Facebook's fail is going to be epic
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
The hypothesis that high schoolers with Facebook profiles will continue to use them throughout life is only now being put to the test. And here's the thing: In high school, many people really care to know exactly what each of their classmates is doing and who they are dating. Sometimes that continues through college. But eventually people grow older, and they escape the social fishtank that is school, and they go out into the world... and, what do you know, eventually you stop hanging around with all of your school friends. You make a big show of keeping up with all of them for a while... but eventually it tapers down to sending Christmas cards now and then. You visit every few years. And you certainly don't visit them all.
I'm not saying that you'll ever stop using social networks. But there are a lot of social networks now. They're not that hard to develop, and they're just going to keep getting easier. And the result may well be that different people will gravitate to different ones as they go through life.
Facebook's counterargument is that they are going to be the generic platform on which all future special-purpose social nets will be based. But Facebook wasn't designed as a generic platform. It was designed as a social network for college students. And I'm not sure that opening the user base and tacking on a thousand third-party apps has really changed that. It's hard to take a tool that was carefully optimized for one task and repurpose it for N other tasks... especially when there are a thousand competitors with similar technology, and the lock-in isn't that strong.
It's not a social network in terms of meeting new people, but it serves well the purpose of keeping in touch with people you already know.
But PG's essay is mostly about high school and earlier, as I recall. Facebook was originally designed for college students. So I wouldn't want to suggest that the app was built around the kind of warped prison-yard junior-high-school culture described in the essay. The situation is not that bad: Facebook is an app for adults, and it remains relevant for adults. But it is primarily an app for young adults, of a certain age and social position.
Sites have flat spots. I would be careful before counting those guys out.
hardly indicative of epic fail
You have to understand that the average facebook user doesn't know who created facebook or what beacon is. Facebook will be around for a long while yet because it provides a useful service with a really big inertia.
Seems like everyone with money invested in web 2.0 really wants them to succeed. Your argument works equally well there. Don't be so sure of Facebook's infallibility, either.
Basically, everybody just chill out.
My bet is that the truth is in the middle as usual, just like when the first bubble bursted, it was a godsend who cleaned up all the mess produced by the basical non-understanding of the internet.
You are using an incompatible web browser.
Sorry, we're not cool enough to support your browser.
Please keep it real with
one of the following browsers:
⢠Firefox
⢠Opera
⢠Safari
⢠Flock
Facebook (C) 2008
â Hacker News*new | comments | leaders | jobs | submit login
[grayarrow] Facebook's fail is going to be epic (theregister.co.uk)
48 points by nickb 1 day ago | 68 comments
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
[ ]
¢ [add comment]
[grayarrow] 14 points by pg 18 hours ago | link
¢ *Judging from the eager way in which people are seizing on
this tiny bit of evidence, it seems like a lot of people
want FB to fail. And when you want something to be true you
* should be especially skeptical of evidence for it.
Sites have flat spots. I would be careful before counting
those guys out.
¢ nreply
/sarcasm (just in case)
My next app I am going to put in 'zeta' for the duration of it's lifespan, to show that its super-duper mature.
value_per_user = valuation / num_users
an easy example: if facebook made 15B per year with 5B in profit, they could distribute dividends of the 5B each year to stockholders. In only 3 years, your original investment would be paid back and it would be all profit (to the investor) from that point on.
Would you think that was a good deal? I would! So good that it'd get bid up on the open market way past 15B.
Not to mention that we don't know what percentage of the 50 million are active, participating users.
That's a bargain compared to GeoCities, which, I believe was purchased by Yahoo for $1100 per user.
Of course 100x is an extremely high valuation multiple for a company based on fundamentals instead of speculation, so if they can't monetize, or if they stop growing, or if attrition goes up, then their multiple goes down and then they might have to make $6, $12, or $24 in profit/user/yr, which I'm pretty sure is unreasonable.
Moral of the story: we're all guessing. If they can monetize, then every doubter is wrong. If they can't, then every doubter says "I told you so."
