I TRIED TO ADD MANY FRIENDS BUT FACEBOOK GAVE ME WARNING~!!!!!
Imran
· 1 year ago
I hate facebook for the limitations.....my account had been disabled 3 times & i had to make a new account each time.....first time my account was disabled for sending too many msg to my friends...second & third time for sending too many friendship requests & i was only adding the friends i lost from my first account......i dont spam.... i travel alot so i need to change my network each time i move....but facebook has limitations on dat too....all these limitations have to go.....shouldnt the user decide how many friends he wanna make or how many groups he wanna be a part of....whether its 50, 5000 or a 50000...MYSPACE donot have such problems....i totally agree with you.....Facebook need to fix these problems ASAP to be better
Steve Poppe
· 1 year ago
Love to respond Robert but too busy digging out from under all these cows, drinks, games and...
ambrosiality
· 1 year ago
OMG OMG OMG WTF I think ure site cursed me! read this last night!
& TODAY FACEBOOK WARNED TO BLOCK ME FOR SPAMMING. & i just reply my friends!
FACEBOOK SUX!!
auschick
· 1 year ago
I still like facebook, especially for connecting with old friends, but I am SO OVER the application requests. If they had a button that let you either not get requests, or delete all in one go, that would be nice.
Rob Brend
· 1 year ago
Good Article
ambrosiality
· 1 year ago
crazy about the guy that was just chatting with his friends?
Richard Callaby
· 1 year ago
Robert,
For me this network is definately out. For many reasons the most important one is that friends that I regularly meet with are not on it and do not see themselves on it either. Furhtermore it seems like companies are looking at these networks as an excuse not to hire you or give you insurance or any such thing that they deem inappropriate.
Facebook for me is out of the picture and I am happy to say my life is better for it. Too many time wasters and not enough sites that help get what I want when I want it.
Just my two cents of course
Thanks,
Richard
Geoff Livingston
· 1 year ago
Shear inertia and numbers saves Facebook, but they are vulnerable until they address issues like these. I am not impressed with management.
Oscar Toscano
· 1 year ago
I agree with your post.
Bill
· 1 year ago
Facebook never had much "shine" for me. I joined, added a few friends, joined a handful of groups. Noticed that there wasn't much going on in the groups. Started getting regular "Facebook apps spam". Noticed that the friends in my book and I were already doing plenty of communicating via Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks. Ergo, I haven't been into Facebook in about six weeks, haven't posted there in even longer. Ho hum. Life goes on.
Steven Hodson
· 1 year ago
I am getting such a kick out of all of this fuss over a dip in pageviews that is being depicted as the plateauing of social networks like Facebook.
As anyone who has been around this internetty type thing or even the old BBS era can tell you the larger part of what is happening has happened since the days of NNTP newsgroups and web forums.
As I also said on TechCrunch .. it must be a slow newsday when this makes it as a news item.
Michael Markman
· 1 year ago
Patina is usually something that wears on, not off. It's an pleasing aging effect. The metaphor I'd use is that Facebook is rusting rather than getting a patina.
I'm a less avid user now. I dread the apps which default to spamming my friends. I know that now and again, I'm going to forget to take the extra steps to by-pass the spam. That's just evil. Evil.
I'm also highly suspicious that anything they do to monetize the service will exploit me, and my reputation (such as it is), and my contact list in ways that will piss me off. I think they may be in a bind about that.
But, I agree with you that FB is the best we've seen so far. The only thing better than FB would be an improved FB.
DC Crowley
· 1 year ago
Yeah I'm using it less as well, notice the fatigue, even have contacts quiting and I'm making less new contacts than 6 months ago.
That said I prefer Facebook to anything other SN. They are clever people and they hire great people as well! The fallback might be a wakeup call to work with the customer better than they do now. The PR side really needs to shift up at least 2 gears. Hire people who will be visible as FB employees... get them interacting with the community and take a page from Robert's time at Microsoft.
