When it comes to social media, people rarely "exit" when they're very dissatisfied. A few people do, but most of the ones who are displeased with changes in the service respond by shifting some of their previous uses of it to other services while continuing to use it in different or more reduced ways.
For example, people mostly didn't leave Facebook after getting the message that Facebook is bad for privacy, but in the early days of Facebook I could find nearly every single one of my friends' phone numbers and home addresses on their profiles, and the "phone book" feature was very useful. Now, hardly anyone puts their address there, only a minority put their phone numbers there, and the "phone book" feature is mostly forgotten (I don't even know if they've removed it, I haven't looked for it in a couple of years at least). What kinds of photos people post, and how much they share, has changed a lot over the years, but most of the people who pulled back in this way didn't delete their accounts, and still post material there when they don't care much if it "leaks".
I've observed a similar thing with Google services over the past couple of years. People pull back by shifting some of their activity to other providers, while continuing to heavily use Google.
I don't know about you, but I've used Google Street View in residential areas a lot, and never once for "casing".
I've used it to look up someone's address I'm going to visit and then get a view of that portion of the street so I could recognize it more easily.
I've used it when helping a friend shop for new houses, to look at some of the places that published open houses and help narrow down which ones to actually take the time to go visit.
I've used it when chatting with distance friends online to show them places familiar to me.
That's a bizarre statement, and certainly not grounded in facts, yet you seem to believe it is factual. Plenty of long-term happily married men and women have had non-relationships sex. Your worldview is blinding you in a seriously astounding way.
I see things like this coming up in the literature from time to time, since the mid-90s or so when OO started becoming all the rage.
Even back then, though, I could never convince myself that it was a good model, until Perl5 came along and I started using objects without inheritance. Perl5 allowed inheritance, but it made has-a relationships just as easy and convenient to use as is-a relationships, and didn't push the is-a (inheritance) ideology at me, so I didn't bother because it wasn't useful as far as I could see.
I'm still convinced that the disadvantages of is-a OO (using a lot of inheritance) far outweigh the advantages, and that it is a misguided model for programming. has-a (containers without inheritance), on the other hand, is comfortable for me.
Okay then, your comment about this in the post was dishonest. Rather than explain that this is something you oppose and that's the reason you won't do it, you tried to explain it as something that "quality women" won't do (and then added an aside about how you're not really interested so that's not a big deal). I wonder if this attempt to rationalize is related to the reasons you're dissatisfied, and whether there are other things your question is hiding or obscuring in similar ways.
I'm more productive the more active, engaged, and social I am. This can come from a variety of sources: Anything that gets my mind engaged, gets me to do more things, gets me out and about more, gets me to meet people, gives me things to plan and things to do.
So, for example, I'm more productive when employed than unemployed, even on projects unrelated to work, even you'd think I'd have more time for those when unemployed. Part time work, or multiple contracts and gigs of very different sorts (such as a political campaign and a sysadmin contract) is even more effective than a single every-day job.
Relationships generally have these kinds of effects on me: I plan outings, trips, and dates. I meet her friends, and go to things she likes. Interaction with her is mentally engaging. So, Relationships make me more productive.
I'm not sure what you mean by "unattached casual sex" - if you mean it literally, then I don't have very much experience with it. However, I do have plenty of non-relationship sex, with friends. "Quality women" are definitely not universally opposed to this, and it does improve the richness of a bond with someone even without a committed relationship. It also does some of the things I described above (for example, greater motivation to travel to see someone, as well as a greater variety of people-connections) so that also probably increases my mental engagement and productivity.
No, you're not alone. I've been playing Settlers for years, and it's long been a favorite of a number of friends of mine in different cities who don't all know each other. Perhaps it's been a niche game this whole time and will go "mainstream", but its niche hasn't been that obscure.
I think it may just be because the title "De-anonymizing social networks" didn't actually convey what the experiment found, and it's the result (as communicated in the title here) that got people interested enough to click.
Actually, I'm pretty sure year comparisons are more standard than month comparisons, for a lot of financial and economics stats. The press sometimes reports ambiguously, but since year-to-year comparisons tend to be more useful, they also tend to be more often used.
If someone joins a group, for example, I'm much less likely to see that, whereas before I might've looked at the group based on the title. If someone adds a friend who I know, I probably won't notice now, whereas before I might've seen it and added that friend. These kinds of things are valuable for social networking.
What kind of performance are you measuring, and why does it matter more than other kinds?
Are you really comparing the new design with what was the case a month ago? You sound like you're comparing the previous design with the older 2006-2008 design.
It's possible (though not very likely IMO) that that could turn out to be "much better" once app writers adapt their apps to it, and people get used to it. In the meantime, though, the viral aspect of apps was based on publishing actions people take, as a side-effect of people taking those actions, and that just isn't happening now. You do NOT see this stuff on your homepage anymore.
