Anecdotal evidence: I had never messed with Instragram until I got a girlfriend whose peer group used that exclusively over Facebook. These are all in the 28-32 age range. It seems they were all eager to use a system that just focused on sharing photos and didn't want all the 'bloat' associated with Facebook. In addition to preferring the focus on photosharing, there was a sense of just wanting to be back on a network where they just dealt with the few people they cared about.
Obviously Instagram falls under the Facebook umbrella, but it did serve as a wake up call to me about there possibly being a group of young professionals that is more than willing to completely ditch Facebook proper for something that better fits their social networking goals.
It is amusing that there's less friction to move to a new network than to clean up the old one. Unfriending (or hiding/muting/whatever while still actively using Facebook) is much more likely to be taken as an affront by your long-time Facebook friends than simply stopping using FB much.
But eventually it seems like the same people will move to the new network of choice, and try to contact you there, and you've got the same problem all over again? Or you drift out of touch with that new network...
> Unfriending (or hiding/muting/whatever while still actively using Facebook) is much more likely to be taken as an affront by your long-time Facebook friends than simply stopping using FB much.
I've muted hundreds of people in my friends list, and they are none-the-wiser.
Maybe the list shouldn't be called 'friends' anymore? That list is bigger than my list of Outlook + GMail contacts.
As a prime example for a very different use of social networks: Can you explain to me how adding these people to your account (friends, acquaintances, whatever you name the list) adds, especially if they are muted and don't show up in your feed of social stuff (tm) anyway? Fascinating.
Based on what I've seen, refusing to add someone can be seen as a social snub in many circles. Simply adding and muting someone avoids a lot of social hassle of people wanting to know why you refused to add them when you did add some other person.
This is one of the things Google+ got relatively right: Perceived "friendship" are not in any way symmetric. Even close friends will often have different ideas about the depth and importance of their relationship. Facebook has tried very hard to ignore that.
Most people I know have had a facebook account through high school and university. You meet a lot of people in that process. A few years ago adding everyone you vaguely knew was fairly vogue, and so friend lists build up.
I'd say that most people I know just leaving university have around 500-600 friends. Younger people who got facebook earlier in high school tend to have more. It takes a lot more effort to remove friends than it does to add them, and so they build up.
friends used in the facebook sense. I certainly wouldn't consider most of my facebook contacts to be more than acquaintances.
I drove from Alaska to Argentina for 2 years and blogged the whole time, and I visited the "Magic Bus" of Chris McCandless Fame. [1]
Because of both of those, I get about 10 friend requests in Facebook a week. I accept them all in hopes of driving my traffic to my websites. So you are correct - these are not "friends" in the strict sense of the word.
I've had an instagram since it started and have watched friends slowly adopt. It really seemed to be catching fire in the past 3 months.
So in my experience I've found that people follow me but because the tool doesn't very easily show if someone follows you back, without digging back and forth through your followers, it's very easy to just unfollow the friends who don't provide content I care about.
It's more similar to Twitters model of pub/sub vs facebooks 1 to 1 dynamic. If I 'defriend' on facebook it forces you to defriend both ways right? I think facebook has made attempts at fixing this with subscriptions but ...
I deleted my Facebook account with it's 700+ friends and moved over to Path. I've been there for about a year and so far only have about 10 friends and family. We use it hourly, sometimes more often, and it's has been a refreshing respite from the cognitive overload (and sometimes time drain) that Facebook used to be. So I get the move to Instagram...
An interesting concept I hadn't thought of: how desirable is it from an aging Facebook user to start off with a clean slate? Given the amount of people I now know in my age group complaining that no one on their Facebook feeds is relevant to their lives post-university, I'd imagine it's quite high. I know my Facebook feed has acquired quite a bit of cruft over the years.
I delete people and don't feel bad about it thus I keep my FB(s) to minimum friend levels. I see a difference between people I like and have met vs. people who I share life experience with. I've kept the latter on my principal FB and subsequently created a separate FB for the former. Only those on the personal FB know about the acquaintance FB, but not vice-versa, of course. I don't even switch back and forth much, keeping it at a 80/20 time split. It works really well, actually.
My problem is that I delete many people, but I still have divides in groups: family, friends, co-workers, distant connections.
Separate accounts seems to really be the only option aside from trudging through heaps of menus to make lists. I had a list relegated to family/distant connections, however I can't for the life of me find out how to configure it again, or find it for that matter.
Imagine this concept coming from school. I cant imagine the amount of bloat facebook will have for younger users. Having a thousand friends entirely from before college would make me jump to a new network as soon as it became popular on campus.
At some point, there will be a paid social network with significant membership.
This is likely to occur after some particularly egregious and underhanded sale/use of user data by Facebook.
It's likely to be more popular among older professionals, who care more about their reputation because of their career, and don't care about paying a minimal fee.
That would be kind of cool, actually. A $5 one-time fee for every user. It would keep out the riff-raff and spammers, and there would be no need to sell user content or even have ads at all.
That may be a bit low. Facebook makes approximately $5/year off of each user.
Another problem with a $5 one-time fees is that people expect to use your service in perpetuity. That price point probably isn't sustainable over a more than a few year period.
$5 per user is equal to $5,000,000,000 for revenue and I think Facebook made $1,000,000,000 net profit last year, so Facebook makes about $4.5 per person gross and about $1 per person profit at the moment.
Nah. I would bet they are just using it because of the filters. It makes all the photos look so artsy and romantic. I doubt it has anything to do with networking.
I don't want to come across as rude, but I am fascinated how easy people are buying into these numbers. From my perspective the survey is in its current form far less informative than the original anecdote.