James D Kirk
· 1 year ago
We all know how much you lover hosting your site on <strong>WordPress.com. And hopefully, they'll be moving more towards adopting the DiSo Project's philosophy of allowing you, the "site owner" to develop and control their own social network. A lot of what DiSo stands for and is promoting would solve many of the issues that you currently have with Facebook. Plus, with your lovely mug attached to DiSo, like you have with Data Portability, the group that could provide you with solutions might get there that much faster! Maybe you could give Chris Messina a jingle and help the cause?!?
Robert Scoble
· 1 year ago
Michael: well, a patina is something that usually adds value. If you watch the Antiques Roadshow, you'll see that people who clean the patina off of things like furniture or sculptures usually dramatically reduce their value. That's what I was going for.
James
· 1 year ago
facebook is still huge here on college campus, usa. i am a member of a college network and a geographical network for my city; i almost never mess with the geographical network. perhaps facebook is best suited as a network for college kids, as it was originally created. the only thing i'm getting sick of is all the bogus spam applications that junk up people's profiles and my inbox.
Fredrik Johnsen
· 1 year ago
I think the hype of Facebook is definitely slowing down here in Norway, just as the numbers from the UK suggest. Most people don't see it as a true utility, and are sick of being invited to all kinds of odd applications. When they do decide to add an app, they often involuntarily spam 15 or so of their own friends, in turn giving them a bad reputation and a crappy feeling. Add this to your list of things to fix, and I think Facebook will continue to grow...
Anonymous
· 1 year ago
Sick of it, waiting for the next social
obble wobble
· 1 year ago
Facebook? Beacon! Pass.
Seriously, I can't stand the thought of the privacy issues. The future? FB won't be able to adequately monetize pageviews via advertising, and someone, probably Apple, will develop a secure, encrypted, client side app that tracks people's social database for them. We need a cognitive prosthesis* for managing our relationships, not a corporation.
*see Charlie Stross, passim.
Uilleam
· 1 year ago
Yep, I'm over it. Though to be fair, I'm pretty much over the whole social thing anyway. I'm not sure why we need them anymore. Don't we already have a social network called the internet. Some may still serve a purpose, like goodreads or fanstory, but most are just a waste of time, and don't offer much in the way of useful interaction. But that's just me.
Horsman
· 1 year ago
Definately. I've removed all of my core personal details (although they no doubt still exist on some db within for future use against me), whittled down my apps to a core few and reject every invite that now comes my way.
I feel saturated by the whole thing and see my usage, as well of that of my contacts, dipping on weekly basis. I guess that this is inline with recent result of FB usage in the UK.
Christopher Coulter
· 1 year ago
Well, time to find some new shiny thing(s)...hype up the next promises of salvation.
d2
· 1 year ago
Are you serious? It wasnt that long ago when every other post was praising facebook. finally figured out the scam robert?
John Durkin
· 1 year ago
Would facebook "wear off" for anyone here simply to be replaced by another different social networking site? Not for me. I see it as the last social network site where everyone involved must also participate in the same site. I think facebook and any social networking site will eventually either fall into disuse or come to represent a particular demographic niche, but the structure of social networking in general is here to stay. As dataportability catches hold, the next thing after facebook is simply keeping track of your friends... your social graph... regardless of the particular platform/context/framework/virtual-world that you find yourself working within at the moment.
John Durkin
· 1 year ago
And Michael, I agree that the patina metaphor is strange. I immediately thought what you said, that patina is something that "wears on" over time. If I left a shiny copper penny in the yard for long enough it would develop a patina. Then I discussed it with a friend and he suggested that patina is often a coating added to "fake a look" - usually to make something look older than it is, so that when the "patina wears off," something is revealed as a fake. When patina is real, it indicates age and that is why rubbing it off of a thing you want to sell that is valuable *because* of its age is a bad idea.
Jesse Tayler
· 1 year ago
Each of these monolithic sites has a life-cycle.
They begin with no members and are useless, they grow enough to catch fire, or reach a critical mass and they explode to the enjoyment of many.
After a while they loose relevance. They can't grow much more and their purpose becomes blurry and finally, they start the Death phase.
Death means they still get used, but the truth is that the number of new users don't really reach the number who are leaving the site.
Facebook is clearly in the midst of this last stage, I suggest they sell to Microsoft soon and count their money.
