A VC - Latest Comments in Quitters

Re: Quitters

jayfallon — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 01:30:59 -0000

I missed this article from the WSJ, dated from August 25th, with the exact same line: http://j.mp/i9ukC

Re: Quitters

Jan Schultink — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:03:57 -0000

Journalists should be careful about making generalizations based on a small set of qualitative interviews with users.

Re: Quitters

adam — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:34:40 -0000

while i think this is an interesting issue to investigate, i also believe there's some vetting of facts to consider. or at least, a need for the distinction of metrics.

while the comscore graph does indeed show a different story--increased usage vs fleeing subs--it is measuring a different factor. the nyt article suggests that subscribers are bailing, not uniques. whereas comscore is showing that more and more uniques are flocking to facebook.

the detail to keep in mind here is that it's hard to draw more than the correlation that uniques = subs. a larger subscriber base on a platform inherently means that the platform draws more interest, even from casual or disinterested browsers. i wonder how many of those uniques came to facebook to see what was going on.. vs join.

i think a more interesting chart would be one that tracks a given month's uniques over a quarterly basis. if the bulk of them are still there after the quarter, then we can assume they're mostly subs. but if they trail off, then we know what's going on.

my 2c

Re: Quitters

fredwilson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:48:02 -0000

Facebook is not leveling off. Its growing faster than ever

Re: Quitters

fredwilson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:47:04 -0000

Facebook is not leveling off. Its growing faster than ever

Re: Quitters

fredwilson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:24:02 -0000

I think facebook is the place to look. Its been dominant for five years now and growing more so every day. I never had real friends on myspace. I do on facebook, I do on twitter, and I do on linkedin. I think friend networks are powerful and do build defensibility over time

Re: Quitters

fredwilson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:12:02 -0000

My son needs a rehab for his farmville/farmtown habit!

Re: Quitters

Cflexman — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:26:42 -0000

Myke,

Is that a PDF you'd mind passing around? Would love to be able to share around as many of my friends and colleagues have the same problem. I tend to send mashables "how to" twitter guide but it doesn't always have the same impact.

Re: Quitters

yaqoobm — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 16:58:11 -0000

Facebook has a lifecycle: it started as small core for early adopters, puff out as mainstream users get dragged in by users, and then see growth is tapping down as people get turned off by spam. That's what happens to Friendster and many other social networks. Facebook is now just a time sucking hangout or I’d say that it’s a new spam heaven. Almost every few hours I’ve been getting messages from my Facebook acquaintances with links to some phishing sites also these messages are not sophisticatedly crafted but randomly drafted. The more such messages, the less useful Facebook becomes as a communications portal.

Such a spam free zone is it, isn’t it?

Re: Quitters

benjaminjtaylor — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:50:33 -0000

No debating Comscore numbers, but how do those numbers paint an accurate picture in terms of long term sustainable growth and retention? Rather than short term growth and brand equity we ought to ask ourselves how do most if not all SN services build long term customer loyalty. Something "old world” businesses do quite well. Beyond data retention, there is no brand loyalty. Leaving a social network today does not mean a user leaves his or her friends, thus the abandonment of SN-x is a practice widely accepted in our culture.

We talked about growth numbers, brand equity, and the sale of MySpace as a social network, now it’s a hybrid music/lifestyle/entertainment portal. Still a major player but I'd be surprised if it weren't anything more than a marketing arm for NewsCorp a few years form now. Geocities went dark and it barely registered a blip outside of niche tech news reporting sites. And briefly following GC, we had Friendster. Once the cool factor dies and the curiosity wanes, we use comscore numbers to illustrate the quarter to quarter decline in use as users leave in mass.

Now it's Posterous evangelized by Rubel and Scoble and Tumblr which seems to skew to that lucrative 12-24 demographic. And even if you follow Geoff Cook's recent TC article about higher concentrations of teens on Twitter compared to Facebook it still doesn’t change the fact that most users would leave Twitter in an instant if presented with a viable alternative micro-messaging service. And we're not far away from that.

Re: Quitters

Cyrus — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 12:01:39 -0000

People aren't necessarily "quitting" because these sites are doing anything wrong. In fact, in some cases it is because they are doing everything too well, and people find themselves sinking unhealthy amounts of time into their social networks.

Perhaps this sort of rehab isn't what you were initially thinking in the demographic of "quitters," but this sort of user-on-hiatus definitely exists and usually returns.

Re: Quitters

fredwilson — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 05:23:02 -0000

I think you are right. Even my kids who are late teens and love FB and use it more than any other web service have started blogs and twitters to get more control of their online presence. I would imagine 20 somethings would want that even more. I think some of those 20 somethings end up on tumblr

Re: Quitters

dan_leslie — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:42:53 -0000

I think RDF, like anything else, can suffer performance issues depending on the implementation. But part of the value of RDF and related standards like RDFS, and SPARQL is that they actually help to eliminate the data modeling issue altogether. E.g., with a triple-store, you don't need to redesign a bunch of relational DB tables every time you add or change a feature. I'm just starting to explore this approach as an alternative to relational databases, but it looks really compelling.

