Facebook Turns to Spam

[Renegade]

Well, it was fun while it lasted, but Facebook appears to be heading to the graveyard. I can't see why people would want to bother with it anymore as it blocks things you want to see, and posts spam for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euwRfBoYLMs

It took me some farting around to be able to see the first thing there, as most of the things I subscribe to on Facebook are blocked by Facebook now. i.e. Facebook won't show them to me easily or at all.

But, then it just shows game spam and other spam.

This will not sit well with people, and Facebook will lose users. I'll likely check it every now and then, but my usage will decline by probably over 95%.

Fun while it lasted... Looks like the business guys have taken over and are about to completely ruin Facebook.

Oh well. Next?


(Oh, and I'd like to plug mouser's screencast program there! Check in the NANY 2013 programs for it. And yeah, I know... crummy audio... from my webcam mic. Not mouser's fault.)

[Paul Keith]

Facebook has been on the way out for a while but they managed to leverage themselves by having a commenting system (which for some reason sites like Techcrunch prefer over Disqus) and their base has no alternative to move away to.

(Still no idea why Subjot could not monetize, Twitter is more spammy than Facebook if you just hate the follow sections and Diaspora and G Circle are too different for FB's main core audience.)

Other services are also being threatened to be bought out and have no way to monetize while Facebook is established.

This is the hip direct competitor to Facebook but I don't think many could understand it. I certainly don't: https://path.com/

Others are moving on from social network to services like Pinterest but Pinterest is not a fully opened service with a built in social network interface yet.

Every other services has the same problem. Some are moving on to Instagram and Instagram alternatives but there's really no bridging social network that is fast to replace plugged in services when things like the Instagram scandal hits.

It's just really tough right now to move away from Facebook because Facebook has become a walled garden much like Yahoo but Facebook has captured the more hard core casual connectors such as FB logins, commenting, game hosting... if it was smarter at chasing the Yahoo Mail audience instead of the Gmail audience ...FB might have surpassed Google.

Right now there's three things FB is not a walled garden of:
-Search: and I don't mean Gmail but Netvibes/Yourversion/Trapit like integration
-Mail: It needs a dumb Ymail and Gmail import
-To-do list/Public question: Learn from Quora's mistake

Fix these three and they only have to mimic Evernote's product placement and they're the web.

The key though is that there's zero real competition for Facebook much like DuckDuckGo may compete against Google Search but not Google Image Search or Google Alerts. FB's competitors are stuck at going back to the social network model while FB should be treated as much as a social network as it is treated like Kongregate.

So long as that keeps happening, people don't care for ads. Ads and spam only matter to casuals when there's a non-ad/non-spam alternative. It will get much worse if Facebook finally has a browser.

You have to give Facebook credit though. That's as Amazon as you can see and Amazon is cutthroat at making you ignore their spam. By having those stars, they are channeling some of Amazon's "I'm fine with that" good feeling interface instead of the spam-feel of Google's ads.

[rgdot]

I present more ammunition to you 

http://www.businessinsider.com/storify-pulls-in-private-status-updates-from-facebook-too-2013-1

People post all sorts of status update messages to friends on Facebook, many of which they never intend to make public.

But Storify, a social media curation tool, occasionally bring them to light, no matter the user's Facebook privacy settings. It also pulls in the person's photo, name and time stamp along with their private Facebook status message.

[f0dder]

If you're not paying for it, you are the product.

I hope that what facebook is doing (ad-spam, data mining you all the way up your hiney, ...) doesn't come as as a surprise to anybody? Anyway, AdBlockPlus + Ghostery does a nice job of making facebook not too awful, at least for the time being

[app103]

I think this is one of the reasons why diehard Friendfeed users don't want to ever leave Friendfeed. It's Facebook without the stupid...no apps, no games, no ads, no censorship, and governed by a completely different privacy policy. We hope that Facebook never pulls the plug on it.