Lars Rasmussen: Why I quit Google to join Facebook
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I won't deny that Facebook can make certain connections easier - of course it can, that's what it's designed to do. But how large is the net positive effect?
Think about the difference search engines can make to finding information. Without the web and search engines, how can you find information on a topic? You have to go to a local library - hit or miss on what information you'll find, especially for something obscure, or find some magazines or a book on the topic, or maybe find an expert who's willing to explain it to you.
Think of the difference social networks can make for keeping in touch with people. Without social networks, you have to remember to send them an email to see what's up, maybe pick up the phone now and then and give someone a call, meet up at a pub now and then, send a card for Christmas.
Now, to me both are incredibly convenient services, but by FAR only one can be described as world-changing.
Uh, "zero"? Maybe some people compulsively stare at Facebook for hours at a time and decide against going out tonight to click "refresh" instead, and I suppose there's always a marginal effect, but most people just stuff Facebook in their downtime or other extra time, from what I can see. Obsessives will obsess anyhow so even that's probably not a problem.
And then of course you stack this up against the real connections renewed that would have expired and your argument is just not credible.
Then from the other side you equate a social network to a phone call or email, completely ignoring the astonishing fact that Facebook has signed up a double-digit percentage of the entire world population in a single social network. Or how common it is on Facebook to find people you may never have seen again otherwise. Or the fact that you can maintain passive contact with networks an order of magnitude greater than what is possible via traditional social channels.
And I say this as someone who doesn't particularly value any of that. I log into Facebook maybe twice a month, and I don't particularly admire their mission. However when it comes to your closing statement, I'm in agreement, except with the inverse proposition.
I am, because all the information on the Internet is useless if you can't find it.
>completely ignoring the astonishing fact that Facebook has signed up a double-digit percentage of the entire world population in a single social network.
Everyone in the world IS a single social network, barring several small isolated tribes here and there. The phone network is a single social network. Email is a single social network. Facebook formalizes and makes access to this network easier, but to a lesser extent than Google makes access to the world's information easier.
>the fact that you can maintain passive contact with networks an order of magnitude greater than what is possible via traditional social channels.
That is a fair point, and I'm certainly not denying that Facebook is useful, but I stand by my assertion. If you could somehow quantify and compare the difference made to society by search engines vs. social networks, search engines have a far larger impact.
Let me put it another way: Google is to the printing press as Facebook is to ???
Yes, Google is nothing without the rest of the Internet, but so is Facebook, so I'm content to run with that comparison even if it's not perfect.
What does this tell you about the real strength of this friendship? I don't mean to pick on you; I hear this argument a lot and I don't understand it. A really good friendship would have found a way to stay alive over 10 years with or without Facebook.
That's true, and I certainly have friends that I intend to stay in touch with for many years to come, Facebook or no. Relationships fall into concentric circles though; there's acquaintances on the outside that only care about slightly, and there's lifelong friends near the centre. Somewhere in between are people that you would certainly talk to if you ever ran into them at random, but wouldn't make much of an effort to stay in touch otherwise.
Facebook is ideal for these kind of relationships, because the semi-public nature of wall posts keeps things casual (letters and emails feel very intimate, and it can be strange sending a long "hey, what's up?" message to someone you don't know that well). There's also the fact that you can see their recent activities and photographs, giving you an easy conversational opener ("I saw you visited x/did y/know z, how was it?"). I think it was quite carefully designed to afford such interaction styles.
[1] Sending various forms of media to each other, having a historical record of communication, etc.
[2] Privacy controls, control over your data, etc.
I mean, I recently left my home town to go to a new school and when I wanted to say good bye to my friends who I don't normally talk to- I wrote on their walls, but I also called them-
But in the end, you are right, I'm not quite subjective because of the way I grew up.
I communicate with my high-school friends more often than the days of ICQ, MSN, and Friendster joined together.
Keep in mind that me and my friends have passed university and are working and have our own life. Oh, by the way, we live in different continents of the world.
That's pretty world changing for her.
I have not been in touch with my dad in the Philippines for almost 20 years. We lost contact when my mom, brother and I moved and we didn't have telephones back then.
Last year, my half-sister found my brother and me on Facebook.
It was good to learn to that my dad is still alive and got to talk to him after all these years.
With Facebook you open up a very non committal link into each others lives, where you may send each other the odd message, comment on what each other is doing, without getting right back into things straight away.
Basically, you just implied what Facebook has done - redefine how we build and maintain relationships. That's a huge social impact.
Now that every single damn website has "Login with Facebook Account" button, I think it's a big deal.
Now that every phone comes out with "syncing with Facebook" feature, I think it's a big deal.
Now that people actually put their credit card info and buy stuffs on Facebook (although it's small right now), I think it's a big deal.
Now that there is a single entity that keeps track of our life/relationship history, I think it's a big deal.
I mean... these are probably not a big deal for you, but many people in the tech industry think so. That is why the valuation of Facebook is so high. It has a lot of potential. It's not all about just.. attracting people to increase traffic and spamming them with ads. It's more about how the social aspect of everyone's lives have been redefined. There was letters, then phone, then emails, then now.. facebook/twitter/etc.
