True enough, but Z either got greedy or started drinking his own kool-aid.
$1B is a ton. He should have taken that and went laughing to the bank.
$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.