Also, what about niche social networks? Linkedin seems to have conquered the professional social network. Facebook seems strongest in the friend category. To me it seems awkward having family and friends in the same Facebook network. Perhaps a niche family social network could succeed...
If Facebook hasn't managed to get people to adopt this, it seems hard to believe that anyone else will.
Surely they can atleast guess for me (based on who I share friends with, when we became friends, whether we went to school or lived in the same city at the same time, etc.). If FB would give me a draft to review, then I'd try sorting through my friends.
If they don't, then I simply won't share many things that I might like to share, just because it has to be broadcast to everyone.
Because the act of 'defriending' someone has such strong negative social connotations, it will continue to be very uncommon, and as a result the number of friends any given user has is increasing monotonically. I've had Facebook for years, and by friend count has steadily increased and is now nearing 900. The users who only have 100 friends now will eventually be in the unmanageable and uncomfortable position of having 1000 friends, and by that point I won't be surprised if my count is approaching 1500.
Facebook certainly seems to want everyone to have as many friends as possible (note the friend suggestion features), so it's only a matter of time before everyone is presenting themselves to such a large auditorium.
Now i think that maybe "lists" have bad orthogonality to what people want to do. They seem to make sense from a DB perspective, from inside the system, but they miss the point by so little that they actually cloud the issue. Weirdly enough.
My current guess is that it boils down to identity management. I would like not to classify friends, but to manage "personas", like masks or roles that i play. For example "student" or "employee" or, you know, "night life". It is more like a sub-profile than like a list of friends, though. This would obviously involve a list of friends, maybe it could only involve a list of friends, but still...
Definitely an area where more experiments would be needed.
Consider Flickr - it's a great tool for photographers. But it's not socially useful; all your non-photographer friends can't be tagged in photos. Can they solve that problem? Or can Last.FM? They already have events and a social graph, they just don't have a way to get the rest of people's activity. Basically no-one is going to join a social network that they don't think they can get their friends to sign up to.
Remember http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html -
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).
Users can have multiple profiles for each of the groups they communicate with e.g. one for family, one for friends and one for colleagues.
The privacy settings are also very simple. Public or private. Only followers get access to private profiles so you don't have to worry about friends of friends seeing something you don't want them to.
Currently under heavy development but a beta is up at http://www.swytch.net for anyone who wants to have a look
This sort of generic answer is not very exciting. It would be more exciting if you could say what the new thing would be. (To some people at least; to most it would seem a toy.) But that is quite hard to do.
Also, do you think it's all Facebook merit or there is also some "people" thing helping them, and not their rivals? [Perhaps some novelty factor, a (n unknown) social economic factor, whatever, I dunno].
If only I had realized that at the time, though. I remember thinking that a social network for college students sounded about as exciting as yet another used textbook exchange, but without the revenue.
It wasn't that easy according to "The Facebook Effect" ~ http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connect... Competitors existed but Facebook had 2 things going for them that the others did not - a) A fast school addition tool allowing Facebook to quickly add new universities & b) A strategic thinking founder who realised if you added universities around existing sites (friends, associates of the target university) you could pull in enough of the users of their competitors sites to render them ineffective. Such is the power of the "social graph" and relentless determination.
My money is either in 1 of the 3 giants (GOOG, APP, MS) finally getting the social web right or Twitter.
But the problem with Twitter is it has fumbled countless times already and is only growing due to the strength and type of its community. So i have no confidence they can catch up to Facebook.
So Im guessing if its not the 3 giants, it will be an inter-operable social layer and a thousand private social networks.
The way i predict success in online businesses is how well they can replicate real-world actions and dynamic. The bigger and better the set of real human actions a startup can build a online counterpart for, the stronger it becomes.
Facebook is building online equivalent of verbs or actions you can do with people. so the more verbs it can do the more unstoppable it becomes.
What if someone can build the Facebook+ phone? i would also bet on that.
but facebook is a social time sink. we all seen many came and go. in brazil facebook is just now dethroning Orkut. wich had just before dethroned photolog, or something.
They are all the same. it's just the latest momentum.
Facebook just overcome them now by sending more lobster-trap-email-spam then any other managed to send before.
So the answer: it will be any other social time sink clone (they're all the same as friendster or other anyway) that manages to send your friends SMS every 5seconds.
There you go. build it and give me 4%.
