’m talking about me not you Mike haha) have 🙂
Don’t get me wrong though, as you know, I’m a passionate about the idea that FB needs competition, but let’s be sober about what will work and what wont.
Well said, Chris. There are a few of us that have this problem, and we can motivate the changes necessary.
In addition to restricting number of friends, Path should prevent you from posting your path posts to twitter and facebook. Really, what is the point of that, except ruining path for everybody. You know some people over there, talk to them Mike.
I don’t get it. If all you want to do is chat with your 200 closest friends why not unfriend all the others? Wouldn’t this take you less time and effort (several hours max) than convincing all these 200 people to use the same other social network?
Sure, it’s only nice and clean until people join, but as a new network there’s a good chance that they’ll push out some differentiator or at least experiment with something that has the potential to make waves in the social space. One of the biggies with G+ was their Circle feature, which at the least provides a means to have a cleaner network after the masses join due to the accessibility of the filtering toolset. Whether or not people actually use those tools to any extent leading to a cleaner network in practice, well, I guess only Google knows how those numbers are looking. Regardless, I’m enjoying the not too crowded/not too empty feeling in the mean time. 🙂
That said, it certainly seems that it at least inspired FB to take a closer look at their friend grouping/filtering capabilities/ui.
No doubt the vast majority will die a cold and userless death, but if they introduce a worthwhile feature that is adapted by other networks in the process, well, I think we all win in such a case. Speaking of which, I wish my friends used Path. It’s bloody gorgeous on Android.
This could be remedied by meeting users half way – creating a bulk list of icons & names where you simply select the users (friends?) you wish to remove by clicking on them.
yep. or facebook could fix it all the way instead of half way. but I’d take a bulk friend remover.
I don’t agree. Many bloggers like you owe their success to Facebook. Actually, without Facebook I would not follow you today, as I would not be familiar with your blog or you in general..
If you like to keep close relationship with your close friends then you might face some problem, so better manage another account or service, but for most of us, Facebook only add enjoyment in our social life.
Thanks,
Isaac
you don’t agree that a do-over on friends is a great option for people because facebook adds enjoyment to your social life? ack.
Hunter’s Law :
“Any communication service which publicly displays a metric serving as a proxy for popularity will cause users to take steps to increase that number”
From a great piece citing your “pink swears’ by Hunter Walk, http://www.hunterwalk.com/2012/01/sorry-mike-facebook-could-reboot-and.html
you wouldnt get this much traffic to your website if you didnt post this on facebook! so I completely disgaree. the article is just to promote “Path”
again, sigh.
Apparently the Subscribe vs. Friend difference really is beyond the comprehension of most.
People, it’s not what he publishes that appears on YOUR feeds, it’s what appears on HIS feed. You can subscribe to him and see his posts on FB without being friends. He wants a way to easily clean up his Friends list, which is completely irrelevant to what he publishes publicly.
I completely agree that Facebook has a problem. But I dont think most people realize this. And I can’t see that mainstream audience using Path, just like they didn’t use Friendfeed, Buzz or Gowalla. Path is a great acquisition candidate just like ff and Gowalla. I can, however, see the mainstream using G+, and other specialized services like Pinterest and Instagram. Their friends are already on those sites and recruiting them on Facebook.
I have really loved reading your stuff through the years but this is the most Luddite thing I’ve ever heard from you. You’re basically telling Facebook that you need adult supervision because the platform is just too much to handle. That’s like saying you need help crossing the street cause the world is just so darn big. You are absolutely entitled to this “you kids get off my lawn” mentality. I find fb can be oppressive and stifling at times too. But I recognize it is a platform and an ecosystem full of people using it very differently from each other. I don’t expect them to rewrite the whole thing to suit my niche notions of what would work for me.
Do I expect them to improve? Yes and hell yes. But they are in fact doing that better than anyone. To wit, Timelines. Timeline 1.0 is quietly changing the way we think about social networks. Timelines 2.0 will Eat. The. World.
When timelines can be built from aggregate data, on demand on the fly as a response to queries, then the more friends you have in your network, the more compelling the results you’ll receive. The richer the story. So you’ll be glad for all the people you think of as bottom 10% of your network because occasionally they will be a source of life changing serendipity. And that’s just something no other social network will be able to compete with no matter how slick their fresh start approach may be.
What I picture happening is roughly this: http://tredeger.posterous.com/facebooks-timeline-predicts-the-future-by-inv
I’m not sure you know what the word luddite means.
double woot
I did use it more loosely and casually than the strict “wants to reject technology because it is viewed as a threat / Ned Ludd versus progress” meaning – to a more inclusive sense of “feels oppressed by the technology in his life” notion that seems to come through when people write about being overwhelmed by their social network. It was not the best choice of words; you are right.
My main point is that wanting a “do-over” is a reactionary response that doesn’t appreciate the nature of a platform for a diverse audience. I’m not saying fb can’t be better, just that 1. they are getting better faster than anyone and 2. the “do over” you propose is not one of the ways they could get better, at least not for most users.
This doesn’t mean that other social networks don’t have value and offer a better use alternative for some. But fb seems to be making mostly right moves to me.
