What will replace Facebook and Twitter?

hask1965

spelt it wrong but its true what you have said facebook will get old and boring and something eles will come along

BrianD

KungPao wrote: »

I don't get why people are so confident that Facebook will be forever popular. As the years pass I reckon kids and teenagers will just see Facebook as some old web site for old people...and thus will cease to be 'cool', and some other schite will come along for the kids, and the older people will have better things to do...and stop using facebook.

And remember when Yahoo! was the search engine of choice? or Geocities? or Kazaa, emule? Hotmail?

All pretty big sites and programs that have faded away.

Don't agree. There is a constant investment in Facebook which means that it's always evolving. This didn't happen with, say, Bebo. Also it's achieved the critical mass that no other social network has achieved - Yahoo, Hotmail, Kazaa or gmail. Plus these services only offer specific services. FB in theory offers it all (well apart from Kazaa)

There will be space for niche networks but I don't see the possibility of anything else taking on Facebook. Who's going to leave Facebook for a network that doesn't have all their friends on it?

sarahisainmdom

Google+ - you heard it here first...

Yahew

KungPao wrote: »

I don't get why people are so confident that Facebook will be forever popular. As the years pass I reckon kids and teenagers will just see Facebook as some old web site for old people...and thus will cease to be 'cool', and some other schite will come along for the kids, and the older people will have better things to do...and stop using facebook.

And remember when Yahoo! was the search engine of choice? or Geocities? or Kazaa, emule? Hotmail?

All pretty big sites and programs that have faded away.

and remember the Google search engine. and it's fading away? Once you are good and established you are it.

On FB average age is already 38. These aren't "bands" where coolness is about appealing to teenagers with no money. Facebook started immediately with an older demographic than MySpace, and a smarter one - college kids and grads and alum. The kids were still in MySpace. Kids dont matter provided they move on as they get older.

Yahew

sarahisainmdom wrote: »

Google+ - you heard it here first...

Nope.


Google+ doesnt work as a concept for me. I dont use facebook but I follow about 300 people on twitter, and have about 280 followers. I post tech stuff and other related items, and retweet interesting stuf.

When I follow someone on twitter, their posts are automatically in my feed, unless they talk to @someoneelse. So I can use twitter as both a social tool and an aggregator. I follow boards. I follow rte. I follow the Economist. And people I know. And journos. etc.

Thats the point, and it is why twitter works. On google+ you don't follow stephen fry to get his posts, he has to add you to his circle.

For that reason celebs and brands aren't going to bother. Its not an aggregator. And it doesn't work like facebook: it doesn't need someone else's acceptance to get in his feed, you can add who you like to your circle which apparantly pushes your ( possibly unwanted) stuff to them.

This seems ass over tit. It would mean that someone popular , or a brand like The Economist, would get a lot of people adding them to circles and a massively busy stream, meanwhile they would post to their circle of 20 people they have added. Pointless.

PaulPinnacle

Yahew wrote: »

On google+ you don't follow stephen fry to get his posts, he has to add you to his circle.

Have you used + yet? That's not exactly how it works. I can happily add Stephen Fry and get updates of his posts, assuming that he makes them public posts. I obviously won't get any limited access posts which only appear to certain circles he has created, but that's one of the benefits of the system (in theory) to allow for extremely curated content publication. A celebrity of that ilk will have very limited circles and will focus on public posts rather than limited ones.

Yahew wrote: »

it doesn't need someone else's acceptance to get in his feed, you can add who you like to your circle which apparantly pushes your ( possibly unwanted) stuff to them.

The feed on + is very different to that on Facebook. Even when the site was in beta, very few users had signed up and I was using a very small number of contacts; the general feed was all but unusable. There's simply too much noise and content in there for it to work (imagine twitter timelines but with full page documents rather than 140 character messages).

You have to, from my own experience, use circles to filter it down and make it usable. Spotting the odd post of interest in the main feed will no doubt happen, but it's the circle list filters that reduce the content to just that which you're specifically interested in which is the majority of 'day to day' use.

robinph

You can add people to your circles without them needing to do anything, you then see their public posts.

If you want to know about what they had for breakfast then they would need to add you to their "What I had for breakfast" circle, but anything public you get to see.

Yahew

PaulPinnacle wrote: »

Have you used + yet? That's not exactly how it works. I can happily add Stephen Fry and get updates of his posts, assuming that he makes them public posts. I obviously won't get any limited access posts which only appear to certain circles he has created, but that's one of the benefits of the system (in theory) to allow for extremely curated content publication. A celebrity of that ilk will have very limited circles and will focus on public posts rather than limited ones.

Yes, I have used it and I dont see any public posts. The normally prolific ( on twitter) India Knight who I have included in a circle has posted twice - once a profile picture, and once when asking people to a circle. So most of her posts are non-public by default, apparently. I bet she is posting to her circles, though.

Also where is this public post option. Clearly I cant post to the entire world. Its "extended circles". Thats what I see.

The feed on + is very different to that on Facebook. Even when the site was in beta, very few users had signed up and I was using a very small number of contacts; the general feed was all but unusable. There's simply too much noise and content in there for it to work (imagine twitter timelines but with full page documents rather than 140 character messages).

I found that too. Lots of work. This has a niche. Its a from of aggregation, where the filters are like RSS channels. Not a replacement for Twitter, or FB but a weird hybrid.

robinph

Yahew wrote: »

Also where is this public post option. Clearly I cant post to the entire world. Its "extended circles". Thats what I see.

The default option that shows up for me on starting to make a post is a green box saying Public below the comment box. That can be removed and circles added as the options for where your posting is visible to.

PaulPinnacle

Yahew wrote: »

Clearly I cant post to the entire world. Its "extended circles". Thats what I see.

Potentially your options are a little different from mine depending on your current 'Profile' privacy settings (eventually it will have to go 'Public' at the highest level if not already, but you can then control the individual sections and still retain the privacy you require), but if I click on the "+ Add circles or people to share with" the last three options there are "Your circles", "Extended Circles" and finally "Public".

Yahew wrote: »

Not a replacement for Twitter, or FB but a weird hybrid.

I'm not quite sure where it will fit into the mix to be honest. Any social media platform is dynamic and down to how the users choose to use it really. When twitter first arrived I'm sure the last thought many had was "this will be a valuable business networking tool", yet that's exactly what has happened there.

+ has huge potential and looks like being the fastest growing social network to date, but it still has a long way to go to fulfil that potential. I suppose the benefit of it is that you can use it as an aggregation tool, having a wide net of active circles in the areas you're interested in, while still using it for very personal and closed interaction with good friends and family members. They've certainly improved on the segmenting side of things, though it is far less 'idiot proof' than I believe it should be. As they continue to tweak the UI and improve the UX, this may be resolved in time.

sarahisainmdom

Yahew wrote: »

On google+ you don't follow stephen fry to get his posts, he has to add you to his circle.

I've added Stephen Fry (without him adding me) and I get to see lots of his posts as he makes them public. He doesn't see my stuff because I'm not in his circles - that's how it works.



If anyone on this thread wants to discuss Google+ further I've made a thread for it here.