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Comment by ZachPruckowski | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the issue here. Anyone who beats Facebook is going to have to offer nearly all of Facebook's features and some killer-app features of its own. So any Facebook-killer will make it similarly easy to integrate a FBKiller-Connect feature.

And the ramp up of any Facebook-Killer is going to be months or years. In that intervening few years, people will be dual-networked: they'll be using the new network with their friends who have the new network, and they'll be using Facebook for the friends that haven't switched or for legacy features (Farmville), sort of like now, where many people have both a Facebook and a MySpace.

And given the existing fundamental lock-in of the network effects, I don't think Facebook Connect is the largest hurdle someone plotting a Facebook-Killer has to overcome.

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Anyone who beats Facebook is going to have to offer nearly all of Facebook's features and some killer-app features of its own. So any Facebook-killer will make it similarly easy to integrate a FBKiller-Connect feature.

Examples of this? Mature market leaders are not usually unseated by someone out-doing what they do best. They get blindsided by new approaches or market shifts. No one is going to out-Facebook Facebook, their engineering operations are truly truly amazing. The agility they demonstrate at that scale is mind-blowing, making Google's operations look easy by comparison. That doesn't mean they are invulnerable, just that a head-on attack isn't likely to succeed.

Mature Market leaders don't usually have the network effect lock-ins that Facebook has. In a traditional market, I'll swap to the new Product (Product X) as long as Product X does a decent job on the features I use in the original product and something new that makes it better for me.

The problem is that a Facebook-Killer has to be able to attract everyone at once, because of the network effects. It can't just be better than Facebook for me, it has to be better than Facebook for most of my friends (who use completely different subsets of the Facebook features), because I'm not switching unless they do. The end result is that the Facebook-Killer, in order to build its network effects, has to have replicated features and new features that make it better than Facebook for a large segment of the population.

A traditional app-killer can duplicate the most used 40-50% of the App's features and toss in a new revolutionary feature, and it'll take off (since most people don't use App's features that AppKiller didn't implement). However, Facebook is like Word - most people only use 20% of the features, but everyone uses a different 20%. So if you want to grab even a third of Facebook's users, you have to re-implement 60% or more of Facebook's features in addition to your killer features.

The network effect only reinforces my point, I fail to see what you're getting at.

The point here is not necessarily to protect a potential "Facebook Killer," but rather to protect any service that wants and deserves its own piece of the social web. This isn't about duplicating Facebook's feature set but improving on it.

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