The Facebook Obsession 265
rabidmuskrat writes "Are we too obsessed with Facebook? With 500 million users and a CNBC story about it, the answer would seem to be yes. PostRandomonium notes the media's obsession with Facebook, and how it impacts their news coverage — in particular, that of CNN. One out of every 13 Earthlings and three out of four Americans is on Facebook, and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis."
Missed an important stat (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Missed an important stat (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot: News for teenage girls, the stuff that matters.
Re:Missed an important stat (Score:5, Funny)
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That would be one of the signs of the End Times, so we avoid it.
Anyway... Face-what?
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True, but only 40% of people know that.
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Four out of five dentists agree with you.
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But only 1 in 40 articles about Facebook on / are ever read.
So then this is your 1 out of 40? Considering the rate which CmdrTaco posts facebook articles here, if you skip the next 39 it means you'll be reading another one approximately Thursday afternoon.
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What's *really* worrying me... (Score:5, Funny)
... is our obsession with our obsession with Facebook. Are the media writing too many articles about how they're writing too many articles about facebook? Are we being too public about our desire for privacy, or too private about our attention-whoring publicity?
Making it prior art right now (Score:2)
Intertoob idea! Metabook! It's where you go and comment about what's happening on all of your other social web sites!
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That's exactly what I was thinking. No one I know is obsessed with Facebook; we use it, yes, but it's just one of a great many things we do with our time.
Slashdot on the other hand does seem to post an inordinate number of stories about it...
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CmdrTaco has become a boob noob. He used to see through all the posted BS, and really single out the real geek important stuff...but I think /. has become too big to single out just those types of stories where us geeks would really appreciate, as he has a now much bigger audience he has to cater to.
Gone is the /. of yesterday, and gone are the stories that would let us know how to build robots in our basements, or how to create our own bio diesel fuel, or how someone came up with a special way of putting 5
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> Is the world obsessed with facebook? Probably not.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook%2Ciphone%2Cgoogle%2Cjesus [google.com]
Statistics all wrong. (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, lots of people are on Facebook.
But a large percentage of the "user accounts" are fake accounts.
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Or pages for people's pets.
The 1 out of 13 figure assumes that every page corresponds to 1) a human, and 2) a human that only has one account.
Blatant attempt at sensationalizing with complete disregard for reality.
The media moved on to Twitter already (Score:2)
Facebook is old news. The hip thing now is to obsess over tweets.
Re:The media moved on to Twitter already (Score:4, Funny)
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I think Twitter is an interesting case because it's already been hugely popular once before, and is now bucking off the traditional social trend of being popular, fading, and dying by adding at least one more wave” of success between the fading and dying stages.
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P.S. Don't tell anybody! Especially those losers on slashdot!
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All the really cool kids are using fnord now!
Just great... now you've got me pining for the fnords...
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At least Facebook and Twitter are legitimately used by people, unlike the weird media spectacle that was Second Life.
Where is the story? (Score:4, Insightful)
When you use the word "obsessed," I was expecting a story about people losing sleep and productivity over Facebook. Or statistics showing the amount of time spent by people using Facebook. Instead, we get an article from CNN that compares Facebook to having a bellybutton, a story from CNBC that doesn't load, and some guy's personal blog. Where is the story?
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compares Facebook to having a bellybutton
What, that they both enable naval-gazing?
Re:Where is the story? (Score:4, Funny)
What, that they both enable naval-gazing?
They stare at warships? Wouldn't Jane's Compendium be better for that?
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Signs in? (Score:2)
One out of every 13 Earthlings and three out of four Americans is on Facebook, and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis."
Signs in on a daily basis? I don't even log out!
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One out of every 13 Earthlings and three out of four Americans is on Facebook, and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis."
Signs in on a daily basis? I don't even log out!
Me neither, but I never logged in either.
we're not obsessed with facebook (Score:2, Interesting)
we're obsessed with socializing
facebook is just the tool which makes the most sense to manage your social network now. will that be the case in 10 years? if you say definitely "yes" (or definitely "no") you definitely don't know what you are talking about. maybe it will be, it could be, it has the network effect on its side, that's for sure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect [wikipedia.org]
ps: i don't have a facebook account and i never will. egads, the tedium
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we're obsessed with socializing
For millions of years people have been obsessed with socializing, because socializing leads to getting laid, which leads to descendants that are even more obsessed with socializing. And what happens to the people that aren't obsessed with socializing?
