Zuckerberg: Most of Facebook Will Be Video Within Five Years 206
jfruh writes: Facebook recently held its first ever town-hall meeting in which Mark Zuckerberg took questions from the general public, and one of his answers might raise some eyebrows. When asked if the increasing numbers of photos being uploaded might strain the company's servers, he said the infrastructure is more than up to the task, because they're preparing for the notion that "in five years, most of [Facebook] will be video."
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it increasingly more and more difficult to take Zuckerberg seriously.
Re:No. (Score:4, Funny)
Oh no. How ever will a CEO of a fortune 500 company be taken seriously if not by slashdot user kuzb?
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, yeah. So?
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, but I was talking about people taking him seriously. Not whether he was right.
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Is it really a prediction when the ceo says "the company of which I'm the ceo is planning our infrastucture to be able to handle x"? I don't get the original poster's bitchy tone on this article.
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Well, to be fair, he said not only will infrastucture to be able to handle x, but people will be doing x in sufficient numbers.
Now I do not think x or video is a good thing. Many people are just plain ugly or not as charismatic as they can be with writings. I think a shift in this direction will take a lot of the allure of 9 million friends who cannot even remember your name away from social media. And I bet that if there was market for it, Google would likely be in it first with some youtube google+ hybrid
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A property shared by virtually every other organization on the face of the planet :)
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erm, i was saying that users 'walking away' in significant numbers would be the definition of a death knell for any organization.
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All it takes for facebook to fail is for ordinary users walking away in sufficient numbers.
Already done on my end. Only 499,999,999 more to go. :)
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All it takes for facebook to fail is for ordinary users walking away in sufficient numbers.
Pretty much true for anything.
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Nope, not everything.
1) Cable companies: since they own the last-mile connections to peoples' homes, they basically have a monopoly on high-speed internet service. Unless you want to use your cellphone for all your internet connectivity, or perhaps you happen to have an alternative like FIOS (which probably isn't any better or cheaper than cable internet), you can't walk away from them.
2) Banks. If people walk away from them, the government will deem them "too big to fail" and give them all the money they
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1) Definitely a first world problem. If enough people walked away, something would change. I didn't say it wouldn't be inconvenient in the mean time. When I dropped Comcast back in the day, I stuck with DSL for a couple years until FIOS became available. The slower speed was worth it to not have to deal with Comcast.
2) If people continued to stay away, the banks would eventually fail. Why would the government continue to support them if nobody was using them?
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2) If people continued to stay away, the banks would eventually fail. Why would the government continue to support them if nobody was using them?
Because corruption.
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At least kuzb can write their username, unlike you! You can use a video facebook to hide your illiteracy, i kan reed!
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
How do you know kuzb wasn't trying to spell "flamingo"?
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Steve Ballmer wasn't taken very seriously by various Slashdot users, and he ended up getting sacked by the MS board. He also made all kinds of dumb decisions during his tenure (which is why he was sacked, the latest dumb decision being Metro).
CEOs aren't brilliant geniuses, not usually anyway. They're just in the right place at the right time and don't screw up too horribly while they're there, like most successful people.
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Oblig xkcd...
http://xkcd.com/678/
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Oblig xkcd...
http://xkcd.com/678/
There is truth in the rollover -- "a technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away indefinitely.". We've all seen examples of that in our lifetimes. (fusion, flying cars, universal health care)
I think there is some sort of threshold -- perhaps "50 years away" where the technology accelerates away from us. So that it'll be 55 years away from 10 years from now, and so on, becoming less and less attainable over time. There needs to be a cool name for this.
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How can you forget the ultimate example of Linux on the desktop?
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I was indeed wondering about what's so special about universal healthcare.
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(gritted teeth) It. Was. A. Joke.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, Zuckerberg (and every other website operator) hopes it will all be video, because video ads tend to make more than static. That's why every website from MSNBC to Slashdot have suddenly tried creating video content, even when it makes no sense.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Worth mentioning, there's a difference between asserting it will all be video, and preparing your infrastructure for that possibility.
I tracked down the webcast [facebook.com] and the question is asked ~34 minutes in.
Here's what he actually said, beyond the snippet being quoted everywhere
5 years ago, most of facebook was text and if you fast forward 5 years, probably most of it is going to be video, just because it's getting easier to capture video of the moments of your lives and share it [...]
He then talks about the news feed ranking your stories.
Every day there are about 1,500 stories that are shared with you and the average person will only look at about 100 a day, because that's all you have time for
In 5 years, if everything on facebook is video, the average person is sure as hell not going to have time to interact with 100 videos per day.
