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Comment by JonoW | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, currently there no real competitor to facebook, if people are closing their accounts its because they want to remove themselves from social networking all together (my one friend did this) rather than move to a different service.

Facebook is so ubiquitous now, it's like email. It will take one hell of a competitor to kill it.

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It's usually not competitors that can hurt or even kill a product, it's substitute goods. Cart manufacturers in the early 20th century didn't see their business diminishing because of the sudden emergence of a better cart manufacturer, it has happened because of the invention of the automobile.

Similarly, if something threatens Facebook's position, it's quite possible that it will be a substitute product, not a direct competitor. A significant substitute product of Facebook is real life interactions with your friends, for example.

A significant substitute product of Facebook is real life interactions with your friends, for example.

I think that's totally missing the point. I don't think anyone uses Facebook as a substitute for real life interaction. I imagine that most people use it partially to coordinate the meeting up with said friends and partially to interact with people whom, due geography or various life circumstances, it is infeasible to meet up with in real life. I doubt there are many people who'd rather sit at home and read their friend's Facebook updates if they have the option to pop around the corner and meet them face to face.

I know way too many people personally who do exactly that. I'll let other decide if it's a good or a bad thing, but in my experience an awful lot of people use social networks instead of real life interactions. I think those of us who live far away from our friends and family are in minority.

About half of my Facebook friends (IRL) are actually too far away to meet up with in real life. Facebook is a handy way to "keep up".

Unfortunately they don't post as often as I would like - instead preferring to talk "face to face". :-(

I agree that an incumbent is very hard to be beaten head-on. Examples: Google on search. Microsoft on OS or Office.

Over time monopolistic players start to be everything for everybody. This may be just fine but in addition to that they promote bloat at the expense of their main product's usability. That's when new players emerge.

Of course there are alternatives. Twitter is an alternative (not saying its a killer though). An alternative doesn't (and really shouldn't) have to contain all of the same features or work in the same way. It's just something that you use instead of. The Windows killer turned out to be "The Internet". Although it's a different beast, it moved Windows to the background. The Facebook killer might very well be a protocol for sharing things on the net. Or simply more sites adding their own social features. Or something no one has thought of yet.

I don't see Twitter as a competitor, for me they're too different and I don't see any problem using both of them parallel. Comparing Windows apps to web-apps; I think for the end-user they're conceptually very similar, just delivered differently. Is GMail that different from Outlook to the user? I think your average person will want something at least a little similar to Facebook; I don't think Twitter is that thing.

Yes and no - personally I closed my Facebook account while becoming much more active on Twitter. No, it wasn't a direct replacement for me, and my reasons for using both services were very different, but the fact that I don't find Facebook useful doesn't mean I don't find any type of "social networking" useful.

I'm finding Twitter of at least some limited use too. The big difference is that I don't follow my "friends", I follow people that know a lot about things I find professionally and artistically interesting, most of whom I'll probably never meet in person.

"Facebook is about people you were friend with, Twitter is about people you wish you'd be friend with"

-- approximate quote from someone I can't recall

This is not quite exact in reality, but I think it captured the difference in essence between the two social platforms.

I see the reality in the Twitter part (even though I'm not a user of twitter myself). But I think that the Facebook part of that assertion is outdated.

It used to be true that I only had friends on Facebook. But nowadays I have way more acquaintances than friends. My point is, if Facebook was still today only about people I am friends with I would still use it as much as 4 years ago. But nowadays the signal to noise ratio is way too low for me to really get anything out of the platform:

* I'm reminded of birthdays of people I don't even know how I met

* I see pictures on my news feed from people partying that I don't recognize...

PS: I might not be a good example of the average user, since I've also been moving from one country to another over the past few years accelerating the process by witch everyday friends turn into acquaintances

EDIT: fixed formatting

I agree there is no alternative, but I think Facebook can go as quickly as it came. My experience is from using Orkut in Brazil. In 2005 Orkut was as hot as Facebook is now in the US, everyone was there. Nowadays everybody is moving to Facebook. I suspect the same thing will happen again 5 years from now.

I normally compare the odds of unseating Facebook as the same as unseating Google for search. It might happen at some point, but it will be exceptionally difficult. I think FB is so much more ingrained than any other social network has been before, say MySpace or Orkut. I really hope we do see some competition in the future.

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