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they go extinct. however, plenty of species are strictly asocial, and they make time to get laid, so its not that big of a deal to socialize to procreate... unless of course, you are a member of homo sapiens
that which makes homo sapiens compelling is not our gray matter, its our voicebox. a genius with an amazing idea and no way to communicate it is useless: his idea is future skull dust. meanwhile, an average intelligence person who communicates his idea well changes the world. socializing, socializing mor
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no, not entirely. many species communicate, all sorts of ways. so you are right, voicebox is not entirely the description to go for. so howabout RICHNESS and COMPLEXITY of communication is what makes us special, whether by hand or voicebox
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voicebox is not entirely the description to go for. so howabout RICHNESS and COMPLEXITY of communication is what makes us special, whether by hand or voicebox.
Excuse me, but there's a humpback whale at the door that'd like a word with you....
no, humpback is not a counter example (Score:2)
yeah, it sings. big deal. so does a mockingbird. it is many orders of magnitude less complex than homo sapiens' communication
in terms of bandwidth, a honking goose or a hooting monkey might be a 300 bps modem, and a humpback whale or a parrot might be a 28.8kbps modem. but homo sapiens is a fiber optic trunk, far beyond any other creature on earth by many orders of magnitude in terms of richness and complexity of communication
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Do you have any citations?
yes, i have a citation (Score:2)
my fucking ear
i'm not sure why you resist the obvious. does it pierce some sort of mythology of yours? whale song is nowhere near as complex as human speech, not even remotely. this should be blindingly obvious to you if you aren't deaf
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And what happens to the people that aren't obsessed with socializing?
The read /.?
Re:we're not obsessed with facebook (Score:4, Insightful)
...he said, socializing on a web 2.0 style ajax site
you're a giant hypocrite
The reason (Score:5, Insightful)
People is ossessed by FB because media tell them that everyone else is.
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E-mail (Score:3, Insightful)
You need an e-mail address to get a Facebook account, but not everyone who has an e-mail address uses Facebook. So the real question should be, Are we obsessed with E-mail?
Email (Score:2)
So how many people check email on a daily basis? And why isn't that front page news?
Re:Email (Score:4, Insightful)
There was a time when that was front page news, yes. I remember getting email for the first time ('89, so it had already been going for what - 20 years?) and being astounded. Then discovered newsgroups, saw the web get built etc..
All this stuff was news, but it's happened. The Facebook thing is new, so it's news today.
Cheers,
Ian
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There was a time when that was front page news, yes. I remember getting email for the first time ('89, so it had already been going for what - 20 years?) and being astounded. Then discovered newsgroups, saw the web get built etc..
And then you discovered free internet porn, and your productivity really took a hit. Then, of course, you discovered slashdot, and now you get nothing at all accomplished at work.
Peak Facebook (Score:4, Interesting)
I could give two shits about facebook, its about easily seeing what friends and family are up to and communicating, not about facebook itself. Its like a very easy to use forum and blog for your life. If another website came out tomorrow that was better everyone would use it instead. Its akin the old crazes and obsessions of writing and journals, video diaries, the internet and blogs, remember how obsessed people were over those! OMG society almost didn't make it through those crazy times! The fad will fade as all do, you sign up, connect with lots of old friends, post a ton for a while, then after a while realize its all pretty meaningless and the people around you are the ones who matter most anyways, and you don't need facebook to talk with them. It will never go away though because its still great to see what distant friends are doing every once and while. Peak Facebook is coming soon though...
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Its like a very easy to use forum and blog for your life.
Ah, and there you've hit the nail on the head... It allows people to pretend that their life matters to a bunch of "friends", most of whom you've never met, and will probably never meet in your lifetime. Nothing personal, but the lives of most people {myself included} just aren't interesting enough to blog about.
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The closest fad I think it matches up with is CB radio. Many here may not be old enough to remember that craze. My first truck had to have one.
After a few years, you finally figured out that most people didn't have squat to say. It became a technical exercise to see how far you could get a 4 watt signal to reach. After a while of reaching, and finding what you reached to be totally useless, you lost interest and moved on.
I expect FB to stick around a little longer, because:
1) You can add pictures, video
Useful tool for some (Score:3)
I had the same disdain for social networking as most of the /. crowd until a very close friend who had moved far away lost her husband and requested that her friends join Facebook so she could correspond with us. I gladly created an account and was able to "be there" for her even though I couldn't actually be there. What I found after joining was that people I had lost touch with and had tried to find using every other method I could think of were there as well. I quickly reconnected and renewed relationships that had been lost for years. I still think most of it is of questionable value but its social aspect is very much real.
Re:Useful tool for some (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wow, talk about missing the point.
