Cloning Is Lame. Google Should Do It To Facebook Anyway.
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
What's a plane clone, Michael Arrington?
"Plane clone" is definitely in my vocabulary, now.
I don't believe it. Google wasn't first to market with apps like Gmail or Google Docs, but their implementation is arguably much better than the competition. Why cant Google do this with social networking?
He says: "What Google shouldn’t do – must not do – is try to tie the service to other Google products for the wrong reasons." This makes no sense. I think a social networking service that utilized Google's other services effectively would be a very powerful thing. I could see tight integration between events and your Google calender, or sharing Google docs/waves easily with friends. Google has a massive portfolio of very useful services; it would be foolhardy to not use them if they were to attempt a "Facebook clone" as the author so lovingly calls it.
I see person who wrote this doesn't have much contact with females, especially female groups and their behavior on facebook. "This is public, this I only want some to see, this can be viewed by my friends but not that bitch"...
Hell I don't understand those privacy settings on facebook, but I sure know every female I know knows them and knows how to use it.
Social networks come, and social networks go. Sure, Facebook is run rather more competently than, say, MySpace ever was. But it isn't at all clear how big uniques and a whole lot of people playing Farmville equate to being a contender for Google-killing internet domination. I suspect that a lot of this breathless punditry is going look very silly ~5 years from now.
Is it just me or is this a silly, meaningless sentence. Are you predicting it is more robust? Then that makes you the most favorable third party. If not, and if you have no evidence to offer, then why mention this mere possibility?
A) That Facebook would still have your personal data and would possibly still be misusing it.
B) For most people, Facebook still has the largest "critical mass" of your friends, family, etc., which makes it difficult to pointless to move to a different social networking site.
B) If there is another site that's painless to migrate to, then this isn't an issue. That's why such an outlaw tool would be useful.
Certainly not impossible, after all, look at how quickly FaceBook eclipsed MySpace. But I haven't seen the next big social network site on the horizon, have you?
Yeah, see, that's the trick. The users don't want to. They explicitly abdicated control when they signed up to Facebook. They knew what they were doing. They know that they can get games and chat and publishing and status messages without Facebook.
And they know that using Facebook requires giving them access to all sorts of data they might sell to... well, anyone willing to pay. Of course, so could/does Google. And Amazon. And their ISP. And their phone company. And their credit card company.
If users cared about control, they'd still be using email and blogs and separate accounts for separate services from separate vendors, etc. Like we few holdouts.
But you simply cannot make a social network site work without giving away a shocking quantity of data. You either get something that works like Facebook (warts and all) or something that works like hotmail+yahoo games+classmates.com+icq+flickr+twitter
Users already chose. I think they chose wrong, but no Facebook-knockoff offering 'control' is going to change it. They want the integration and ease-of-use that requires Facebook have access to all that data.
I think this is more a function of a lack of viable alternatives, where viability includes the functionality that comes from the network effect. The trick, of course is not to replace Facebook, but to become a hipster adjunct to Facebook.
But you simply cannot make a social network site work without giving away a shocking quantity of data.
You only have to give data away to your friends to make it work for you. Giving your data to the world (or to the part of it willing to pay) is only required for advertisers.
Users already chose. I think they chose wrong, but no Facebook-knockoff offering 'control' is going to change it. They want the integration and ease-of-use that requires Facebook have access to all that data.
The way to supplant Facebook is by not supplanting it. Become the defacto primary social tool for an influential subset of society -- a useful adjunct. If such a tool can be made, it will benefit from Facebook's network and not suffer from competing with it. The key is to grow out from a hipster/youth demographic and peacefully coexist for awhile. Once that is established, then go in for the kill by giving users things Facebook cannot or will not -- Facebook certainly has these weaknesses.
Imagine a tool that allows a hipster to stay in Facebook, but network with a subset of her/his graph with complete information control and privacy, conveniently and without duplicated effort. That would be killer and also very hard for FB to duplicate, as it runs counter to their DNA.
Most of the challenge will be in marketing. If they can get a hipster fringe to adopt it and give them real value, they can use this to bootstrap themselves. (Much as Facebook did with the college crowd.)