Facebook To Introduce Video Ads 180
another random user writes "Facebook is reportedly introducing video advertisements to News Feeds this summer. Reports in the Financial Times (registration required) say that the clips will last for around 15 seconds, and the first one users see each day will play automatically. The first video will apparently play without audio, and restart if the account holder chooses to activate sound. Facebook is yet to officially confirm the move, but the report claims that the social network will gradually introduce video advertising to minimize user disruption. The company's most lucrative marketing partners, including American Express, Coca Cola, Ford, Diageo and Nestle, are expected to be the first brands to make use of the feature. Facebook is said to have implemented the strategy in a bid to take a slice out of TV ad revenue by undercutting the sector."
that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:5, Insightful)
and is likely to result in my pulling the plug. screw 'em.
Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who sat through previous Facebook abuse will sit through this. They have a monopoly on your friends. That's a hell of a thing to overcome. I deal with it by only ever talking to the friends I'm quite close to and leaving everyone else to themselves in the modern social networking era.
Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone who sat through previous Facebook abuse will sit through this. They have a monopoly on your friends. That's a hell of a thing to overcome.
Yeah, people used to say the same thing about MySpace.
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Sure, in the long run, every element of culture is doomed to decay, and on the internet that process is a little more rapid. I didn't mean to imply that Facebook was eternal, just that people will put up with a lot until there actually is an alternative with all their friends.
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Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:4, Insightful)
That says something about the value of your friends if they are only willing to use a crappy medium to talk to you. Would you talk to a guy who only talked to you through a bullhorn?
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Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like someone who's a facebook addict.
As someone who doesn't have a facebook account, I can tell you that you're wrong, and you'll likely realise just how wrong you are in judging the importance of facebook when you actually leave it and see that all your friends, acquaintances, people you need to contact... exist here in real life and have email accounts and phone numbers.
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But email is not one-to-many in the way that FB is. It is point to point, not broadcast. Understand I say this as someone who pines for Usenet daily, has no great love of Facebook, and wishes for something better. I'm also struck by the irony that I'm having this discussion with some faceless person on a web forum (no offense intended, it just runs a bit against the grain of your point).
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Use CC or BCC. Also use mailing lists. I routinely use email as a broadcast for a hobby of mine broadcasting messages to a community of approximately 100 people.
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I used to run a pretty active mailing list of about 30 people in my home town (pre-Facebook), and we used it for many of the same things people use Facebook for now. So been there, done that. They're all on FB now, and for many things it's actually easier. It's not FB as a concept that is flawed, just this particular execution, exacerbated by some well-understood phenomena like network effects and first across the finish line.
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Very few people on that list are friends. It's a list designed for managing certain sports-related activity across the city I live in.
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Ditto. I had the same problem. People are tired of IMs, IRC, chat, e-mails, etc. outside of Facebook. I refuse to use Facebook (did have it for about three weeks before being kicked out for using fake datas). :(
Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:5, Insightful)
A friend of mine who left FB entirely last year, with whom I still keep in touch because we both accept e-mail, has bemoaned instantly losing touch with most of his acquaintances. And then mutual friends of ours often ask where he is nowadays
If friend's can't be bothered to respond to your emails or telephone, then perhaps they are not your friends at all.
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Bullshit.
I don't think a lot of anti-Facebook people realize just how much Facebook has become integrated into people's lives and their methods of communication. It is EXPECTED that you have a Facebook account by now. Not having one makes you a social pariah apparently, and you miss out on a ton of things in you friends' lives that you probably won't hear unless you have Facebook. People aren't being rude - it's just a reflection of how society expects everyone to communicate these days. Trying to be differ
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I also have no FB account anymoer, and I have to say that you're not as right as you might think.
Sure, you get communication with people when you initiate conversations - but if you want to just keep up-to-date on what your friends are doing in life without having to pester them about, it's gotten much harder for the facebook-disconnected to do.
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but if you want to just keep up-to-date on what your friends are doing in life without having to pester them about, it's gotten much harder for the facebook-disconnected to do.
I don't get it. My friends are the group of people that enjoy talking to me about their life. How can you call that "pestering"? Isn't "sharing your life" one of the things you do with friends anymore? It seems that the facebook friend status has become a (poor) surrogate for having friends instead of a way to keep in contact with "real" friends.
