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.
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.
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%.
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.