Offer events Offer to migrate your photos and posts (that Facebook offers to let you export to HTML) That'd be a good start.
I think the only thing that a social network could really do to pull people away from Facebook is to create a service which appeals to extremely hip early adopters, and then gradually expand their focus and features to match pace with users who drift over to be where the hip people are. Simply offering feature parity with Facebook is never going to do it, because all other things being equal, people will always choose to be where their friends are. They're certainly not going to do it with improved privacy options and friends management capabilities (circles). That shit's not hip.
Most people (who aren't teenagers) don't have time to muddle through learning new software unless they are dragged into it kicking and screaming. As crappy as Facebook is, people aren't going to migrate unless they have compelling reasons, and even then they still probably won't.
And that's one reason why I prefer G+ to FB. You can go back and forth on how evil or user unfriendly each company is, but Google has the Data Liberation Front. Export your profile and stream to HTML.
That's very nice, I don't need it at the moment but it's good to have the option. So are you saying that Facebook offers no data export whatsoever? Surely you could at least cobble together some tool that uses Facebook APIs to pull out your data?
I just did it out of idle curiosity. You get a zip file containing your photos and videos and a bunch of HTML to tie it all together and present it. One of the HTML files also has all of you wall posts. Mine go right back to 2007 and managed to crash Firefox the first time I clicked the Wall link.
Sadly, there is no way to take your history from one social network to another and maintain the historical nature of it. I can't export my Facebook and import it to Google+ such that the posts from 2007 on FB appear as being posts on G+ in 2007. That is probably the reason that despite having an account on pretty much every social network I barely post on them. I'd rather post on my own blog, which has changed hosts and even domains many times since I started it in 1998, but if you go to where it currently resides it has all my posts from the beginning to now.
A friend of mine told me to join Google+. He said it had much better privacy protection, because no one was on Google+.
LOL it's funny because it's true. I don't see what the big deal about having a history. Social networks should be all about 'the now' and 'your future starts today' sort of thing. If all of my friends switched to Google plus I would drop Facebook in a second, no matter what kind of history it had.
I may have used this thread to track some people down on FB. I know FB is evil, but it's where all my IRL friends hang out so I go there. So if you get any requests from an Alex today, you know who it is!
I finally went ahead today and tried out this G+ thing. I'm not really sure that it's something I'd be using too often as a) absolutely nobody I know IRL uses it (most of my friends, even the more nerdy ones haven't even HEARD of it) and b) I am incredibly anti-social and social media in general frightens me :).
Facebook is for people you know in real life. Google+ is for people you don't know in real life, like a forum.
I find the mash of friends + random "interesting" people really annoying. I am sure I could turn it off, but meh, close tab is easier. I just don't get G+. I come here to talk to fellow nerds, don't need Google's help.
Google wants everyone to use Google+, obviously. I'm talking about how people seem to be using these networks.
Or not using them. I log in about once a month, if even that, mostly to see what you and Jason Pace have linked.
So G+ now has communities, which are even better for a purpose like this -- people can post to the community when they have something relevant, and if you subscribe to the community rather than the people, new joiners get automatically added to your circles, etc. Of course, in a way a G+ community actually overlaps with a forum, so.
