I just reread the article substituting the string “BoingBoing” for “Facebook” and you know what… a certain amount of Potkettlism in there… now don’t get me wrong - FB is clearly a platform with issues, but these days when I wade my way through BBs increasingly banner ad infested waters I have to wonder. Everyones got to earn a living I guess, even back in the days of CompuServe and dial up modem access to Usenet…
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What is the ratio of “forced” sign ups to actual users on Twitter? The number of Google+ users is comparable to the voter turn out in North Korea - so I wouldn’t call Twitter numbers a good analogy.
I use “Dunbar’s Number” with my Facebook “friends” list. So I haven’t encountered any of the issues stated in this article. I’ve never encountered any spam, but maybe I can credit that to “Ad Blocker Plus”.
Not really relevant, and nor is the number of dead accounts or spambots. The number of people who regularly choose to read their stream of social updates from Google+ is larger than the number of people who regularly choose to read their stream of social updates from Twitter. People who have accounts but who don’t use them excluded in both cases.
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As someone who tracks weekly events around the city of Cambridge, MA, I’ve seen a clear trend over the last year of activist groups organizing on Facebook. Some organizations post their events information only on Facebook. In emails with Howard Rheingold, he’s told me how his university students want to use Facebook for their assignments and discussions, even though Howard dislikes the Facebook discussion format.
Peak Facebook may or may not have arrived but the uses of Facebook seem to be changing.
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I always joke about Facebook being like the abusive relationship you keep going back to.
I really like your approach - Facebook is different things to different people. I have an aunt in her fifties who shares terrible sparkly picture memes about friendship and what it means to be a mum, and so on. They’re not to my taste, but I’m glad she’s online. I hide the posts, but I drop by and write on her wall now and then. Managing my friend list and managing my news feed are different - there are plenty of people I care about who use Facebook in a way that I don’t enjoy. Those people are unfollowed, i.e. removed from my news feed, but not unfriended.
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It’s more than just the number of people though. (Similar to the entire “page views” vs. “attention” thing that content creators are currently arguing about.) It’s also how long people spend on the site. I mentioned the average of less than 5 minutes per month for Google Plus users earlier. Twitter is approximately 20 minutes per month per active user.
So more people may actively use G+, but they’re not using it as much. (I know that’s the case with me: I go to G+ every now and then, scroll through what’s new to see if anything has interested me, and then close it again for another month or two since rarely anything has been posted that I feel is worth talking about.)
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