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Without FB I'm an riddle, wrapped in a my
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Now you just sound like a jobless teenager.
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It isn't that tough to leave. Google+ is getting just as entrenched via apps, web pages, "+1" buttons, and many other items. In fact, I know a number of people who keep both G+ and FB running because both are useful.
If FB disappeared entirely, it can be completely replaced. Even if G+ didn't take over completely, messaging could go back to SMS or one of the IM providers, posts/walls could wind up on livejournal, cat pictures would move to Flickr or some other site, phone numbers and contacts could be sha
Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:4, Interesting)
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I believe that the illusion of friendship is what keeps a lot of people hooked on Facebook. Without it, people are left to the real world where most of the people they are "friends" with on Facebook are not worth the bother of contacting specifically, if the thought of these people ever occurs at all. That, and the knowledge that the feeling is broadly mutual.
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Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:5, Interesting)
It's reaching a breaking point, even among those who use Facebook heavily. I'm a self-described heavy user of Facebook, but recently removed it from my phone to avoid ads (and the stupid bullshit where the app would still try to pull my GPS location even with 'location' turned off - but I digress).
Not having access to mobile Facebook has been a big personal change, but one I'm generally happy with. I do miss being a "part" of some friend interactions (typically sporting events or other immediately-topical events), but I also feel my smartphone usage is far less compulsive - no longer am I idly checking Facebook on my phone during my commute, "forcing" me to read my book, for example - and it's definitely reduced my "need" to know what's going on immediately at all times. I may have a little easier than others because I never got into Twitter, so my Facebook feed is the 'fastest' social networking I do.
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Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:4, Informative)
They have a monopoly on your friends.
Yep, and FB has done work to make sure that the monopoly is more secure; they removed the "phone book" feature that used to list your friends contact info, and they changed everyone's listed email to a username@facebook.com email address. Good luck contacting all your old friends you've reunited with via FB unless you manually ask all of them for contact info.
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Facebook does have the option to 'download your data', which should include a list of 'Friends' with the email addresses they have chosen to disclose.
I hadn't ever used the functionality, so I am curious what the archive will contain when they have compiled it and I am able to download it. I would be sortof surprised if indeed I found only @facebook.com addresses in there, but if so, it's a real dick move by FB.
On the other hand, the contacts in my Android contacts list do have info (email addresses and pho
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I would be sortof surprised if indeed I found only @facebook.com addresses in there, but if so, it's a real dick move by FB.
If it shows only the ones people chose to reveal, then those won't show up. About a couple years ago, FB quietly hid everyone's chosen email and replaced the listed emails with their FB ones.
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I've downloaded the data and as a way of getting contact info of your friends, it is utterly useless.
Basically just a list of plaintext names of which a whopping 2 had an email next to them. They were gmail addresses, though.
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A little while ago I was able to get all the emails addresses from Facebook, albeit in a somewhat convoluted way. I had to have a Yahoo email account, and link that to my Facebook account, and I was then able to import my Facebook contacts into the Yahoo account which, thankfully, had an option to just export that (to CSV I think). This was maybe a year or so ago, so I don't know if it will still work, but it was after they switched everyone to the @facebook thing.
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You overvalue my friends.
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My solution:
I'm on facebook. I use it for the messenger and practically no other part of my private life. It's a nifty way to be able to tell all your friends that you love/hate/miss them at once, without making real, personal, intimate contact with anyone.
Also, it reminds you of everyone's birthday.
The rest of the site could disappear tomorrow and I'd hardly notice.
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and is likely to result in my pulling the plug.
So pull the plug already... Some of us never even got into that squalid bathtub (social diseases, ugh).
Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:5, Insightful)
For some it's really not that easy. Paul Miller's article [theverge.com] about leaving the internet for a full year is pretty interesting, and touches on some important aspects of social networking. Facebook enables casual long distance relationships that are often not realistic for many of us. I rarely talk to my best friend from high school on the phone or via text, but we do interact via Facebook pretty frequently. Without that social network link, we would've fallen out of touch over the years - with it, we're able to stay relatively up to date with minimal effort.
Now, do my friends deserve *more* than minimal effort? Of course. But the reality of leaving one's hometown (or college town or longtime employer) makes it unlikely that I'm going to see/call/write those friends of mine on a regular enough basis to keep close connections going, something Facebook has made possible for me.
