What lesson would that be? Facebook is hugely successful.
Now they're Facebooking Instagram.
But I think Zuck knows this and buys up enough up and comers to probably stay ahead on enough things.
* MySpace, at its peak, had around 75 MM MAU.
* Facebook's core properties (Insta, WhatsApp, Messenger/Big Blue) have around 2.6 billion MAU.
Even if I just consider FB core + Messenger, Facebook is roughly 20x larger than MySpace. Facebook, as a core product, also is growing in non-US markets, even though it has saturated the US markets for years.
MySpace and Facebook just aren't comparable anymore.
75m MAU in 2008 is very different than 2.6b in 2020.
The MySpace argument often calls to the transient spirit of social media: one day it's hot, the other it's not. I recall Digg's death too after a controversial redesign. The issue with this argument is that:
1. Numbers not only increase inertia, but social products increase it too. If my friends aren't using a social platform neither am I, usually.
2. Facebook has such a rich culture of A/B testing that they'll never release controversial changes without a deeper understanding of the impact of those changes on engagement. They won't shoot themselves in the foot like Digg did with current leadership.
3. Facebook has a really successful history of acquisitions and its leadership is very aware of social media trends. It catches those trends early.
As a consequence of (1), I'd argue that Facebook has a tremendous moat in comparison to its peers: it has a large amount of users who are more likely to stay put. While Facebook also moves slowly as a consequence of (2) often enough, it can move really quickly on producing novel products.
Facebook certainly will face challenges in the future, but they're likely to be a lot different at this stage.
The questions for continued relevance is if Facebook-the-company can continue to iterate Facebook-the-product, or if its codebase has grown too unwieldy, and the company's culture gone toxic, making it harder to add a feature to Facebook, compared to creating a new company, writing a bunch of code, buying content and acquiring users. Given the rise of Instagram(Acquired), Snapchat (IPOd), WhatsApp(Acquired), TikTok, it's not clear Facebook-the-company is able to innovate. It's not clear that they have to, either, given older Internet brands like Yahoo! are still around and making money.
The comparison I'd make is to email. There are reasons email will never die (along with reasons why email can't innovate), and I think some of those reasons also apply to Facebook by this point. There's just some percentage of people that won't ever move, so while, eg, IRC is no longer in its heyday, it's still alive and kicking.
A decade ago you could have everyone on it for their entire lunchbreaks, deep-stalking their mates. But nowadays people are not engaged with it compulsively.
Younger people don't use it because their parents are on it.
Content isn't made by people for Facebook because it won't show in their friends feeds.
Advertisers that are small to medium size businesses don't get a return from spending their money there, so they have left too.
Before Facebook there was the printed telephone book and the Yellow Pages. People and businesses had to be in the phone books because someone might want to contact them that way. But the Internet and email came along. Facebook is a bit like that, people are there but no more engaged than they are with a printed telephone book.
Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram to keep the same eyeballs. Because of that Facebook are successful.
But TikTok is the new, cool app in town. 80 million users in the US apparently, not all of them teenage girls.
The only thing I disagree with is that Facebook does make big profits from its ads, in fact it does a tough competition to google and amazon... the rest of your arguments seem correct to me... facebook doesn't feel like the home that it was before... it feels more like a newspaper, full of ads, debates, news and toxic people
> Advertisers that are small to medium size businesses don't get a return from spending their money there, so they have left too.
No, this is not true. Not only has Facebook done well in Q2, performance was unaffected by the boycott of large advertisers because of revenue from small businesses.
True. But then they should speak with humility and uncertainty, not proclaim their wrong ideas with confidence.
> if someone is wrong about something, they deserve to know the reasons
No, it's not our job to educate people. Least of all, people who are ignorant but purport to be knowledgeable. These are the most resistant to any kind of learning.
Kodak didn't die when invented digital cameras, but it was a downhill ride towards inevitable cliff.
Facebook is probably the the company most able to claim to have achieved this, with facebook.com and Instagram being two big hits, arguably Messenger and WhatsApp too. TikTok is probably the biggest sign that they have actually failed to hit a 3rd generation.
It might be a successful strategy to run a business when you are big enough to do it (as long as your buyouts are correct).
I heard about facebook from a friend when it was still exclusive and I joined when it was opened up. Now I open it up at what seems exponential intervals, and each time it seems my disappointment with the platform is also exponential.
Its a mess filled with garbage mixed with adds that pretend to be content.
Facebook has been declared dead without actually dying for so long now that it might still be alive when the retro mechanisms start kicking in.
But they sure love Instagram and WhatsApp.
Absolutely. They just reported their Q2 earnings, and Facebook has 2.7B monthly active users. When you exclude China (where they aren't allowed), people without internet or too old/young, then yes - is growth is limited, largely by size of the human population.
Even if young generations decide not to join, this will be likely most powerful network for decades.