Dave Winer
· 1 year ago
Turn it into the Internet's address book, and they can get back on the hypergrowth track. Make a coral reef instead of just a shipwreck.
DJ
· 1 year ago
All this social networking is making me tired. FaceBook was nice when it was new and fresh. Now it just feels like a chore to sift through all those profiles and keep tabs on the world. I feel like I have other---more important---things to do than read my friends' incongruous wall postings and delete the latest barrage of app spam.
G
· 1 year ago
Facebook is a social networking utility which works remarkably well for the market it was designed for — college students. It serves as a great intermediary between sitting half a room away from a peer and striking up daily conversations with them, and it is just as useful in finding people with common interests and seeing who knows who.
I never expected Facebook to take off as a business model, however — anyone I want to make a serious connection with, I would much rather send an email or place a phone call to them. Meshing pleasure and business rarely works well in real life, why expect it to succeed on the internet?
Facebook may very well prove to be just a fad for the adult, business-minded demographics (and haven’t sites liked LinkedIn proven to work as a far more focused utility?), but I anticipate that it will continue to run strong for the college crowds.
Janet Tokerud
· 1 year ago
They need establish some standards with the applications and enforce them. Spamming needs to be a selectable option that starts out in the No position when you add an app. They need to absolutely stop their whole commercial priority at the cost of our privacy. I am very tempted to get entirely off even though I like SNS's and enjoyed Ryze quite a bit in 2003 for a while. The guestbooks (similar to the Facebook Wall) and customizable HTML home pages as an option were pretty cool at that time. I'm not so sure Facebook has subscribed to Don't be Evil. They need to clean up their act if they want to stay on top --- or come out with incredibly compelling new features we can't live without.
Murat Aktihanoglu
· 1 year ago
Facebook will not address these problems until it absolutely is forced to, either by a mass exodus or by a better and truly 'open' platform, from which you can export your friends contact information, which you already own. Still wondering why we don't have an open-source social network, which can be paid for the same way wikipedia pays for all those servers and bandwidth. Maybe all we need is an initiative?
Ryan
· 1 year ago
You're outta your mind Bob. FB is growing at a very aggressive rate. Your requests are edge cases that probably affect less than 1 percent of the user base. If I was PM'ing at FB I would prioritize these asks very low.
Robert Scoble
· 1 year ago
Ryan: you're crazy if you think the second issue doesn't affect everyone. The fear you're gonna get kicked off keeps a TON of people from using Facebook and the technical limitations (5,000 friends, give me a break) also keep it from being a true utility.
Hisham Rana
· 1 year ago
Facebook usage in the UK doesn't surprise me with the limited anecdotal evidence from my own life. Part of the problem is many private business, in additional to NHS trusts, across the country have started blocking access to the site. This stop casual browsing and stops feeding the positive feedback loop social by which networking sites live and die.
Internationally, the larger problem is "friend saturation"--the paradoxical phenomenon where social networking site usage decreases as the number of potential new addable friends decreases for individual users. Facebook partially mitigated this effect with profile specific mini-feeds and the news-feed but the signal-to-noise ratio with applications and spammy information has made them nearly useless. Introducing controls to show/hide options on the news feed and limiting application spamming is too little too late.
Ultimately users need something to do on a social networking site once they are allowed access. Finding friends and consensual stalking are the bread-and-butter of sites like Facebook. The only way Facebook will continue to be relevant beyond 2008 is if they implement:
1. A simple but robust privacy system so people don't fear mixing work and personal friends in their lists.
2. A robust private messaging system rivaling established webmail systems out there with open IMAP/POP3 access.
3. Splitting the mini-feed such that user actions are separated from application notifications. The same should be done for the main news feed.
4. Forcing application developers to stop forcing invites.
5. Allowing higher-resolution photo uploads.
6. Tighter integration with mobile phones and text messaging a la iPhone/Blackberry/J2ME phone applications. This could be helped by possibly forging alliances with mobile phone vendors.
7. Integration of web feeds from other Web 2.0 sites much like Plaxo Pulse.
The point is to make sure Facebook has usefulness to people beyond the "friend saturation" phase.
