1. Kids rebel against their parents and don’t want to use the same things their parents use. Ironically this issue will be exacerbated by Facebook’s desire to force people to make everything public (“I’m grounded because my Mom saw those pictures you took at the party last night”).
2. The young are still building their social graph and can be more open to new things. So all those things that tie people to Facebook won’t be relevant to kids growing up today.
So new generations come into the market both inclined and able to pick new movements and hence unseat the existing ones.
Right now Facebook looks invincible because they have no real competition. They did a very smart thing in creating an API. In doing so they’ve tricked startups into making Facebook stronger with apps rather than creating competing solutions. So all Facebook has to do now is fend off the pathetic attempts at competition from large companies who aren’t agile enough to compete. So they have no real competition and kids have no real alternative.
But if an industrious startup with innovative ideas comes to market targeting the youth demo I think they could kill Facebook pretty quickly among that group and become dominant as that group grows up.
Same here. Kids will still use Laptops, PCs and Cell. Phones but probably won't use the same sites as their parents when going on the web. Because the PCs are enabling devices that get you some place while the sites themselves are venues that you go to.
Point 2 - agreed - Facebook can be beaten. Some young upstart will come up with something kids want more. I doubt finer privacy control will clinch it, or more openness.
In other word, I can see your point that kids want to be more grown up. But kids do tend to rebel too. So if both of those are true the only explanation I can come up with is that kids want to be better adults. They want to one-up their parents by doing things better than they do.
Which I think is consistent with my theory in that they'd be drawn to a new Social Network and abandon Facebook to prove that they found a new social network that is way better than Facebook
(Also keep in mind Facebook started as a youth movement among College students. That doesn't necessarily apply to 11 years old but it's worth a mention)
Every kid wants a cell phone no matter if their parents have them or not.
My opinion is yes: They want cars and motorcycles, and houses, and be respected, find friends, find love. The tools they use are just that, means for getting a goal.
I have been teacher too,in general I love kids, and I think is not kids wanting to change, is adults "hating change", halting grow when they get in their comfort zones once grown up.
I agree. Was talking to a 9yr-old yesterday and he didn't know what a playstation was. Thought he was kidding at first.
I don't think fb can be killed anytime soon though. It's just so big. Migration of half a billion people to another social networking service can't be simple.
See: "How the Mighty Fall" by Jim Collins (http://www.amazon.com/How-Mighty-Fall-Companies-Never/dp/097...).
Just two different spellings of the same thing?
Solopism is a misspelling: http://omploader.org/vNHJtZA
It costs real money to keep Facebook's servers running and Facebook's employees working. If a market shift revealed Facebook as a money-sink "as far as the eye can see", then the folks other than Zuckerberg who control that money will want to use it for something else.
One might ask what magic does FB really have for profitability that Myspace didn't have? I'd like to hear how this magic will come from more users in and of itself.
1. Mobile. Facebook does have one of the top mobile apps on the planet, with its iPhone app at the top of the download list for quite some time. But I think it's fair to say Facebook doesn't really care about mobile; the iPhone app languished with overt bugs for half a year before they fixed some of them recently. They have no iPad app. They no longer innovate in this arena (more on that next), and while that probably won't be the case forever, there's a great opportunity for a network with a best-in-class app to take the lead here.
2. Innovation in social. Take, for example, geolocation. Foursquare and Gowalla have definitely found some new niche that will be here to stay: people like to know where friends are, where the currently happening thing is. I've tried those services three or four times each and, while interesting, still aren't compelling enough. Facebook has done nothing here. Yet.
3. Out-facebooking Facebook. I'm a member of the initial Facebook group: my school was something like the fifth school on the site. Things have changed dramatically from those humble beginnings. It's much harder for me to cut through all the Facebook app bullshit today and actually find out what's going on with my friends: status updates, photos, events, that sort of thing. Things that actually matter. People still will want to play games, but I think there's a huge part of the population that just want a clean, social network again. I've expanded on this on a short blog post last month, if you're interested in reading more (and I apologize if you're not): http://zachholman.com/2010/05/rebuild-facebook
While I don't think Facebook will die a Friendster death in a poof of magic scaling sprinkles, I do think there's opportunity yet for a small outfit to out-innovate them, out Facebook them, or just otherwise carve a lucrative niche for themselves in the market.