Plus, Lars cannot give Wave "another try" at Facebook. Google Wave is a Google's property and anything related to Wave technology will make a good reason for Google to sue Facebook -- just to worsen the relationship of the two companies. Facebook probably wanted the leader who excels are putting out great products. That's what Lars is great at.
Actually, the underlying protocol is open and some of the related software has been released under an Apache license:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave_Federation_Protocol
In short - my definition of Facebook. its the web in the CONTEXT of your social circle and that has changed the web biz game, it has only begun to change the world 'proper' and thats what i think excites people like Lars.
A lot of technical people look at the collection of services that Facebook is offering and can easily enumerate instances of prior art and thus I imagine feel somewhat dismissive of Facebook.
"Farmville? Why not just go to any of the number of flash game portals that have existed since the early 2000s?", "Messageboards? Older than dirt".
Technical people tend to forget that the average person doesn't like searching, and needs to be told what they "should be doing" (topically, that was probably part of the problem with Wave's lack of adoption - too much freedom, too different - people need to be guided). People prefer having "everything in one place" with explicit parallels (rather than absolute freedom) to what is important to them.
I would hazard to guess that to the average person, Facebook is the web. That part is kind of game changing (and arguably, not necessarily in a good way).
Something is going on here, and IMO what is happening is most difficult to understand for bleeding edge techies like the people on this forum.
Actually - The Social Network may be mostly fiction but it does capture an idea about facebook that I never realized before - the idea that it's important who you know. Which is the essence of places like Harvard. And the essence of Facebook. Like many others I thought facebook was just a slightly less annoying version of MySpace or friendster, but, as it turns out, it's not, and you have got to give credit to Mark Zuckerberg to understand this from the very start.
Apart from all that, facebook is now the new Google in terms of desirability to work there. No wonder, as it's pre-IPO so you stand to make very good money once they do their IPO. Especially as an exec. You can be a me-too rich person like the Googleionnaires who didn't do anything special except get hired by Google before the IPO. I get the appeal.
Facebook has a number of features for communication that email doesn't have:
1) Passive communication: the fact you can go and check someone's profile and see what they have been up to is very powerful
2) Default public communication. By making communication public by default it lets your other friends and family benefit from any communication you do with a 3rd party
3) No email addresses - people change email addresses a lot more than they should. The only comparable problem on Facebook is when women get married and change their lastname, but I've never seen any problems arising from this.
That really just scratches the surface of the differences.
Sometimes, doing something better really is enough to make a huge difference.
- It helps me connect better with people I already known for long (There are a lot of people I'd have been out of touch with if not for Facebook)
- It helps me also maintain a network of 'loose connections'. These are people I don't know very well, but can now easily keep in touch with. I would otherwise have never written or phoned them.
- I get a lot of relevant content from Facebook - this includes links to articles/blogs that are relevant to me,videos that I find to be fun/useful/inspiring.
- I have had some of the most interesting debates on people's Facebook walls. Some very long ones. At times, we've decided to then take the debate offline, and have actually followed that up with a debate when we meet.
facebook for me is content discovery + keeping in touch + updating + discussing. Thats a lot, and quite simply, it is not very far from being at the center of a lot of my online activity.
You can search for pages, things, groups. I'm not sure if this is a good thing, if having this internet where you're forced to reveal your identity is a good or bad thing, but it definitely has the ability to change the world.
Google can dominate the rest of the net, but if your net only means facebook then the chocolate factory just got made irrelevent.
Now imaging facebook does a deal with a phone maker to only connect to facebook, or to only have free data to facebook then Google's ad revenue goes down
When you can connect and understand the social interactions of 500 million people, you can do amazing things.
My guess is that Zuckerberg has his own "Reality Distortion Field", albeit of a very different style than the original (Steven Jobs'), and this is a major factor in the recent migratory wave.
Many folks inside and out think that FB still hasn't found its "adsense" - when and if they do even late comers to the party will live out their days like sultans.
Among the things I find interesting - the guy was the co-founder of what is now Google Maps (after Google's acquisition). However, now, he has chosen to join Facebook instead of setting out on his own new venture.
Perhaps he could have a bigger impact if he founded a new company.
If you have a brand new or revolutionary idea, that may be true. But if you have an idea that fits into what somebody else has done, then joining that company and using it as a lever to magnify the reach of your work might be more effective. Another way to look at it is that in a startup you usually have to worry about a lot of things that are not core to the idea, such as marketing and productization. If you have other people to do that for you (as I'm sure Facebook does) then you are more free to focus on implementing your ideas to the best of your ability.
I fail to see how he could possibly hope to achieve that.
I think Lars could get funding from just about any investor in the valley, if he wanted to start a new venture. But Norvig said it best (paraphrasing): "If you want to accomplish interesting things, go where the data is." Right now, FaceBook has one of the most interesting data sets on the planet, possibly rivaling Google's. If Lars wanted to replicate that, he needs to build a product that's useful enough to convince everybody to give him their data. That's non-trivial. It's easier just to join a company that already owns the data and then figure out interesting things to do with it.