Yes, there are ways to communicate with people without using Facebook. However, Facebook is easier for people to use (no, I don't understand why either), and the main point was, allows you to reconnect with people you may have lost touch with.
My mom was able to find her childhood best friend through Facebook. Exactly how do you propose she do that using her phone, Skype, or email?
The point is that the social aspect of Facebook is very real - people are able to find people t
Re:Useful tool for some (Score:4)
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People graduate from high schools and collages, people get new jobs, people move, etc etc etc. Not every relationship gets curtailed because you no longer relate to your past friendships.
It very much is, and follows the pattern of young people tending to send text messages instead of calling someone directly. It is a more passive, less confron
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I've had the same experience with several "old friends". I hid them from my pages. I also found a few friends that I fondly remember and we'd have beers every Friday they didn't live in another state/continent.
It ain't all roses, but it ain't all manure, either.
The most annoying thing about Facebook... (Score:3)
The most annoying thing about Facebook isn't that everybody expects you to have one, but that everybody and businesses are expected to have one (as well as a Twitter). What ever happened to Good Ol' RSS/Atom? My feed reader is infinitely better than using Twitter or Facebook for news, so why should I only be given the options of Twitter and Facebook to follow a company or website? Every store you walk in to, every product that you buy almost, somewhere in there is that stupid little Facebook/Twitter logo with the text "Find us on Facebook/Twitter!" Never a feed. Never. To find a good feed I have to search for it specifically and it often takes a while to find (thankfully Netflix and most modern blogs have a feed option). It's backwards, it's illogical, it's annoying, and it's centralized! When every single business in the world (pretty much) and every single person that you meet expects you to have a Facebook or Twitter and be willing to share your personal information with them, it's impossible to find peace without complying. I use Wordpress and Identica/StatusNet exclusively for my blogging needs, and my Twitter/FB accounts are merely mirrors of both solely because the general population refuses to switch to a much more secure, more flexible, and more decentralized social network.
Now get off my lawn!
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What ever happened to Good Ol' RSS/Atom?
It never really caught on among non-technical people.
I hope that wasn't a rhetorical question.
Re:The most annoying thing about Facebook... (Score:4)
What ever happened to Good Ol' RSS/Atom?
It never really caught on among non-technical people.
I hope that wasn't a rhetorical question.
And that's the problem... RSS/Atom and just feeds in general are a million times more useful than adding a 140-character-limited feed on Twitter where it's mixed in with everything else (in this respect Facebook isn't as bad due to having less character restrictions). Adding a feed is just as simple as subscribing to any other type of social presence, but it's so much more useful. You don't even need an account on a centralized website to subscribe to a feed. Why has the uptake been so slow? Browsers and email clients and feed readers and feed websites are all over the place, ready to be used, yet their use pales in comparison to the obviously inferior Facebook/Twitter.
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You're absolutely right, but it doesn't matter. People don't do what makes sense, they do what they see other people doing. I have a website with an atom feed, but I have Google mirror it to Twitter so people who can't figure out what a newsfeed is can subscribe.
You want to see the definition of a blank stare? Try explaining to one of your Facebook/Twitter using friends that they are depending on a single company for their social networking, and that company can either disappear tomorrow or decide to erase
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You can't comment on a feed or "Like" a feed.
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Re:The most annoying thing about Facebook... (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt very much the 500 million are unique at all.
Of course not. Facebook is going to hit the public stock market and this number is just part of the hype to increase the value. The number of accounts is a meaningless figure anyway -- you can bet that the vast majority of accounts are completely unused. In violation of European privacy laws you cannot even delete your FB account, so they've probably included my own account I've canceled long ago in this number, too.
In the long run FB will likely suffer the same fate as AOL, because they don't have anything valuable to offer. They just happened to offer the right waste of time at the right time. There will be a new waste of time for the masses by another Internet bubble company soon.
Other Obsessions (Score:4, Funny)
I think we obsess too much over other things as well. I surveyed the last three weeks and 37% of Slashdot articles were about the Internet. Worse, 87% of were actually sent over the internet.
Definition: Obsession-That thing that most other people like that you hate.
Fake accounts (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't be so bold as to say Facebook hasn't grown like wildfire, or that huge numbers of the population aren't using it, but 3/4 of Americans on Facebook? Seems like there are large portions of the population who that's simply not possible for, due to age, economic status, work constraints, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if there are 2 fake Facebook accounts for every real one.
A source of inaccuracy (Score:2)
Compare texting (Score:4, Interesting)
500 million users? (Score:2)
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The most important quote (Score:3)
and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis.