Unless they copy Vine, a richer video experience on facebook will necessarily mean that you interact with less people per unit of time.
Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
Who the fuck has the time to look through 100 FB stories a day???
Nobody; they look at the headlines and then add 100 comments, just like here on slashdot.
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Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, video ads are less blockable because users run the real risk of blocking the content they wish to see as well. That's why they pay more. And you can make them unskippable and all that too.
Why do you think all the TV networks have embraced putting TV shows online? Because they realize they can put ads on the stream and the user has to sit through them (or go to the bathroom). Either way, they can't fast forward through them like they can on a DVR.
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Either way, they can't fast forward through them like they can on a DVR.
Only a matter of time before users go through a revolt like they did with pop-ups and 'punch the monkey' type advertising if the advertisers get as crazy as they did with the web.
My response to the 'please allow our advertising' is to send them a question 'I have the allow non-intrusive ads box checked in ad-block. Why are your ads not on that list?'.
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Why do you think all the TV networks have embraced putting TV shows online? Because they realize they can put ads on the stream and the user has to sit through them (or go to the bathroom). Either way, they can't fast forward through them like they can on a DVR.
...except that in my case, I block the paths to the ad-content streams. You know what happens? Video stream loads, html5/flash then goes to the "insert ad" code, gets no response, and moves on to the next queued stream, until the next in the queue is the non-ad video. This means that where others get ads, I get about 3 seconds of spinners. I could probably write a greasemonkey script that would flat-out scrub references to those streams from the code so that playback is seamless -- AdBlockPlus, Ghostery
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If you stand in front of a mirror and say "Adblock" three times, it summons him!
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Zuckerberg meet incumbent Telco ISPs, incumbent Teclo ISPs meet Zuckerberg. The only way Zuckerberg can get video Facebook is to create a mercenary army and get them to kill all the current senior executives and board members of the incumbent Telco ISPs and replace them with non psychopaths thus creating the management environment to change from strangle band to actual broadband. National real broadband many countries will be lucky to see it by 2050 let alone 2019. The incumbent Teclo ISPs all want to beco
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I don't think it could get more difficult to take Zuckerberg, or Facebook, seriously.
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I liken it to the pseudo-hard-on some folks have for Meg Whitman. They think that just because you have a multi-billion dollar idea, that you obviously must be some kind of goddamned genius. Let's give it up for meg and for zuck: they had a couple really great ideas and were able to execute or hire people who could execute those ideas. But that doesn't mean they're suddenly the smartest people in the world or the most visionary or whatever and it certainly doesn't mean everything they can think of is go
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"I find it increasingly more and more difficult to take Zuckerberg seriously."
Indeed. I predict in 5 years it will be, not almost all video, but almost all MySpace.
So long as it does not autoplay. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I suspect all browsers will have video autoplay blockers, just like every browser has popup blockers now.
Re:So long as it does not autoplay. (Score:5, Informative)
adblock rule: ##video
Any other problems that can be solved really easily?
Re:So long as it does not autoplay. (Score:5, Funny)
adblock rule: ##video
Any other problems that can be solved really easily?
World peace?
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Can you make windows 8.1 stop changing the keyboard layout every time I reboot? Adthanksvance.
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HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Keyboard Layout\Preload\1
The value is numberic, so you have to know. US standard is 409(I believe). Don't know what you want.
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See? While you have to drop to a commandline and use cryptic hacks like this windows will NEVER succeed on the desktop.
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Facebook today auto plays videos in your newsfeed. But you can turn it off: https://www.facebook.com/help/... [facebook.com]
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How about an on demand HTML5 video blocker like Flashblock and Mozilla's plugin's ondemand option (click on it to show it).
But of course! (Score:5, Funny)
And in five years, we'll all be using a system where we wave our hands around in the air to do gestures to control our computers! /sarcasm
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And in five years, we'll all be using a system where we wave our hands around in the air to do gestures to control our computers! /sarcasm
We already do that! /masturbation
Most of Facebook is moms reposting the same jokes (Score:3)
Most of Facebook is moms reposting the same jokes and images over and over again. I actually think I see where Zuckerburg might going with this: since media companies are getting smarter about packing their mass-market content as "clips" (e.g., Jimmy Fallon's bits), they're getting easier for mere mortals to post. However, I don't think any significant portion of videos will actually get posted to Facebook - instead it'll all still be hosted on YouTube, media sites (e.g., NBC) or somewhere else.
