I can see what FB does right - identity and other apis are good, but the site itself has very poor usability, unfortunately. Author's point - that you usually have no idea where your message goes and who can see it - is one thing that makes me limit it's usage to a minimum.
And the very valid observation that FB wall is usually cluttered with senseless status updates and stupid game events from an otherwise intelligent people does not add any points, too.
But surely, seeing how well FB is doing for other people who don't want to learn all that complicated things to post pictures online, I give them credit. Just not 50B of it :)
FB will never become the new Internet, and probably will never even become Internet's identity DB. See interviews with Mark where he tries to reply to a direct question whether or not he understands what kind of responsibility he gets with owning 500mil user records. He has no idea. I foresee a horrendous crash of trust. Hope I'm wrong.
What, are you serious? Since 90% of my non-techie friends can figure out who's going to see what you write in walls, messages and photo comments, I'm pretty devastated to hear that 5 HN users find it a challenge.
I think your non-techie friends are just assuming that the folks that they want to see what they write, will, and those they don't want to see what they write, won't. And, mostly, they're right.
The biggest problem, for me, is that who can see these things is not up to only those involved in the conversation. It hardly even matters what the exact effect is of the rules currently in place, since they could change at any time. The rules on who can see my email inbox don't change. (I think this was what really upset people about Google Buzz: suddenly the rules around who could see what changed, making everyone on gmail who cares about that sort of thing insecure about their own email.)
Thanks but I'm really not that old :)
As to your point, I guess it depends on what your friends use facebook for. As a place for some smalltalk and humor - sure, they probably would never worry if the whole world reads it. But not suitable for discussing anything at all, since you have no control over the audience. And most people don't realize that their inner-circle private discussions are most probably world-readable - I'll save some space and won't list endless possible consequences.
I know a lot of people. I don't have an account on FB. Absolutely zero % of the people I know have stopped talking to me even though 95% of them all have an account.
I trust FB far less than any site online.
Fun Fact: pretty much every other social network, HI5, Tagged, MySpace etc. were all started by spammers. Friendster and FB were just started by douchebags.
And the very valid observation that FB wall is usually cluttered with senseless status updates and stupid game events from an otherwise intelligent people does not add any points, too.
But surely, seeing how well FB is doing for other people who don't want to learn all that complicated things to post pictures online, I give them credit. Just not 50B of it :)
FB will never become the new Internet, and probably will never even become Internet's identity DB. See interviews with Mark where he tries to reply to a direct question whether or not he understands what kind of responsibility he gets with owning 500mil user records. He has no idea. I foresee a horrendous crash of trust. Hope I'm wrong.