Hacker News Reader

> For someone who has consolidated power in a company that could rival Google

I think you may be getting ahead of yourself on that one.

Facebook/Google comparisons always strike me as way off base. It's like comparing a Central Park (busy, no money) with Disneyland (busy, big money).

Central park isn't a business. If it were a for-profit venture, it would be fairly easy to monetize, purely because it's so popular.

> it would be fairly easy to monetize, purely because it's so popular.

Why? Popularity as a free service doesn't necessarily imply that said popularity will be retained upon introduction of a monetary fee.

The monetization need not be direct (i.e. charging people to use the site). It could be better ad placement, a search engine that knows more about you than google does, monetary transactions (auctions, payments), as well as other stuff...

Like it or not, facebook has real utility (just like central park), and people are willing to pay for real utility in one way or another.

What I'm surprised they haven't done already is extend their event planning mechanism to partner with ticket agents, train companies/airlines, cinema chains, restaurant booking systems, pizza delivery, etc etc.

"Central park isn't a business."

A lot of people don't think Facebook is a business either.

It's still trivially easy and often very enticing to bail out of Facebook entirely. I still don't see anything that Facebook is doing that successfully locks in customers, not even in the way that Amazon locks in book-buyers and certainly not in the way that Google becomes most people's default approach to Web search.

Moreover, if every user loses money for Facebook, what's the financial model of the company? Even if I like Facebook, if I'm not providing it with cash flow, when it does it have to bail out of its business?

It is not as easy as it seems. I use facebook because it easily allows me to see what is going on in a lot of people's lives. There are no huge technical or design hurdles to beating Facebook. The problems are social.

Only sites with a lot of users, like Myspace, could quickly become a threat to Myspace. Facebook has surpassed a critical mass of users, so they probably would have time to respond to any technical challenges.And Myspace seems to have a different and less successful focus than Facebook that would need to be changed. I don't really care about telling everyone who my top friends are, designing my page, or using Myspace as a blog. Basically, I just want to quickly and easily find out the major events in my friend's lives. It does not matter how brilliantly designed a site is, I cannot adequately meet my needs with a site until it has a good portion of my friends as users.

So to go against Facebook successfully, a company would need to start in an extremely small niche and grow, or provide value unrelated to social networking. It is a lot easier to reach critical mass in a very small niche. And if you aren't solely in social networking, people are going to be using your network before it provides decent social value.

ala twitter, sf geek crowd

Don't compare Facebook to Twitter. It's enormous in comparison. Twitter may be getting lots of press, but my friends who've tried it have nearly all abandoned their accounts.

> For someone who has consolidated power in a company that could rival Google

You're out of your mind.

I'd have said the same about Google and Microsoft when Google was Microsoft's age. Google didn't get their business model (ads) until they were a year older than Facebook.

Looking at things now I wouldn't say that Facebook would rival Google, but it's definitely not out of their mind to imagine that they could.

> 5) Mark Zuckerberg can't be removed from the CEO position, and probably holds more than 20% of the company

Really? I've never heard this. Is there a condition in the companies charter that forbids it?

Usually all you need is a majority of the board to vote the CEO out and since he only has one vote and there are more than 2 people on the facebook board it seems like he could be voted out.

What's the point of #6 if you don't do anything with that talent?