Chris L
· 1 year ago
I keep my Facebook account because it helps some old friends find me. They could just type my name into Google and send me an email, but seriously, there must be people who don't even think to do that.
ron
· 1 year ago
yes, it's doomed! and just yesterday it was the next Google...!
you Bloggers are a riot:)
jareddriskill
· 1 year ago
I got tired of facebook over two years ago. with the exception of a couple of people everyone who was my friend was someone I spoke to on a daily basis in person.
It seemed useless to me but I found it very odd that no matter how hard I tried, Facebook wouldn't let me delete my account. Anyone else have this problem?
And seeing how I still have an account on there, I check it maybe every 6 weeks or so out of curiosity and man, all those useless applications they added over the years just doesn't do anything for me.
Patrick Dodds
· 1 year ago
Reasons I deactivated: 1. Application spam. 2. Experian (irritating UK company who were all over everything every time I went on - way too intrusive). 3. Aimlessness. 4. As pointed out above, lack of access via work (at lunchtimes, of course) means that fun and utility aspect is fatally impaired. 5. I have email, a blog, scrabble software for web use, and Flickr, all, of course, elsewhere - not sure much else needed web-social wise.
Haroun Kola
· 1 year ago
Nice post, my own Facebook usage is down too, although I'm not sure if its because I'm more introverted these days or if its due to FB itself.
A few of my friends have also been kicked off because of sending too many messages, that's really strange thing for a social network to do, and I just like everyone else am highly irritated by the spam from Applications and Group messages.
At the end of the day its still the best way for me to meet new people, so I'm hanging around some more.
Jeff Bean
· 1 year ago
Patrick, You're spot-on. Application spam is horrendous. Designed for high school and college kids -- not adults balalancing work, family, outside interests. Seems facebook is trying to be all things to all people. Will be interesting to see what happens with the 60+ million member number.
R.O.
· 1 year ago
I think Facebook is good for keeping up with old friends, but if falls apart beyond that. They won't let you change your name and adding any semblance of privacy to your account is way too difficult. Meeting new people on Facebook is hard because unless you are part of their social sphere or have an app, you really can't get a hold of them. I am also not comfortable allowing strangers access to what I am up to. And I don't think it is the best site. I think it is overhyped now and the new Myspace.
Jeremiah Owyang
· 1 year ago
Robert
we probably had a chance for Facebook to expand beyond 5000 friends, but after you scraped it, I doubt they're going to want to do that again, in fear of this being a rolodex scraper.
hamiltonflickrgroup
· 1 year ago
Im mildy enjoying facebook robert, having read all your posts and seen what happened to you Im not enjoying the FB experience .
I got totally miffed when all my so called friends spam me with app invites ,, zombie , vampire all the crap
Ive for this USerscript that blocks all them annoying apps . Its the best thing since slide bread
Facebook needs to become more user friendly . People need to know that there data wont be held hostage . Deleting an account should occur in minutes and not days .
jp
marshal sandler
· 1 year ago
In the beginning I , used Facebook! I made a few comments on Blogs after a while, that Facebook has no order and therefore how could one advertise and aim for a specific market ! I was of course told I was wrong ! Then I posted that Facebook was an expensive experiment and might be the next Edsel , without executives who under stood marketing ! I still feel it is an experiment that has proved money does not always cover up mistakes in judgement, cause as we, know Scobie you can't buy judgement ! I am 71 years old had a lot of belly to belly marketing experience and have a few scars ! I hate to see anyone fail that had a shot at it, but the facebook shot has missed the target ! I am sure Mark is a good person but he needs advice from marketing pro,s not geeks ! Why do I read Scobie? Cause there is effective generic content here ! Facebook must realize that content is king not site full of screwy one time apps!
Larry: yup, and you've never changed your mind about something as you've gotten older and wiser?
Shay
· 1 year ago
Scoble - totally with you here. Not only are the messages from groups getting super-spammy, the zillion invites from applications are a headache: NO I don't want a Zombie Kiss or a Rubber Duckie gift...thanks anyways.
Preach on!
ivanpope
· 1 year ago
When I read how Zuckerberg went to breakfast with a dictator (and took you along) I lost any pleasure in Facebook:
Mark Zuckerberg, founder/CEO of Facebook, which now has 68 million active users (people who’ve signed on in the past 30 days).
