Scobleizer - Latest Comments in The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

disqus_JTzngGnkEp — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:06:23 -0000

Everyone commenting about FB vs. Twitter here is looking at these services as they are, not at the long-term trajectory of these services. Also you are looking at these services from the perspective of a tech-savvy user.

The end-goal is to provide a personalized newspaper (newsfeed) - and that includes work, family, friends, local, national, international. No "common" user would rationally want or be able to manage two separate newspapers. Both FB and Twitter are gunning for this market and it would be stupid of either to limit themselves to anything smaller.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Sherry Harris — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:50:35 -0000

I am a 40+ mom and I get Facebook. I get to communicate with people I know. Twitter on the other hand must be for a younger or more technical crowd. I am still hoping to to figure out the appeal of Twitter.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

paulrharvey3 — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:43:57 -0000

Is there room for Facebook Lite, which I would imagine would be similar to Twitter, regular Facebook, which would be as it is, and a Facebook Ultra, which is basically FriendFeed? So people can choose how they want to interact? for instance, I could tag family photos to stay in my circle of friends on Facebook, but trade show photos could go to the Facebook Ultra/FriendFeed stream, and a link sent to my Facebook Lite stream.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

jonnybgood — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:56:50 -0000

I agree with a lot of the sentiment expressed here - Facebook is for non-techy and best used for personal ends. I certainly reserve it for keeping up with friends and family scattered wide across the planet.
Yes brands/companies/services need to have a presence in FB and there are numerous ways of developing business (see Paul Dunay). However, in many cases, for insight & engagement there are are numerous other social media (blogs, forums, communities, portals, message boards, review sites) especially focused on cell phones, hotels, cars, desinations. FB groups on such discussions are buried deep via a clunky search and are often limited to a few inactive members with a level discussion: "Here's my new car - Yo, cool dude like, it." (Twitter conversations are likely to be similarly limited, althoug the potential for engagement & customer service is very high.) Are there potential, present, former and competitor cutomers posting questions, answers, recommendations and suggestions on Facebook and the like? Are the pros and cons of products/services/brands fully debated? I think not. Go to targetted social media for the inisight to feed into your marketing, communications, product, customer service and engagement.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

spinchange — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:31:18 -0000

I don't think any of these companies really 'know' what they're doing. They're essentially screwing around and trying to figure out the best way to make money off of it without pissing everyone off. I really don't think Mark Zuckerberg is that concerned with our philosophical ideas of public and private space, even though he should. He cares about sustaining that valuation of his.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

jenbeevercausey — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:50:15 -0000

Great observations. I have a friend that said, "I see your status updates on Facebook, but I have to say I don't understand most of them." My updates on Facebook come from Twitter and include biz links and my blog entries. In addition, I add more personal stuff like recipes, interesting links, etc.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Paul Chaney — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:40:58 -0000

My sister is on Facebook. So is my wife. If you knew them, you'd know they would never find themselves on Friendfeed or even Twitter. They are so not techy types.

To echo Lewis, Facebook started out as a place for nerds to find dates (something like that). Now, it's a place for grandmas to see photos of the grandkids, Facebook Pages notwithstanding.

Personally, I think someone should develop another version of Friendfeed, because it's going to be some time yet before we see the open, distributed, non-proprietary web.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Jack Humphrey — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:42:09 -0000

I still don't understand the allure of Facebook. I have a lot of friends and followers who swear by it and love it above all else. Maybe I need a better class of friends and followers. :)

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Alexander Lugg — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:07:32 -0000

I find that I read heaps of interesting stuff on Twitter and can talk about those things with other people who share the same interests. It's particularly useful when it comes to getting stuff from websites that I don't have time to trawl through like Neocha.com, but whose content interests me.

But at the same time, I also post stuff that I find interesting to Facebook because the links are more accessible to people that I know better, so there's a place for both as far as I am concerned.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

adir1 — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:44:56 -0000

The whole beauty of Facebook for me (and now my children) is the privacy aspect! Putting public conversion has it's place, but many people enjoy Facebook exactly because of the privacy benefits.
I do think facebook should give us even more privacy controls, to allow certain "public" conversations from time to time, and other such fine-grained markings for images and statuses, etc.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

DanielEgan — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:22:35 -0000

I dont think they are planning on fixing it. Honestly, I think they are using FriendFeed as a you would a junkyard (for used parts), or at least the brain equity that comes along with it. Although, I cant blame FriendFeed. Sell while the selling is good. I know everyone want to be the "Next Big Thing" but sometimes it is better to take the Mark-Cuban-Take-The-Money-And-Run approach. I mean, isnt real money better than percieved value?

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:11:52 -0000

This is really Jesse Stay's arena, but I would think that the best solution is to establish one (or more) Facebook fan pages for public conversations, and reserve your personal Facebook account for more personal conversations. From that perspective, I don't really see any issues with the Scobleizer fan page. If Robert wanted to sell a used car, he could presumably use a personal Facebook page, with a friend number closer to Dunbar's Number than Scoble's Number, which concentrates on people he knows on a more personal basis.

Another option would be to establish one (or more) fan pages for the more personal stuff, such as a "Milan pictures" fan page, possibly with approval of people who join the page.

