Comments on: Facebook is a fad!

By: Abhishek

Abhishek — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:32:39 +0000

You’ll be surprised at how common it is for people to break up through Facebook, by changing relationship status! So really humans are pretty cruel themselves.

By: Chinmay

Chinmay — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:57:05 +0000

Thing about User Experience set me off… Was talking to this fellow undergrad… She had a problem with the way Facebook interaction is structured for changing your relationship status: “It asked me ‘Are you sure you want to cancel this relationship?’. It was so traumatic… I couldn’t get myself to say ‘Yes’”

There’s certainly a lot that could be improved for online SNS. When it comes to understanding and communicating with people, even after centuries of speech; we aren’t perfect with it. SNS has only been around at max a decade?

By: Abhishek Nayak

Abhishek Nayak — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:51:08 +0000

Thanks for passing by Panamajack. You made a valid point, my facebook experience is a lot dependent on my network. The events and address book features are pretty useful, though I have hardly used it. It’s still growing in popularity in India, where we are all on orkut.com. Which is quite ugly, but serves my need.

Talking about twitter, I believe adding scobleizer on my follow list was the last nail! But I recently cleaned up my follow list and slowly getting back to use it.

By: Panamajack

Panamajack — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:40:33 +0000

Hello Abhishek,

My experience with Facebook has been far more positive than yours, leading me to disagree with your assessment of the service (at least in my case). As for fads, I’d be curious to see what you think of Twitter (viewing Twittervision was what drew me to your article). I thought it was a stupid useless fad, now I just can’t wait till other friends join Twitter and make it truly useful for me.

First of all, I’m Canadian (where we still prefer sex over 60″ of LCD glory . Canada has extremely high rates of FB users, which do lead the service to be functionally much better – I can reasonably expect just about anyone under 30 to be on it, unless they are firm holdouts (something which I respect, others harass my non-FB using friends, which is unspeakably lame).

Politicians, celebrities, organizations/NGOs all (assuming they’re tech aware) have a presence on FB as well.

This being the case, I find it’s a fantastic service for all sorts of communication; catching up with friends, family, and increasingly actual networking. Certain emerging features that allow you to differentiate between different personal networks (family, friends, work, professional assc.) will make it much more useful to customize. Moreover, it functions as a fantastic address/event book, esp. for bdays.

That all said, stupid apps are the scourge of services like this, but sadly it’s part of the appeal for many. I think FB will have to allow tighter controls on what type of app-invites people can send you for this annoying problem to go away.

By: Abhishek Nayak

Abhishek Nayak — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 23:11:22 +0000

Ah it’s the Americans, they are truly strange… I heard about this, they would go without sex for 6 months if they would get a plasma screen TV at the end of it .

By: Shravya

Shravya — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:26:27 +0000

A survey I read some time back said facebook is the second most popular thing(tied with beer and sex) only after Ipod. But, thank goodness someone agrees with me..my first hand experience with facebook has been really cumbersome.I’ve been surprised as many companies r so eager to collaborate with facebook(maybe ur explantion provides an answer), and even more when I heard some bollywood movie(can’t rem the name!) being first screened on facebook..

By: Abhishek Nayak

Abhishek Nayak — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:38:11 +0000

It’s called wisdom

By: ravi

ravi — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:31:29 +0000

when I last read abt u on the net(ya,u r already dat famous),u were supposedly developing a facebook app of your own…wats gone wrong ?