Or rephrased, roughly 96% of the "users" sign in less than daily. The graph would be interesting to see. My wife checks FB at maximum interval of a couple hours. Everyone knows someone like that, but that doesn't mean they're a statistically relevant population.
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Everyone
This generally is construed to mean "all people" i.e. 100%, which is probably within the sphere of "statistically relevant". Just sayin'.
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That Open Source Project? (Score:2)
What's up with the open-source privacy-oriented project that was touted so fervently here awhile back? Are they producing anything useful?
Facebook follows the power law too (Score:2)
I think it's a bubble, but it's a big one! (Score:2)
One thing I've noticed is that social media in general has made computer technology somehow more accessible. Remember, just a few years ago, basic computer literacy was being able to boot up your PC, drive an office application and produce "work." Social media use now appears to be the basic computer literacy unit -- the UIs are simple enough for most people to pick up and the draw of social interaction is irresistable for most people. And now that smartphones that don't suck as user input devices are out,
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Smalltalk is not dead (Score:5, Funny)
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Seriously, you can't have a conversation that starts with, "Hey, haven't seen you for a while, what've you been up to?" Because you ALREADY KNOW. And if you don't know, you're an insensitive clod who's not reading their facebook posts.
Since Facebook is "news for you and your 300 closest friends" you should either be a better friend with more to talk about than that, or it at least gives you some topics to talk about with people who'd otherwise be almost strangers. Unless they're the kind who has to put every fart they do up on Facebook, if they both do that and get annoyed you haven't read it maybe you should revise who your friends are.
Re:And it's killed smalltalk with friends. (Score:5, Interesting)
Tell ya what happened to me. I had some colleagues at work. People I had known for 13 years at the time of this happening, and always gotten along with. Until some day one of them divorces his Russian wife, gets a wee alcohol problem and a midlife crisis to boot. Now these guys were a couple of flavours of Scandinavian, FYI. So this jackass starts insulting Russians on Facebook, and I comment on that. My wife is Israeli, but from Ukranian descent. So I tell 'm to chill out with his statements about eastern European and Russian "whores" (to mention one of the more palatable things the guy wrote, picture a drunken Mel Gibson if you will) because he's getting on my nerve. Some other guy pitches in and before you know it I've gained 3 people I won't speak to again in this life time.
On top of that FaceBook is a ridiculous place that fuels pettiness, jealousy and generally doesn't really contribute to my life in any tangible way. So, my wife and I removed our accounts and never looked back. For those that want to find me, there's a professional profile on LinkedIn. This is enough. I don't want to see what my boss did with the neighbour's dog at the Christmas party in 2008, I don't want to see my old shag buddies and my wife's old shag buddies mingle in all kinds of lists, I am uninterested in my teenage nephews' dumb friends and their void messages and I certainly don't want to get reunited with anyone from high school.
So yes. When I speak to my friends, we have something to talk about beyond the colour of their toilet paper this morning, and it's all good. My friends will be my friends long after Facebook has croaked.
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Facebook is for whiny wimps and grandma who want pictures of little joey. Real men use twitter.
No, real men supposedly play sports and shoot things. Not that I'm one of them, but even *I* won't use Twitter.
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I am one of the many people who don't have Facebook. None of my friends have it so there's no reason to subscribe.
Get out of your cave much? If you don't Tweet, you don't exist.
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He's not cool. If he were really cool he wouldn't have a computer. He wouldn't even bother to sit next to the stinky guys in the library and use a computer. Somewhere, rolling out of bed and getting ready for the club tonight there is a really cool guy. He has no computer or phone at all and... oh crap... he's that John Travolta character from Saturday Night Fever.
OK, Let's start over. We. Are. going. to. figure. this. out--hey dummy! Yeah? Trying to figure it out isn't cool.
Dammit.
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One out of every 13 Earthlings and three out of four Americans is on Facebook, and one out of 26 signs into Facebook on a daily basis."
Wow, there's a lot of losers!
Well, 25 of 26 don't sign into Facebook daily. 4% losers ... sounds about right, Facebook or no Facebook.
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What is this Facebook thing?
It's the internet replacement for soap operas.
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My print newspaper never used to put "some guy down the pub thought ..." in the middle of its stories.
They just didn't attribute it. The stereotype of the hard drinking reporter didn't come out of thin air.
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I was born in the 60s
So was I; but at least that explains the "Darn kids, get offa my lawn!" attitude.
Re:Keep in touch (Score:2)
Everyone who says they can't keep in touch seems to have forgotten emails and IMs.