There is absolutely zero information on the data source he or Survate was using. The population seems to be selected based on the single factor age - meaning they might be getting the data from the easiest, cheapest accessible data sources available. In the end most of the responses could be coming from 30 y/o guys in India clicking on random answers to earn their 5c on mTurk.
In contrast to that, the original anecdotal evidence had the full story, provided the exact context on why and how the data was generated. But data without context is no data.
Survata is a survey-wall -- meaning you have to answer a survey before you see a given article. They have about 20 publishers signed up, and they're all non-spammy content. Users are all US-based, which can be verified via geo-ip, and there's little reason for people to spoof that here.
I never claimed to have more anecdotal evidence -- the whole point is to try to validate the claims via some form of data collection. It was cheap and fast to do.
Garry's explanation is a good one. The data for this survey was collected via surveywalls (example at [1]), which let visitors access premium content online for free in exchange for answering a few questions.
All respondents here have US IP addresses and self-report age in the 13-25yr range. We generally see honesty rates of 90% or higher to questions for which we can verify the answer (e.g. "Which OS are you currently using?" or "Who is the President of the US?").
I see many parents who forbid their children from using Facebook, but they are barely aware of what Instagram is and have never heard of Snapchat. Needless to say, those children are all over Instagram and Snapchat.
The first thing every adult says when I explain Snapchat is "oh, it is a sexting app!"
Lots of truth in this one. My uncle took away my cousin's phone a few months ago, and it didn't even phase her since her iPod had better communications tools than the dumbphone. She was texting via Kik (I thought it had died), Instragramming and FaceTiming. Talk about punishment.
I am so happy to see someone make an effort to do more than tell a story of how their girlfriends cousins dog said something and so obviously facebook/college/everything is totally over. Anecdotes are for color, data is for predictions and analysis.
People are beginning to preface anecdotal evidence with "this just anecdotal, but ...", as if there is some loophole to the fallacy.
It's really annoying when people confuse humility and an acknowledgement of a scarcity of evidence with jumping head-first into making a useless, fallacious argument.
Personal stories are fine[1], but it's worth keeping in mind that one of the pre-eminent unironic peddlers of anecdotal evidence as proof is Thomas friggin' Friedman.
In discussion forums I'm okay with the preface, because I read it as something like an implicit request for more information, "I think I've noticed [x] but don't have any real data, anyone know something further?" But I wouldn't write an article (not even an essay-length blog post) based on that premise.
>> People are beginning to preface anecdotal evidence with "this just anecdotal, but ...", as if there is some loophole to the fallacy.
maybe we just subconsciously hope that maybe, someday, someone/thing/program will just come along and compile all our "just anecdotes" into real, hard, data? So we just have to write it down, just in-case maybe that person is reading our story right now!
I would be hesitant to wonder about the data on Snapchat and what it provides. Think of how the app works: You take a picture, add a caption, and draw on the picture if you please. Then you select friends to send it to and you're done. That can be accomplished in < 30 seconds. Viewing snaps sent from friends is at MAX 10 seconds per snap. Unless a user is sending and receiving a lot of snaps, I would doubt they reach ' used regularly (defined by several hours per week or more, multiple answers OK)' threshold.
Thinly veiled, Snapchat is for sending nudes. In that sense I suppose it's more incentive to send photos, given the premise that the photos won't be seen by a third party.
The most striking thing is the across the board drop from one age group to the next. That to me is the more interesting story here.
Curious about Survata' methodology. Neither the author nor their website go into a great deal of information about this. (I mostly want to know who crafts the questions, as it's easy to inadvertntly skew survey results).
As an aside, linking to Survata's homepage not just once but three times in a ~600 word post makes this thing, aside from its casual observations, feel like an 'advertorial.'
Survata has a DIY survey creation tool, but we review and suggest wording changes to avoid biased questions. We also advise on how to arrange (and randomize) answer choices to allow us to calculate and compensate for answer biases like always clicking the first or last option.
Responses are gathered on surveywalls across the web, where visitors answer short surveys in exchange for free access to premium content (e.g. ebook or video).
What this post doesn't describe is usage numbers per person. I wonder how many Tumblr users are also Facebook, Snapchat, etc. users...? Also, how many respondents chose none of the options?
it would never cross my engineering mind to develop app like Snapchat. If you pitch it to anyone who played with iOS for a moment, they will laugh at you and say: no fun, I can hold two buttons and take print screen and the purpose of your app - dissapearing photo - is gone. But yet SC managed to raise $8MM. How on Earth is that?? Is it possible that those who took photos have no idea holding power button and clicking menu button with take a print screen??
Don't underestimate the power of defaults. When you send someone a photo through most systems the recipient has to go out of their way to delete it, so they wind up keeping (and re-sharing) things they didn't even intend to. If you want to circumvent Snapchat's retention policy you have to actually care enough at the moment to do so, which is a much bigger barrier than any technical one.
We have too many companies offering "free" products to demographics with very limited purchasing power... I'm glad I'm not in the boat of appeasing this fickle group.
For example, if 50 percent of a sample of 1,000 randomly selected Americans said they favor recycling laws, in 95 cases out of 100, 50 percent of the entire population in the U.S. would also have given the same response had they been asked, give or take 3 percentage points (i.e., the true proportion could be 47 percent or 53 percent).
The bigger the sample, the smaller the margin of error, but once you get past a certain point -- say, a sample size of 800 or 1,000 — the improvement is very small.
Obviously Instagram falls under the Facebook umbrella, but it did serve as a wake up call to me about there possibly being a group of young professionals that is more than willing to completely ditch Facebook proper for something that better fits their social networking goals.