Early contender for 2012 Best Author Comment Reply
Facebook way overplayed their hand with Timelines. Yes, it is a cool feature, but it should just be that… a feature. It shouldn’t replace your profile page.
Bring back the old profile page, and make the Timeline a “detail” page off the main profile.
Shameless portfolio promotion.
proud portfolio promotion.
what a lawyer.
This is easy Mike.
Everyone just needs to create a second Facebook account… call it something like Mike Arrington 2012 or Private Mike Arrington. From this second account you should only friend the people you are truly friends with. From the first account, friend away to your heart’s content so you don’t offend anyone.
I know this violates all sort of Zuck-policies, but maybe if enough of us do this, they’ll improve their feature set.
While a nice workaround, I think you’re overlooking a couple things here:
1. Your friend list is but one of your personal assets on Facebook. Creating a second “close friends only” account doesn’t migrate your photos, subscriptions, or anything else that is your entire social identity to the new account.
2. Even completely ignoring the last point, your “second account” scenario breaks Facebook at scale. Think about it: say Mike creates a second account, and invites only the closest 100 out of the 1,000 friends to it. If you are one of those 100, then you have to deal with TWO versions of Mike in your News Feed since he’s not willing to unfriend anyone in his primary account. If everybody did this, Facebook would be a friggin mess.
Facebook is a mess now so having the second account would only worsen an already messed up site
Your aside on sweater vests was priceless.
Interesting to read this post while not using Facebook for already 4 months (and counting…). Curious reactions from ex-facebook friends: “I’ll miss you”, “you are so brave”.
It seems Path was previously limited to 50 friends. Path now limits the number of friends to 150, let’s hope they will stick to it.
Mike totally agree. This is what I am doing right now: running my FB “friends” through Path too sift the gold from the mud. Path is the real friend filter (r)friend filter.
I guess if you were dumb enough to accept hundreds or thousands of stranger friend requests.
Solution: Delete and create a fresh account accepting actual friends this time (don’t be dumb).
Most regular people I know don’t have 500+ fb friends.
FB is more than half way to full retard. Never go full retard.
Just remember folks, without Mike, none of this would have been necessary (proudly borrowed and reworked from YB)
Agree that it’s getting noisy at FB and there’s more and more sites that solve a different/specific “social” need for users like Path, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
As choices increase and fragmentation continues, I am guided by a great philosopher who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
While I’m an early adopter, many of my friends from home are not (you grew up in HB – you know exactly what I’m talking about). They don’t know what Path is and they only just got used to the idea of Facebook – so while I’m on both – I find myself going to/sharing on FB more. Plus, while I know my closest friends love me – they really don’t care that much about when I wake up and go to sleep.
Instead, what I’ve done on FB is go to my closest friends pages and changed my settings to “receive all updates” – that way the FB algorithm that hid my friend from SD bc she’s a liberal and I’m not – has started showing me her posts again. It takes time. It’s annoying. But it works. And it’s what I’ve got.
Until my closest friends find out about Path. In another 5 years or so…
Cue 2013 blog post “Nobody Goes to Path Anymore. It’s Too Crowded.”? I don’t see a convincing argument why Path is not going to end up in the same place – and that at a faster rate than Facebook. Path conveniently notifies you and lets you add (or “migrate”) exactly those same people when they join. I don’t see why the circle won’t continue, but I guess that’s how some of us get our kicks; Jumping from one new thing to the next before the crowd starts barging in.
FB is too crowded and I dont wanna share I Feel Like **** with 500 people who i can’t unfriend bcoz we work together or we worked together or we are related.. I am now on Path. Period.
Google FTW…the war is over…has been for a while. You’re not even talking about the real game which is so far beyond FB vs Google + that it’s difficult to believe this discussion is actually taking place. I bet you are all just a pack of bots.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/FriendList/
Anyone could create a cool drag&drop “friend shorter” app. So just for fun hire a coder who can do it in 8 hours. 🙂
With lists you can block user groups or set up chat to limit availability.
can you please get someone to program that, I think that’s a cool idea 🙂
My Facebook engagement peaked months ago. I barely go there now, for this precise reason- too many people saying too much stuff I don’t care about (Oh, look- I went to Venice on vacation! Whee!). I find myself going back to the old reliable, original social network: email and IM. This way, I can interact with whom I want, when I want, how I want.
Facebook is just noise, and I’m tired of trying to figure out the privacy settings. I’m also hesitant to really express myself, because God knows who will see what. This is Zuckerberg’s fault. By making Facebook so ‘open’ he has created a place where many don’t feel comfortable. To use Mike’s analogy, I feel more comfortable being myself at a private table with a few friends, than at a big street party with all my friendfs, relatives, neighbors and friends-of-friends watching.
Facebook started off as a really private network, then in trying to copy Twitter, it caused us to overshare. I’m pulling back. So are many people.
First, I want to thank you for making this post necessary.
I agree, it would be nice if Facebook made it as easy to unfriend someone as Twitter does, but I probably wouldn’t use it if they did (although I unfollow people on Twitter regularly to keep things manageable).
Facebook is that place where I know I can always be connected to not only my close friends, but also to the folks I knew in high school and college whom I have no other way to keep up with. It’s the only place I can keep a contact list of all these tangential relationships in the event that I might want to connect in the future. I wouldn’t prune that list even if I could because I don’t have any other place to put those people. Besides, unfriending on Facebook leaves bad vibes (you can observe this just by watching), so I don’t think they’ll ever make a feature that makes it easy to create bad vibes quickly.
