Not to put too fine a point on it: Social networking is a load of crap which is only social and a network by the most trivial of definitions, primarily used by those who have no real (as opposed to virtual) friends and more and more by those who would do evil — even if a certain subset of interactors use it as legitimate communication.
Now, mind you, I'm not much of a Facebook user, and I'm not especially fond of Facebook or its ilk, but...
I don't think that's really a fair statement.
Now, throughout history, whenever you give people the chance to say whatever they like, you find that most folks don't really have anything interesting to say. That's not a problem with social networks; that's a problem with people. Facebook has 500,000,000 active users. Given that many people can't find anything more interesting to talk about than what they had for dinner last night, that means a lot of Facebook posts are about what they had for dinner last night. And given that most people are shallow and superficial and form shallow, superficial social connections, that means many folks on Facebook are shallow and superficial and form shallow, superficial social connections. None of that is a problem with social networks so much as a problem with human nature.
But if you get 500,000,000 people in the same place, you discover that a lot of those folks DO have interesting things to say.
However, what do we need to be once a person gets here? It seems there's a big move to equipment like iPads (Hal's iPad thread got nearly 30,000 views) but, on our site "iPad" is one of five items in one forum. Do we need to have specific forums for iPads and iPhones?
What about the operating systems? We are Mac-computer-centric but maybe we need to have a place where people easily find or search advice about iOS.
Both of those sound like good ideas to me.
The iPad is a red-hot, game changing gadget. I think having an iPad forum is probably an excellent idea. I don't know that I'd be able to contribute to it, as I don't have an iPad (unless one of you wants to buy me one...
) but I think it'd be a great thing to put here.
Similarly, an iOS forum would probably be an excellent idea too.
My guess is that stand alone computer troubleshooting forums do have a future. Computer problems often create a lot anxiety in the user, take a lot of time to fix, and require a good deal of special expertise. I don't think that they will fit easily into multi purpose forums -- and certainly not "personal communication/revelation" forums such as Facebook.
What I see happening is that, particularly for younger users, Facebook is the gateway to the Internet. If folks in the Facebook set have computer problems, they turn to friends for help. If that doesn't work, they don't seem to Google for solutions--they take it in to the Apple Genius bar or something like that. While I would like to think that standalone forums sill have a place, and I definitely agree that they are more appropriate for troubleshooting than Facebook is, the numbers show that standalone forums are dying.
In addition to opening an account for FTM on Facebook or advertising there or both, I'd somehow try to see to it that Google and Yahoo, etc. turn up FTM more than they do. I do not know how to do this. I hope that it is somehow doable.
That's an excellent idea, and something I plan to work on when I have time.
RE Facebook is more than some inane fool posting every thought that comes into his head.
No argument except to say that there are legions of the effete who do.
Sure. And like I said, most folks don't really have a whole lot that's interesting going on in there. That's neither here nor there, of course. In any group of half a billion people (and by the way, Facebook's userbase is one-fourteenth of the total human population...how's that for reach?), a lot of folks won't be interesting and some folks will. If we are to survive, we need to go to where the half a billion people are, not wait for them to come to us.
I wonder if that's maybe a reference to Twitter, which, although it apparently does have some limited usefulness, basically meets the criterion (as well as makes me shudder at the thought of it).
I used to think that way, before I started using Twitter.
As it turns out, Twitter is brilliant. Its simplicity and immediacy fills a nice gap between real-time communication and forums like this; it's more immediate than forums, but less immediate than a phone call. That actually works out really well. I've "met" a number of folks who've become close real-world friends on Twitter.
Yep, there is a lot of rubbish. Same rule as Facebook; get tens of millions of people together and most of 'em won't be interesting. The problem isn't with Twitter, though. Find the ones who ARE interesting, and Twitter becomes extraordinarily useful.
Personally I cannot envision an FTM troubleshooting Facebook page. What I can envision is a page that would be a portal to the FTM site and an option on FTM to "Like" the FTM Facebook page. If all of the FTM users "like" the Facebook page, that would show up in their Facebook profiles and might entice other Mac users to find and join FTM.
Yep, that's about how I see it too. To me, an important part of that is the ability not just to redirect Facebook users here, but to let them log in here with their Facebook ID, so they do not have to register again. Sadly, that will have to wait for the next release of UBB.threads.
I also think that in order to be successful, that FB page will have to be updated frequently, perhaps with particularly good troubleshooting threads from here. You know, give folks a taste of the quality of the troubleshooting advice they can find here.
You need more visibility on the search engines, I my opinion. One-on-one TwitFace referrals are not the solution, I fear. And I have used Facebook (until I got burned). The movie, Social Network, was excellent.
I see more search engine visibility as a stopgap solution; something that's definitely beneficial, but ultimately I do see a shift away from standalone forums that I think is only going to continue. I'm not quite sure where Facebook fits in that equation--it's the 900-pound gorilla right now, but its forum system is so awful that it can't totally squeeze standalone forums out just yet. However, whatever the next step *after* Facebook is, very well might.
'm looking not just a year down the road (I definitely think we can survive that long), but five years down the road. I see an Internet that will become increasingly aggregated in large sites of some sort, whether they be like Facebook or something else, and increasingly hostile to small, standalone forums.
However, just seeing the shape of the problem doesn't really suggest a solution.
