I think you're describing EF there actually as it's FB that's taken all the useful events and socialising from this site.

FB will continue to grow (although maybe slower), so it lost 20% of its value, I bet it's still worth 10 times what it was 10 years ago.

As Treverus says, it's an immensely useful site for millions of people for socialising and keeping in touch with friends and family all over the world (including me) and, more importantly, businesses. I run 4 small business pages through FB and nothing comes close to being able to achieve what FB does. Most marketing I do there is free but I spend maybe $100 a month on paid adverts and they are easy, cheap and very effective.

I can see how's it useful for traders, sure, and how these partners, investors or stock holders want it big.

I am still interested why the hit in stock value? It looks sudden, but maybe it isn't? No idea. The few assumptions I mentioned are just a guess.

Skype isn't out of fashion. Microsoft bought it and carefully integrated it into the corporate software they sell. I used to have telephone conferences over some terrible dial in bridges for years. Now I push one button in Outlook to automatically set up a session that includes screensharing, video or whatever I need. Skype was some free tool making little money selling minutes for cents of outgoing calls... now it is replacing very expensive systems from companies like Cisco all the way to WebEx. And companies happily pay for it a monthly fee.

Perfect example of a merger that actually made sense.

No it's (very probably) not.

Next, please.

Probably active users is more significant measure then growth.

There is a definite move to closed social platforms, but most of these are owned by the big tech companies anyway.

As for GDPR that's a red herring as it doesn't massively affect how most platforms or apps use your data and most people only care about data defined as sensitive personal data and less so for personal data

This talks exactly about the over saturation, basically everybody who would want to be on it, is on it already. No big numbers anytime soon.

http://www.google.cz/amp/s/seekingal...9-end-facebook

#deletefacebook is listed as a bigger problem for FB than the new data legislatute.

FB is considered old news. Instagram is the thing. Apparently.

This is a bit of a plug, but my wife is CMO of a Swedish company, IDKA, which is kind of like FB combined with Slack.

You have chat, video chat, and lots of (free and easy to organize) storage! Freemium business model and it is in Beta now, so everything is free, likely until next year. While it is a "social network" you are NOT the product. There is no data harvesting/scraping, and nothing is sold or used by 3rd parties. And no ads.

The biggest difference from FB is there are not millions/billions of people to engage with at the moment you join. Ideally, you bring your own groups to the platform; families, clubs, work groups, entire companies. And of course, Mark doesn't track your phone, or build a detailed profile about your life/habits!

Check it out! Feel free to PM me if you have questions. You can sign up/register directly on the site. My Wife was on EF, but we left CH 7 yrs ago and she is no longer active here.

fduvall

Sounds like a face off!

(Most) Everybody gives their personal data away without a second thought. People simply don't care.

People
- reply to those"Congrats, you have won xy, just reply to this" leaflets
- use Migros' Kumulus points (virtually every retailer the world over does essentially the same)
- demand airlines' frequent flyer programs
- prefer mobiles with "free" operating systems (why would Google do that if not to track and collect your movement data)
- use "free" mail services that openly scan the mails to better target ads
- upload their data, some of which are most intimate and crucial, onto some cloud service, shedding control to some entity they have zero control over
- upload their personal pictures by which they shed control over to, among others, FB

etc etc etc

People (yours truly often, most readers always, included) don't care. They just don't.

I agree with you that most people don't care, but often it's because they fon't really understand what the stakes are. At the end of the day, giving off some of your personal data for may be worth it to you in one situation but not all and the point should be to make an informed decision rather than being 100% "in" or 100% "out".

I left FB during the winter (I think it was in March?) and I don't miss it at all. Admittedly I will lose touch with a few friends, but my real friends know how to reach me and I know how to reach them. It's not possible to maintain a meaningful relationship with more than a few people anyway, especially when you live far apart.

I do my groceries at Migros and I like the cash backs, I use them to buy training gear; Migros is welcome to harvest data on my cottage cheese and ready washed salad consumption. Same applies to Coop, I use their points to pay for cosmetics and wine and in exchange they know that I only buy their grapefruit Eco dishwashing liquid.

I used to fly a lot, being able to check in in the business class line was worth sharing my data with Air France in my opinion.

I'm on LinkedIn. Find it a bit hard not to, but not a big fan.

But I don't use cloud services, I don't participate in free games or answer free surveys, and I'm gradually leaving gmail for protonmail (using gmail for non-personal emails while I'm investigating my alternatives). My last "social" network that I would like to shed I WhatsApp, but I can't seem to get all my contacts over to Signal or Threema, so I gave up on that one; I just cut its access to my address book and pictures and I don't back-up on their cloud.

I try to be conscious about what I give and what I get back and not just hand in my data without a second thought. Hopefully awareness will grow now that the issue gets more media attention.

Honestly, I thought it would be harder to leave FB than it proved to be.
- So far it hasn't happened once that I have missed out on something because it was only on FB. I certainly miss out on things in general, FB or not, but what I don't know doesn't bother me, and it's impossible to do everything.

- I have so far not encountered an app/site where you MUST have a FB account to join. Even Tinder allows profiles without FB now. But it has made me think twice before opening certain accounts, and I've become a lot better at deleting/closing profiles when I don't use a service anymore. Not a bad thing, in retrospect.

- Friends are more complicated, as I have lived in 5 countries and have friends in several more. I had to grudgingly accept to keep WhatsApp, and I keep in touch with people using mostly sms, iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal and Threema. Sure, I don't see the memes, the baby pictures, the perfect vacation reports and the kitten videos, but that's ok. People's lives are becoming so staged on FB that I prefer to stick to messages. And that way my friends are spared pictured from my own "staged" life (because nobody wants to show a less perfect life than their friends, right?!).

Took me several months of pondering, about 6 weeks of transition (f.ex. making sure that I had an address for every single friend, and making an assessment of who really was my friend in the process), one weekend to get it done (downloading FB's file on me and all) and somewhat anticlimactically, I haven't missed it once since.

Which is owned by Facebook.

Like WhatsApp. Which is a shame, really.

At the end of the day, if you pay with your data, might as well be for something useful. PEronsally I find WhatsApp more useful than Instagram, but presumably other think Instagram provides an essential service.

That.

I'm only on FB. No twitter, instagram, etc... I only follow a select few bands and airlines on there, mainly in the vain hope that Led Zepp will tour again.

In the last year, we've organised gig nights, film nights, surprise parties, transport to weddings, dog sitting, house sitting and emergency baby sitting (between friends) on there. I've booked hotels and restaurants. I've also employed a joiner, plasterer, decorator, electrician, landscape gardener, bricklayer, and plumber via PM after using the local 'Find Tradesmen' page and keeping an eye on their FB pages to see photos of their recent work and read customer reviews.

Facey B is going nowhere just yet.

Facebook's biggest problem with continued growth is that it isn't 'cool' for the young folk anymore. It's seen as a website for people's parents to go on and parents aren't cool.

Snapchat seems to be all the craze amongst the younglings but I imagine monetising it is a lot more difficult than it was with Facebook.

The system cannot infinitely make cash on a generation who's just about to get in debt over their education. Plus their taste changes faster than the mammoth algorithms. Visuals are harder to feed into algorithms anyways. I think the FB type of social obligation and exoectation has become bothersome, uncool and parent-like.

Congrats on comeback to real life.

GDPR Red herring...tell that to FB and Zuc.

LOL, time sure flies, huh?