I suppose you could have something like the PC revolution, where the industry was still based around manipulating data, but the data lives on your personal property. But that ship has sailed: personal computers have been available for 35 years, so pretty much all applications that rely on one person's data being manipulated in isolation by themselves have already been discovered. The interesting work now is when you collect patterns of data among many users, and that requires that many users be willing to give you their data.
You say it like our personal information is the only data in town.
Of course, any app needs data, but it can be anything.
Personally, the major reason I'm still interested in startups is because I haven't yet succeeded at one. It's the challenge that's the thrill. There's a whole lot of bullshit that goes along with that, though, and if I already had a major success under my belt, I'd be more than happy to go work for the hot flavor-of-the-decade company where I can spend my time innovating and let someone else deal with the bullshit.
I'm sure Lars is well-off as he is, but my understanding is that an order-of-magnitude more money is a real possibility.
If you do a startup, you spend a LOT of time thinking about managing and hiring people -- at least after the jump.
Startup are great places to potentially make a lot of money. After doing a few myself, including some pretty decent deals -- I don't think I'll do another unless I simply have some Google-like breakthough.
It didn't really out. Best of luck to him.
Wave was brilliant, but Google definitely made the right decision there.
Wave has no metaphor, it is complete non-sense to my mother. Neat idea, totally useless in reality. What worked (real-time collaboration) should be (has been?) ported to gmail and google docs, period.
I love Google products and I didn't shed any tears when they shut down wave...
I think the problem is that the intelligence of a group is defined by the minimal intelligence of its members, not by the average. If you have even one member who just doesn't get it, then everyone else needs to dumb down their ambitions so that he doesn't get left behind. That's why the "no false positives" rule is so important in startup hiring, and why the public school system sucks so much. I think it's a fairly good bet that with 25k employees, the dumbest person at Google is dumber than the dumbest person in FaceBook. And with Google's shared infrastructure, it's fairly likely that you'll run across some design decision made by him.
there are recent, fairly inexperienced hires doing amazing things
Maybe, but is that true of the average new hire? I'm sure Google is still hiring a fair number of smart people who will do amazing things; my argument is that the average has dropped. You can cite individual examples of smart people but those aren't a counter-argument unless you have a statistically significant number of them.
Remember, if you're going to use free food and candy stations as hiring tools, don't be surprised when the type of people you hire are more interested in eating free food and candy than building something awesome.
As an early-stage startup guy and hired gun, my outside perspective is of course biased towards the smaller company, so take this with a grain of salt:
I think the main thing is that Facebook has a unified product and vision, with really strong UI, and a lot of hardcore infrastructure all centered around a global experience. Meanwhile Google has one strong business, and is repeatedly throwing spaghetti at the wall to find new areas to expand to. Sure there's a lot of great products there, but nothing with the potential Facebook has.
On the other hand, hackers (myself included) value raw utility highly and maybe on average we just prefer google search and google maps as tools due to the vapidity of Facebook. I certainly feel that way.
However, comparing the impact on the larger world, I really really think Facebook has made way more impact than we care to admit. They got the whole world on a single social network. They created the newsfeed, some thing which is ubiquitous across all sites now. The Facebook platform, though buggy and heinous was completely revolutionary when they launched it. They created a single sign on that is used by a staggering number of people across the web.
Personally, Facebook's innovation over MySpace is every bit as impressive as Google over Altavista or MapQuest. We may not value the ends, but 500,000,000 users with orders of magnitude more engagement than Google is undeniable impact.
When everyone is super smart, it's great but it's also a curse. It's hard to get anything done because there is always someone very smart to find one possible reason why it should be done differently. Think of it as the curse of perfection.
I witnessed this firsthand in a previous life. It's amazingly frustrating, because it's so counter-intuitive.
As someone else noted thoughtfully in this thread, Norvig once said "Go where the data is." [extreme paraphrase]
Google's data isn't largely proprietary. The web is accessible for any to crawl. Google Maps is based on essentially public data, or easily obtained data. A savvy and well funded enough competitor could enter these markets.
Facebook's data is proprietary and user-created. The users have built-in inertia for Facebook 'cause they sure as hell don't want to abandon the three years of content they've built on a whim.
Add to that Google's recent missteps like net neutrality, and their insane and technocratic hiring policies, and I don't think I know a single truly bright person who would want to go to Google right now.
Facebook, however, is looking pretty damn sexy... all that data that the users forked over... hmmm... Not to mention the fact that if you're a social person, Facebook is FUN.
He took a job without having any idea what he will be doing? And why would that be an exciting thing?
Facebook will likely give him the latitude to write his own job description and recruit his own team. The end result hopefully will be something that he enjoys, and that benefits Facebook and its users.
I think the main problem with wave was that it wasn't solving any problems it was just mashing up a lot of features in to one application and never recovered from performance issues.
Kinda sounds like Facebook to me. They seem to be handling growth / performance well though.
Whether that makes Facebook more important than Google I don't think is what's really going on here.