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Comment by russell | Hacker News Reader

One thing that the last boom showed is that the first well executed play in a segment captures the segment and makes competition nearly impossible. Examples Google, Amazon, and eBay. The investors are betting that Facebook, Groupon, Zynga, and Twitter have captured their segments and further competition is impossible. The gamble is whether those segments are now closed. They weren't in the case of Alta Vista and Myspace.

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I agree that the investors are making that gamble. A better way to look at Google though is as a company that made major breakthroughs in two segments (search, advertising) and then executed brilliantly for years while benefitting greatly from its rivals' (Yahoo and Micro) sustained incompetence. Which of the new group has breakthroughs in two segements? Which is on track for years of sustained brilliant execution? Which will be lucky enough to have incompetent rivals?

It seemed that MySpace belonged in the former group not too long ago, dominating competition like Friendster. With only ~10% of the world's population on Facebook, it may still be too early to speak definitively about the future.

Sure, but at the same time I think it's worth also taking a moment to think about this number. 10% of the world's population has an active Facebook account. That's staggering. The best number I can find for MySpace is 100 million active users. It's easy to misrepresent the scales involved just because they're so very large, but the difference between 100 million and 600 million is huge. 17 year olds are fickle consumers. 53 year old Aunt Sue is not. How many people still have a paid AOL account simply because they don't want to lose their email address? AOL's stayed alive for YEARS on them. I don't think Facebook is particularly overvalued: it may not be what all of your friends are using 5 years from now, but it's going to be a very, very big and profitable company for many, many, many years.

I wouldn't take face cook's claim that they have 600M active accounts to mean that they actually have 600M active users. If you wander very far from your own "neighborhood" you'll reali ze that there are a lot of bogus accounts used by spammers.

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