Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Unfriending

Facebook has become totally unusable to me. There are a small number of people I don't communicate with every day - but who are old friends or were friends and I want to keep the option of re-contacting. Also family.

Having 250 plus Facebook friends who met me professionally or through this blog eventually made Facebook meaningless. I didn't use it any more.

Besides I don't really have 300 friends and nor do most of you. And I don't really know the 3000 people in my Google contacts.

So, dear readers, I unfriended you all.

Strangely though not a single person contacted me and wondered why I had unfriended them...

In other words nobody noticed and cared.*

Facebook revenue is still rising fairly fast. Relevance is another matter.





John

No position in the stock. Was long a while ago - but stuffed the timing up for small profits.

*That nobody cared of course can be taken both ways. Maybe I should go back to self-loathing...
at

15 comments:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 28, 2014 at 6:50 PM

    Hey John,

    You may find this triggers an interesting perspective on the long term prospects (revenue-wise) of the entire social media phenomenon.

    https://www.thebaffler.com/past/all_linkedin_with_nowhere_to_go


    Cheers,

    SamB

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJanuary 28, 2014 at 7:14 PM

    While I agree its useless on a personal level, I still have an account as many sporting clubs & associations (sailing, football etc) I am involved in use facebook. It's cheap, easy and allows all members to contribute, something a proprietary website cannot do. How FB earns revenue off this function is a different issue

    ReplyDelete
  3. Stephanie ChenJanuary 28, 2014 at 8:22 PM

    Very interesting take on FB. I think more and more people are starting to feel this way. I used to check my FB account hourly, and now it seems more like once a week!

    ReplyDelete
  4. William M. ConnolleyJanuary 28, 2014 at 8:34 PM

    I don't think I was ever your FB-friend, but you ought to know that knowing when you're unfriended isn't easy. To the extent that people write extensions for it, e.g. http://www.unfriendfinder.net/, and then facebook ban them. Facebook doesn't want you to know when people unfriend you: http://socialfixer.com/blog/2013/10/27/facebook-doesnt-want-you-to-know-who-unfriends-you-do-you/

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousJanuary 28, 2014 at 10:38 PM

    Hempton - Please post your fund's annual returns for the last 10 years. We are very interested to see the performance. Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousJanuary 29, 2014 at 8:48 AM

    Any follow-on thoughts on the unusually energetic and enterprising Mr. Nishi? The Henry Ford of cross-border bathroom tile intermediation.

    Tile Shop investigation complete

    ReplyDelete
  7. RajJanuary 29, 2014 at 9:47 AM

    I guess you are unfriending to make it manageable, meaningful so that you can start using it more. What does that say about Facebook?

    ReplyDelete
  8. chrispycrunchJanuary 29, 2014 at 12:22 PM

    I was kinder than you John. I simply walked away from my account. I left my investment fan page and all "friends." The site did not drive any traffic, and now penalizes users. It rewards only paid and sponsored content.

    I moved to Google+. I think you should investigate linking blogger and plus. Although I now have 40000 followers, it is still a meaningless number, and as someone who writes content, it's unfortunate there's no solid link between google+ activities and showing up in search.

    ReplyDelete
  9. AnonymousJanuary 29, 2014 at 12:30 PM

    the person being de-friended is not aware, unless they check their friends list. Usually you figure it out when you notice after sometime that that person does not seem to post anymore, you check their page and realised you weren't receiving it....

    ReplyDelete
  10. Ryan BloomfieldJanuary 29, 2014 at 12:42 PM

    There is a great story in Malcolm Gladwell's the tipping point. It discusses Dunbar's number, which is a theory on how many people you can maintain a social relationship with, based on the size of our brain. Basically it indicates 200 is a the approx limit for humans. This dunbar number idea puts most social media platforms into question. except for mediums such as twitter/snapchat, in which you are sharing 140 characters, or a photo, rather than attempting to share a deeper social connection with your contacts.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Asia InvestorJanuary 29, 2014 at 8:21 PM

    Absolutely on the money: FB is now the equivalent of a global contacts list to be used when and if required. An experiment i should like to do is to change all internet services from free to paid and see who maintains engagement levels. personally would only pay good money for google+its ecosystem.
    http://asiabizchronicle.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  12. AnonymousJanuary 29, 2014 at 8:26 PM

    Did you see the us academics who applied a disease model to myspace and predict facebook use could fall 80 percent. They have used a failed site as a guide, which may be their mistake, but very interesting idea. I think they suggest usage peaked last year for FB. There are risks being short high momentum, but one to watch.

    I dont use fb much, but i dont click google ads either and look how well they are doing.

    ReplyDelete
  13. kristiinaJanuary 30, 2014 at 12:56 AM

    The benefits of self-loathing...

    Very interesting to see some commentors getting quite pissed about the post that handles a very basic human learning procedure: self inquiry about the possibility of mistake, and possibility of correcting it. There's a group of people who do not admit mistakes. Criminals - constantly in and out of jail, never of their own fault, and never seeing any cause for self-correction. They have externalised the self-correction. Seems almost like there's something similar going on here (for some). I am thinking about this in perspective of this article: Series of Deaths Among Financial Workers http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303277704579348591876659108 If there is an inability to handle self-criticism when facing adverse fortune suicide may seem like a good solution. Fessing up=character.

    ReplyDelete
  14. indievestmentsJanuary 30, 2014 at 6:58 AM

    Facebook is for Mom's. Google+ is for entrepreneurs. As is Twitter.

    I'm unfriending Facebook too.

    Nice post, John.

    ReplyDelete
  15. CurmudgeonlyTrollJanuary 30, 2014 at 7:55 AM

    http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22delete%20facebook%22

    I do agree it's lost relevance in the sense of driving the conversation, building new things. more having to play catchup by buying things like Instagram, (not yet) SnapChat. Pre-IPO a lot of engineers would rather join/sell to Facebook to get in on the IPO, but not any more.

    Also the API, apps integration, people building stuff on top of the graph ... not happening.

    On the other hand, hard app to delete, and they seem to have cracked monetization without driving off users.

    ReplyDelete