Is Facebook Really Just AOL 2.0? | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook Really Just AOL 2.0?

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14 pointscocaman22 comments

Yes - Facebook will become the next eBay or AOL.

Facebook does not actually do anything particularly well. Indeed, I'd go as far as saying they succeed in spite of themselves. Their interface is busy. Their app is always spamming me. The messaging infrastructure sucks. They have confusing privacy policies (and underhandedly change them). Their photo management is weak. I'm constantly being petitioned for scammy quizzes and second-rate games. The list goes on...

The only thing Facebook has, and it's tremendously valuable, is the social graph. They really were just at the right place at the right time.

Over the next few years people are going to gradually decide that dealing with all the shit and cruft of Facebook isn't worth the diminishingly interesting experience of half-heartedly stalking the people you thought were fascinating 10 years ago. And since the value of Facebook is the social graph - once the graph starts contracting, it will do so at an accelerating rate.

The social web will likely continue to be a growing plain, but it won't really get interesting until it starts dealing in standards and decentralization.

Facebook does not actually do anything particularly well.

I largely agree with your sentiments about the spamminess of Facebook, but you got this very very wrong.

Facebook has astonishingly well-run engineering and design operations. What they do in terms of scalability makes Google's operations look like child's play. They are web UI design leaders, and they keep rolling out changes at an amazing pace (they push significant changes multiple times per week). The interface is cluttered yes, but it's cluttered in the same way Photoshop's UI is cluttered, that is it caters to the needs of heavy users.

It's okay and maybe even a moral obligation to hate Facebook for its time-wasting banality, but don't hate them for being good at what they do. Claiming it's all luck is like some kind of playground taunt; their operations blow the vast majority of tech companies out of the water (look at how they ran circles around Twitter). It's good discipline to recognize greatness in companies you don't like, and Facebook has a lot of important lessons for any tech startup.

I agree with you: there is a lot to dislike about facebook if you prefer to, but there is also a technological achievement there that is frustratingly difficult to deny. But I don't think they will go the way of AOL (at least not for many more years) for two major reasons: address book and photos. I know plenty of people who have two contact lists: the numbers in their phone and the people they are friends with on facebook. Sure, systems like the one Palm has let you download your contact list from facebook, but until most people are aware of that option, they will continue to use facebook as the way to keep track of people. And photos. Man, was that a killer app for that site. I personally know several friends who never wanted to sign up for facebook, but ended up having to do it so they could see their friend's wedding pictures or baby pictures or vacation pictures. And I also know friends who put their pictures on facebook and nowhere else, because they don't do back-ups or have a consistent place to store them locally and assume facebook will always have their pictures for them.

Until people can easily get contacts and pictures off of facebook and onto another accessibly sharing service in an automated fashion, they will continue to depend on it.

Fair enough. Serving completely dynamic content to 200+ million uniques is a pretty solid achievement in itself.

Though still, with the growth they've been seeing, doing anything besides throwing PhDs and scalability geeks at the problem would have been colossal foolishness (see Twitter).

I'll make the weak speculation today that Google Buzz will be the new social network for "grown-ups" and leave Facebook to the teens (and old people). Similar to the MySpace -> Facebook migration. Mostly because people love Gmail so much.

There are similarities between Facebook and AOL. But one significant difference is the interface. AOL had a proprietary client to access its service network. It made sense at the time, but it was often clunky, had not-insignificant bugs, and generally behaved like an application separate from the rest of my user experience. The client also wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as a web browser (though AOL CD's were so common that we used them as coasters and frisbees).

Facebook itself may be a closed network, but it's a closed network running in an open client---my web browser, which works on all my computers and my cellphone. Since the Facebook team doesn't have to build the end-user software, they can focus on their core competencies of the network and the user experience inside the browser. That takes a lot of the complexity off of them that AOL had to embrace (in my experience, the Mac client was never as reliable as the Windows client, for example).

Facebook could go into the business of making its own client apparatus (such as a branded phone), but why bother? The web is serving quite well for them as a transport medium. I think that AOL suffered badly when the state of the internet became "There are these closed networks, and then there is everything else, and you need two end-user clients to access the two separate systems." As walled-in as facebook is, I still use the same client to access it as I use to access the rest of the web, and hyperlinks inside facebook and the larger web can still interoperate between each other seamlessly. That's an architectural strength that AOL didn't get to leverage.

Other similarity: I've used Facebook free for 1000 hours.

At least I don't keep getting facebook cd's in the mail.

I just realized that because Facebook makes "unfriending" so public most people never do that, which leads to an ever-growing circle of friends. You can hide people, but you can't hide yourself form them without them knowing it. The only way to politely terminate unwanted relationships is to quit using facebook and move on to something where you have more control, or at least something fresh.

I didn't think unfriending was public. Is that a new thing?

I've done it before and never noticed any public announcements.

It's not public in that way, i.e., people don't get notified you "unfriended" someone but you can show up in the "unfriended" person sugestions when you "unfriend" that person. If that person is also friend with some of your friends then it's almost sure you'll show up on the sugestions box thus making it public. My workaround: I have a list named "Not really friends" with people I can't afford to delete (think big company employees for example).

Oh I had no idea! It turns out they have a black-list: you can create a group and then hide any post you make form that group! This is so awesome. I take back what I said above.

If you block them, you don't show up in the suggestions, and they will never see any news about you or your posts in mutual friends feeds.

It is, of course, a little conspicuous because they will never see you tagged in a picture.

No, because AOL made a s* load of money, leeching 30 dollars a month from millions of people, where Facebook is trying to monetize.

There's a reason it merged with Time Warner: AOL was making tons of raw cash.

With that many users, Facebook can also make tons of money if they choose to do so. They are simply focused on other priorities at the moment.

But whereas AOL had paid subscriptions (and some adverts), Facebook appears to only be able to serve adverts. Would Facebook survive if they charged $30 a month?

Also, AOL made money from dial-up - now, everyone's on 'the Internet' which various phone companies provide - not AOL.

How are you going to move ~400 million people to a new social network?

How many people used AIM at its peak? How many use it now vs. Skype / GTalk / etc.? Watching the shifting sands of Friendster / Orkut / MySpace / Facebook has made me believe that Facebook's hold on its currently vast user-base will always be tenuous. It will never be entirely irrelevant (same can be said for AOL) but has no guarantee that it will continue to dominate.

One social circle at a time.

one foot in each

I use facebook and Orkut. Sure, I use one more than the other, but there's possibility for that to shift because I'm free to use both.

Ask MySpace and Friendster.

hey, that's a billion dollar question

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