Facebook hype will fade
cnn.com
cnn.com
college --> high school --> young adults --> everyone
facebook's biggest potential for failure is in not capturing the next generation of young users. The young users pick up some other social network, everyone else follows suit, and facebook withers, slowly starting to resemble an '85 buick.
EDIT: fickleness with social networks not restricted to teenagers, obviously.
All these social networks are simply an extension of the email use case. It's nothing new, nor do I see Facebook taking down google.
Social networks are like hot clubs. Eventually their popularity fades, as soon as another it scene opens, which is why I'd never invest in a social network site.
So shall it pass with Facebook
I've only thought of it as a blogging platform that focused on small, "multimedia" posts (pictures, video, a short quote, etc)
I derive a huge amount of value out of it. I put in the time to train it to show me what I want to see, and I don't become friends with everyone I meet.
It's silly to say that nobody likes Facebook. You don't, and that's fine. But you're in a very small minority (and arguably for a reason).
"what if they're talking about me on facebook?"
Facebook is directed peer pressure.
I think for me, the longer I've had my Facebook, the less useful it has gotten and the less time I've actually spent on it. It's like talking in a room with everyone you've ever met listening in. It's unnatural. I think Facebook's market will eventually fragment-- LinkedIn being the first chink in FB's armor, I imagine the next will be a college exclusive network like how Facebook got started.
And I would sooner create LI account than FB. I am also very careful about what information I release about myself to the world.
But we are few and far in between.
When any of my contacts update their info, it sends me a weekly email. I like that. (And when I click on a link in the email, the web page HIGHLIGHTS the changed sections. I love that.)
The interactions on Linkedin, although fewer in number are of higher value.
And they charge to contact people outside your network. I think this is fair and lucrative to them. This seems like a steady source of income.
All in all, I'm impressed with Linkedin. They've avoided becoming sleazebags and managed to remain useful.
LinkedIn gives recruiters in various companies and consulting industries a way to find passive candidates that they will not be able to find on a job board like dice, mosnter, career builder, etc.
Passive candidates are ones that are not really looking, they have the skills that the recruiter is looking for, but candidate needs to be convinced to take another job.Passive recruting tools is a huge need right now, especially for areas and industries with labor and talent shortages, ie high level tech jobs that is being talked about now.
So think of how large websites like career builder, monster, the ladders, etc are.They for the most part offer actively looking candidates. Linkedin is the only player offering a database of passive candidates that you can get in contact with, build a relationship with and track.
LinkedIn is in control of a segment of a very large market, with a very definsible competitive advantage. They won't be a game changer or the next google, but they will be positioned to make a lot of money in the future. LinkedIn provides a legitimate solution to a legitmate demand and the demand is huge.
Also, a lot of the high level tech people i've spoken to do want to keep work and personal life seperate or keep facebook life and linkedin seperate.
1) If I don't remember who you are, hide. 2) If I knew you in elementary/middle/high school/college and I don't think I'll ever see or speak to you again, hide. (This would cover people who don't share any of my interests, etc). 3) If you spam my newsfeed with "Farmville/Which Twilight character are you/I have a secret to tell you" sort of apps, hide. 4) If we have nothing in common, and I don't think anything you're going to say in the future is going to be interesting/have a real impact on me, hide.
There may be one or two more, but those were the core ones. After applying these rules, I found Facebook was SO much nicer and more fun to use, and there was none of the social stigma of "unfriending" people.
Now that everyone and (and every company) are on facebook, I'm more comfortable back on a blog, where there isn't the illusion of anything but talking to the internet.
Someone using facebook AFTER the were introduced definitely should use them.
Oh believe me, I used the hide feature ASAP. But your quote above is my point, I shouldn't have to spend 2+ hours customizing Facebook. Everything should have been opt-in to begin with.
If you're going to spend time on Facebook at all, it's worth the time every now and then to make the time better spent. They even have a page called "edit friends" where you can just go down your friends list ticking the X button to unfriend them.
www.fbpurity.com
I don't want to be rude and accepted it, but she went to my list of people that I don't consider friends, but people that at some point in my life I had some interaction that as now ceased. That list doesn't have access to my photos, only some personal information and the majority of my status updates are invisible to them unless I explicitly set otherwise.
So yeah, they're my fake friends. If your friends list is already big setting this up and checking if there are no backdoors into your information will be painful, but I think it pays off. I did it mostly because I didn't want to bring the family and friends sides of my life together in a single website, with all the potential problems that could come from that, but I ended up creating more than just the friends and family lists.
Funny thing, right now Facebook privacy is more about protecting your information from your "friends" than from the outside world.
