Facebook’s grand plan for the future | Hacker News Reader

Facebook’s grand plan for the future

ft.com

39 pointsbeeker16 comments

Facebook is the big story of the decade, but I wish publications who do these puff pieces do a better job for covering the company.

The quote below is enlightening:

"This is a somewhat different Zuckerberg to the one the public knew just a year ago. In recent months he has transformed from an awkward wunderkind with a preternatural ability to anticipate where the web is going, into an amicable executive unafraid of laying out his grand plan."

So, Mark has become better at communicating the vision of where the web is going. And what exactly is this vision? It is that Facebook will grow and expand and with one of the largest audience platforms in the world, any move it makes into adjacent domains (places, deals) will be instantly successful. Talk about self-realizing prophecies and stating the obvious.

"In other words, the world will be experienced through the filter of one’s Facebook friends."

If you think this is a strength, it is actually not. On the open web the universe is the set of all indexed pages. On Facebook, this universe depletes to what your connections know/discover and now the pages that have the opengraph data on them. I do think that we are quite safe from a world which is exclusively experienced via Facebook because it can't, as things stand, represent the actual universe of information out there.

Facebook is a big and important company, but it is also at the height of a frenzy in a domain that is desperate to realize some of the potential it holds - thus the breathless accounts from media, bloggers and of course, the investors. We keep hearing about 500MM active users, but last I checked, they had about 130MM visits in a day, which is not too far off from what a Youtube gets at 103MM. Some degree of perspective is badly required in analyzing these companies, especially when you have nearly zero public data to rely on.

The fear, according to people close to Google, is that as Facebook users index the web through their Likes and shares, Google’s algorithmic indexing of the web will become less relevant. “Search is a business that will be pretty profoundly disrupted by social media,” said Augie Ray, an analyst with Forrester Research. “Ultimately, what matters to you is not what Google thinks is important, it’s what your friends think is important.”

What ultimately matters to you is what you think is important. Whether Google's algorithms or Facebook's social graph better predicts what's important to you remains to be seen.

Actually, what really matters is what you will pay for. Google's algorithms are currently winning at figuring that out.

The entire concept of 'like' and 'share' via the open graph has been badly misread.

What OG gives Facebook is the ability to classify and index (not sure if they are doing this) 'active' pages on the internet. Look at it as a cheaper and more efficient way of classifying pages on the web that are being accessed by users. The OG metadata identifies the page content in a structured manner, thus offloading a lot of the classification pains to the content publishers.

It is a smart way of attacking the subset of active pages, but it can't compare to the indexing and classification of a larger web - which is what Google does.

In terms of profiteering: What's strange about FBs promotional way of advertising is that stores almost get into a price war to get the customers. In the end, only the customers win and stores will simply struggle to make more profit, impeding them to offer better services. Google's way of advertising is a lot more interesting because it simply announces what a service provider has to offer without it having to change it's product price.

"According to comScore, about one in four online display adverts in the US now appears on Facebook."

Most of the Facebook ads are easily ignored, but some are quite well targeted to things I'm actually interested in.

There's far too many "get a college degree" ads that don't go away no matter how many times I give negative feedback on them. Note to facebook- if I explicitly reject an ad more than once, you're wasting opportunity by showing it to me again, no matter how high the ppc is for education-related ads.

But there's also a decent percentage of very, very niche items that are advertised that I am truly interested in. I click on FB way, way. WAY more than I do on any Google ads.

Maybe Robert Scoble was prescient [2009].

"Here’s the phases of Facebook:

Phase 1. Harvard only.

Phase 2. Harvard+Colleges only.

Phase 3. Harvard+Colleges+Geeks only.

Phase 4. All those above+All People (in the social graph).

Phase 5. All those above+People and businesses in the social graph.

Phase 6. All those above+People, businesses, and well-known objects in the social graph.

Phase 7. All people, businesses, objects in the social graph."

http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/21/why-facebook-has-never-list...

> The takeaway from that is that the social features are really the killer part of this,” Zuckerberg told me. “Having good social integration is more important than high-res photos.”

Look at the rapid rise of Instagram. If you make a product that makes you appear cooler to your friends and followers, you can attract a lot of users quickly.

[1] "Previously, Instagram reported 100,000 users in its first week post launch. The startup is now said to be close to the 1 million mark"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20101203/tc_mashable/instag...

