F8 Preview: How Facebook Plans to Take Over the Web | Hacker News Reader

F8 Preview: How Facebook Plans to Take Over the Web

gigaom.com

50 pointsjaybol37 comments

They're gonna take over the web with a toolbar and checkins? Nope.

Compare to Google's web browser, phone platform (Android and Google Voice), operating systems, web platform (App Engine), app marketplaces and fiber.

I like Facebook and depend on it. They will happily be a top destination on the web for a long time to come if they keep doing what they are doing: run a pleasant, useful and fun website for keeping in touch with people.

But Facebook is a web app, Google is a technology empire. There's no comparison right now. Twitter and Yelp should be scared, but not Google.

google should most definitely be scared. they make something like 90% of their profit from advertising - advertising based on your search query or the context of the page you're reading. facebook's ad platform has the potential to destory them, given they know your so much more about you, your friends, interests etc.

is it hard for facebook to launch a search engine, with rankings tweaked via the social graph? not really.

is it hard for google to catch up with fb's graph? yes very, but they're trying.

The difference is the last mile. Google's ads target someone looking for something (which is much more likely to result in a sale) whereas facebook's ads target someone looking to check out his friend's pics from last night's party or the profile of a girl he met recently.

Vastly different contexts.

Maybe, in the future, facebook will be able to change this, but it's doubtful. At least not on the facebook.com property. There's a very good reason why social network CPMs are consistently the lowest in the entire industry.

> There's a very good reason why social network CPMs are consistently the lowest in the entire industry.

That's the whole point of the article in my view - Facebook is looking for ways to increase that CPM. If they can do that then they would stand a chance of 'taking over the web'. Yes they probably would have find a way to 'target someone looking for something'. I would estimate that the average user of Facebook is more naive and influence-able in their purchasing than the average Google user which could be a useful advantage.

>google should most definitely be scared. they make something like 90% of their profit from advertising - advertising based on your search query or the context of the page you're reading. facebook's ad platform has the potential to destory them, given they know your so much more about you, your friends, interests etc.

I suspect that your query stream is much richer data than everything you've ever done on facebook.

>is it hard for facebook to launch a search engine, with rankings tweaked via the social graph? not really.

This is dramatically underestimating the difficulty of search. Ranking sites by quality is not hard (in the head at least), and facebook can certainly tweak that well with social data. Ranking pages by relevance to a query is extremely hard.

Google can take the approximation of the social graph that they have (in Gmail & Orkut) and improve search results based on that. I doubt they haven't at least tried to estimate how much does this help.

While I agree that Twitter / Yelp should be scared (very...very scared,) you forget that Google makes little to no money on all of those things you mention. They are a search company. Facebook stands to be a giant threat to their search business.

It's getting a bit boring to say it, but Google is not a search company. They provide search to sell ads (doesn't matter how they started out), so while I agree with the threat conclusion, I doubt Facebook will create the next general purpose search engine.

It's not a war for search. It's a war for user attention.

Per Alexa, the average FB user spends 30+ mins on FB each day; the average GOOG user spends <10 mins on GOOG. And FB has far more extensive info about each user.

I think the risks to GOOG are generally underestimated. It's going to be a great stock to short within the next 3 years.

It's going to be a great stock to short within the next 3 years.

But then what isn't?

Dear everyone, please move to the next freebie online platform and kill facebook so that their plans to use you fail. Please repeat once every 5 years.

This is good enough to keep our privacy for now.

Keep dreaming. Facebook is here to stay.

I mean, even my mom uses it for god's sake.

Yeah, that's what they said about AOL.

I think that's part of the problem, though. Once your parents, coworkers, and old acquaintances have littered your friends list it is no longer a fun experience. To me Facebook just feels like such a chore.

Agreed. Facebook has already become a giant contact list for me, I don't feel like I can "be myself" there b/c of the varied audience (from kid cousins to random ex-coworkers).