He invited me to a breakfast with Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf. We walked together to the breakfast, which was interesting because of Musharraf’s comments, where he defended his administration.
Robert Scoble
· 1 year ago
Ivan Pope: it wasn't a personal breakfast, it was a breakfast presentation to about 100 people at Davos.
fp
· 1 year ago
FB sux bigtime. Always has. Cute utility for a campus-wide network but puke-iferous when it went global.
Rodney Rumford
· 1 year ago
Robert, I don't think facebook is doomed at all. At it's core facebook is a communication platform. Applications allows new and different forms of communication.
Facebook is the most efficient and effective and egaing social network that i have ever used.
I agree with you... they seriously need to remove the limitations. They also need to be careful about how people are kicked off and the course for reinstatement.
Scott Goldie
· 1 year ago
I've written a desktop app that lets users receive and send Facebook messages from a regular email client (www.fblocalmail.com); handling messages in this way would also let users leverage whatever tools they have for spam filtering and information management. I'm yet to include notifications (I'm developing it in my spare time), but support will be there eventually.
Larry
· 1 year ago
@42. Yea, but that usually happens over a span of years, not months. This seems to be the proverbial "irrational exuberance"
All Comments
I think ure site cursed me! read this last night!
& TODAY FACEBOOK WARNED TO BLOCK ME FOR SPAMMING. & i just reply my friends!
FACEBOOK SUX!!
For me this network is definately out. For many reasons the most important one is that friends that I regularly meet with are not on it and do not see themselves on it either. Furhtermore it seems like companies are looking at these networks as an excuse not to hire you or give you insurance or any such thing that they deem inappropriate.
Facebook for me is out of the picture and I am happy to say my life is better for it. Too many time wasters and not enough sites that help get what I want when I want it.
Just my two cents of course
Thanks,
Richard
As anyone who has been around this internetty type thing or even the old BBS era can tell you the larger part of what is happening has happened since the days of NNTP newsgroups and web forums.
As both Frederic at The Last Podcast (http://www.lastpodcast.net/2008/02/21/social-ne...) and I (http://www.winextra.com/2008/02/22/social-netwo...) have noted that this seasonal cycle is an intregal part of our online lifestyle.
As I also said on TechCrunch .. it must be a slow newsday when this makes it as a news item.
I'm a less avid user now. I dread the apps which default to spamming my friends. I know that now and again, I'm going to forget to take the extra steps to by-pass the spam. That's just evil. Evil.
I'm also highly suspicious that anything they do to monetize the service will exploit me, and my reputation (such as it is), and my contact list in ways that will piss me off. I think they may be in a bind about that.
But, I agree with you that FB is the best we've seen so far. The only thing better than FB would be an improved FB.
That said I prefer Facebook to anything other SN. They are clever people and they hire great people as well! The fallback might be a wakeup call to work with the customer better than they do now. The PR side really needs to shift up at least 2 gears. Hire people who will be visible as FB employees... get them interacting with the community and take a page from Robert's time at Microsoft.
Beacon!
Pass.
Seriously, I can't stand the thought of the privacy issues. The future? FB won't be able to adequately monetize pageviews via advertising, and someone, probably Apple, will develop a secure, encrypted, client side app that tracks people's social database for them. We need a cognitive prosthesis* for managing our relationships, not a corporation.
*see Charlie Stross, passim.
I feel saturated by the whole thing and see my usage, as well of that of my contacts, dipping on weekly basis. I guess that this is inline with recent result of FB usage in the UK.
It wasnt that long ago when every other post was praising facebook. finally figured out the scam robert?
They begin with no members and are useless, they grow enough to catch fire, or reach a critical mass and they explode to the enjoyment of many.
After a while they loose relevance. They can't grow much more and their purpose becomes blurry and finally, they start the Death phase.
Death means they still get used, but the truth is that the number of new users don't really reach the number who are leaving the site.
Facebook is clearly in the midst of this last stage, I suggest they sell to Microsoft soon and count their money.
