One wonders whether the stable number of Facebook users is approximately equal to the number of high school and college students.
The hypothesis that high schoolers with Facebook profiles will continue to use them throughout life is only now being put to the test. And here's the thing: In high school, many people really care to know exactly what each of their classmates is doing and who they are dating. Sometimes that continues through college. But eventually people grow older, and they escape the social fishtank that is school, and they go out into the world... and, what do you know, eventually you stop hanging around with all of your school friends. You make a big show of keeping up with all of them for a while... but eventually it tapers down to sending Christmas cards now and then. You visit every few years. And you certainly don't visit them all.
I'm not saying that you'll ever stop using social networks. But there are a lot of social networks now. They're not that hard to develop, and they're just going to keep getting easier. And the result may well be that different people will gravitate to different ones as they go through life.
Facebook's counterargument is that they are going to be the generic platform on which all future special-purpose social nets will be based. But Facebook wasn't designed as a generic platform. It was designed as a social network for college students. And I'm not sure that opening the user base and tacking on a thousand third-party apps has really changed that. It's hard to take a tool that was carefully optimized for one task and repurpose it for N other tasks... especially when there are a thousand competitors with similar technology, and the lock-in isn't that strong.
Well, that argument feels very circular to me, since I had PG's essay firmly in mind when composing my words about Facebook. :)
But PG's essay is mostly about high school and earlier, as I recall. Facebook was originally designed for college students. So I wouldn't want to suggest that the app was built around the kind of warped prison-yard junior-high-school culture described in the essay. The situation is not that bad: Facebook is an app for adults, and it remains relevant for adults. But it is primarily an app for young adults, of a certain age and social position.
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One wonders whether the stable number of Facebook users is approximately equal to the number of high school and college students.
The hypothesis that high schoolers with Facebook profiles will continue to use them throughout life is only now being put to the test. And here's the thing: In high school, many people really care to know exactly what each of their classmates is doing and who they are dating. Sometimes that continues through college. But eventually people grow older, and they escape the social fishtank that is school, and they go out into the world... and, what do you know, eventually you stop hanging around with all of your school friends. You make a big show of keeping up with all of them for a while... but eventually it tapers down to sending Christmas cards now and then. You visit every few years. And you certainly don't visit them all.
I'm not saying that you'll ever stop using social networks. But there are a lot of social networks now. They're not that hard to develop, and they're just going to keep getting easier. And the result may well be that different people will gravitate to different ones as they go through life.
Facebook's counterargument is that they are going to be the generic platform on which all future special-purpose social nets will be based. But Facebook wasn't designed as a generic platform. It was designed as a social network for college students. And I'm not sure that opening the user base and tacking on a thousand third-party apps has really changed that. It's hard to take a tool that was carefully optimized for one task and repurpose it for N other tasks... especially when there are a thousand competitors with similar technology, and the lock-in isn't that strong.
I actually keep up with a lot of old friends even though family life keeps me very busy, but I had to create ourdoings.com to do it.
It's not a social network in terms of meeting new people, but it serves well the purpose of keeping in touch with people you already know.
This would be circumstancial evidence for school being a popularity contest ( http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html ).
Well, that argument feels very circular to me, since I had PG's essay firmly in mind when composing my words about Facebook. :)
But PG's essay is mostly about high school and earlier, as I recall. Facebook was originally designed for college students. So I wouldn't want to suggest that the app was built around the kind of warped prison-yard junior-high-school culture described in the essay. The situation is not that bad: Facebook is an app for adults, and it remains relevant for adults. But it is primarily an app for young adults, of a certain age and social position.