For those of us with (even mildly) busy lives who have met many wonderful people over the years, social networking has been terribly useful.
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and is likely to result in my pulling the plug. screw 'em.
What took you so long?
Years of abuse, leaks, privacy violations and lying to you are ok, but one goddamed ad an you are gone?
I'm glad I never signed up for Facebook, and still pissed they mined my information from my airhead
friends that sell me out to them by useing Facebook as their address-book.
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You are not the only one. Bandwidth isn't growing on trees in the US. Adding streaming video ads that can't be stopped on iOS [1][2], and people will be starting to look elsewhere once the phone bills start rolling in.
I remember in the time frame when people started leaving MySpace to FB, where at first, it was the more educated people who went, then as they left, virtually everyone else followed suit. I'm starting to see the start of the exact same migration to G+.
[1]: Well, if you had a jailbroken pho
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I have a bit of a following on Facebook (mostly political ranty-type stuff, nothing that amazing IMO). Still, more than a few people have told me that my FB posts are their daily news feed, for whatever that's worth. And I kind of despise Facebook for many of the reasons already described in previous posts. Yet I think "social networking" (ugh) has its place and its utility. I like Google+ better. I have wished vocally, on FB, that we would all just migrate together. Last month I decided to just jump
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At the same time, these ads suck bandwidth and power - notice the fan running on your computer when you have many ad-hungry tabs running - and they don't complain.
Ads, and selling your personal data a
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screw 'em.
See you say that, but I don't believe you. Maybe because every time facebook does something like this people say screw them... and go right back to using them in a month.
I haven't used facebook in over 5 years and nothing they are doing is making me regret my decision.
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They'll start using HTML5 video and Javascript to play automatically.
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I don't think that HTML5 autoplays have become pesky enough to attract much attention; but Greasemonkey or equivalent should make detecting and neutering Video tags easy enough, even if the browser itself doesn't offer controls natively.
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Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess we are seeing yet another new generation of marketers learning old lessons, or old marketers who have rising through the ranks and not learned a think for the last 20 years.
Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:4, Interesting)
My suspicion would be that this is just another of Facebook's "Oh fuck, now we have shareholders to answer to" thrashing moves.
They've got crazy pageviews, lots of hours-per-month, and a huge pile of personal information; but they've been learning the hard way that cellphones are cutting into conventional page views(since even the best mobile browsers are still coping with a tiny screen), lots of hours-per-month can only really be monetized by pissing people off with increasingly aggressive ads and upsells, and that huge pile of personal information can be used either to maintain network effects or to scare users in temporarily valuable ways; but it is less obvious that it can be used for both at the same time...
We can only hope that we'll look back at them, as we now do on myspace, soon enough.
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Their mistake was going public. That means they have to answer to the lash of threatened shareholder lawsuits should they do anything but focus on what profits are coming on the next quarter.
FB should not have IPO-ed. Instead, they should have kept to themselves and worked on honing their backend technologies, perhaps offering things for sale to the enterprise. For example, all their magic and redundancy lies in the top level app layer. A server failure isn't handled by a HA mechanism or a hypervisor si
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I would wager the various adblocking tools will be updated to handle these new Facebook ads pretty quickly. You would think that by now marketers would have learned that people will generally let ads slide as long as they are unobtrusive, but these 'HEY LOOK AT ME!' ones always end up with people either avoiding the site or installing blocking software. These ads just don't work.
I guess we are seeing yet another new generation of marketers learning old lessons, or old marketers who have rising through the ranks and not learned a think for the last 20 years.
You would think that by now people would have learned that their own experiences does not equate to those of most people ;)
Most people don't use ad blocking software. Most people don't actually know it exists.
Most people accept that the Internet is all full of ads, and will continue to frequent sites laden with them because they don't realize there's a choice.
We know this is true because the advertising business remains extremely profitable - which only happens when ad impressions are made.
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but these 'HEY LOOK AT ME!' ones always end up with people either avoiding the site or installing blocking software. These ads just don't work.
We on Slashdot who use ad blocking are in the definite minority of users out there and especially so on sites frequented by the masses, like Facebook. They know that we block ads but they don't care because 90+% of regular Facebook, Disney and ESPN users don't. If the ads weren't effective, the advertisers wouldn't still be paying for them. I'm actually fine with this arrangement because it means that a sort of détente exists between us and the advertisers. They have no desire to engage us in an arms r
that's my schituation (Score:2)
I mostly use my phone to check in. that's so NOT gong to happen.
Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:5, Informative)
Re:that is a massive rip-off of my data allotment (Score:5, Informative)
Out? Why? There's nothing here that AdBlock Plus can't fix.
I don't go to Facebook, i have absolutely no interest in it. but, you are right. This is exactly why AdBlock was created.
Re:exactly why AdBlock was created (Score:4, Insightful)
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There is an Adblock for android, but I have to leave it off or some sites will not work at all.
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In the case of Facebook, that would be a good thing.
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and in the future (Score:2)
Facebook will allow you to add your own content to your ad... I mean news feed, but only once per day without paying per word.
A whole lotta "don't care" (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's go to a site that requires registration to read an article about a site I don't use that's going to annoy its users attempting to take market share from a medium I watch less and less.
Eurobook... (Score:3)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5mIm4bPBWE [youtube.com]
^ That's what I think of Facebook.
I'm psyched! (Score:2)
This is great. I thought my news feed was messed up, because it had been weeks since I'd seen a story about Facebook sucking even more.
Teevee (Score:3, Insightful)
Facebook is said to have implemented the strategy in a bid to take a slice out of TV ad revenue by undercutting the sector."
More like mimicking TV and the number one thing about it that made the internet seem like a potentially worthwhile alternative.
Really? (Score:2)
I must add the obligatory "there are ads on the Internet?"
Also, having not read the actual "story", I asked myself: "There were not video ads before? Who knew!".
Seriously, Facebook (like Google) is an Ad Platform. Not news, move on.
The ultimate slap in the face (Score:2)
When Joe User exceeds his monthly data plan, he has to pay more just for the privilege of viewing a video ad...to access his own Facebook page.
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When Joe User exceeds his monthly data plan, he has to pay more just for the privilege of viewing a video ad...to access his own Facebook page.
If you're exceeding your data plan, Twitter less or lay off the porn (I would suggest that you might be "pirating" copyrighted intellectual property, but that's all a bad set of words here).
Seriously, lay off the porn.
This is for your own good! (Score:3)
Oh, we're sorry. You haven't NOTICED the text and graphical based ads here. Since we know that can't be because you have no interest, we wanted to make it easier for you to see our advertising!
Reminds me of the project managers where I work. "Oh, reality? Fuck that, we warp it to what we think it should be!"
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The ads are already reaching my maximum tolerance now that they started blowing text ads into the middle of my news feed that look like normal posts, but they're not quite annoying enough for me to spend half an hour writing a Safari extension to banish them. But video ads? You get to show me exactly one, Facebook, and then it's worth the half an hour to block all of your ads. All of them.
This can only end poorly for FB (Score:2)
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People are going to get pissed off at having their data get used by auto-playing video ads when they use FB for phones. Those using FB on desktops will probably figure out some way of filtering out the ads (maybe disable flash, or whatever they use to serve ads).
But if you disable flash, how can you play Zynga games?
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"This can only end poorly for FB"
You say it like its a bad thing.
Punch The Monkey! (Score:2)
You can quit any time you want, right?
What a coincidence! (Score:2)
I'm introducing Adblocker and NoScript to my Facebook News Feed this summer!
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Unfortunately, neither of those really work entirely (or at all? I have both and am not able to see any effects on FB), since the ads are pretty well integrated into the platform. socialfixer [socialfixer.com] is an answer, but it's not ideal (nor is there a mobile analog that I know of).
Darth Zuckerberg (Score:5, Funny)
I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
Here we go... (Score:4, Insightful)
The new, more obtrusive, more bandwidth hogging ads are coming.
Next will be the increase in frequency and length of ads.
Then the exodus will start.
Then there will probably be a site-wide remake or relaunch to try and get people interested.
By then a new social networking site will be getting hype and half their user will already have an account on it as well.
Then they stop using their Facebook account and start referring people to the other site who contact them on FB.
Then Facebook becomes another ghost ship of abandoned profiles like MySpace.
FB down 2.5% since this announcement. (Score:2)
Since this announcement, Facebook stock dropped 2.5%.
This advertising move is called "pulling a Myspace".
adblock (Score:2)
It works with youtube ads, so I can't imagine having a problem with these.
