I think the best advice I ever got from my parents about weddings is that you have to have really good food. Nobody hardly remembers anything else, even the bride's dress, but if you have incredible food, people will talk about it for a decade. This may be biased, being from a southern Italian family, but I think it's good advice.
It's articles like these and the responses they engender that I'm very glad I grew up working class, and lived my 20's punk rock. I can appreciate the finer things in life, but I've also got the skills to survive a near-apocalypse.
Getting rich has never been my motivator for being involved in technology, and to be honest, I'd probably be happier if the industry were de-funded (hopefully in favor of something like biotech or alternative energies, instead of url shorteners like bit.ly), and it cut the fat out, of all the people who prefer schmoozing to hacking.
I've had similar experiences. Git has great potential, but the tools seem very immature, and basic things I took for granted with Subversion are huge pita's with Git. And it seems like all that needs to happen is a really solid toolkit to simplify those tasks.
I've had the opposite experience. I've generally found git a joy to use and I don't miss SVN in the slightest. I highly recommend reading Chacon's Pro Git book. As really understanding how Git works internally helps in using it a lot.
Game developers hate Zynga for the same reason that real comedians hate Dane Cook: Uninspired, unoriginal (borderline theft), and a dilution of the craft.
Sure, you could chalk it up to jealousy of success, but the reality is that there are people out there who are in it for more than money, and sometimes it hurts on a visceral level to see mediocrity succeed wildly.
"Sure, you could chalk it up to jealousy of success, but the reality is that there are people out there who are in it for more than money, and sometimes it hurts on a visceral level to see mediocrity succeed wildly."
Mediocre is a relative term. What is this based on? To you it might mean graphics to me it might mean the storyline.
This happens in more than just the gaming industry. Look at how much attention instant youtube got a few weeks ago. The developer just slapped together some ajax using a pre-built API. As a developer, I could have written the same thing in a relatively short amount of time. Yet, it got him lots of attention and a job offer.
I also say the same thing about things like Django. Rather than knowing how everything works, developers are putting blocks of pre-built code together to build applications. I am almost certain the assembly guys were saying the same thing when C became popular.
Facebook has the most users in one place, but the dust is nowhere near settled on where everyone will end up.
This bodes very well for a decentralized solution. I doubt Diaspora will be the first (I think Appleseed (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org) is much more likely), but ultimately, it will be an easily implemented protocol with mature cross-platform libraries that'll really take it down.
This is a good PR move on Facebook's part, because it willfully misinterprets people's frustrations with Facebook. It's not that you didn't have a local copy of your data, it's that you had no control over your data when it was out in the wild. This will take some wind out of the sails of the decentralized solutions, but the armada is still coming.
It seems like the majority of the non-Facebook figure comes from Chinese language sites. Since social networking sites will quite likely be segmented by language for the foreseeable future, I don't think this really counts. In the English-language world, Facebook has serious network effect and you would be hard-pressed to combine all of FB's competitors into anything.
I agree dispersed social networking is coming... I'm not sure if "control" of data is the way to phrase the "problem"... Still, creating a dispersed network where each contributor controls where their data goes is a very hard problem.
Sort by Registered Users. You don't even need the Chinese language site (QZone).
Habbo + MySpace + Bebo + Orkut + Friendster + Hi5 = 679 million. Assuming 50% cross-over (which is a very high estimate), that means 340 million unique users, for just six social networks.
The sites I hadn't heard of aren't Chinese language sites but failed English language sites. But they are still failed sites. I don't go to my two Myspace pages, ever.
And in India, where Orkut used to be big, almost everyone I know has migrated to Facebook, so those numbers include a large number of accounts no one is using
The thing is, I doubt a decentralized social networking approach would really be allowed by the Chinese government. This kind of solution can only really gain ground in very open countries if at all...
Tons of working features, a more well-defined roadmap, (much) more experience, and it's way easier to install (LAMP vs Rails). Also, Appleseed is a full social platform, that allows you to build components and extend it. Diaspora is more of a single application, it doesn't have any kind of modular framework to build off of. I don't think Diaspora will ever be dead in the water, but it just has so much catching up to do, and not small stuff, big architectural stuff that doesn't really benefit from the "many eyeballs" advantage of popular open source.