Prodigy, CompuServe, AmericaOnline, Friendster, Myspace and to a certain extent even Yahoo and Microsoft. At one point in time they were all pervasive, disruptive, and dominant. And now they've either gone or are having to pivot into a niche to maintain viability at a fraction of their former glory.
The internet and technology will keep growing. Facebook will get marginalized at some point.
No-one, looking at Apple in 1998, could have correctly predicted what they would be like a decade down the road. It's not unreasonable to suppose that guesses at what the big companies in the industry will look like a decade from now will often be wildly incorrect, no matter how obvious things seem.
Now I'm currently refering to facebook failing in the same way that "Microsoft and Yahoo" have failed. They still exist, are still (quite) profitable, but their relavency is fading.
As to apple. I've always wondered if the magic there will continue after Steve Jobs dies.
Apple did just fine while Jobs was on medical leave for six months or so.
One of the comments in that thread pointed to this presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...
Which points out that the current Facebook does not match the needs of real social networking (ie. multiple networks, different levels of trust, etc.). These things are hard to implement, but I feel that whoever does get it right (along with a killer feature to get users, such as what Photos was for Facebook) will be a winner.
The other feedback that I have from average Facebook users is concern for privacy (ie. a prospective employer finding your party pics), inability to control access easily (ie. your grand parents seeing your photos from a party), an overflow of information and the feeling of a 'fad' wearing out.
I keep waiting for either Facebook to solve this problem, or for someone else to solve it. Google comes closest with their social network concept. On the one hand, I hope they pull it off. On the other, I try to minimize giving Google much more information about me than they already collect, so I'm not sure how comfortable I'll be on their social network. I suppose I'm hoping their success pushes Facebook to implement a similar concept.
Its like the big poker websites. If they get caught cheating, then EVERYONE will jump ship and they will die.
Google is (I think) too smart to truly violate my privacy, nevermind ads targeted to Prozac after that nasty breakup email.
These two sites were semi-boycotted by the online poker community (twoplustwo.com is the HN of online poker) but this ultimately didn't work. The reason being that recreational/poor players didn't know about the scandal and continued to play there, which made the games so easy to beat that many players tossed their morals aside and made a killing.
But Google is different than poker sites, just imagine the uproar. Just for gathering data for maps they've gotten in a ton of trouble.
Facebook seems to offer this, at least in a very limited manner. But there's one big issue with their implementation, which is that if someone has decided to share content with a more limited group, there's no indication to those permitted to see it that it was "exclusive" and to whom.
Facebook's lack of clearly defined networks leads people to assume that the concept of "friend" is pretty egalitarian -- any content one friend can see, others can too.
This led to at least one embarrassing occasion where I said to a friend something to the effect of "You're Facebook friends with <person>, I can't believe you haven't said anything about that scandalous picture they posted." Then we discovered that I was permitted to see that content and they weren't. Drama ensues, and we both learn about a feature on Facebook we weren't aware of.
It seems like Facebook should somehow identify this restricted content in some manner, like "You can see this because you are college friends with <person>" or "You and <these other people> may see this photo."
The other alternative is that people only use Facebook to carry out their discussions about experiences and photos people post to Facebook, so that Facebook's access control will handle this for them. This seems counterintuitive to the whole "social" aspect, because presumably Facebook is a place for real-life friends to easily share content online.
1. FB will go public in the next 5 years. 2. 5 years after that it will become filled with old people. 3. There will be a reemergence of social networking startups trying to displace the then bloated solution with a more elegant alternative. 4. One of these will win and become the next FB. 5. Repeat.
Or is that
dujmiu
I get -4 for asking what something is
and he gets +5 for saying what it is
never mind that if I did not ask a lot of people would have been completely lost
It can only die if:
i. Government intervenes with some crazy law.
ii. An entrepreneur somewhere thinks of a better idea for people to spend time on - instead of on social networking and quiz taking and game playing online. (Hmm... Maybe something like Hunch - but a lot more user friendly and socially interactive (an updates stream).)
iii. Facebook does something crazy and self destructive.
I'm sure that Friendster and Myspace shared your opinion of themselves at some point in recent history. Facebook, Google, and any other site that is popular today will find itself as the next MySpace if their innovation slows. It won't take a government to kill Facebook, a disrespect for innovation will do the trick. There are thousands of startups with FB's users in their sights; all it takes is one with a good enough idea.