"To those who view it as the 21st century version of the online ghetto called AOL"

That's really the question. Is Facebook poised to be the 21st century AOL, or something as fresh and new (and useful) as Google was when it first appeared? This will be an interesting set of developments, especially if discerning users of Facebook can mostly free-ride while doofus users do most of the monetizing for the company.

"Daddy, where were you when privacy died?" "I was on hacker news commenting through facebook connect."

On the one hand, I don't have to use facebook. On the other hand, I worry about the immense asymmetry of information that facebook has about me even if I don't join. If I'm a hole in the social graph (because all my friends use it regularly to post pictures, etc. of me), it doesn't take much effort for them to fill in the data on me.

It would take a hell of a heuristic for facebook to fill in holes in the social graph. Without some very intelligent fuzzy name matching, facial recognition, and textual analysis of your friend's profiles and walls (if you ever are mentioned), not having a profile ID basically means they have nothing on you that can be extracted in an automated fashion.

A human investigator, however, would be intelligent enough to build a profile on you from your friends' submitted information, so there still is some cause for concern. But at least you are safe from datamining.

I will be greatly annoyed if Facebook becomes the default login on other websites.

Funnily enough, I don't mind logging in with my Twitter credentials, but Facebook? That's a no-go.

why?

I submitted this 2 hours ago but without the trailing slash; HN considers those unique URLs?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1280902

That is strange...sorry for the duplicate submission, you were first on it indeed :) From the gigaom.com homepage the article link had the trailing slash and it went through as a unique URL.

No worries, I was just confused :)

A facebook toolbar at the bottom of webpages?

Just a quick reminder: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2040/1924189728_668c4bc4e2.jp...

Those are all at the top, so this shouldn't be a problem ;)

Facebook check-ins mean one thing to me:

The next version of Facebook for iPhone will pop up a "Facebook would like to use your current location" every time I open it, to which I will select "Don't Allow" each time, at last encouraging me to stop using the app and thus stop using Facebook.

I'm still kind of wondering how Facebook continues to thrive, after time and time again showing the Internet it does not do so well with customer service (in more direct terms: has a very hard time listening to its users).

I'm sad to admit the only reason I haven't deleted mine a long time ago is that a good 80% of my friends are completely lost without it, even though they have working email addresses and phone numbers.

Because it has the right combination of easy, useful, and fun for the majority of people.

They treat their users so poorly that they come back every single day.

I think they do a good job of doing things that their users don't know they want, and soldiering through the shitstorms that follow. Except for Beacon, which could've been successful with slight changes.

s lot of people play the games on facebook. did you see the recent article about 7.4 million people on farmville?

I'm pretty sure the number is closer to 80 million. Yes, you can climb back into your chair now.

Here's the thing...I don't trust Facebook to have this much power on my web. They simply haven't consistently shown themselves to be trustworthy when protecting their users conflicts with making money. It would only take one such incident to make me hesitant; and there has been more than one such incident.

I always wonder if people really paranoid about online privacy apply the same fears to their offline lives. That could include always using cash to avoid being tracked by retailers, wearing hats/sunglasses to make yourself harder to identify, making sure no one is looking at you when you go shopping so they can't make a judgement over what you might buy, using fake names whenever possible, wearing gloves to avoid possible finger print traces of your presence, keeping a safe distance from your friends & family in public to avoid any possible observers from noticing you are socially connected. I kind of doubt it. Not sure what to make of that.

Facebook has good chances of taking over the social web for the same reason Microsoft took over the desktop 15 years ago: they target the non-technical majority of the population. Techies usually demand more transparency, flexibility, quality and minimalism, while non-techies, paradoxically, generally fall for interfaces with lesser degrees of freedom, which makes them more comfortable with it. Less freedom translates to "ease of use" for non-techies.

This is why Facebook somewhat intuitively reminds Windows and will most likely share its faith - not exactly dominance, but pretty close to it.

So that explains the timing of that xauth announcement from google.

Interesting to see Facebook has reached that stage in every big tech company's lifecycle where they waste a lot of resources on Things That Obviously Won't Work.

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