My sister is in four social networks other than Facebook. I don’t think it matters. (Five if you insist on counting MySpace.) She would pick Facebook if she had to.
> The combined size of social networks that aren't Facebook is over 1.5 billion people, probably more.
How much of that overlaps with Facebook? Approximately 500 million? Also, they're measuring total registrations: FB has probably close to a billion registrations on their 500 million actives. All that statistic tells you is that FB has room to grow.
Let's assume there's total overlap, meaning everyone who has a non-FB account also has a FB account. Now let's assume all of those smaller, but substantially sized, networks started inter-communicating. Who would stay on Facebook? Why would you stay on the centralized network with 500 million people when you can spend all your time on the open network with 1.5 - 2 billion people?
As for active versus registrations, we can't be sure of that from anyone, but rest assured, a decentralized network has much greater potential than Facebook does. Especially in the rest of the world where Facebook isn't nearly as popular.
500 million vs 1.5 billion is a meaningless metric regarding which social network people will use. They will use the one their friends are using, and no one has near enough friends for those gigantic numbers to have any relevance.
It's a useless metric in regard to an individual person's decision to use facebook as opposed to something else. People don't care that facebook has 5 million users, they care that their friends use it. If all/most of their friends started using something else, they would too, regardless of whether that new network had 5 billion people or 5 hundred.
Also, can we stop to consider the fact that a company that is worth billions of dollars can only barely eke out a profit, despite having access to the personal lives of 500 million people? It's not like they lack the capability to be evil. More likely, they're a paper tiger. They don't have much time to build the killer app that people will pay for before their investors start gettin anxious.
The approach to social networking they've taken simply isn't a particularly profitable approach, the profitable approach hasn't been invented yet. Eventually, people will realize that, and while they're running and begging venture capitalists for another $100 million just to keep the lights on in their server farms, someone else is gonna build the next big thing, and Facebook will go the way of Friendster and Myspace. If we've learned anything, social networks are fickle, and it doesn't take long for a trickle of users to become a flood.
Zuckerburg won't ever starve, and the company probably won't ever fold (heck, even AOL is still around), but the idea that his wealth and any perceived power is in any way stable just doesn't check in with reality.
Think about an Oil rig, if you will. Just because it takes half a billion dollars to get it started doesn't mean it is barely eking out a profit while it's being built. Once it's built, its going to make the owners billions.
I think a comparison to an oil rig is wishful thinking, to say the least. You have a basically clear and proven business model that's existed for 100 years, based on selling a tangible product that everybody inarguably needs.
Facebook has none of those characteristics, and nobody's proven that there's anything substantial where they're digging.
Because you can leave Google. You may not want to, and they do a great job of having features nobody else has, but if they piss you off enough, there's plenty of email providers.
Facebook, on the other hand, holds your social network hostage. We'll always resent any site that takes advantage of that.
I think you are overdramatizing Facebook's importance quite a little bit here. It's not like your friends will hate you when you quit and I have seen plenty of people quit online social networks while retaining their life just fine.
I could make up a similar argument the other way around: to me, services like Facebook provide little to no value; I can quit them just fine. I have communication details of a lifetime in Google, I store my documents with them, organize my calendar. (Note: I have heard Google's export features are quite okayish so that argument does not really hold.)
I think you're underestimating Facebook's social importance. Sure, your friends won't hate you, it won't be the end of the world, but there is a palpable sense of disconnect.
And there are more people who rely on Facebook for social connection, than people who rely on Google for business and finance (especially if you're talking about the under-25 crowd).
I believe your claims but is there any evidence to back it up (and is that possible on fuzzy metrics such as palpable sense of disconnect)?
From your other comments I understand you are from the US and I guess its a wholly different matter across the pond, but I for one cannot reproduce these effects here in Germany. Sure, most -- rough estimate: all -- of my contacts do have accounts on various social networks (me included) but we have never critically relied on it. It never gained quite as much traction as I always hear from Facebook.