Re:Most of Facebook is moms reposting the same jok (Score:5, Funny)
Zuckerburg is looking to kill youtube.
Unfortunately, Google's own social network beat them to the punch.
Re:Most of Facebook is moms reposting the same jok (Score:4, Insightful)
That hasn't been my experience. These days, my Facebook feed seems to be filled with people posting Buzzfeed links to "20 sexy historical facts that will blow your mind!" or else it's a link that says "You won't believe what happens in this video!" without giving any explanation as to what's in the video.
In other words, it's mostly tedious, useless advertising for something or other.
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That hasn't been my experience. These days, my Facebook feed seems to be filled with people posting Buzzfeed links to "20 sexy historical facts that will blow your mind!" or else it's a link that says "You won't believe what happens in this video!" without giving any explanation as to what's in the video.
In other words, it's mostly tedious, useless advertising for something or other.
They thought this comment was pointless, but they never saw this coming...
Video isn't hard now (Score:3)
I can't think of any impediments I have to uploading more video to Facebook right now. If I wanted to upload more videos I'd upload more videos, but they don't usually make sense where text, stills, or links do.
So Mark must be betting that they'll make sense in five years when they don't now - I wonder what his reasoning could possibly be.
I hope he doesn't mean that people will be video recording their status updates. There's a reason many people call it "Dumpbook" - the tile wall in the background is sort of a giveaway.
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I'm not particularly found of facebook but I have a lot of friends that use it and the younger ones tend to post a lot of short video rambles instead of text.
Really a 20 second video from your iphone about riding in the car and something funny happened, but you didn't catch it on video and all we see is your face?!?!?!?
Will it eventually replace the text on a status update maybe, it already has for some people.
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I can't think of any impediments I have to uploading more video to Facebook right now.
Except when Facebook blocks your video because of alleged "copyright issues". My wife shot a video of a spider building a web on her iPod Touch, edited it in iMovie with one of their templates, and then Facebook continuously blocked her saying she was violating copyright. It was a real shame, because it was a very cool video that a lot of friends and family probably would have enjoyed.
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MySpace 2.0 (Score:2)
It will mostly be video. Yeah. Just like MySpace. And we all know how successful that was.
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It will mostly be video. Yeah. Just like MySpace. And we all know how successful that was.
MySpace let users control too much of the look and feel of their pages, and it devolved into GeoCities.
How cute! (Score:5, Funny)
Zuck thinks that Facebook will be relevant in 5 years.... how ADORABLE!
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That anyone thinks video will be all we consume in 5 years.... how awful.
vertical (Score:3)
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vertical videos are no longer a problem: just fill the black bars with a 3 times magnified, blurred version of the video
Pics or it didn't happen (Score:2)
Where's the video of Zuckerberg saying that Facebook will be mostly video?
In five years (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook will be completely irrelevant to the vast majority of people - pretty much where MySpace has been for the past half-decade.
Seriously - Facebook's user base is rapidly skewing older and older. When I mention Facebook to a young person, they generally either say they aren't on it at all anymore, or they say they only get on Facebook to stay in touch with their older relatives (mom, dad, grandma, etc.).
And, at least right now, there doesn't appear to be one dominant site where everyone under thirty has landed. Some hang out on Tumblr, some on Instagram, some only do SnapChat (I realize that's not a "site"), etc.
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Many of my younger friends (the ones who aren't in college yet) keep trying to get me to join Vine. I think they also use Twitter and Instagram. I couldn't say whether any one of those qualifies as the Facebook of that generation, though.
On the flip side, just about everybody I know who is college age is on Facebook, because they come in as freshmen and find that all the sophomores, juniors, and seniors are on Facebook. Rinse and repeat with each successive year.
Re:In five years (Score:5, Informative)
I bet you were one of the Facebook bashers who ran around here chanting that GoogleMinus was going to make Facebook die a few years back too.
You know, we get it, you hate Facebook. Fair enough. I can't say I blame you. But after a decade and a half of listening to the Slashdot peanut gallery I've come to realize that the only way you guys would ever make a million dollars in business is if you started with a billion dollars.
While Facebook isn't exactly going gangbusters it is still increasing its user base. This talk that it's dead and we should stick a fork in it reeks of the same kind of mentality that makes investors pull their money out of a company because they're only showing a 10% increase in revenue and not 20%. Nothing more and nothing less than knee jerk nonsense.
See you around when the next Facebook article appears here and you come up with nothing but a handful of crap to sling as justification for why you think Facebook is failing.
