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Comment by kprobst | Hacker News Reader

"We will move on, just as we did from the chat rooms of AOL, without even looking back. When the place is as ethereal as a website, our allegiance is much more abstract than it is to a local pub or gym."

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.

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This isn't really unique to Facebook. It's called lock-in and it's the desire of every service provider and software maker; they want you to be held hostage to their network, so that even if you want to leave, you can't without potentially serious ramifications (like losing contact with your grandma, or losing access to your documents).

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.

I agree with the way you describe the lock-in, of course that's the whole point of any closed network. But I disagree as far as the phenomena not being unique to Facebook. While grandma might have been on AOL, to her it was just the way to "use the internet" or whatever, she wasn't on any communities or groups or chat rooms. That required a slight uptick in the level of computer savvy one had to possess, which she never had or bothered to acquire. More to the point, her family wasn't on AOL, or wasn't interested in AOL, or if they were they couldn't interact the same way with her.

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 not really 'lock-in' unless the potential switching costs are too great to overcome. If another social network could set up your friend network with minimal effort (and are better than Facebook), they will win. No one has long term contracts to use Facebook or pay a monetary penalty (like a cell phone). So if someone can re-create your social graph with you putting in less effort than you normally put into facebook, they will win.

Switching costs are absolutely the thing to focus on here, but limiting the switching costs to a replication of the social graph may be understating the true cost. Think of all the photos, and to a lesser extent, wall posts. I would imagine a lot of the time that's spent on Facebook is just browsing through photos (and again, to a lesser extent, people's wall posts). Much of it probably is just new photos, so obviously those don't need to be replicated since if you port the social graph over, people will start posting photos on the new site and people will just look at those, but a ton of the viewing is probably of legacy photos. That is, some of the viewing is seeing what's happening with your friends (the party last night) but a ton of it is just checking people out (facebook stalking). How can I stalk somebody without seeing all their past photos/videos/notes/posts/etc.?

Everyone has a facebook account. If they want to look at old photos, they will look on facebook. Just like you used to be able to look at old blog posts on Geocities. People will post new photos and their favorite old photos on the next facebook, and stop looking at the old site. The old content sounds like a big deal if you are a geek who is worried about vendor lock-in, but I doubt that real people will really care.

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 know how many times I've had to show my mom how to upload something to Facebook? A lot of times. Facebook upload support is baked into her photo manager (Shotwell), and it's as easy as clicking "Publish", and she still usually can't figure it out.

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 hate to sounds misanthropic, but Aunt Tilly and Uncle Bob are why I'm not on Facebook, and why I didn't use it much when I was. The Tillys and Bobs of the world meant I had to spend basically all my time tweaking my hide/show settings to see anything useful, and everyone else's own Tillys and Bobs kept them from saying anything interesting.

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.

Yeah, I think my family is already sufficiently gossipy.

It's funny, my mom just sent me a Facebook message saying that I need to build a replacement because all of her friends on Facebook are getting sick of the ads and spam...so it's not just "us geeks" who have had enough.

I told her I'll get on it.

That's strange, because most of my older relatives want nothing to do with Facebook after all the FUD around privacy and security.

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