Perhaps "Ye Olde Tome of Countenance: A Throwback to the Days When Facebook Didn't Suck - Click here to import your profile and photos"
As for your third angle, I think there is room for a niche-facebook that could be crazy profitable--but i don't see a niche social network taking over the social graph. that seems relatively far-fetched.
The same thing will happen here for a timeline of 5-10 years: Facebook will likely be the dominant player in an old and boring space called social networking.
Maybe virtual reality will be big (people walking around with really helpful devices in their pockets/on their eyes), or something you can't even think of.
What killed Office: once again, the Internet is making desktop applications obsolete. Enter Google docs.
Socialization is in a different market than office productivity, so "people wanting to socialize with their friends" killing "Windows/Office" seems a non sequitur.
Of course Facebook still seem much more nimble in their space, maybe they will be able to jump in early on the next big thing.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/26/microsoft-numbers/
It's true that of late the focus has been mobile, mobile, mobile, and Microsoft missed the boat here to a degree, but only in comparison to what Apple did, which is start a revolution around the idea of easy, mobile devices. This is a completely different market than the desktop market, and the popularity of one doesn't mean the death of the other. By the way, people have been calling for the death of the desktop since the 80s. 90s. 00s. Hasn't happened yet. Down the road...who knows.
Lately I've actually heard sympathy for Microsoft in areas that used to be viciously anti-MS. It seems some of the hatred for MS has been transferred to Apple, and to a lesser extent, over to Google. But that's probably my subjective experience. I do think to the extent Microsoft can go lean, hungry, and humble, it will go better for them in the years to come.
I think just like we've moved from desktop to web applications you're going to see a similar move from web to mobile interfaces. This is will be especially true of social networking platforms.
Google has direct control of one of the major upcoming mobile operating systems and because they host the contact/relationship graph I think they could make a confident push into Facebook's space if they were so inclined.
I'm also not sure how 'people socializing with their friends' has had any impact on the Operating System and Office Productivity space either way?
Instead of placing central control of our social graph with an organization that believes people are essentially targets on the great Advertising Dartboard of the future, you could distribute control of that graph.
Instead of logging into Facebook to connect to your friends, you'd simply have your "profile"--your web page or other net identity--and things like status updates, tweets (because this is also how you "kill" Twitter), likes, groups, friends, etc., would be handled by the protocol.
In short: you kill Facebook by building an open protocol that does the same thing.
So my whole career in this industry is helping companies 'get open' and embrace 'open'... and I can tell you this is not what will kill Facebook.
Being 'open' isn't a feature consumers directly care about. The teenager on the street corner, the mom in the grocery store, the middle-aged office worker... they are not going to use Service X over Facebook "because it is open".
That means nothing to them. There's nothing in there which explains to a normal person why there is any problem in making their tweets, likes, groups, etc on Facebook.
Further more, disparate services which rely on users having their own control of their node (Dispora, DiSo) make no sense when 99% of most normal people have no web hosting or other way of hosting such a node.
If there's one thing we've learnt from recent Facebook debacles, it is that people appreciate a level of privacy and control around their profile data. Now, open doesn't equate to no privacy - but you have to expect and assume that all nodes will treat privacy the same, otherwise the system fails. With a closed system you simply have to trust one actor with your privacy - the host network.
Finally, the 'dartboard of advertising' is what gives companies like Facebook the resource to outcompete their rivals. If an alternative service doesn't have that kind of advertising strategy then it's going to find it hard to compete with the might of FB.
Open may form part of the ultimate successor to Facebook, but it is just as likely to be something totally closed as Facebook. Open/closed is [sadly] not what consumers care about.
Take the (by no means parallel, but similar) case of iPhone vs. Android. The typical user could care less about whether iPhone is "open" or not, provided their apps work and their calls don't drop (heh). Still, Android makes a compelling case to developers and to handset manufacturers. Android gets huge points for being "open", and over time, I think that creates a head-leads, body-follows scenario where early adopters, tech evangelists, and people who surf sites like HN move to the new platform (whatever it is) en masse. Some time later, "normal" users then gravitate to that platform because the thought leaders have gone there, that's where the hype is, etc.