Also, I really don't care about people's virtual mafia's and pictures where everyone is obscenely drunk.
That's exactly what I hate about FB. These days, I just keep my profile so that people can contact me, but never log in to.
The power for expansion is in the marketing, very creative people selling water vapour (in Spain people now smoke water vapour since the prohibition to smoke in public places).
(incidentally, the iPod touch is a great way for Apple to build a userbase among the young)
Well said.
Sounds like a bubble to me.
Heads we win, tails you lose. I'm just waiting until they start dividing up the stock into tranches.
I disagree with this, simply because grandma wasn't on any AOL chat rooms, but she _is_ on Facebook. The only reason I'm on FB is because Aunt Tilly and Uncle Bob and grandma are also on there, and I can connect with them that way, and know what's happening in their lives in real time, instead of seeing them once a year at Christmas.
Grandma isn't going to sign up for IM or get a blog. She's on Facebook.
That's the difference between FB and everything else that came before it. The thing creates its own gravity field that attracts everyone, and as long as everyone I care about is on Facebook, so will I. Even though I really hate the thing.
That's the genius of FB, I think. Hate it or love it.
Facebook has reached a level that had never been reached by any social network before it. Did your grandma use MySpace or LiveJournal? Once something crosses the threshold of youth and tech-savvy and "regular people" or even old people start using it, you have a much less transient userbase. Look at Microsoft -- the young and tech-savvy are happy to use Apple products over MS, but MS is king and will remain king at least until anyone born before 1975 is well into retirement. Once these things reach a certain level, they become generational standards, and then only minimal effort is needed on the part of the vendor.
I know old people that still use AOL. Most old people never would have left AOL in the first place if they'd come up with something sensible for broadband. Perhaps Facebook will come upon a stumbling block that's similarly fatal, but I wouldn't necessarily expect that, at least not within a reasonable timeframe.
Facebook's success is a combination of making things easy for people like grandma and attracting everyone related to her. Without those two pillars FB would be just another MySpace.
It's activity that matters, not membership. If facebook stops talking about activity, and only talks about membership, that's when you know there's a problem.
Do you really think that many FB users are going to know how to move "their favorite old photos" from Facebook? Unless the next product includes an automatic importer, which Facebook would attempt to destroy as quickly as possible, and it would devolve into an arms race/lawsuits (as scraping Facebook has for people with much more innocent intentions), then I don't think that many FB users will be interested in coming over.
I told her I'll get on it.
Like AOL, Tilly and Bob will still be using it and still generating revenue for them long after the rest of us have moved on.
The author seems to completely miss this. AOL didn't die because it was bought by TW, it died because broadband became commonplace and people realized there was much more to the internet than AOL's walled garden. Myspace died because it was the last vestige of the "personal homepage" style internet and never ran with its burgeoning use as a network for musicians.
Facebook will fade when the next major gap in social connections+communication is filled. Simply saying "something more popular than Facebook will happen" seems a horribly obvious and empty statement. Now talking about what we still need or might discover with connections would prove insightful, but of course no one's going to blog about that until it's launched.
So facebook will fail when people venture out and socialize in real life?
Seriously, though, I get the point generally, but I don't think it's quite the same. AOL and MySpace were assimilated and stifled by their parents' ways of doing things, whereas Facebook will likely continue to do things its own way. This is a company that is able to convince its investors that it knows best, and I don't think things will change with the Goldman investment.
I don't know if Facebook will be on top in 10 years, but I don't think this is the beginning of the end.
The author's main points seem to be that: 1. Facebook has similarities to AOL, and AOL's bubble burst 2. There was a bubble in the late '90s therefore there must be a bubble now 3. Goldman is investing in Facebook, Goldman invested in other bubbles, therefore the investment must be bad 4. Social is a fad
Nothing on why Facebook specifically is doing a bad job and why someone else is positioned to upset them. Not much evidence at all if you ask me. You could write the article with 90% of the content the same and replace "Facebook" with "Google" or "Apple" or "Microsoft"
"Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It's the people that matter, not the venue."
All the other stuff in the article is an attempt to back this argument up (AOL/TW merger stuff, Goldman deal a symptom of cashing-out mentality, MySpace collapse as a precedent.)
People who use AOL who discovered "the real" internet had no reason to go back. Everything they wanted was just as available + more. There's no friction to switching, beyond learning how to use a search engine.
Facebook has billions of photos, posts, comments, friend requests, updates, registrations through connect, all being added to the site every day. The longer someone uses it, the higher the cost to stop using it, or switch to another.
That's why FB has the staying power AOL did not.