Friendster and Myspace didn't have a chance to figure out a way of making money that earns billions a year. Facebook has. That is why - Facebook is now in a position to not wither away like Friendster and Myspace. But thats just my opinion.
You can see that Google is more or less established not because they are making billions but because there's an "eco-system" of companies who make money along with Google and can be expected to keep pushing that money long term back to Google. The same might (or might not) be said about the iPhone. But you'd be hard pressed to find anything like a stable ecosystem grown-up around Facebook. The only thing that grows on Facebook seems to be social games and those depend on FB's own growth. The claim of social network sites has been that they can sell focused eyes. But I haven't seen evidence that they can sell social eyes that will do anything.
It seems like even without a competitor, Facebook will become Yahoo in a few years - not dead but a site that can charge very a premium for ads or experience.
But hey, I'm just guessing...
Claims for Facebook making billions seem exagerated to me.
Facebook isn't going to make money just by knowing general things about you. It still needs to be there when you are looking for something.
What do I care how targeted an ad is when I'm not at a location to buy things to begin with.
A lot of normal people are wary of the security concerns, but I wouldn't say they despise facebook itself for them.
Over a third. Which is abysmal compared to other companies in other industries.
See http://www.allfacebook.com/report-facebook-ranks-low-in-cust... for more details.
So, 1: it can happen.
But also, 2: it will not happen over a feature list. A friend once said to me that MSN displaced ICQ because all the dumb hot girls didn't grok ICQ. As awful as the idea is, i think there is something to it. Something like street-cred.
Which obviously comes from who and not what. I think the official term is "cluster effects". But then again, cluster effects only require that YOUR friends be there, not that everyone is. Which is to say: it's not about universality, but traction --- similar, not the same.
Finally, 3: should it? Why must FB fall? It is a walled garden, and it is stifling of competition, for sure. But the thing about walled gardens is that while obviously flawed from the collective perspective, from the individual perspective they are, well, gardens. As in pleasant.
I guess anything that "competes" with FB is as bad as, the "good side of the force" is not killing FB, but creating reasonable ways to mine it's data, like open protocols. Those will come, sooner or later, just like twitter and FB kinda interoperate, but they will not kill it, maybe at best make it less relevant.
Facebook will survive, most likely, but I think its influence will slowly wane to the point where they will be just another "media company" like AOL and Yahoo.
http://activitystrea.ms/spec/1.0/ http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/ http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Using_Activity...
Worst case: Facebook becomes the MS Exchange of social networking
An alternative social architecture seems appealing in some ways but I just can't see the [realistic, might actually happen with a significant chunk of the Facebook crowd] vision of how we'd ever get there from here.
Barring that (or some sustained operational mishap -- downtime, security breach, etc.), network effects make it unkillable.
I won't even take 2 years. I will be surprised if several competitors don't emerge by the time Facebook goes public.
I wouldn't for a second assume that just because Facebook came out of no where that history is a given to repeat. When FB came out of nowhere there was no web property with anywhere near FB's critical mass and momentum.
Try just quitting Facebook cold-turkey. You'd be surprised how easy it is, and you just might like it.
I can obviously quit fb easily, but I would miss it. And it would make no sense for me to join a different network instead, where my friends aren't (or only a fraction of them are).
Hey... anything is possible :-)
Once every website has a universal login, contacts, and sharing features, then why would I use Facebook, when I can use X, Y, or Z which have lots of other features too? And then the cycle will start over again.
When a feature goes mainstream, it neads to be openly standartized (Take GUI toolkits, take instant messenging). Then another feature/innovation moves the "battle" elsewhere.
Facebook somehow made MSN instantly much less relevant by combining jabber to their social networking site. Someone else will surely do the same, by combining social networking protocols (plug Dispora++?) to something else interesting by itself for its data. Maybe more interactive appliances and webstores? Imagine for example every appliance (phone, computer, camera…) having an adapted 'view' of your dashboard and relations, backed by a distributed datastore with proper backup and cryto.
This won't kill Facebook it will just make it less relevant as a way of attracting innovator mindshare and new capital. As with Microsoft, this may take a decade or more to play out, and like Microsoft, by most measures (other than stock price) they'll still be considered a fairly successful business as this happens. Just one no longer growing insanely or having new Hollywood movies made about it.
