Facebook's fail is going to be epic (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's fail is going to be epic (2008)

theregister.co.uk

22 pointsheartbeats11 comments

I'll be honest, I was a Facebook naysayer back in 2008 too. I thought that the public was too fickle, and would jump to the next big thing within a few years, and the platform would quietly die off.

Completely wrong, obviously. Coming from a position of tech savvy early adopter, I totally underestimated:

- the impact that mobile had on the landscape. For most of those over 30, the internet was for work, not for "group socializing". I think mobile normalized the practice of spending hours a day on social media for average users.

- how "sticky" older users are. Once they're on Facebook, they stay on Facebook.

- Zuck's adaptability, and the difference between "Facebook the platform" and "Facebook the company". I mean, I was partially right about the exodus to the Next Big Thing (TM). That's exactly why Zuck just went out and just bought it (Instagram and WhatsApp in particular).

That being said, I still think there's a coming reckoning on digital advertising. I hear so many complaints about poor ROI, click inflation/fraud and general dissatisfaction (e.g. Basecamp competitors bidding on the search term "Basecamp"). I can't help but think there'll be a shift in spend towards advertising on more "conventional" media (Spotify, Netflix, YouTube).

I think Instagram is very, very effective as an advertising platform. Consumer product direct sales work very well on IG. The ads don't even feel intrusive to me as I can easily scroll past without having to engage, but occasionally a product catches my eye and I find myself purchasing directly from an ad.

Facebook stock (recently sold all of it) made me a millionaire. I think FB-the-company is a scourge and wish it good riddance but it was more than obvious years ago that there was a lot of value there for stock speculation.

I've lost track of how many friends and family laughed at my investment and/or advised me to dump it before "I got ruined". What I found interesting was that a lot of these friends were tech insiders with decades of experience in the field and ought to have known better. What I think happened was that in all cases, their personal dislike for FB-the-company clouded their ability to properly analyze the situation.

I predicted Facebook's success years ago. I think what everybody misses, even within the tech industry is that Facebook (and now Instagram) have one very important 'killer app' for the modern world that nobody realizes. That is that those websites are everybody's defacto 'photo album' for the 21st century. I know people whose entire life in photos from the last 15 years is entirely on Facebook and likely not backed up anywhere else. Every major life event is readily available in seconds with dates attached and even the nice or mean things that friends and family said about each photo at the time. This was what MySpace, Friendster, Google+, and the other apps of the time did not understand. They concentrated on crafting some pointless 'social network experience' when in reality nobody cared to switch anyway because all of their photos and memories were somewhere else already, and I think this is what keeps people on the platform.

The success of fang is about unlimited capital's ability to buy the competition, rather than the sage intelligence they pretend to. They will not fail until society gets fed up with an information oligopoly driven by adverts. Why all these smart people feel revolutionary serving dumb ads, I have no idea.

Honestly if Facebook had not been so savvy and bought Instagram and WhatsApp it is likely it would of been considered a failure already

Lotsa ifs though. A lot of smart people, including investors, were behind it, and essentially the entire (non-China) world was using FB. With unlimited money it's hard to bet against them, unless the government stops them from buying competitors.

But I agree that their failure will be epic. Not sure about the time though

Even though I was both a user and familiar with developing on the platform, I remember thinking it overvalued when I saw people offloading their private shares at a 10 billion valuation. Now valued at 60 times that.

I didn’t doubt it would continue to grow in popularity, but I never expected them to be able to monetize it as well as they’ve done.

A big difference between the past social sites and Facebook is that Facebook is now able to buy the up and coming competitors. Even in 2008 it had enough money to absorb competitors. At this point it has even more power. Additionally their user base is broad. Even if one sector decides to stop using the site there's still a big base that will keep site going until it can recover the base. Additionally, Zuckerberg is a super smart CEO and is able to correct problems that would cause it to fail.

I think short of getting the govertments of the world to shut it down Facebook is here to stay.

Two months after Feb 2008 article, in April 2008, Facebook released [1] Facebook Chat, and gradually captured the 'chat with people you know in real life' usecase.

In April 2008, we're three months before the launch of the iOS appstore, more than a year before iOS push notifications, and more than two years before Android push notifications -- and three years before iMessage. For instant messaging, most people are still using 'legacy' networks like AIM, MSN/WLM, Yahoo Messenger; tech early adopters may be using Google Talk inside Gmail, which stopped being invite-only just a year prior. People with phones are using SMS, and smartphones are not too common.

With Chat, Facebook became much more than a place to post text or pictures on one's page: it became one of the largest Instant Messaging networks overnight.

They stayed relevant during the rise of mobile apps as other players faltered, then years later, they turned to acquisitions to buy a few networks that presented a competitive threat.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13465483

I know one guy who thought it’d be like yahoo and drop. I think he lost a bunch on shorts...

That being said I never bought stock in google or facebook and clearly I should have and even put my 401k in early growth us tech.

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