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.
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.