To put it another way: being open doesn't necessarily win you normal, everyday users. But it can win you the power users, the early adopters, and the thought leaders; and where they go, "normal" users tend to follow in time.
As for the "how do users host their own node" issue, I agree. This will never happen if people have to (my God, the horror) sign up for a web hosting account to have a Facebook page. But in an Internet where "websites" are torn off from the cloud at will, and where creating a "website" or "web identity" is as easy as pressing a button -- easier, in fact, than it is to create a Facebook page currently -- I think that's when you'll start to see user-controlled nodes become a real possibility for the mass market. Not before.
I think the Android argument can play out the other way, and I say that as someone who is onto his 3rd Android phone, never owned an iPhone yet was an Objective C programmer in a former life and total mac-head.
Android may be open, and Apple App Store has it's problems but monetization opportunities are much bigger on iOS platform because everything is geared towards paying for apps. No one I know pays for apps on Android.
Plus, app dev for iPhone is cheaper because it's (sort of) one platform rather than Android's disparate handsets due to it's very openness.
Another case in point: Facebook FBML Platform vs Open Social. Developers way preferred the close Facebook Platform over the open standard Open Social (again, I was part of that so I say it with some disappointment).
Facebook effectively provides limited, specialized web hosting supported by ads. There's no reason companies can't offer exactly the same thing via open protocols.
> Now, open doesn't equate to no privacy - but you have to expect and assume that all nodes will treat privacy the same, otherwise the system fails. With a closed system you simply have to trust one actor with your privacy - the host network.
With a federated system you have the ability to blacklist nodes that misbehave. With a closed system you have virtually no ability to influence the provider's behaviour. I know which I'd choose.
> Open/closed is [sadly] not what consumers care about
Maybe not directly, but an open platform creates the possibility of competition between application providers. Consumers didn't want Compuserve or MSN 1.0, they wanted The Internet.
If a few companies offer the hosting of nodes, rather than true "open"/"federated" where each user is in personal control of his node than really you have little change than the current system.
Rather than a monopoly on the social graph, you will have a biopoly/etc with control still spread between a small group of actors who will just bound together for mutual benefit.
The idea of true federation and disparate systems where each user is in personal control of his node is really the utopia. But sadly it's never going to happen.
Another problem is that Facebook is responsive to market pressures. Despite the recent "Exodus" of privacy-aware folks being little more than a trickle, they made changes to the way their privacy works. They adapt, and any significant improvement offered by a competitor will be added to Facebook's arsenal (Tagging in statuses, for example).
Finally, knowing all of this, it is much easier to simply include Facebook Connect in a social service than to leave it out. By including it, you get over that first critical-mass hurdle. The problem is that by including it, you are also putting no pressure on Facebook or increasing the drive to migrate to your service.
Now that I've got a year of undergrad left, I can safely say that my two uses of Facebook are Tetris and connecting with family. For Facebook to succeed, it needs to get better at intentional information sharing (writing on walls and messages do not encompass the ideal experience) as opposed to the passive information sharing that we've all used it for for so long.
I don't think it's possible for Facebook to pivot (and, basically, abandon a whole lot of work) to just being a way to share pictures, messages, and plans with friends and family (which, I believe, will be what people want moving forward).
That's what we're building at the mo :)
facebook only recently started to slowly gaining traction here.
Given that facebook is functionally (news feed, apps) and visually (less obtrusive adds) way superior to facebook the main reason for the slow adoption is surely that "everybody" is on studiVZ.
Given that facebook is real good executed I don't see any way it's getting serious competition anytime soon.
Facebook is trying to change people rather than serve their needs.
They'd rather put up with poor privacy controls and keep their account than have no account at all. Just because they're not leaving now, doesn't mean they won't leave when a viable alternative to facebook comes up.
Once the culture matures, we may see more predators preying on this information at which point privacy will become a hot button topic (for a while). This could be con artists or the "facebook serial killer" or whatever.