That having been said, it would be nice if Facebook fan pages allowed more than one feed to be incorporated into the page, but I assume that Facebook's newest employees will be making the same suggestion.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

AxisPortals — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:47:18 -0000

I'm not a huge FB fan, although I have several pages there. Two are for business, one is my original page (used pretty much exclusively for academic contacts and networking), and one is for a church/school that I work with.

In every case, I experience FB as clunky. At first, when only the academic account was active, it wasn't too bad--I threw some cows and whatnot, tired of that quickly, and moved along. But it has grown progressively worse, just chock full of silly bells and whistles, and somehow more devoid of content and navigational ease (or sensibility) with every alleged improvement.

By contrast, FriendFeed is a Zen Garden--clean, elegant, focused on content, and ideal for bringing ideas and information together so that they can be discussed (at length, even, which is fabulous) and archived (discussion and all).

It's one place where friending/following is very easy to manage, and is driven by quality and connection. Haven't experienced anything else quite like it.

It will be interesting to see how things develop, and whether anything else manages to be quite so satisfactory.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Ru Viljoen — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:32:09 -0000

Yup a necessary evil. Thats exactly how I see them for the moment.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Brent Logan — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:29:27 -0000

Facebook won't replace FriendFeed until asymmetrical following is the standard. Allowing conversations to be aggregated elsewhere is also necessary.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Chris Lindhartsen — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:29:06 -0000

To an extent, some people will always want privacy. We want to know who can hear the conversation, let alone the point that does everything have to be public? Is there no such thing as having a group of friends in this world any longer?

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Mark Essel — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:58:18 -0000

I haven't really dug into facebook beyond commenting occasionally on friends statuses.

I removed my ff embed from my blog today, mostly due to getting used to the possibility that it won't be a growing service. That real estate is up for grabs at the moment. It was my virtual home's white board, time to get another one that won't be tied to an outside company working.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

maverickny — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:57:55 -0000

Good points, Robert.

You know, many of us just don't want have business or industry discussions on Facebook, certainly my nieces and old school friends will not be interested in my babblings and conversations there and I'm not keen on mixing the groups.

It's not my day for comments - the Twitter signin is over capacity, I don't want to sign in with Facebook Connect and end up with a comment to my feed there and clicking on the link to the Facebook Note in the FF widget to the right took me to my Facebook homepage even when signed in, sigh.

I guess we will all go back to fractured conversations on blogs at this rate.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

haraldf — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:51:50 -0000

Facebook keywords are "close", "closed", "personal", "walled". A conversation, on the other hand, need to be open.

Two cures:
1. We need to find a new friendfeed, unless
2. Facebook opens up.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Herschel — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:51:11 -0000

Robert,
You are so out of touch with the real audience of Facebook.

Stop, read that again.

Facebook and Zuckerberg understand that the small IT audience is not where they will make money. On Facebook I have over 100 friends who mostly found me. These friends are from my past I am amazed that they find me - but they do. And of these 100+ friends, who I approve and want to hear from, at least 30-50% of them post at least weekly of what they are up to. Even the Mafia war sucked me in because my good friend likes it.

So after reading my response and re-reading your post, you are right. Facebook isn't for a professional conversations. It is a place to hang out and have a beer, to relax after a day and to catch up with people you know and only those people. It's the first real Bar on the Internet.

I think eventually it could be expanded to include those features you like about FriendFeed and Twitter.

You qualified the other day that the Facebook purchased of FF is for easy R&D. I don't think this analysis is correct. I think Zuck took a play from M$FT's play book to take out a competitor and to get some good development resources. And on top of everything it really didn't cost Facebook a lot of real cash.

Just admit that you are a FF fan-boy and you hate that it is being sucked up by the fat-cat and will be watered down from what you like - maybe.

Oh, not everyone in the world wants an open conversation with everyone else in the world. For those who do, go for it, for those who don't that's ok -- just having a choice of either communication model is fine with me.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

josephgelb — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:48:31 -0000

I am a huge fan of the depth of communication people can do on the Facebook. If something I add is good people like and dislike it, leave a comment and make it go viral sometimes better than Twitter.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

mattsingley — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:40:39 -0000

Good thoughts. So does this mean you're going to follow more people on Twitter after your mass unfollowing...to have more conversations with customers, fans and friends? -@mattsingley

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Ben — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:33:20 -0000

Aren't we all friends? ;-)

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Nikole Gipps — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:13:21 -0000

The problem with this is the assumption that I want my conversations public and all over Google! I actually like that they are not. If they were, Facebook would stop having use for me. The real problem that you can't have a conversation as a brand, only as an individual, is the the issue with major companies and Facebook. It makes Facebook into a broadcast medium and not as a social media conversation for them. I agree with the person above who said "Facebook is for family... twitter and friendfeed is for friends." ... but I would take it one step further in say that Facebook can't expand its offerings until it comes up with a way to keep personal and business lives separate, especially for small business owners who do business under their own name. I want to keep all of my professional contacts connected to my Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook Corporate/Page; I want all my personal contacts to be on my Facebook personal account. Facebook has not done a good job separating that off at this point, and in that they will fail to bring in the big accounts for true social media connections.

Re: The problem with Facebook for public conversations

Jon — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:35:40 -0000

I disagree that they have to be different services but any combination of Facebook & FriendFeed needs to recognise the different uses. If they can - somehow - combine them on one platform while continuing to facilitate different styles of communication they will have one very powerful tool. I, for one, am open to seeing what they come up with.