Path is a good enough do-over for me for the purpose of a real-friend network.
Anyway, this conversation is like deja vu all over again.
so Path is basically for introvert people?
I say it’s time to bring LOYALTY back into the online world!
and humanize the entire social media sharing process
I’m not sure anyone has all the right answers for that yet but facebook is def on the right path.
You realize I’m sure, someday someone is going to walk in and pitch you the following;
“It’s like Facebook, but it’s only the friends you really want to share with. You can comment on experiences and events and choose explicitly who to share things with. If you want, you can tell people where you are, or not – up to you. Unlike Foursquare you can even tell people where you’re going in advance. On our network, all those people you haven’t seen since high school are gone and you’ll never accidentally share drunk updates with your boss – not on our network.”
It will sound great – all the ingredients of the perfect social network. And at that moment the internet will explode, because you’ve just been pitched real life. For fun, read the pitch again as if it were offline.
The cycle is pretty funny if you zoom out enough.
If Facebook create a suggestion list of the people that we interact the less with in a year, you are going to see that out of 100 friends you actually interact with 2 maybe 3 people per month.
The same idea if you put a dislike button there is 90% chance for people to share 10x time more dislike than likes which will show you are negative people and the network will looks like.
Seshn is going to dominate in 2012 and beyond for this reason. http://seshn.com
“Simply as I can, Facebook is where you connect with old friends. Google+ is where you find new ones.”
Social Networks do this because they want their social graph as indestructable as possible and want people/profiles to remain connected, for business and maybe other reasons. I recently painstakingly removed 90 of my then 350 friends on Facebook one by one, and I know the pain. But I also sort of understand why Facebook makes it so difficult to remove friends quickly. Their API doesn’t even support it.
Google+ is my preferred social network nowadays
I agree there’s huge opportunity for a more intimate conversation via Path and leaner social networks, however it’s rather short-sighted to say that Facebook’s TOO big. The whole reason reason Facebook is successful is because you can find anyone you meet or ever knew. It may not be where you have a conversation among your friends, but that doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly important.
BS. Facebook is nothing more than BS. Took me half a day to remove some person whom I didn’t know (I had accepted their request in the hope that people loved making friends). Facebook is the place for people who love to blow their own trumpet. You can’t even get to relax or entertain yourself, it is simply crowded like hell.
People are running towards it because Facebook is big. But am sure that its downfall is near as Facebook is shoving on our faces too much adverts.
Moreover, the system is just complicated. You want something to be done, click, another click, another click, and it goes on untill you are fed up.
I wonder if there is social network that is real cool and it doesn’t squeezes you.
Going to take a look at ‘path’ and let us see what it has to offer.
I was crazy about Facebook….till I took an arrow in the knee
Totally agree, Facebook is chaos. But I did manage few months ago to bravely remove 50+ people from FB, it got easier now because its not total breakup, they still stay subscribed to you and in most cases they don’t even notice it. I love Path but at the moment only one contact on it, bit frustrating.
In Facebook, ‘Acquaintances’ friend list is the best tool to unfriend people. (On the right column) it suggest you people you don’t interact much and you can either add them to the list and see less news, or unfriend them all together.
I think facebook’s strength is it’s focus on web identity rather than some perfect social experience. People like Michael and others with thousands of subscribers (pseudo-friends) see the extreme of where things are going. That’s why they are in a unique position to express where they think the web SHOULD be going. It’s nearly impossible for any place online or offline to maintain it’s soul forever. Sort of like the cliched nightclub rule… Eventually everyone and their middle-aged uncle is coming to the same place and it’s unbearably crowded, no room to move, so it’s time to find a smaller spot to be surrounded by the people you actually know or like. That’s what Path etc.. seem like to me. But Facebook is still the means to getting into that private party, it’s your ID card. So in my mind the friend’s list will become the least important part of the service in the long run. Am I being Mr Obvious?
@ Michael Arrington, You are famous and get the perks of sites like Twitter where you have more followers than I will ever have and can crowd-source information at will – a luxury I will never have. Conversely, I am not famous and so my facebook network does not feel bloated at all. I know everyone on there from “real life” and can easily keep track of anyone I may want to unfriend.
As for Path, I am still skeptical because its in our nature to need acceptance and have our voices heard by as many people as possible. Admit it or not but most people get pleasure with the more and more likes and comments they get for their post.
Yes, it would be great to have a tool that would let you unfriend a group of people or even all your friends. Saying that, I don’t buy that it’s a substantial problem for the vast majority of Facebook users *and* I certainly don’t think it’s going to lead to the success of apps/platforms like Path.
I signed up for Path. I stopped using it. Why? Because its features already more-or-less exist elsewhere, in a better form and nobody else was using it. Why should I give more of my attention to Path rather than Facebook? I rarely need to curate my friend’s list on FB and I haven’t noticed a crowding problem in the slightest.
You talk too much sense Arrington, I don’t understand you at all
Totally agree.