What takes the mindshare? I don't know. Perhaps the marriage of consumer electronics and a collection of narrowly focused and ubiquitous services seems more likely to come together and be integrated into people lives than does belief that a walled garden "portal" conquering the world will continue.
Or possibly: social congregation around digital media. The return of the shared experience around the TV.
Or it could become fashionable to do stuff in the real world again.
It might become like TV - mass entertainment, but not really exciting anymore.
Honestly, whenever I log into Facebook, I feel at a loss as to what to do. I just tried playing a game, and it asks for all my information including friends list, before I even know what it is all about. Uh, I just want to play a game... That kind of thing might start it's demise.
I suspect at the moment there is a lot of pushing and nagging to keep users active ("do you want to send a purple cow to your friends"?). Eventually people might just tire of being manipulated.
Even if not, and it remains the biggest thing on the net, there might still be a significant number of people who want something else.
That's how I tend to think of it at least. So if I were trying to make a Facebook killer, I might attack one of those two groups... provide either a vastly better social/chat/discussion/link-sharing scheme or a vastly better scheme to play games. But I don't have any ideas on either -- they both work pretty well apparently (the completely technophobic all have Facebook pages at this point!), which makes me think it'll be really tough to compete with Facebook.
And, besides, if you did compete that way, you'd still be at a disadvantage because of the network effect and that you appeal to only a subset of the existing Facebook crowd -- as I said, I don't play a lot of games, but I still want to be friends with people I remember from high school and that do.
BORN TO A STARTUP THAT HAS THRICE DEFIED THEM...
oh, never mind
1. A destination site that is closely tied to a mobile hardware device. (Apple, Google and MS have the closest chance with this). +1 if company has TV expansion to get the rest of the population.
2. Implosion. Internal conflict most probably from investors/shareholders vs. leaders.
3. Site-wide security breach that affected more than 30% of users and had serious and press-juicy consequences. The issue should persist for more than a week.
4. Zuckerberg's death or serious illness. (non-issue if a strong leader emerges)
5. Talent migration. This is inevitable as there will be fewer and fewer challenges left to excite sharp minds (3-5 years)
MS has Xbox, Xbox Live, Windows but weak mobile + web products.
Apple has itunes, ios, macosx but negligible web prowess and zero social web domain expertise.
Google has strong web engineering output and Android, nothing else come to mind.
If you can apply a social web layer to their products which would come out stronger?
The answer to that might be the Facebook killer I think.
Social networking is emerging as far too important a communication medium for one company to be allowed to dominate. It may take a few yeas for regulators to catch up, but if Facebook isn't unseated by something better and more open, it will get broken up by government or at the very least forced to inter-operate openly with its competitors.
I'm betting something better will come around before the government steps in, but either way I'd say Facebook will be taken down a peg or three within the next few years.
If you use facebook often, especially from a mobile phone, then you are leaving a data trail for everything you are doing in your life, and everything your friends are doing. It is easy to apply that against you if needed, which is why a government will be happy to support facebook.
Two days ago I awoke to find my status had been changed to "penis" overnight. I have no idea how this happened, since I don't share my account details with anyone or use it on a shared computer. It had an interesting effect on my friends, to say the least. Had it been changed to something worse, an attack like this could easily have led to damage to my social network of friends, which would definitely be grounds for me quitting Facebook.
2) If FB continue trying to become all-internet-in-one-company then they will soon follow Yahoo.
3) Future belongs to specialized social networks utilizing unified social protocols and APIs (not developed yet). LinkedIn is one of early birds. More to come.
I think the companies embracing the facebook ecosystem and helping them to grow are in risk of future policies changes.
Facebook was able to ride this wave by marketing itself as an exclusive club. It was you and your friends home away from home. It beat out MySpace because of its focus on "networks", allowing entire schools of students to quickly have contact with each other.
I think a Facebook killer is unlikely, unless there is another wave of increased internet activity (which I don't see happening any time soon). However, niche social websites are on the grow and are gaining with popularity. Perhaps if enough of these are created, it'll engulf Facebook in popularity. But then Facebook could simply revert back to its "school" niche that it used to focus on three years ago.
The fact that Facebook beat MySpace in the US is astonishing, IMO.
I'll share the results if I find anything good.
For reference, see Yahoo.
Google didn't kill Yahoo. Yahoo did.