Comment by mattferderer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattferderer | Hacker News Reader

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Facebook: Twitter is a decent competitor for network effects. I've moved my photo sharing to Google Photos as it trumps anything Facebook offers. For me, the biggest Facebook benefit is sharing photos with family on Facebook. Everything else on there is pretty much noise or garbage you can find on any other site. The one recent thing that Facebook does better than anyone that I get value out of are "local events".

Google Drive: Dropbox, Box, OneDrive....

Google Voice: Depends what you're using it to do. Amazon & Microsoft have apps you can use that do similar tasks. Whichever you use does require access to a lot of personal data to be useful though, no matter what company you pick.

Amazon: Target, Walmart, Jet, etc... Lots of competition here. Amazon's online experience is typically better but their is plenty of competition & they often have cheaper prices. FYI in case any Target person reads this. Your site is terrible & full of bugs.

Suggesting Facebook and Google and Amazon as serious replacements for Facebook and Google and Amazon really drives the point home.

Nicely said. I did do that for 1.5 out of the 4. While I didn't state it well, my argument was meant to be for replacing one or two of them, not all of them.

Voice is probably the hardest one to replace all 4 of them on.

For Facebook's network effects, I mentioned Twitter which is not one of the four. I did mention that my main use I've replaced with Google Photos. I did that because it's free & great. If I hated Google, I could use several paid services that offer similar benefits. Snapchat is becoming more popular with the older people I know. Instagram was great before getting bought out by Facebook so we can't count them now.

I think maybe one point that needs to be made, is if you want a "free service" you must be willing to let your data be sold. That is the big problem that many people have with a lot of the above free services.

What is the Amazon competitor to Voice? I use Voice for texting from my computer and phone calls (not sure if there are other services it offers)

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