Facebook knows who are close friends are (mainly based on who we are tagged with the most). They could easily build a mobile only “intimate Facebook” app with our close friends and family there by default and let us easily edit those friends when we join this app.
That’s what I woul do if I were them anyway.
It is what it is, another Promotion, because of another Investment, in another Social Networking site. BORING. It’s like herpes, you think it’s under control, but it just keeps coming back for more.
I’m way ahead of you on this one ;D 6-9 months ago I deleted my facebook & twitter account, and started over with 3 types of connections. 1: family, 2: close-friends, 3: stimulating likeminded individuals. None else. No out of touch acquaintances. No co-workers who aren’t 1,2, or 3. No old friends from high-school. Never again! That’s not to say that anyone outside of that isn’t awesome, but we only have mental space for so much, and quality > quantity in the social space.
I know a lot of people who still use facebook and I am considering a fanpage for my site http://watchavideo.net though I’m not sure if we need it at present. Then again you do make some valid points. Sometimes its like a clique in there and sometimes there’s just too many videos and junk floating around in there.
Couple of things
#1 Just me concept applies only to the people who really wants to be them. What I am trying to say here is that these days people want to boast about what they are doing..What they r going to do blah blah…So its just ones own intention. People don’t want to just share info with their friends but they want to do it with others unknown entities so that they become so called famous. Some do it for business others for fun.
#2 there are many (including me) Who accepts friend requests only of the ones who are known to me. So ultimately Its just ones own way of using things.
Google+, Twitter are mere marketing tools (They have lost their social networking concept). Facebook is a bit different but soon it might turn into a marketing tool too. Lets see how long it lasts. Sure it will be more than the other 2 as they have more than what you call social networking.
Well, I stilldo..though I have joined many new networks Like G+.. But I still am engaged on FB
I agree for the most part. However, when I went to Asian countries like Japan and Korea, where FB is gaining huge traction, they do not have this problem. They keep their circles close, very close. Conclusion: it’s up to the user to manage their friend list, not FB; but FB can make it easier for us…this I agree with.
Facebook was better in 2005.
you are so right mike. i defriended all but about 60 people on facebook in march 2009 (and blogged about it). it has made all the difference for me. i use facebook like many people use path.
There is a workaround on Facebook for rollers with a lot of Friends that want to start over… “How do I convert my profile (timeline) to a Page?” https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=116067818477568&ref_query=migration
They do suggest you do a backup of your Profile and note that some aspects of your data will not convert. I highly suggest this option as I did one for a popular model friend and the migration crashed leaving neither a Profile or Page, and while Facebook mentions ways to restore the Profile they didn’t respond to requests for over half a year.
On the other hand I did another migration on one of my spoof Profiles and it worked fine, your old Friends become Likes. I think the problem I had was an intermittent 3G connection and buggy browsers–but in any event the backup option is vital. Another good practice would be to use a third-party backup service that might make the data more accessible, as Facebook’s backup is just a huge text file. Some of these services will preserve your Wall postings for example.
The reason I converted my alternate profiles, which are pretty easy to have under the radar, is I began to have serious business connections made through Facebook and didn’t want to risk losing all accounts for violating the TOS. One upside to Facebook I haven’t seen much elsewhere besides Twtitter, is if you begin making friends with people connected to your businesses, in my case models, photographers, DJ’s and musicians, you get loads of recommendations from their networks, and while FB discourages cold called friend requests you can often make a connection with a short message giving your background and a web link.
When people see on your profile you are already Friends with several of their real world connections, they are more likely to accept your request–even though the FB idea of friendship is far from a real world referral!
I should re this migration method… create a new account/Profile BEFORE migrating so you can add it to the new Page as an Administrator…
Did you delete your Fbook page b.c. people were flaming this article or can I just not find that post b.c. Facebook is too crowded?
This article is amazingly self-serving. Arrington has rust on his keyboard and it shows as he is trying to make a point
Further, Path while cute, is an annoying life blogging app that still doesn’t solve the problem of people grandstanding and letting others facestiouly stroke them for their non-events.
Usually I agree with you Arrington but this time you are wrong. People are still flocking to Facebook and if user engagement is down there are several reasons I can dive into rather than it just being noisy. You control the amount of noise you have on Facebook. Regardless of lists and circles you can subscribe to only certain updates from people and also completely shun someone from your feed as well. The options are much better than Google+ which is a noise fest and turned me away after a week.
The reasons people are not engaging on Facebook more is….
1. Everyone is on Facebook. That post you were going to make about how hot that girl’s ass was? Yea you probably don’t want your boss, sister, mom, brother-in-law to see. You would rather post that anonymously on Twitter.
2. Games. People have grown tired of playing these games and have realized how much time is being consumed by them. They also have heard the calls from their friends on how annoying they are.
3. The interest of Facebook and Facebook Games has been moved to other life distracting elements such as mobile apps. Discovery on Facebook for killer new apps has never been good yet Apple and Android got it right with their mobile offerings.
I have used Path and I found it to have a nice UI but it seemed like a featureless product. I see the future of that group being bought out by larger company not for the product but for a talent acquisition. I registered for Just.Me and I will try OurSpot.
