FB has always had a MSN.com or Yahoo.com vibe, but with the latest "see other posts across facebook" update, it's gone completely Taboola.
that's not even half as entertaining as instagram or snapchat right now. i feel like snapchat should really be a little bit ahead, because the social experience is a lot more interesting than instagram's, but instagram's larger user base means more interesting pictures and videos right now, even if these videos are a little bit "detached" from the user's social experience.
facebook's social experience has totally lost the plot when they started trimming the social feed in favour of links to websites outside of facebook.
really the crux of these social websites is that they need to have a social experience. if i wanted gossip news or political reading i'd go to a gossip website or a political journal.
I agree with the Yahoo vibe. You know the left wall of navigation items on the desktop browser version of Facebook? That shows eg: Events, Marketplace, Groups, Pages, Friends List, On This Day, Find Friends, Photos, and other similar junk.
It looks just like a portal straight out of 1999. It comes across as generic, soulless - a product trying to be everything that ends up being nothing in particular.
Here's the most recent Yahoo version of that left strip of be-everything-and-nothing portalism icons (archive.org stray example from 2014):
I consume a lot of content from YouTube. It's fun, mostly enjoyable (can easily ignore the trash comments). Facebook is an extremely mediocre product by comparison, it's not much fun at all. I use YouTube regularly to watch video that might include everything from news, movie trailers, documentaries, vblogs, entertainment show clips, sports clips, speaker forums, and so on. Facebook by contrast, I consume with a bare minimum type approach: I use it as little as necessary.
The only two complaints I have about YouTube's product, is the quality of the comments, and there are still too many fake automated junk videos on there (or otherwise the: you won't believe what happened next junk). Most video search results require a bit of filtering through that.
the crux of these social websites is that they need to have a social experience
I think something people forget when they're talking about social media is how new it is. Social sites have yet to prove they're something people genuinely want to engage with in the long term. There's no particularly good reason to believe someone who joins a site in their teens will still be on it in their 30s and beyond. They might move on to something else. Or they might not. Teens might not want to join it now that it's an established platform and not 'trendy', but they might come to it later. We don't know. There is no data for this. No previous social network has lasted long enough to discover what happens.
Let's not forget that Facebook has only been around for 14 years, and for a couple of those it was closed to world outside of academia. 12 years is nothing when you're trying to work out how people use something. This entire thing is a fascinating experiment. We're a long way from drawing any conclusions yet.
that's not even half as entertaining as instagram or snapchat right now. i feel like snapchat should really be a little bit ahead, because the social experience is a lot more interesting than instagram's, but instagram's larger user base means more interesting pictures and videos right now, even if these videos are a little bit "detached" from the user's social experience.
facebook's social experience has totally lost the plot when they started trimming the social feed in favour of links to websites outside of facebook.
really the crux of these social websites is that they need to have a social experience. if i wanted gossip news or political reading i'd go to a gossip website or a political journal.