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*active users* (Score:2)
And usage per active user. It's declining and has been for a while.
No it's not going anywhere anytime soon but younger users are the life blood of these sites and they've been peeling off for a while.
Older people have disposable income (Score:2)
Online spending vs age:
56-66: $122 / month
46-55: $106 / month
23-31: $103 / month
18-22: $43 / month
If I'm Facebook, trying to put ads in front of buyers, college kids are a waste of my time. I want baby boomers.
better not be using facebook on the toilet (Score:2)
I use facebook on my phone, when waiting for something, often in public places, where i don't want to play sound, nor do I want to record a video. I doubt I'm the only one.
People may be posting more videos, but text posts are not going away. Let's look at phones for comparison. Video apps like FaceTime are readily available, but I rarely see them in use. SMS was introduced well after voice calls, yet that somehow has become very popular. Video isn't going away, but it's definitely not replacing other more c
FaceTV? (Score:2)
This is not how we use Facebook today, and not how we use social networks in general. The difference between "most video" and "text-based news feed with pics" is very roughly the same as the difference between television and books - there're just different mediums (media?), and they do not replace but complement each other. And he says "we'll replace your book with a TV programme".
Which means that:
- either he expects Facebook users (really, most of us) to change our "information consumption" habits with tim
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Twenty years ago, people were saying the same thing about Internet bulletin boards, talkers, and MUDs becoming interactive video experiences. They were wrong then, and they're just as wrong now. The core problem isn't a technological issue; it's a biological one.
Allow me to explain. When you have a dozen friends, videos are a great way to keep in touch. When each friend posts a couple minutes worth of video every day, you're spending thirty minutes per day watching the video clips, which is doable... b
Youtube (Score:2)
So basically, youtube?
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YouTube could really be done much better. It is such a vast cesspool of random crap that there is a lot to be done for bringing some order to it. There are excellent university lectures lost right next to cat videos.
How a fixed youtube would fit into Facebook is beyond me however...
If he's right, (Score:2)
I won't be using Facebook in 5 years.
First, video is a pox. Most waste time with pointless or awkward intros, fail to make the point, or, -the worst-, communicate a technical point or information by repeating the unimportant stuff over and over and over. Most video should be text.
Second, a predominantly video Facebook guarantees it will NOT be user-created. You're not creating a quick video on the A train, or being stuck on the PCH, or walking to school. Oh, wait, you are. And doing it badly. Point 1
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a predominantly video Facebook guarantees it will NOT be user-created.
I already see a lot of video status updates posted by users... oh look you took video snippit instead of a photo... not that I care to see everything your cat, dog, or kid does that you think is cute...
Videophones (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, just like how everyone now communicates via "video phone" (aka Facetime (TM), etc, etc) instead of just talking on the phone. Oh wait, we don't even use the phone any more, we use mostly written text. How many prognosticators of future technology utterly failed on that one too? Video is not the logical culmination of still images. It is something totally different. Nor was the music video the logical culmination of merely listening to music. He's looking too closely at things like technology and
Re:Videophones (Score:4, Interesting)
That is actually pretty hilarious, about video phones. It was supposedly, for decades, one of the greatest new features that couldn't be done well for bandwidth and equipment cost reasons, and when finally everyone had a 4G phone with a front-facing camera, we found that nope, nobody cares about video phones.
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That is actually pretty hilarious, about video phones. It was supposedly, for decades, one of the greatest new features that couldn't be done well for bandwidth and equipment cost reasons, and when finally everyone had a 4G phone with a front-facing camera, we found that nope, nobody cares about video phones.
I think it's not so much that no one cares as that decent video calls require more infrastructure than a phone. The camera needs to be steady, lighting needs to be good, sound isolation needs to be good... all in all, video calls work much better from a laptop sitting on a desk in an office, or better yet in a conference room with dedicated video-conferencing equipment.
For an interactive, focused conversation, phone calls are better than e-mail or chat, and video-conferencing is better than phone calls. V
Instagram (Score:2)
I think it's not so much that no one cares as that decent video calls require more infrastructure than a phone. The camera needs to be steady, lighting needs to be good, sound isolation needs to be good... all in all, video calls work much better from a laptop sitting on a desk in an office, or better yet in a conference room with dedicated video-conferencing equipment.
And some goes for most other forms of video.
Making a decent video clip instead of just quickly recording something with a camera phone, is difficult.
Much more than putting some effort into a photo.
Until some startup finds a way to do the video equivalent of Instagram (i.e.: making it easy to create nice video clips) video won't be a major communication medium.