Wow, 237 like this page with Facebook, so far 🙂
I see a theme here…
When I started using Facebook, it was for college students only, and you needed a .edu address to join up. Watching it expand over the years, I can safely say that my practice of removing people I no longer speak to has paid off. Yes, I have many friends, 675 to be exact, but I personally know all of them in some fashion. Facebook for me has become a medium, like print or blogging, that allows me to get messages out to groups or individuals better than email or IM chats ever did. If someone is my friend on Facebook, and I find myself hiding their posts, I just take the extra few seconds and remove them.
The theme I mentioned earlier is that everyone wants it done faster and without all the “drama” associated with unfriending someone. For those of you under the age of 21, you’re still immature so I expect that from you. For those of you over the age of 21, I have this: It’s a few extra seconds now, but do you really want to see another status with smh in it about something as simple as a haircut???
Yes, it would be nice to get a do-over for the friend list. The other option, as mentioned above, is to take the time to remove people from your list. Remember back before Facebook…remember how long it took to remove someone as a friend in real life? Be glad we have an electronic way to do it, without having to deal with sob stories, crying friends, arguments, fights, and general surliness for the next few months…
Lastly, I do not see an issue with the current setup. Yea, like I said above, it would be nice to have a tool to help me, but its not a major fixture in my life. I don’t know who said it originally, but it was said to me a long time ago by a man who is no longer in my life, due to old age:
If you have time to complain, you have more than enough time to fix the issue that causes the complaining.
I use FB more to reach to friends and not-so friends. I guess Path can be used for the latter better.
I haven’t seen these sentiments from a single real world, non-techie person I know on Facebook, or from any of their friends. They were just as restrained on the site with friending people as they are in real life.
This is a 1% problem of early adopters and tech nerds. People in the real world—Facebook’s actual audience—don’t have this problem, so Facebook won’t care.
I haven’t seen these sentiments from a single real world, non-techie person I know on Facebook, or from any of their friends. They were just as restrained on the site with friending people as they are in real life.
This is a 1% problem of early adopters and tech nerds, or perhaps even just a fabrication of investors in competing products that don’t actually have a shot in the market. People in the real world—Facebook’s actual audience—don’t have this problem, so Facebook won’t care.
Its like deja-vu all over again.
Maybe you should read the customer comments on the Path website before investing. After reading the numerous poor reviews, I would not even attempt to try it
I couldnt agree with this more, for me the notifications is the main issue – nothing holds any weight any more.
A notification from a friend used to get all my attention, it was personal – like they were asking me to do something, then apps came along and notifications just became noise. It would have been fine if somehow these had been ordered, so that friend notifications still held some bearing or weight but they just don’t. This has also seen the downfall of events which I’ve blogged about here – http://blog.plan.nr/post/15293693860/lost-in-a-sea-of-facebook-notifications
For me Path don’t solve anything.
When I started to use FB 2007 none of my closer friends where on that thing. So I started adding almost-friends just for fun. But thats just starting from the wrong end of the rope. When my closer friends joined FB I didnt unfriend my almost-friends and the mess started..
Well, the same goes for Path: I now have a bunch of almost-friends over there and I wonder if I’m going to have the same problem repeating at Path in a year or so..
I actually like the wide circle of “friends” I have on Facebook. I talk to my close circle of friends on phone or in person a good deal already and don’t need some new site just for it. FB allows me a wider group of folks from throughout my life, from grade school to the present. If I don’t care to hear what they say, but don’t feel like taking the big unfriending step, I just unsubscribe from them, which is easy and takes seconds. At first I thought this blog post was a joke; seriously, is it that hard to unfriend some folks, or just unsubscribe? Is it that big a deal in your life? Then I realized you were serious. How pathetic.
People should stop once with this exaggerated social craziness. There are also other things to do over the web excepting going social.
I go to facebook once a week for the past year. It is nearly just another email to me.
I find myself going to Facebook less and less. But here’s the thing. None of my friends follow the start-up scene. I can literally count on one hand (2 fingers) my friends that have heard of Path. This even makes it difficult for me to try out these start-ups as I’m usually the only one of my friends with the app; makes it a pretty lonely experience (read: Google+).
Facebook would be smart to reach-out and assist the early-adopters that have 1000s of friends and don’t want to manually unfriend them all. Help them move those people over to ‘subscribed’ instead of friend.
Subscribe is a useless feature too. I have thousands of subscribers and much like Arrington describes his thousands of friends, it just creates noise, clutter, and spam.
I found this article through a link on Facebook..
I can imagine that someone who entered FB with an eye to competing with everyone else on how many friends they could get; without really trying to understand how the security settings worked; by accepting every request that came across would want to have a do-over. But most people don’t live in the rarified air of the social media gurus, because most people can’t afford to buy the latest and greatest hardware platforms to run them on whenever they come out, so they have to step cautiously through all the SM crap in their “Path.”
I completely agree that FB is far from the perfect SM platform. There really isn’t one. I try all of them, including Path, and they lack either the functionality breadth of FB, lag on anything but the most powerful mobile device or just lack the comparable intuitiveness of the FB platform. There are a few obscure efforts out there that are making a solid effort, but they still have to link into FB to work.
In the meantime, I’ll keep an open mind, and defriending when necessary and friending when interesting.
If you have over a few hundred Facebook friends, you are doing it wrong.