As I pointed out, it's not just apps. Photo tagging, friending, and a host of other Facebook actions that used to be viral aren't anymore.
Your analysis is much too simplistic, and lumps a number of very different episodes of Facebook change into one common pattern when in fact they differed significantly, and what happened after was different.
See my comment in reply to devicenull for more detail.
They've done a lot more than that. Most significantly:
1. There is no more news feed, they've eliminated it! What you now see on the homepage is basically a "status update feed". While they've enhanced status updates so that they now combine the former share/post functionality, every other kind of action that used to go in the news feed is no longer there. This has a lot of corrolaries. For example:
2. Apps can no longer be viral. When you take an action in an app that causes it to post to your profile wall, that action will not appear on your friends' homepages, so they won't see it unless they go looking for it.
... the same is true for other things: For example, when someone tags a photo of one of your friends, you'll no longer see that on your homepage. You'll only be notified of the new photos if the person who posted the photos is your friend.
There are a lot of other bad changes and features removed, but that's probably the biggest problem.
You're making a mistake in not looking at the substance of what people have said and are saying, and collapsing several very different episodes into "every time facebook makes a change". Reactions to Facebook changes, and results, have actually been quite different.
The first big outcry was about the introduction of newsfeeds. People were upset because Facebook sprang it on them by surprise, and suddenly information was being shared in new ways that people weren't used to, hadn't expected, and had no control over. In the long run, newsfeeds turned out to be one of Facebook's most useful and visionary features, but they did make two mistakes:
1. Surprising people, causing them to realize after the fact that they'd shared information in ways they hadn't intended
2. Providing no control. Facebook's success owes a lot to the way it offers people very granular control over their privacy and sharing.
Facebook fixed #2 by adding granular privacy controls for newsfeeds, and #1 just naturally fixed itself once people figured out the new system.
A couple of later episodes of "everyone whines" were different: Facebook made a big mistake, everyone complained, and Facebook backed down completely, thus quieting the criticism:
1. "Beacon", which let partners' web sites post to people's feeds (for example, you buy a book at Amazon and it appears on your feed). Facebook pulled Beacon. They later began reintroducing some of the more useful aspects of Beacon in limited ways, with better user control, and this has been useful.
2. The change to Terms of Service a few months ago. Huge outcry, Facebook admitted their error, backed out the changes, and started work on a new terms of service to fix problems in public view with public comment.
Another case, and probably the one you're thinking of, was last year's profile redesign. That time, Facebook did things right: They informed people early, and opened a group where they posted weekly mock-ups of what they were thinking and asked for comments in a managed way, and responded to the previous week's comments. The process went for several months, and I followed it and could see how it improved the design significantly.
When the new design came out, some people did indeed object vocally. But a lot of other people (me included) saw the value of it because we'd been included during the design process, and because the new design really did have a lot of advantages, which we could articulate. This outcry took a different path than previous ones: Facebook did not have to make any changes, and instead, proponents of the new design eventually converted most of the opponents.
When Pages were overhauled recently in the same way as the Profile redesign from last year, there was no major outcry.
And now we come to this new Facebook redesign: It really is AWFUL. They threw away all that they learned last time. They took out most of the advantages of last year's redesign, eliminated many of the most useful features, and actually went back even further, effectively eliminating the newsfeed. They did not include users in the redesign process, and they did not give previews or warning.
Your analysis is much too simplistic, and misses almost everything significant about the differences between these episodes of Facebook changes followed by objections from users, and therefore misses all of the factors that make each episode different from some of the others.
Generally, I just use my own (co-located) DNS server from my laptop. However, I sometimes run into problems with wireless providers away from home, especially at airports: sometimes they have it set up such that you have to log in or pay at a URL that they expect the local DNS resolver (which their DHCP will have handed you) to resolve to the local server.
So, for example, foo.someprovider.net when resolved at City Airport using the local DNS server will point to an IP handling payment/login for City Airport, but the very same hostname foo.someprovider.net at OtherCity Airport will resolve to a different IP that happens to be the payment/login server on the local net at OtherCity Airport.
I've run into other instances of this. Basically, not taking the DNS server that DHCP hands you, sometimes causes problems. Usually you can figure out what's happening and change your settings, so it's an annoyance rather than a real failure.
Well, of course: Facebook started by serving a specific niche (campus social life) that was very large, but that no social networking site specifically focused on. By doing so, it built critical mass quickly.
Lots of new social networking sites are starting these days focusing on specific niches, and they're very useful within those niches. And then there's ning and its ilk, which are "meta-niche" social network sites.
There are also still a number of very large unserved niches that create openings for new Facebook-like social network sites. (I'm actually kicking around the idea of going for one of those that I happen to be very familiar with)