I have long believed that Facebook/MySpace is like a TV show. Once the "content" becomes less interesting, people will slowly tune out. I am personally seeing fewer and less interesting updates from my friends.
In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Those businesses have shorter shelf lives.
On the other hand, Google/Microsoft are in the productivity/time saving business and they have more durable advantages since they don't have to keep coming up ways to make people stick around. People stick around and use their service, because people save time.
Watch out for Twitter to do to Facebook what, Facebook did to Myspace and what Myspace did to Friendster.
Twitter on the other hand may not exactly be like a TV show as much as TV channel with each mega Twitter star (e.g. Charlie Sheen) a TV show within that channel.
Same here. I'm getting more and more bored with it. What was most interesting about Facebook for me was learning about certain people. This guy I work with likes cheesy movies, goes out to Irish bars with his wife, and likes to tweet quotes from whatever movie he's watching when he's drunk. Learning that was interesting. Seeing the same pattern every day is horribly boring. Same thing with most of my high-volume friends. A close high school friend's wife, whom I haven't had a chance to get to know in person, loves mariachi music, can't write a coherent sentence to save her life, goes to la pulga (the flea market) every weekend, enjoys drama with her coworkers, and is constantly sharing coupon deals. Fascinating to know, boring as shit to see every day.
And of course the highest volume people are the most boring. All my friends seem to have about the same volume of inanity, funny stuff, somewhat interesting comments, worthwhile content, and vital life updates to share. They just vary in what their sharing threshold is. If I could tune out everything below "worthwhile content" then Facebook would be great. I'd also only need to look at it once a day for two minutes to keep up with everybody. Alas, there is no "setLogLevel" method on my Facebook feed.
I am not on Facebook, but the last few games I tried on iOS have a "post achievement on Facebook/Twitter" every single level. I can't help thinking that if anybody is actually pushing those buttons it must drive their "friends" absolutely bonkers.
On some level I can understand the concept of "keep your friends up-to-date with your life". But not using these definitions of "friends" and "life".
You can block specific applications from ever being shown to you. If it wasn't for that feature Zynga games would have made me quit facebook a few times already.
Game updates are annoying, but they aren't much better than anything else anybody posts, ever.
Agreed. If I was only facebook friends with the 10 people I really am interested in, I'd hardly notice the difference. I don't want to go through and remove all the loose friends I met in college one-by-one, though.
Twitter is much more relevant to me; I'm only following around 50 people, all of which I deliberately chose.
In fact, the general theory of mine is that any business whose key metric is "time spent per user", is basically a time sink AND in the media business and needs to keep up with new ways to entertain people. Those businesses have shorter shelf lives.
On the other hand, Google/Microsoft are in the productivity/time saving business and they have more durable advantages since they don't have to keep coming up ways to make people stick around. People stick around and use their service, because people save time.
Watch out for Twitter to do to Facebook what, Facebook did to Myspace and what Myspace did to Friendster.
Twitter on the other hand may not exactly be like a TV show as much as TV channel with each mega Twitter star (e.g. Charlie Sheen) a TV show within that channel.