You must determine your Facebook purpose before you friend your first person. If you want it to be a “crackerbarrel” experience, you must keep it tight and intimate.
If you want the whole world to know about your business, or your experience, that’s a whole different deal.
Perhaps it is time for a newer, more fluid social network. Don’t blame the old network for your lack of discipline. I get the distinct impression that that lack will show up in another area of your life as well!!!
I agree. I still use Facebook but it’s hard to sort through these days and I miss a lot of updates and messages. I’ve seen folks taking the time to unfriend Facebook friends but you are right it’s too time consuming. A fresh start with a more intimate social networking experience is definitely a trend and easier for people to take on. I am finding myself using Path everyday since the relaunch in December 1st due to the its simple updates with a close network of people. I also use Twitter lists to do the same thing but again, it takes time to set them up. OurSpot is interesting as it’s following this trend, so I appreciate your mention of it in this post. I am sure we’ll see this trend continue in the year ahead – the era of the “mini-social network” is upon us.
It feels like an attitude problem.
You can’t escape any of these problems without changing the need to have everybody in your circle, friend list or path. You can’t expect your feed to look pretty when you don’t manage it. You’re opting in to all of the trash by accepting requests and adding every application under the sun. You really have to be proactive with these things and learning that having 5000 friends is a problem when you have 5000 friends is, well…
The only thing that makes sense right now, for me, is Twitter and even Instagram. These apps make it easy to discover people with similar interests which is a network I can get behind.
Facebook, G+ and Path (among others) are about your personal network (3, 2, 1 degree). Go find your friends from college, keep up to date with folks you used to work with, etc. Once your foot is in one of these I call it a done deal. The ability to rebuild this network on something other than Facebook is an uneventful effort. There’s no way a major amount of this network is going to move unless there is a Netflix type event with Facebook.
Figure out a way to take advantage of Twitter and provide some value, like StockTwits, for example, and chill out on riding the FB coat-tail.
very good points mike! (I work for anybeat.com) so I’m biased, but I agree this is a great space.
Facebook is over dude!
I liked this so much I sent you a friend request.
Agreed. I simply called it Why We Need Facebook – http://somatek.posterous.com/observations-on-facebook-foursquare-instagram
I do not fully agree to what has been said in this post. If someone goes on adding people they don’t know for real to their Facebook profile simply for fun (read curiosity) its their mistake. I myself and a lot more people like me, who believe in limiting our interaction to people whom we know actually (out of the web) would never require such a thing as “friend-list-do-over”.
Facebook is the new White Pages.
And I think people are starting to use it as such*. Meaning, you go there to look up people and consume info. But, interestingly, people are often posting elsewhere: Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Path, Instagram, Wayla… These graphs are starting to separate from Facebook; my Rdio and Instagram graph bears little similarity to Facebook friends.
We have become a disposable culture. People would rather throw out dinner ware than scrub the dishes. Why clean up MySpace when you can start fresh on Facebook?
And what Facebook (friends) needs is a thorough scrubbing. So there are a few possibilities: Facebook scrubs on our behalf; we roll up our sleeves and scrub (unlikely); or we abandon it and start fresh.
My take is that we are addicted to shiny, new things and underdogs. Facebook is no longer shiny, people continually complain about its UX & UI. It is no longer new, and most certainly not the underdog. Where is was once built upon exclusivity, its advantage is now that it’s communal, everybody is on it. Like the White Pages.
(*yes, I realize I’m not backing this up with quantitative data; just anecdotal.)
Well said about it being the white pages. That is all it is for me these days, plus a great birthday reminder. Other than that, it’s no fun.
check out my blog XxXXxXx
Facebook will endure. Primarily because its not longer just a social network but a platform: first a customer authentication platform and secondly and more importantly a distribution platform. Why roll your own user ids when everyone has a facebook account? Why setup a seperate website to distribute movies or attract customers when it can be a facebook app? For sure some of this is not ideal for some, but it increasingly will be for a lot of businesses.
Also there is my axiom of network effects:
Once a network reaches entrenched status, it can never really be unseated unless there is a really major paradigm shift. This shift must be a relatively big and even then, most entrenched networks remain more than vestigial for a long time even as the new thing emerges.
Facebook is entrenched. You need to be very very good to make it irrelevant. Path is not that. Nor Google+. Uncle Sam may have to step in some time in the future. In the meantime, Facebook’s conservative and collaborative approach to business most things will push it a long way.
Actually, it tends to be the friends you interact with the least who are your real friends. I actually pick up the phone if I want a conversation with them. It’s not about how many “friends” you have on Facebook; it’s the consistently low quality conversation that can be seen on the News Feed every day. “Witty” small talk and one up-manship of how great one’s life is — those are the FB super users, and it’s all I see on FB, which is why I log in less and less. I think smaller social media sites based on interests, like Good Reads, are remarkably better. I just don’t think friendship, true friendship anyway, works at all on Facebook. A one on one e-mail is the best the internet can do on that score.
Facebook is an entire ecosystem and a database containing lots of information about your overall “on-line social life”. You don’t have to use the Facebook UI (web or mobile) to still benefit from that information.
