Do You Feel Facebook Is Still a Social Network?

With a successful period of almost 10 years, Facebook started as a means to connect to people and now has become more of an advertising platform.

Your timeline now contains page suggestions your friends have liked earlier. Also the sidebar has more ads for other pages you might have visited once. In the Facebook for Android app too you find ads popping up in your timeline. So they have totally become a place where you advertise your product.

So is Facebook moving from being a social network to an advertising media?

Do you think there is a need to redefine the concept of social networking?

Please do vote on the above poll to make sure how many are socially present.

As I predicted earlier, Facebook usage will decline and more distributed systems will take over. They are now talking about showing advertisements on Facebook's Android Home. I wonder who, in their correct senses, would love advertisements on the phone's homescreen?

Facebook was always an advertising media.

It was not always an advertising media in my opinion. With the growth of facebook I think today many organizations have come in touch with their users. They might use it for promotional purposes but along with it user queries and problems are being solved using facebook as a platform. Not only the young generation but also our parents are keeping in touch with their old friends settled somewhere else. Everything degrades with time and I just hope that facebook does not meet the same fate as orkut did !

Nowadays, content specific and user specific social networks are coming up. There is one App.net which is like a clone to twitter but has no ads at all. They charge about $5 a month, but still have a lot users who really want to socialize.

As far as I remember, there was no Ads on Facebook initially, but gradually as its popularity increased, they have started advertising as well and finally giving competition to Google, though they are way behind Google in advertising.

Facebook was always an advertising media.

Facebook was never an advertising media, to sustain in market and being profitable advertise were just a medium.

If any one of feel that Facebook is not good as social media platform why we follow the news and login to look for social happenings?

For me Facebook is still providing one of the strongest social media platform.

CB

Nowadays we have apps for every specific task. For news we have RSS reader or news apps, for photo sharing we have instagram, for chatting we have whatsapp, so there are apps for every category of social networking. And the thing is people are preferring all these apps rather than logging in only onto Facebook. I believe as more people in India start using smartphones, more people would start migrating from facebook.

I think people are smarter than companies give them credit for. People flock onto new social platform simply because they are not commercial and devoid of ads. The moment people realize their personal data is being monetized by the company and they are not being heard, they move again.

Anand Tamariya

I think people are smarter than companies give them credit for. People flock onto new social platform simply because they are not commercial and devoid of ads. The moment people realize their personal data is being monetized by the company and they are not being heard, they move again.

How many people have opted out of Google so far?

Kaustubh Katdare

How many people have opted out of Google so far?

People did stop using Orkut. Few people are willing to join G+ though it's so convenient to join using Gmail account.

Anand Tamariya

People did stop using Orkut. Few people are willing to join G+ though it's so convenient to join using Gmail account.

Yeah, but not because Orkut used people's personal data. People moved to FB from Orkut because it was the most popular Social Network in the West.

If you ask people about their knowledge of their own privacy & control over data, you'll be surprised by their ignorance.

First of all, Social Networking is all about sharing personal data with fellow humans - which now-a-days has become easier with the option of synchronization.
What's the point of bringing it into a network then? The whole idea about socializing through the internet should be taken as a public display of yourself on a larger scale. Why do people dress up everyday in smart outfits? - to get recognized. Here you want to be seen - that's why you socialize on a social network. However, monetizing private data without user consent is a crime.

And to socialize well, you need a bigger platform (if you are a bigger player or business tycoon). In my opinion, Facebook just keeps giving better options for all categories of people. They have the avid advertisement options for the business man and start-up entrepreneurs, and lots of other useful applications. However, it's up-to you to decide what you want to choose to avail.

Unfortunately everything is business now, so there's no 'sans advertisement' option (or maybe there's that option for premium users) - this is the only feature that I think Facebook has left out from it's initial idea, during the making of facebook.

I'm not against advertisements on webpages, but ads on FB Homescreen on Smartphones? - come on? Are we nuts to use such apps. Get rid of them!

My policy: Take what's necessary out of everything, get rid of the rest. We live in world of options after all!