"During his presentation, Zuckerberg uses words such as 'revolution' and 'disruption'."

Fun to contrast this with Jobs thoughts from the interview that was on HN recently: "What's the biggest surprise this technology will deliver?

The problem is I'm older now, I'm 40 years old, and this stuff doesn't change the world. It really doesn't. "

Yeah the comparison between Jobs' veteran attitude and Zuckerberg's um, exuberance came across strongly reading this. The personal computing revolution was far more important, in my opinion; and if Jobs doesn't think that Apple technology isn't changing the world significantly then Facebook certainly won't. Slogans like "This changes everything. Again" for the iPhone 4 are just marketing spin.

"Zuckerberg was still on stage, an analyst leans over to me and says, “They just changed local commerce forever.” It wasn’t even lunchtime yet."

Wrong, wrong, wrong. First, they haven't done anything yet. Not anything visible that I can see anyway. (The 'analyst' is speaking in the past tense.) Secondly, people like to read newspapers and magazines, watch tv then go browsing shops and buy stuff they may need or not based on ads they saw. Facebook or the internet does not enter the equation. The majority of people I know are like this to one degree or another. Amazon and eBay, two companies aimed squarely at bringing shopping online, haven't dampened people's affinity for buying stuff on the high street. And they've been around for years.

"What we’re imagining is very different,” says Chris Cox, who dropped out of Stanford to join the company in 2005 and is now one of Zuckerberg’s closest lieutenants. “If you imagine a television designed around social, you turn it on and it says, ‘Thirteen of your friends like Entourage. Press play. Your dad recorded 60 Minutes. Press play.’” In other words, the world will be experienced through the filter of one’s Facebook friends."

This is also dead wrong. Most of the people I've friended on Facebook have much different tastes to me. The last thing I would want is to get recommendations based on what my 'friends' like. If you were talking to some random person at a party for five minutes it's almost becoming a faux pas not to friend them on Facebook. Do I really want to be spammed with updates about Glee or whatever?

'And while this may sound hubristic, it reflects Zuckerberg’s belief that Facebook’s map of human relationships is among the most important developments in business history. “That, I think, is the strongest product element we have,” he said. “And [most] likely one of the strongest product elements that ever has existed."'

I've been coming to grips with that statement being true.

I don't know if Zuckerberg also implied this but what I find truly awesome is that that map of human relationships is available to anyone now through Facebook. Zynga is just one example of a business that has used the social graph so well. There will be more.

Indeed, a remarkable statement. Let us have some perspective, shall we. Literature is, if at all anything is, the collective mapping of human relationship (and an incomplete one at that). A shopkeeper like Zuckerberg (he sells ads) is not Shakespeare.

Working on something similar. The business plan is coming this February. In fact, I'm looking for financing to get it started.

http://miximum.ca/en_newProjectPage-kiosk.html

gallerytungsten, I agree with you that it's part of the race, but I believe Facebooks approach is fundamentally different.

What's important in this idea is that the content has to be geographically significant to the consumer. Some apps focus on other things, like game mechanics, search, etc. As mentioned in the FT.com article: "Facebook’s application can “check in” to a physical location, such as their local coffee shop,". Significant geolocalized information is key. For example, this concept clearly works a lot less well on a PC. Has to be on mobile or in my case a well localised kiosk.

The objective is to make it significant. Adding friend metadata to the info makes it more important to us.

From the article:

"As Zuckerberg was still on stage, an analyst leans over to me and says, 'They just changed local commerce forever.' It wasn’t even lunchtime yet."

I'll be a contrarian. They're keeping up with their neighbors. Groupon, Living Social, Yelp, Foursquare. It's all part of the race.

The interesting thing for me is that reading the article generated my idea on a way to do better: offer the "local discounts" without the privacy intrusions, overly intensive emailing, or any of the other trade-offs that current solutions have as a byproduct.

The only motivation for the advertisers to do the local discounts is so they can tap into your profile and market very targeted offers to you. Without the privacy intrusion and emailing, how would they do that?

I suspect there are "more anonymous" possibilities than the current implementations of these ideas.

from the web to the TV to the restaurants you choose to eat at – is informed by your stated preferences and your friends’ preferences

This is something we need to overcome, not accentuate.

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