My company, Jildy (www.jildy.com) offers a mobile app that allows you to see updates from people you care about, on topics you care about. Jildy automatically forms clusters of friends from your overall social graph in Facebook, using information about which of your friends are also friends with each other.
Katango did this, but only for controlling how you publish your updates. Jildy allows you to use the lists as publishing controls too, but — more importantly — allows you to filter your newsfeed through these lists.
Jildy also allows you to create lists of search terms you care about, and find posts that match by just tapping on the named list of terms.
Our goal with Jildy has been to create a clutter-free mobile experience of your social newsfeed. We’re starting with Facebook, and are adding other social sources over time.
So to the thesis of this article, I disagree. I don’t believe that it’s necessary to create entirely new social networks in order to control the noise and crowds and information overload. It’s possible to take our existing social services (so to speak) and to build new (mobile) client experiences on top of them.
Information overload? Filter failure? I’m voting for better filters.
Hey, remember Facebook?
Um… who is using path?
(Disclosure: I am not an investor in Path but I am a user. I also have a fair sized Twitter and Facebook following but only know 4 people actively using it [ok, really 3].)
Make a new network.
Charge users to join.
Promise to never sell out the users’ info / data / content.
Possibly require an IQ test on sign up. ;p
I suggested this idea a few years ago and someone said it sounded a little ‘elitist’
My response was : “Yes. Yes it is.”
BTW: Serious question : how is Path going to make money?
Answers on a customised sponsored promoted postcard please.
;p
You could use the ‘birthday goodbye’ technique. Every day, FB says it’s someone’s birthday. If you can’t bring yourself to post “happy birthday”, unfriend them. This way you get through everyone in a year, and they don’t notice because their account is choked in Happy Birthday messages from vague semi-friends.
Totally agree. I’ve tried to take the time to put people into lists on Facebook, but always quit within the first few minutes. Too time consuming.
Also- thanks for sharing the Tech Cocktail article.
G+ is a place where people have something to say and Facebook is a place where people have nothing to say and they say it anyways. You can easily figure it out what this means. If You don’t, good luck with Facebook.
First of all, I have WAY TOO many “friends” on Facebook that I am not good friends with in real life. Two things bother me about the clutter of my Facebook friends.
1. My news feed gets cluttered with things from people that I don’t care about and topics I don’t care about.
2. My friends are not filtered to a point that I can comfortably share something on my own wall and not worry who sees it and who doesn’t. It is too difficult making lists, and sorting people etc. Google+ made it easier to sort people than Facebook did.
In the long run though… Facebook isn’t going anywhere. I still feel it will King of Social for a long long time.
Where’s the like button?
I want to like some of these comments.
Awesome article, Mike, to the point.
The question will also be, now that Facebook has also achieved market saturation in the US, is Facebook able to transform itself in sight of a IPO and remain sexy:
Thoughts?
I like the auto-suggest to remove the least interacted with friends. They should probably do that.
Dear Admin, it’s urgent. Please get in touch with me as soon as possible – thanks!
But what seemed like a fun “sure why not, this is adventurous!” in 2006 and 2007 when Facebook allowed open registrations now feels like a bad hangover.
I hate Facebook. But most of my friends are still there, as are my “friends” that I’ve accumulated over the years.
One of my random wishes last year was that Facebook would just crash. All servers or whatever keeps it going would be down and people would realize it’s not the end of the world if it did.
Or maybe just that auto-suggest to remove, I’d probably be the first they’d be removing on theirs. :))
yes, you are right even facebook is no more adventurous, now it is just like google+ boring :p
A bit frighteningly, Facebook is more so becoming a tool for personal online identification and other more advanced things — e.g., sites like that of USA Today now require people to log in to their Facebook account to make comments on articles (link to AJR story on the topic below).
Like some social steroid-enhanced equivalent of the driver’s license or state ID card, it’s the newest method of verification, and currently… the largest and most popular/only real option available. Weird? It is to me.
Anyway, the question might not be whether individuals want to use Facebook for personal interactions, they might *have* to have account to navigate the web. Even if sites like Path or Just.Me want to market themselves as a sharing tool, FB has become much, much bigger than that…
(Is Facebook the Solution to the Obnoxious Comment Plague? http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=5213)
I agree with mike. I don’t even look at my facebook feed anymore.
Do you have any hard data to prove “Facebook today is so crowded and messy that no one ever goes there anymore”.
It’s a logically impossible statement. You understand this, right? But there’s a fascinating emotional logic to it, so people understand the subtle message. Or, some people do. Which is why it was such a good Yogi Berra quote.
Yes, I understand that, but I wondered if you had any hard proof that usership and time spent on Facebook is declining?
Only half of the clocks in my house are off by an hour – I felt guilty but I guess I’m doing pretty well!
Wiremob is the solution to this problem. Sign up for their beta launch: http://www.wiremob.com/
I will be very happy if nobody goes to FB anymore. In fact I have often wondered what happened to the freedom-liking non-slave net population of the 90s. Internet was a network of interconnected thousand and more sites, not just a monopoly of 4 or 5 data-mining giants like FB, G, Amazon, MS, Apple. Now what we have are millions of cookie cutter pages, and all sites, instead of own independence, are just subsidiaries or “slave” to FB with FB buttons, icons, FB comments etc. They think this drwas more crowd easily but they do not think the enormous amount of crowd they lose who just get repulsed by FB ‘goodies’! When I visit your site, I visit your site : so please do not force me to see even a pinch of FB without my prior permission. – the sites do not get these message.