I think that an open, distributed social networking protocol is a game changer. If there exists the ability to move between social networks while maintaining your social graph, that makes the way that social networks rise and fall very different than when sites hold your social graph hostage if you try to leave.
http://developer.appleseedproject.org/profile/michael.chisar...
Keep in mind, this is beta software in active development, so you'll notice a few bugs here and there (and the live server is missing a major update I'm running locally).
So to start with a simple one: how does one add somebody else? Can you just search by name? I'm just having a bit of difficulty imagining how that sort of thing would work well in a truly distributed, federated way. But I haven't done much thought on it so I'm interested to hear.
Searching is being worked on, that's coming in the next update, but yes, you just search by name (or other attributes). Distributed search is difficult, but only on the backend, on the frontend, it's similar to what you're used to. Only caveat is that it is not exactly real-time, and is more like a P2P search than a google search.
Once you find someone you're looking for, you identify yourself to their site by remotely logging in. This is as simple as giving your ID, which looks like an email address (username@domain). Then you click "Add as friend", and they're sent a friend request. When they approve it, you are mutual friends.
You can post stuff to your "page" (what appleseed calls your wall), and an update will be sent to your friends list. You upload a photo, and an update shows up in your friends lists newsfeeds. They click on the thumbnail and it takes them to your photo album on your home node, etc.
Some other distributed social networking sites are breaking from convention in a lot of ways, but Appleseed's goal is to try and make it work as much like the current systems people are used to as possible. Certain growing pains are inevitable, but so far it's pretty similar after the first couple minutes.
Facebook Connect accomplishes most of what you want here. At least, it could.
I could see that being true for me regarding something like Twitter, though... there, if something new came along ("SuperTwitter") that replaced it, I'd be able to take the 10% that I really like (the 10% I'd know by name) and follow them on that new network.
This kind of assemblage is perfect for weddings and funerals, and that's it. For daily living, it's just too much. If my Facebook friends all went to a building every day to hang out, I wouldn't go there. And I don't find myself using FB nearly as much now as I once did for this very reason. There's too many things to consider when posting even the simplest thing (will I offend my second aunt, will some future boss not like this political view, what if I run for political office in my 50s and find out I friended someone who ended up doing x, etc., etc.)
Initially, I had to block the ability for people to tag me in photos because I was being used to spam other people's walls, then I had to block other people from posting on my wall, because they would post "funny" stuff that wasn't good for my business-contacts to see. Finally, I started using lists, but having different "personas" for each list was just too much. As a result, I'm slowly letting my profile fade away.
Many people are looking at the Facebook stocks like it's a Pablo Picasso painting, and with users twice as the population of United States, it's bound to be valuable. However, in the economy of supply and demand, the bubble will pop if it decides to go public. Unless Facebook can think new ways to earn more money.
But that's hard, because Facebook users hate changes. They aren't exactly Obama fans.
1. Social graph. Many are not active Facebook users but are keeping the accounts cos all their contacts are there. Facebook has actually helped people found their long loss friends and classmates.
2. Sharing links, picture and video. Facebook is replacing email as a means to share interesting contents. One friend actually visits Facebook just to read those contents posted by friends instead of going to the source such as YouTube. "It is easier". Twitter is an obvious alternative.
3. Facebook is the new Flickr.
4. Games. Hopefully when people think of FarmVille or CityVille they think of Zynga and not Facebook. Zynga should seriously break loose of this eco, build its own currency/credit system and focus on iOS/Android platforms.
5. All-in-one ness. Grandmas and aunties love this. Contacts, photos, video, links, cute apps are all-in-one. But this will mean less and less, as this group of not savvy web users will decrease with time.
They cost to run the site compared to how much they're making does not work. Their only hope is to run really fast and create a better advertising story. Otherwise, they need to get acquired by MS, Google or Apple and become an augment to a business that actually generates profit. Problem is their market cap is so huge that's becoming nearly impossible.
People make sites like facebook popular, commercial entities buy in and then corner the initial value that these sites created. All of the marketing potential individual users had in the initial stages vanishes once commercial ads and user tracking appear, and once a value is placed on a site. Myspace still gets great hits, but mostly from spammers and bots, which makes it value worth less than the computers its hosted on. Its their own damn fault. Tom played the game right when he sold early I tell you.
These social media sites aren't doing anything substantial in order to help productivity nor promotion for individual users. They have features that encourage users to spam each other, which make their added peers end up blocking each other because of incessant tagging and messages to user inboxes that require tedious manual deletion, etc [all tactics to generate empty clicks]...