I never expected Facebook to take off as a business model, however — anyone I want to make a serious connection with, I would much rather send an email or place a phone call to them. Meshing pleasure and business rarely works well in real life, why expect it to succeed on the internet?
Facebook may very well prove to be just a fad for the adult, business-minded demographics (and haven’t sites liked LinkedIn proven to work as a far more focused utility?), but I anticipate that it will continue to run strong for the college crowds.
Still wondering why we don't have an open-source social network, which can be paid for the same way wikipedia pays for all those servers and bandwidth. Maybe all we need is an initiative?
Internationally, the larger problem is "friend saturation"--the paradoxical phenomenon where social networking site usage decreases as the number of potential new addable friends decreases for individual users. Facebook partially mitigated this effect with profile specific mini-feeds and the news-feed but the signal-to-noise ratio with applications and spammy information has made them nearly useless. Introducing controls to show/hide options on the news feed and limiting application spamming is too little too late.
Ultimately users need something to do on a social networking site once they are allowed access. Finding friends and consensual stalking are the bread-and-butter of sites like Facebook. The only way Facebook will continue to be relevant beyond 2008 is if they implement:
1. A simple but robust privacy system so people don't fear mixing work and personal friends in their lists.
2. A robust private messaging system rivaling established webmail systems out there with open IMAP/POP3 access.
3. Splitting the mini-feed such that user actions are separated from application notifications. The same should be done for the main news feed.
4. Forcing application developers to stop forcing invites.
5. Allowing higher-resolution photo uploads.
6. Tighter integration with mobile phones and text messaging a la iPhone/Blackberry/J2ME phone applications. This could be helped by possibly forging alliances with mobile phone vendors.
7. Integration of web feeds from other Web 2.0 sites much like Plaxo Pulse.
The point is to make sure Facebook has usefulness to people beyond the "friend saturation" phase.
you Bloggers are a riot:)
It seemed useless to me but I found it very odd that no matter how hard I tried, Facebook wouldn't let me delete my account. Anyone else have this problem?
And seeing how I still have an account on there, I check it maybe every 6 weeks or so out of curiosity and man, all those useless applications they added over the years just doesn't do anything for me.
1. Application spam.
2. Experian (irritating UK company who were all over everything every time I went on - way too intrusive).
3. Aimlessness.
4. As pointed out above, lack of access via work (at lunchtimes, of course) means that fun and utility aspect is fatally impaired.
5. I have email, a blog, scrabble software for web use, and Flickr, all, of course, elsewhere - not sure much else needed web-social wise.
A few of my friends have also been kicked off because of sending too many messages, that's really strange thing for a social network to do, and I just like everyone else am highly irritated by the spam from Applications and Group messages.
At the end of the day its still the best way for me to meet new people, so I'm hanging around some more.
we probably had a chance for Facebook to expand beyond 5000 friends, but after you scraped it, I doubt they're going to want to do that again, in fear of this being a rolodex scraper.
I got totally miffed when all my so called friends spam me with app invites ,, zombie , vampire all the crap
Ive for this USerscript that blocks all them annoying apps . Its the best thing since slide bread
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/12393
Facebook needs to become more user friendly .
People need to know that there data wont be held hostage . Deleting an account should occur in minutes and not days .
jp
Facebook must realize that content is king not site full of screwy one time apps!
http://scobleizer.com/2007/10/02/steve-ballmer-...
http://scobleizer.com/2007/07/28/calacanis-cant...
http://scobleizer.com/2007/07/24/facebook-wall-...
http://scobleizer.com/2007/07/20/what-would-get...
http://scobleizer.com/2007/07/12/why-facebook-w...
Preach on!
Mark Zuckerberg, founder/CEO of Facebook, which now has 68 million active users (people who’ve signed on in the past 30 days).
He invited me to a breakfast with Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf. We walked together to the breakfast, which was interesting because of Musharraf’s comments, where he defended his administration.
I don't think facebook is doomed at all. At it's core facebook is a communication platform. Applications allows new and different forms of communication.
Facebook is the most efficient and effective and egaing social network that i have ever used.
I agree with you... they seriously need to remove the limitations. They also need to be careful about how people are kicked off and the course for reinstatement.