Category Archives: Facebook

Online harassment survey results

Posted on Sunday, June 22, 2014 by No comments yet

Craig Newmark, of craigslist fame, recently released an infographic highlighting the results of a survey about online harassment.  Some points from the survey:

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NYTimes: “Facebook… a major waste of time”

Posted on Tuesday, February 5, 2013 by No comments yet

From today’s New York Times

Facebook is the most popular social network in America roughly two-thirds of adults in the country use it on a regular basis.

But that doesn’t mean they don’t get sick of it.

A new study released on Tuesday by the Pew Research Center”˜s Internet and American Life Project found that 61 percent of current Facebook users admitted that they had voluntarily taken breaks from the site, for as many as several weeks at a time.

The main reason for their social media sabbaticals?

Not having enough time to dedicate to pruning their profiles, an overall decrease in their interest in the site as well as the general sentiment that Facebook was a major waste of time. About 4 percent cited privacy and security concerns as contributing to their departure. Although those users eventually resumed their regular activity, another 20 percent of Facebook users admitted to deleting their accounts.

Of course, even as some Facebook users pull back on their daily consumption of the service, the vast majority 92 percent of all social network users still maintain a profile on the site. But while more than than half said that the site was just as important to them as it was a year ago, only 12 percent said the site’s significance increased over the last year indicating the makings of a much larger social media burnout across the site.

The study teases out other interesting insights, including the finding that young users are spending less time overall on the site…

Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, which conducted the survey, described the results as a kind of “social reckoning.”

“These data show that people are trying to make new calibrations in their life to accommodate new social tools,” said Mr. Rainie, in an e-mail. Facebook users are beginning to ask themselves, “ “˜What are my friends doing and thinking and how much does that matter to me?,’ “ he said. “They are adding up the pluses and minuses on a kind of networking balance sheet and they are trying to figure out how much they get out of connectivity vs. how much they put into it.”

Facebook vs. Housework? Foursquare on the Ropes?

Posted on Monday, November 26, 2012 by No comments yet

#VT – Not everyone is rosy about all social media.  First, from Information Week

A recent study from The University of Canterbury at New Zealand shows… What was a bit surprising was how Facebook fared: It placed 29th out of 30 daily behaviors that study participants were asked to rank. In fact, it would seem, the only thing that makes people happy less than Facebook is recovering from illness. Facebook ranked 28th in engagement and 24th in pleasure. It ranked dead last in meaning…

Ranking higher than Facebook on the happiness, meaning and engagement meter were housework, studying, and paid work… I’m not a huge housework fan, but when it comes to happiness, meaning and engagement, I get more out of housework than I get from Facebook. After I clean the kitchen, for example, I am happy with how nice it looks. There’s meaning in what I did: My family has clean dishes and a clean workspace. We don’t worry about food poisoning… I think the point is that activities with purpose give us happiness, meaning and a sense of engagement — and Facebook all too often seems to serve none of these areas. That should worry businesses who hope to use Facebook to their benefit.
 And from Forbes
Here’s a prediction: Foursquare will be the next highly-funded casualty in the social media sphere… Rather than be disruptive, Foursquare is being dysfunctional. The company is trying desperately to follow industry leaders instead of leading an industry. They are stuck in social media no man’s land.

Foursquare was founded in 2009 as a local “check-in” service. To-date, the company has raised more than $70 million (the last funding valued the company at $600 million). In 2010, FacebookGoogle and Yelp added their own version of Foursquare’s most compelling feature ““ the check-in. This summer, after getting crushed for two years by competitors, Foursquare decided to finally de-emphasize check-in and the game it had created around becoming “mayor” of a location. Only geeks with dreams of being the Michael Bloomberg of the Soho Starbucks were playing…

Don’t get me wrong; checking in is useful on a user’s primary social platform if they don’t mind the privacy implications. Many people want to let friends know where they are or brag about being at a cool event. But like the GPS was to TomTom, the “check-in” is to Foursquare. It was their one trick. Satellite navigation went into both cars and phones ““ bruising TomTom. Similarly the check-in was built into Facebook, Yelp, Google and Trip Advisor. Will it be the death of Foursquare’s pony? By the time Foursquare realized they were becoming irrelevant, it was too late. I estimate that the company has cash for 12 more months of operation with its current 150 employees. There may still be time for a fix.