I can think of a few examples of scalable & high-performance platforms that use this approach, including Thomson Reuters' OpenCalais, Metaweb's Freebase (one of the data sources used by Zemanta), and DBpedia to name a few. DBpedia alone stores 218 million triples.

If you're curious, Jamie Taylor and Robert Cook of Metaweb did a great presentation about Freebase at last week's NY Semantic Web Meetup. Here's a link:
http://www.swnyc.org/index....

Re: Quitters

Matthew Ramsden — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:46:05 -0000

I'm getting in a little late on this post, but as a 24 year old who started using Facebook early on in college when it was only available to college students, I see Facebook differently now as do many of my peers. As Facebook has expanded access to everyone now, alot of the original college students who used it from the beginning are now using it less and less frequently. Alot have stopped using it at all actually. My general feeling would be that the users that are leaving Facebook are in the 22-26 year old range, and alot of the new users would be in the 40+ yr old age group. These are just my thoughts having talked to my friends about their lack of use of Facebook now, and also having my parents friends tell me that they have just signed up for Facebook and use it alot. Facebook is losing users in their 20's, and gaining users who are in their 40's. I'm not sure if thats a trend they would like to see continue-

Re: Quitters

ShanaC — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:44:53 -0000

I'll say it once, I'll say it again - the internet in tech time is like a teenager. If it were human, it's roughly 16 years old.

Wait until it discovers this idea of "adulthood." It's going to be complicated and sucky and needing parenting until then, and will you wait out some of the growing pains?

Re: Quitters

ShanaC — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:14:51 -0000

Thank you :)

Re: Quitters

fredwilson — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:49:10 -0000

Its a good area to focus on

Re: Quitters

ShanaC — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:16:19 -0000

Why do you think I want to study here. Long term, I think there is a really desperate need for such products where on the front end you can't tell. On the back, they are as secure as you can get until the human mistake factor gets in. I also realized before I came here, that most do not look at how people behave with technology or objects and how we are changing with it, or changing technology to adapt to us. I try to only advocate what I sort of see and study.

Most people also don't realize that professional products are premium products. You can't avoid at some point paying to be part of your professional organization and the tools of its trade, as frustrating as it may be. People will pay eventually as you build your core of dedicated average users, especially if you can professional organizations to sign off. If you build the privacy oriented social networked propitiatory networked trading platform for Goldman, they will pay, and others will want it...same with the best document creation and sharing tool among law firms and their clients, it sort of doesn't exist.

Re: Quitters

fredwilson — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:51:02 -0000

Good argument. Although it depends on what your definition of open vs closed is. You are arguing for privacy more than anything else. I could imagine a totally open network from an apis/platform perspective that guards privacy closely

Re: Quitters

Jonathan Gheller — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:41:54 -0000

I want to share a superficial reflexion on twitter/FB with you and see what you all make of it:
UGC metrics are more important in twitter than on FB; For example: the number of photos uploaded in FB is less relevant than the number of tweets on a specific topic. Photo pages can barely be monetized nor can they be aggregate it in a larger context where they could eventually be monetized. Tweets, on the contrary can. If you aggregate all tweets regarding the Iran protest you get content that is relevant to users/readers that are not necessarily directly related to the content (I may not be friends with I guy who created the tweet...I may not be Iranian...But I am interested in the news). Moreover, content can be aggregated (a la hash tag) to provide a valuable complement to editorial news feeds..

Re: Quitters

Mike Bonifer — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:24:43 -0000

I think there's a crying need for the ability to deconstruct media and brand narratives and find out where the real motivation comes from. Who's getting bought and sold. Who's making money and who's losing money. Let's face it, content, including news, is getting paid for by someone. The media's complicity in the war on Iraq, for example, was predicated on the idea that war is good for the news business AND good for Halliburton. The context in which the narrative unfolds is actually means more than the content. Matt Drudge has access to exactly the same content as a million other online aggregators. It's the ability to tint his content yellow, and his business relationship with News Corp that point down the path to critical thinking about the Drudge Report.

Re: Quitters

ShanaC — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:53:25 -0000

http://www.shanacarp.com/es...

Fyi, I know factually that Lawyers are making mailing lists by bar practice area inside cities informally. So, there is apparently a need for walled gardens...

Re: Quitters

kraznet — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:52:24 -0000

just as myspace used to be the big thing, soon everyone on facebook will have moved on to something cooler and fresher.

Re: Quitters

fredwilson — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:47:02 -0000

Yeah, but its scaling rapidly. I don't think it makes sense to focus on what is as much as what will be

Re: Quitters

fredwilson — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:44:06 -0000

Neither. Just making a suggestion