The irritation factor rises (Score:2)
pretty soon, (Score:2)
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it'll be just like a porn site, only without the porn.
You must not have any teenagers on your friends list.
This is good news! (Score:2)
Really, best news I've heard all day!
um... (Score:2)
Bullshit. Video ads are INHERENTLY disruptive.
Make money facebook style (Score:4, Interesting)
at least... (Score:2)
Subscription-based ad-free 'premium accounts'? (Score:2)
A lot of apps are like this: Free and full-featured but with ads. Buy the 'premium version' and remove the ads.
It works for the apps - it will also work for Facebook.
Millions of users leaving... even before video ads (Score:3)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/28/facebook-loses-users-biggest-markets [guardian.co.uk]
http://www.geek.com/news/millions-are-leaving-facebook-every-month-due-to-boredom-1553510/ [geek.com]
http://technorati.com/social-media/article/facebook-deserted-by-millions-of-users/ [technorati.com]
Summary, their oldest markets, i.e. US/Canada/Europe have reached "peak Facebook", and numbers are going down in those older markets. E.g. in the Technorati article...
> Data released by analytics firm SocialBakers suggests that people are
> leaving Facebook in their millions.
>
> It reveals that the social network has shed 6 million US visitors in the
> last month, which represents a 4% fall. The UK fares no better having
> lost 1.4 million users last month, a drop of 4.5%.
> Worryingly for Facebook this is far from a blip. In the last six months the site
> has lost 9 million users in America and 2 million in the UK. There's a similar
> picture across the developed world, with usage falling in Canada, Spain,
> France, Germany and Japan.
Yes, the numbers of well-off North Americans and Europeans leaving will be more than offset by the influx of third-worlders. But that guy or gal in the call centre in Mumbai, or the peasant in Asia, is not worth as much to advertisers as the westerners that they replace.
Using from work (Score:2)
I see lots of people logging on to check FB from work, which is tolerated in my office as long as it's not excessive. Video ads would kill that. It's the same as email - gmail presents a nice discreet screen, the ads are unobtrusive and it looks enough like work. I'm happy using that, but say Yahoo email? No. Loads of flashing animated ads lighting up the page? Ridiculous, and not subtle.
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People are already griping about FB. This might be the impetus that gets people looking at alternatives.
Google Plus is quietly waiting in the wings, and there are sites like vk.com which have virtually everything FB does.
Switching to G+ wouldn't be difficult -- most Android devices have a hook for it, and the iOS app is easy downloadable.
Similar with VKontakte and other FB-like sites. It may not be a US social networking site, but Americans are tolerated.
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Beyond this, there are some important differences.
Google has successfully gone from monetizing search to monetizing their search algorithms (data matching) for advertising. For example, I go to google to look up something, yes there are ads there, but they are non intrusive. There are also ads extended out to other sites, but again are non intrusive. Google now can focus on data acquisition instead of monetization. A lot of their still remaining technologies (google voice, youtube, email, etc, translate
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While Google Plus is a nice aside for them, Facebook (and the companies that make the apps) are completely dependent on the whims of their product... i.e. their subscribers. Squeeze too much, and FB's stock price will be hurting very hard, very fast.
FB is in a corner. If they don't find a way to dangle a carrot in front of developers and advertisers, they will stop paying money or writing for that platform, and with them being public, there is always the constant lash of the stockholders and the quarterly
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If they piss of enough people, they're dead. It won't happen quickly, but in time their 1 billion customers will shrink a few million at a time.
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i already use adblock but mucking up my news feed is completely unacceptable.
If you care that much about your news feed, I doubt you're going anywhere...
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I check Facebook because my extended family posts there; some of them I wouldn't be comfortable talking with one-on-one because we don't have a lot in common (and I've tried!), but I still want to know how they're doing because I love them and care about their well-being. Facebook isn't my main hangout and I rarely post there myself, but to quit FB entirely I would either have to cut myself off from my extended family a little bit, or else convince all of them (most of whom are not particularly computer-sa
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1) When your computer is off, or disconnected from the internet, no one can access your data. This could be addressed by syncing your personal data across all your devices, so that when one is off, one or more of the others is available as a backup. Unfortunately, this increases the attack surface and makes problem 2 worse. I also don't think keeping your private data in a bittorrent-like swarm would work privacy-wise.
2) Given the malware-