These social media sites all make the same mistakes in not emphasizing their talented users, and helping to build followings, while promoting businesses and services that are reliable and relevant to their own users. I'm a firm believer in a future of micro-social sites that focus on specific user communities rather than trying to warehouse everyone into a huge template. Facebook, as it is really doesn't provide much in terms of letting "like minds come together". There should be no reason why I can't communicate [through a social media buffer of course] with Jay Z about rapping, or Kanye about being a douchebag, or ask the real Ivanka Trump out on a date, and they all should be able to block me if they get pissed off in the process, thats what happens on Twitter, and thats why this year Twitter will capture a large percentage of Facebook's user shares, because its much more fulfilling than fake user profiles [for the moment]
American Idol has made a lot more people "famous" than Facebook, yet there are many more musicians and artists on Facebook, how is this possible? I see that as a problem. YouTube has been the only consistently unobtrusive and highly functional/useful social media tool that has survived. They do have user profiles, they host content, allow comments, sharing and communication, and do it all pretty much in an amazing and unobtrusive way. YouTube also allows its users to cross-share content on sites completely unrelated to itself, a major hosting expense, but really solid in terms of usefulness to site users, no idiotic "like" button required. Based on this, the concept of YouTube, perhaps, should be used as a key "roadmap" to social media success in the future.
Instead of working on promoting normal users you don't know, most social media sites are geared towards the "celebrity machine", for celebrities that are already popular. Promoting the same stuff that's on TV, and the radio, because someone paid for the ad space. Following this "celebrity machine" is a losing battle because it has to put on a new expensive outfit every time its launched, and it fails once people uncover its motives, or once innovation can't disguise it.
Facebook makes it appear to users that the only method to generate 5,000 followers requires landing a major record or movie deal, so much for being a talented musician. Programming and monetizing is only a tiny part of creating a successful social media site, this is why most get it wrong. If you want 4 years of profit, who cares, make the next big social media warehouse, if you want a lifetime of success, think carefully of the benefits your site can provide to the average joe, and make sure you keep that in your mantra for as long as your site lives. The motives have to be clear cut, highly functional, and it must offer fair and equal promotion for all of its users while limiting spamming and upholding privacy, otherwise it will stay the game of rise and downfall. There's a reason why YouTube has been a great site all of these years, it sticks to its user base and keeps them content.
Also the amount of free advertising it gets from companies using it's logo everywhere with add us on facebook and have your say on facebook, how many other companies get their logo and a call to action to use there service for free on TV every day around the world?
* Not many "trends" have had 500 million followers.
* The other companies mentioned actually ceded control in some fashion; Facebook is simply taking investment dollars.
* The other companies mentioned didn't have Mark Zuckerberg at the helm. Only a crank wouldn't acknowledge that Zuckerberg's leadership has been masterful.
But when you also have a high valuation, and have been taking money off the table, those choices become limited to those that are perceived as the highest growth. You lose flexibility.
Frugality is good, at all levels.
It certainly hasn't, but can facebook be the first social network to somehow help people maintain their different personas and keep their social circles unentangled when appropriate? Over the summer I facebook updated something about hacking on my front porch, and my wife's aunt commented asking how I got sick. Stuff like that isn't creepy, it's just awkward, and keeps me coming back here and to friendfeed or to reddit or wherever the community feels right for having a discussion.
Facebook only can exists if it can find a way to be a local tool.
I believe that adding a complete stranger is seen as a bit creepy. Maybe the new Groups feature (like the hacker news group) will change that, but that's only a recent addition.
The $50 billion valuation, yeah there's some hype there. But whether Facebook will one day surpass such an evaluation is I believe a strong reality.
I'm just amazed at how well-run a company Facebook is. I'm in awe of how it is in a constant state of evolution and constantly being tinkered with. Usually when companies get big you see them play the game more conservatively. Facebook is exciting because it doesn't do this. I see so much room for Facebook to grow and surpass my expectations for it, as it has time and time again.
Myspace to Facebook is a shallow analogy. If we would like to make an analogy with that analogy it would be like comparing Yahoo and Google. Facebook has far exceeded the market penetration of MySpace. Facebook has one of the best engineering teams around while MySpace attempted to some sort of media company (failing miserably at that). Facebook has a fairly credible revenue stream while we are never sure if MySpace every developed that.
Myspace revenues are estimated at $385 million. Facebook's are estimated at $1.6 billion.
That puts myspace revenues at 24% of Facebook's.
Myspace has 66m users. Facebook has 500m users.
That puts Myspace's userbase at 13% of Facebook's.
In actuality, that means Myspace has found a way to generate more revenue on a per-user basis than Facebook. I'd say that's pretty credible.