I understand the rate of conversion to any religion via websites to be quite low. Wouldn't it be better to encourage that children ask pertinent questions about belief systems that they can't really avoid hearing about?
How a site's look affects traffic patterns and revenue is an incredibly complex and well-researched nebula. For example, Marissa Mayer talks about how a couple pixels of whitespace and subtle differences in color shades drastically affect traffic on Google.
I don't buy that un-categorically "if your website looks BMW-fancy your visitor is going to assume BMW-pricing". Rather than opining one way or another about what look is "right" for sites, I'd be interested in the process of finding that look.
There are some good points here, but that shorthand they use makes a lot of the post a guessing game. If you wrote this, it might be really great if you fleshed it out so that other people could understand it easily.
Yes, but the story of why Facebook is successful is more involved than that, and much more useful than you give it credit for.
Facebook started because Mark Zuckerberg was notorious for hacking yearbook pictures out of a sort of Harvard-official online phonebook (a "facebook") and setting a website to mash them up against each other in a hot-or-not style competition. Capitalizing on this notoriety, he was able to replace the original "facebook" directory, commenting to the Crimson something to the effect "I can do it better, and I can do it in two weeks".
After that, yes, there is very probably some truth to the fact that it may have pandered to the elitism of ivy league schools, but the real lesson here is that Facebook had access to probably the best audience of any social networking site, ever -- a group of highly-social shakers and movers -- and was able to expand because there were similar needs in other similar schools. There have been probably hundreds of social networking sites that never failed to take off; this is, IMO, the key factor that separates them. The other thing is that, they were lucky about the network they were replacing; an online student directory translates very well into a MySpace alternative, as MySpace is arguably really a tool to interact in the world of MySpace. People were ready to be themselves online, they just needed good privacy control.
A startup like Diaspora does not have the luxury of a built-in user base like the Harvard student body. Nor does it replace a very extensible tool that everyone likes/needs. These are all very big disadvantages.
...I'd just like to let you all listen to what someone with an IQ that high actually sounds like. Regardless of which side you come down on, let us not forget that these people are not inhumanly, insolubly brilliant. Like all other people, they and their brains are puzzles, and when we measure their (or our) intelligence, it is NOT certain what it is that we're measuring.
And by the way, it's often said that such-and-such the historical figure was supposed to have an IQ of like 180, but I would also like to remind everyone that these figures were given by an assistant to Lewis Terman, whose ill-fated and decades-running IQ experiment successfully proved that IQ doesn't actually indicate how successful one is at much of anything, INCLUDING doing sort of computation except those types that appeared on the test. Those figures were manufactured before we had any indicator that really smart people like Einstein have necessarily high IQs. Just a thought. Lewis Terman. Look him up.
HA! You just don't get it. ALL the processes for which the internet provides a mission-critical service are going to freeze. What happens when MasterCard suddenly can't access the balance of its creditees anymore? What happens when you need your social security check? What happens when you need money from a bank? Who's tracking stocks? How are you going to get all your important emails, or your contacts, or your off-site financial records from company x? All these processes are not trivially related to the internet; they depend on it in a way that cannot just be "fixed". Make not mistake, our financial system is completely and 100% dependent on internet, and if you take it away, there will be a complete disaster. Sure, some of it will eventually get where it needs to go, but some of it won't. And some of that information you need NOW.
I'll say it again: without the internet, these processes FREEZE. And that's just the effects that don't involve the lack of ability to communicate. Here are some more:
Google is worth $154 billion. That's one company alone. There are lots of companies, lots of small business that are purely internet companies. I'd say, what, a couple trillion dollars worth just in the valley alone? What happens when the internet disappears? They are all suddenly useless. Maybe it doesn't sound like a big deal, but there is a LOT of money tied up in those companies. Not only would investors lose basically all money (and thus, losing their ability to leverage more bets, etc., depending on how deep they were in), the companies that were banking on those companies to buy things would lose money. And many, many more companies would lose time and energy due to vastly decreased productivity related to not being able to get those products in as fast a manner as the internet allows.
Then there's the fact that there is a lot of valuable information stored on the internet. What happens when MasterCard suddenly can't access the balance of its creditees anymore? Who's going to absorb that debt? You? What happens when you need your social security check? What happens when you need money from a bank?
It's no secret that e-commerce is big business in the US. Even a lot of businesses that are relatively small do e-commerce a lot of times, so you also have to count the fact that all their investments are sunk, too. Then there's the cost of the lost business that brought them, which they may have been banking on. Then there's the fact that, again, they can't get goods as fast as they used to because the efficient means of communication are gone.
Then there are the international implications, which means you can take all of what's said up there, and cross-apply the affects to them, as well as how those effects will affect us.
Oh, and I still haven't discussed the fact that you benefit more than you even know from information accessibility. For the last 10+ years, you've been slowly teaching yourself that you don't need to memorize everything because you have the internet. What happens when you need all those facts, but now they're gone? What happens when reporters don't have access to those facts? What happens when vital government organizations don't have access to those facts? And it's not just you: our entire society is built around this accessibility of information. Without it, we are blind.
So yes, the internet is integral to our way of living, and in fact, the way of living of the world as a whole. If you cannot see that, you need to exit the tech sector immediately.
He said that the internet is not something that society absolutely cannot function without. He is wrong. Society very much depends on the internet. The fact that not everyone has a Faceboook profile is inconsequential to this, and I would point out that the one does not follow the other.
Further, saying that the failure lies in the fact that we need to "make software just as intuitive as older technology", is just hilarious. Since when is "older technology" intuitive? Simple, sure, but intuitive? It's not like the natural state of an old-fashioned phone call is fraught with complexity, and that phone companies have won a major victory by wrapping them in a simple user interface. You just call, then you're done. If that's intuitive, I assure you, it's accidental. And have you ever sent a letter before? What's intuitive about addressing an envelope, or styling your letter accordingly? What's intuitive about stamping it and sending off? We've been doing it forever, but that doesn't make it natural.
What you want to say is that we should be making software a simple and familiar as older technology. But at what cost? I love my smart phone, and as far as I'm concerned, it's about as close to being as simple as it can get, while still implementing all these features I like. I'm not switching to a Jitterbug any time soon. Sure, it's intuitive, but it's also simple. My phone is intuitive and functional. That's a win for me.
The fact is, at the end of the day, progress is made by breaking the norm. I don't want to go back to the simplicity of old phones; I don't want to look everything up at a library; I don't want to do everything the "old" way. But with these leaps in progress, a lot of people have been left behind.
On the contrary, even if you don't use the web on a consistent basis, you actually do still depend on it. When people coordinate shipping groceries, they use the internet. When people plan any aspect of any product you use, they use the internet. When newscasters and radio announcers ready their words and check their facts, they benefit greatly from the internet.
One of the greatest benefits of the internet is that information breathability has increased drastically. A generation ago, if you wanted to know why the economy was falling apart around your ears, you might look at a newspaper, but if you didn't understand, there wasn't a lot you could do. These days, you have a million web sites and powerful tools for organizing information. Ignorant people these days versus ignorant people those days are drastically different.
And the debate is not about whether Facebook is intractable social DNA. The debate is whether it is a tremendously bad thing that users can't tell whether they're on Facebook or not. They can't, and therefore their ability to access information is greatly diminished.
I don't honestly see how you could think anything different.