Ask HN: What will be Facebook's weakness?

The way Facebook connects data and people is very clever. There is lot going on behind the scenes that you never see as a user. One of the results is that you just don't know who will see what. This results in a lack of perceived control.

Here's an example. At a friends wedding, I got introduced to a friend of a friend that I hadn't met before. She knew all about my child and has lots of pictures of him. How? My wife sends picture on her cell phone to her sister. She, in turn, uploads those to Facebook and tags them with my name. That opens up those pictures to her complete circle of friends. One of her friends comments on a picture, and another group of people gets exposed. The result is that I can only assume that hundreds or thousands of random people know everything about my child.

The result is also that Facebook is building up a profile of me without my knowledge or participation.

That's why I prefer Twitter. They don't try to outsmart me. I know who will see what. It's obvious that everything is public.

I'm convinced that contextual sharing is the next evolution of social networks, and I don't think FB is in a position to pivot towards it.

Contextual sharing is the idea that in real life you have multiple, often separate social circles (work pals, college roommates, siblings, friends, grandparents, frat brothers, etc.), and that social networking 1.0 (i.e. facebook/twitter) doesn't account for this very well. You really want to share stuff only with specific groups, but this is hard to do on existing sites.

This leads to all sorts of real pain points, many of which are becoming unbearable for some users: i.e. you don't want your boss seeing photos of you drinking, or you don't want your grandmother to see that racy link you just posted, so you suspend your FB account.

Even though Facebook has a crude groups feature, this doesn't come close to addressing the fundamentally flawed orientation of the network: one, big pot of 100 to 1000 casual acquaintances, as opposed to dozens of partitioned ~2 to 10-person real social circles.

This idea has been exploding, recently:

- Google Me (Google's soon-to-be-released last shot at social) is almost certainly going to be based around this concept of contextual sharing (as Google UX engineer @padday's recent slide show indicated)

- Diaspora (the OSS project from NYU students that raised $200k this spring) announced on their blog that contextual sharing is their #1 interface priority

- Frid.ge (YC '10) is built around this idea

- College Only (funded by Peter Thiel) is a solution to the problem just for one context (college friends)

- Groupme.com (betaworks) is an SMS-only approach

And ALL of this projects came to life within the past 3 to 6 months!

Next-generation social networks will mirror our offline social experience more closely by shifting the focus from a giant network of "friends" to private, micro-networks that mimic real friend groups.

I think this change is significant enough that Facebook will be unable to pivot without alienating their huge user base.

Also, one of Facebook's main competitive advantages has been the fact that it is a network good with high switching costs (e.g. in order for a new site to be as good as facebook, you need to convince all of your 800 friends to sign up for the new site too).

If the future of social networking really is contextual sharing, though, this barrier becomes much lower (if it continues to exist at all), because if you really just want to share with your 'real' friends, then convincing these small groups whom you know really well (your best buds, or your roommates, or your sibilings, or whatever) to try out a new site is actually pretty trivial.

Thoughts?

Full-disclosure: I'm thinking of building a contextual sharing tool of my own, because I think it's so damn exciting. Would love your feedback.

Facebook is a brilliant consumer web company, but they never looked at enterprise market. Enterprise market is bigger (but less sexy) than consumer market. So it is possible to build a new technology powerhouse from enterprise revenue and eventually beat Facebook for the next generation of talent.

Look at what happened to myspace

Right now, there's a danger that people start thinking of Facebook as the company that's good for status updates and photos. That might prove to be a long term facet of our lives, but it could also prove to be fleeting. Another example of this could be users thinking of Google as that search company and ignoring the company's attempts at other products. There's lots of ways to take social software, but there's a potential that people will popularly think of Facebook as the status message and friend-tagged photo company.

Facebook's barrier to entry (its closed social graph) is both its strongest asset and its greatest weakness. A barrier to entry like this means that most of your competition is gone. You can get used to having very limited, if any, competition because if someone's 20% or 50% better than you are, the barrier to entry slaps them down and maybe you even buy them and incorporate them into you on the cheap. But then someone comes along who is a genius and changes things and shoots the moon. A bit of a comparison here could be Microsoft. Apple was weak for a long time. The Win32 API was a huge barrier to entry. Then a lot of forces conspired to really break Microsoft. The rise of the platform-independent web (with Google, Apple, Mozilla, open-source, and others), Apple's resurgence (where they took Microsoft by surprise on handhelds and might have even sent Windows Mobile to the annals of history), and just the changing landscape. I mean, I remember a time when I thought my Mac would always feel like an also-ran platform unless Microsoft was forced to open up the Win32 API. Nowadays, I don't think any of us Mac users feel like we're on an also-ran platform (at least not in the way it felt years ago).

People's tastes might change. Right now, people want a connected, low-privacy social graph. In 10 years, we might feel different. People's preferences change.

Facebook might become generationally limited. A lot of us got on Facebook in college. I remember when you could list your courses and find people in your classes. Some non-Facebook company might hit critical mass in a different generation of users who might see Facebook as lame because their parents are on it.

Those are a few that came to my mind. I'm not saying that Facebook can't rise to the challenges. They've shown themselves to be quite an adept company. However, it's hard to predict the future and social networking is something that everyone seems to be gunning for. Others are trying to out-maneuver Facebook and users can be fickle.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

That's a lot of different kinds of people to make happy. That's a huge ship to turn around. That's a huge amount of surface area to be spread over.

Having to serve the lowest common denominator for that many users in a community oriented platform is going to leave a lot of needs unserved, or served poorly. It leaves plenty of holes for a disruptive company with nothing to lose to show up and do something interesting.

The converse strength they can leverage, though, is also their huge numbers: users, engineering staff, sales people, technology partners. If they realize the power of a disruptive idea just early enough, they have the resources and culture necessary to build and scale it in what may as well be an instant fashion, since they can drop it on millions of users at once.