Also, the users that care about privacy (e.g. me) aren't on facebook...
I have some track record in spotting opportunities, esp. in social networking. This is one piece of the puzzle in outflanking facebook and a vulnerability they've chosen, imho. The privacy of the initial years of facebook was a significant ingredient in their success.
Clearly the competitor will not be 'the same as fb but w/ privacy'.
We can find ways to say no, or create ways to make 'yes'. ;)
Now, you probably use the term "social networking" for something different from "interacting with people". If so, I'd like to know how you define social networking.
Now I asked a question. Let me reformulate it: how do you define "social networking"? Why do you thing it is hard to reconcile it with privacy paranoia?
So far the most successful of those sites is Facebook; Facebook is difficult to use if one is paranoid about one's privacy. None of the other partial or past successes were successful due to their exceptional concern for privacy. One does not join a site designed for sharing things with other people in order to hide things from other people.
Fortunately for Facebook, that would mean that each user of this alternative has a personal server at home to run it. And with hurdles such as asymmetric DSL, dynamic IP, Firewalls, NAT routers, and plain ignorance (the internet is very young and few people actually know what it is yet), it will take time. Two decades at least.
All your info would be held by your email provider (gmail, say), and when your friends log onto their email (yahoo, say) your new updates are download for them to view.
If problems with getting email providers to abide by protocols specs aren't too large, I really could see this working.
One thing that can happen is HUGE breach in upcoming Facebook Credits platform. If they manage to loose a lot of money of their users and partners, it can be big. But I do not think it is likely.
Both Yahoo and MySpace are still around (and still very relevant for some), but have shifted as Google and Facebook respectively have come in. They've become less relevant in what we think as their core competencies - Yahoo for search (though their drive to be a portal might have done them in) and Myspace for social networking. What is interesting is how both of these companies have evolved into I would say more niche specialties. Yahoo has great finance and fantasy football tools. MySpace is now the place for music/bands to post their work (The first and probably only time I went to MySpace this year was when I stumbled on a link to the very popular TV show Glee tryouts (a friend was trying out I was supposed to vote for) on MySpace. It got me thinking, why wouldn't they do this on Facebook, soon recognizing that Facebook couldn't support the type of functionality required for the contest. Could that be potentially something Facebook will suffer for in the future? Probably not that one example, but maybe a suite of features.
I guess my point here is that I doubt Facebook will ever "die." The only time that I could see it dying (nice post TomOfTTB) is as it's a complete generational shift where our generation's kids (I'm 23) use some wildly new disruptive technology that's more relevant for the time. My guess is, though, our generation will be using Facebook for many many years to come.
I will be interested if and how it evolves like MySpace/Yahoo. Will it end up niching itself? I took an informal survey of friends who talked about using Facebook explicitly for "what's going on with my friends" (aka stalk their facebook albums and walls to get up to date on what's going on) as opposed to Twitter which is (for me and some of my friends at least) much more about "what's going on in the world? what articles did these cool people I respect find?" Pictures on Facebook are done very well and I could see that being a future niche.
It's a fascinating time to be involved in the internet as it's still to young almost to have "history" or "throwbacks" (some might disagree, I know). I would guess that the "movements" TomOfTTB refers to will be happening throughout the history of the internet. To give an metaphor with the auto industry, it might be like the revival of the VW Beatle/Bug cars (popular in the 60s) get revived 40 years later. It might be that a website like MySpace (or even Facebook someday) goes out of style one decade, but then somehow comes back. It sure will be an interesting ride whatever happens!
The only reason they've gotten away with it is because legally they have some basis to work with, and socially they haven't annoyed their users.
FB will die when somebody launches a new browser that takes all of your social information and copies it to an open, secure, and non-proprietary format -- perhaps in addition to posting it on FB. This poses no pain for the user, yet allows others to participate in their social graph without having to use FB. It's also the thing FB fears the most.
Other than that, not much. As more and more people get sucked into FB by their friends, the service becomes more and more ingrained in the psyche of the users. Just guessing here, but I don't see product X coming out with a few new whizbang features and putting much of a dent in that.