Personally, I've yet to find a reason to even visit Facebook. I still have plenty of old friends - don't need any replacements yet, nor a different way to keep in touch with them.
The problems they have come from too much success, too soon, and some boneheaded mistakes that they made in the glare of a media spotlight.
Rather than stunting social networking, it seems MS is just trying to get in the game, since their home-grown efforts to date have been lackluster.
Besides, typically, if someone is going to give you money at an absurd valuation, unless the terms are particularly onerous, it makes sense to take it.
I don't have any friends there, so this is just speculation, but if I had to guess, I'd pick the latter.
You're right about accepting large valuation investments.
By the same token, it's hard to imagine the investor rooting for the company to fail, after having taken a stake (unless, of course, MS really has a Facebook killer waiting in the wings).
I guess I'm not the only one...
Let's not forget the $1,000,000 initial retainer to do any kind of partnership with them (i.e., Beacon).
Articles like this one tend to neglect the fact that armies of smart people concentrated in one place worth not less (perhaps more) than previous achievements, be it user accounts, traffic or revenue.
Facebook is a LOUSY ad platform because users are interested in interacting with friends, not watching ads.
The subject is bang-on: Facebook's fall will be EPIC
I see it like the free-rider problem: facebook is like roads or plumbing or some other infrastructure, everybody profits from having one central established social network, but the reason it is in that position is because it's free. The hard part is just like paying for roads - you have to find a way of getting people to pay for it without diminishing its appeal
Would it be a total collapse? If advertising isn't working, well...
As for page views option, that wouldn't work either. I, personally, don't do more than 10 page views a day and most of my friends are the same. I suspect many people just check their profile, answer wall posts or messages, look at some apps and log out. There is not much there that can hold your attention.
All Facebook can really do now is pray that people still find it interesting. I think the Beacon was their attempt at monetizing the interest. That got shut down, so they're SOL.
I suspect many people spend hours and hours on it. These are the ones who should, perhaps, be urged to pay. The light users are more likely to leave on any harassment.
Possibly, because it wouldn't happen in isolation. Some still-free FB competitor would make a huge effort to get all the users who didn't want to pay, get most of them, and then most of the paying users would leave FB because their friends had.
I think that they think that charging for access would be a disaster
Bigger fools is all. I won't lament their loss.
$1B is a ton. He should have taken that and went laughing to the bank.
10 years from now, facebook will be forgotten and social networks will seem even lamer than they do now. They are easy to build, and really they come down to this: messaging platform (like email except not as well developed) shared address book that allows you to navigate through to other people's address book (friend list) *basic personal website where you can easily put pictures and text up and have comments.
They consider themselves a platform for apps, but the apps are pretty lame, and just waste time.
Agreed. The only thing these applications really do for people is to make it easy to stay in touch with their friends without resorting to more standard internet techniques such as instant messaging, email and personal websites.
Those are not things you need a specialized web application for and sooner or later the "average internet user" (the core consituency of these "social apps") will figure that out.
When that will happen exactly is simply a question of marketing. It's a lot easier to sell the proposition that "here's our social app, you can use it to let all your friends know what you're doing and it's going to allow long lost friends to find you" than it is to sell something like Wordpress, which, together with Google, can do the same thing.
In ten or twenty years everyone's just going to have a blog of some sort and we'll be using Google to find people. Facebook will be history.
That said I think there are plenty of things Facebook could do to stave off a total collapse. Based on the success of the scrabble application, if I were them I'd make a big effort to become more integral to the online gaming community.
Those that require you to send invites to friends before you can make use of it, or simply requiring you to add the application just to see how someone has ranked you compared to the rest of your friends should get a slap on the wrist. It kills usability, and it hurts. I'll never use these apps, I'm just curious to see what my friend is trying to tell me.
Then again, at the same time you have applications that say you have a message waiting for you, when it's really nothing more than an invitation from someone else. Borderline Spam Marketing from your friends. And when your friends Spam you, what asylum is left?