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Really my teenager and his friends use facetime, all the time...
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When they released it, no one bought it. Moral of the story: market research isn't always right. But anyone who thought video phones would be popular was failing to learn from the lessons of the past.
In 5 years, most facebook will be... (Score:5, Insightful)
When I poke a link to a news item, if it leads to a video, rather than waiting for the commercial to load and play, and the talking heads to stop self promoting and get to the point, I've long since dismissed the tab and found the news item somewhere else as text.
The more Facebook forces video, the less interesting it is.
And of course, Google will copy everything Facebook does, so G+ will be screwed also.
I'm going back to Usenet. run-on puns were better than this. (It was just a capital-K to get rid of them.)
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If a shitty feature is imposed on Google+, is anyone around to see it? In terms of being a desolate wasteland devoid of real users, Google+ is definitely leading the pack, and FB is (sadly) about 5-10 years behind.
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If a shitty feature is imposed on Google+, is anyone around to see it? In terms of being a desolate wasteland devoid of real users, Google+ is definitely leading the pack, and FB is (sadly) about 5-10 years behind.
This leads me into one of my favorite rants. I really liked Latitude. When my daughter first started driving, dating, doing stuff on her own, there was tremendous peace of mind to be able to pop up Google Maps on the phone and see where she was. It saved either of us having to call to check in. When she got stuck for whatever reason, I could easily find her even if she wasn't sure where she was. In my mind, this one feature justified paying for her smartphone.
Then, Google killed Latitude and incorporat
Zuckerberg: Fucking Idiot (Score:3)
If you think FB is going to be primarily video content in 5 years, you haven't been watching net neutrality and the laws ISPs and media producers are trying to get passed which severely limits user bandwidth.
Unless you're going to be paying to get rid of those laws yourself, Mark, you're just a witless fucking idiot without any real eye on the future.
Ain't nobody got time for that (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously? 90% of Facebook is currently graphics certainly not worth 1000 words: they literally are about eight to thirty words, total, with some public domain clipart or unlicensed pop-culture icons. I don't do "meme pictures." If I have a message, I type it.
I've never understood the point of podcasts other than for music or other performance: If I want news, I can read it in 1/10th the time.
And video? What, am I deaf and need to see your body language and lips move? Sure, for educational, entertainment clips, and of course cute animals... but otherwise? Nope.
And get off my lawn.
Will fb (Score:2)
Videos have their use (Score:3)
Call me old school, but for most of those videos, pictures would do the job (or a better one)
Looking for a how-to for something? Gimme pictures, you can't print a video (for one). I don;t need nor want to watch a video (often with horrible music) when 5 pictures and 10 lines of text does exactly the same thing.
Video - Yuk. (Score:2)
The photos are bad enough. Video will be even worse. Hopefully he's wrong.
I *hate* video (Score:2)
I absolutely detest video on blogs/sites/etc. instead of text and where appropriate pictures. Text I can quickly skim through, get to the relevant part, etc.
Video you have to wait a few seconds for it to start, then most of the time have to apply the 30(?)-second-rule, if it's slow you can't fast-forward and you just hope you're luckly you find the relevant bit. Note: the 30 second rule is not the one about making an impression, it's about skipping the leader, the talking head that explains what you're abou
Dear Zuckerberg (Score:2)
Most of what I read is still text (Score:2)
Most of what I read on Crapbook is still text written by friends. Most of them don't even post camera-phone pictures of what's going on, never mind take videos.
Zuckerberg overestimates the ease of creating videos and uploading them to any service. Even if it were easy, people still don't tend to be taking video of what's going on in their lives. They're too busy living their lives to play videographer.
Telling someone to come here for a sec so you can take a "selfie" together is no big deal. Sitting
Re:Video Facebook? An opportunity for someone else (Score:4, Interesting)
No, he expects Facebook users are going to have conversations with video snippets. This has nothing to do with the general population. He's judged his users well enough so far, so there's no reason to believe he's mistaken now. I expect that a lot of people are going to move into VR for their conversations, which means routing and likely storing massive amounts of video.
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There's no ads on youtube, never have been...oh wait, are you one of those people who is unable to install a simple ad-blocking extension?
No, the real scourge of youtube and is the sheer number of videos of some douche doing a straight to cam in a slow rambling talk about how to do some really simple thing e.g. change a registry key to fix something or other. It would take just a two line description in the text to say how to do it, but instead they want you to watch an add laden piece of crap in the hope o