Once internet had great php and other scripts like phpbb, geeklog, vbulletin and great online communities as well as people used to do many unique looking pages at geocities and similar services. Nowadays (despite some small success by drupal and wordpress) there has been no great php script for the last 5 or 7 years or more. Too sad. Once scripts like phpbb, phorum, drupal, wp, geeklog, e107 ruled the “market” in terms of features and coolness, and anyone could set up a good web with these. Nowadays they lag far, far behind unfortunately : user features, once brought by the opensource, is now brought ny multimillion companies like FB. I wish G+, MYspace, orkut and others give really really good competition to FB. If there arre at least even five good social nets many people will be so happy. And another last word : FB has huge PR deals to pimp up the user stats, a huge portion of which is just fake.
in my opinion, FB lost its main appeal when it opened up the service to High Schoolers and then to everyone. The exclusivity created a unique space for people in the same place to escape. The ideals are much different now than when they started, but of course thats going to happen with progression and change. Many alternatives are going to pop up to reclaim the appeal that once drove people to FB and then they will either die off or blow up as well. cycle of social media
This is a Great post. If you’re going to have a large list of friends, I find Twitter to be better and more easily organized (via lists) to organize where your friends appear.
Just kill your current FB account, and start a new one.
FB don’t like it, but it can be done.
Yeah the next thing we need is a NEW social network in our lives. We have seen how little Google + has been used. Why isn’t Google + being used? Because people don’t want to update Google + and Facebook at the same time. Why do people prefer Facebook? Mainly because that’s where their friends are. New social networks (that are not supported by conglomerates like Google) are doomed to immediate failure because you won’t convince enough users to join. In order to convince a person to join a new social network their friends would already have to be there to make it worthwhile.
You might be able to convince some early adapters to join but you will only be fighting an uphill battle. Not only will it be difficult to find users but think about how hard it would be to make the mentioned social media platforms profitable. It took Facebook years to start making money. Ultimately you’re throwing money into a well and hoping to get lucky in return.
I’d suggest you just suck it up and spend an afternoon defriending people. Facebook has all of the tools you need to organize your feed too.
#whiteboyproblems
A year ago I just deleted my facebook account and created a new one and just friended people I really care about. I went from 800 friends to 100. Problem solved.
It makes me wonder what kind of noise we will have to mute when Facebook IPO’s
That title is simply a paradox 🙂
Simple solution: Just put all the friends that matter on a new list and only ever bother with that list. Its really not rocket science…
Do we need a new social network for a friend-list do-over? Most of the people I know don’t have this problem to begin with. But really a new network just for this sounds gimmicky.
Account is unbelavable
Account is unbelavable
There seems to me to be a fallacy in believing that “doing over” will lead to a better result. It might in the short term, but ultimately if you follow the same principles that lead you to an overcrowded Facebook, you’ll get an overcrowded Path. And in the meantime you’ll have lost a lot of time simply rebuilding the valuable part of the social network you had on Facebook.
The problem is rarely the platform — it’s how you use it.
( Longer response on my blog: http://www.sergeboucher.com/blog/2012/1/13/is-facebook-too-crowded.html )
It’s only crowded if you bother to use it. The good stuff is on Twitter, and anyone who has time to check 3+ social networks doesn’t have a life. So say’s me.
Reblogged this on Coretan Dinding … and commented:
Hehehehhe…Crowded Social Network but i still like it – till now –
Reblogged this on Mobile, Socials and Clouds and commented:
An Interesting read…
I would just like to give some encouragement to all of you with a cheating partner and to those who need there lover back. My lover cheated on me The most hurtful experience was during a confrontation with the other woman when she came by my home looking for my boyfriend and looked surprised to see me there. I opened the door and asked what she wanted and she ignored me, i never knew My boyfriend has been having sex with her in our home, in our bed, My reaction was strange when she said that to me. I went and grabbed my boyfriend out of bed and shoved him out the front door. He was half asleep and very confused. I then went and grabbed his dirty clothes and threw them out on the porch with the two of them and told her that if she wanted him, she could have him, but she was taking his laundry too. I then called my friend and told her what had happened. She suggested I take the time to go through his phone. I found 3 other women and called them all. One he had lent my car too when he lied and told me it was in the shop. Another he had slept with when I was in the hospital recovering from sickness, The third was the one on my porch. They had all been seeing him continuously and he had told them we were only living together. The one on my porch didn’t even know I lived there. My ex told her I took off with another man and left all my stuff which is why she looked so shocked when I answered the door. i loved him so much i don’t know why my love for him is so strong, i now have to find a solution to this problem on how i am going to get him back and put his life to shape, when first contacted dr.marnish@yahoo.com to help me because i have had many thing about his love spell, I was doubting not knowing that he was my last solution, when i gave him the chance to help me after 3 days my lover returned home to reconcile with me, we are back now I’m so happy.
linayerkes FLA from USA
After I initially left a comment I seem to have clicked on the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get four emails with the same comment. There has to be a way you can remove me from that service? Many thanks!