Facebook Is Kinda OK but Largely Overrated : Matt's Homepage

The rub is that people keep comparing facebook to Google, without seeming to have any idea how it'll get that far beyond a vague notion of connecting people. The only person I know who doesn't use Google search is my grandma, who doesn't use a computer. In contrast, not even half the people I know my age use facebook, and essentially no one older than me uses it or seems at all likely to ever bother.

Its a platform that allows a kind of lightweight, asynchronous and with easy opt-outs and opt-ins, shared online experience. I think it actually threatens to become the internet for a lot of people.

It's not there yet, though. The login requirement is a barrier. The interface is still pretty complicated and it's not much faster(if it's faster at all) than its competitors. There's still nothing so compelling that people can't break a Facebook habit if they want to.

Facebook has a lot of potential, and of course millions of users count for something, but it's not a Google and really doesn't seem to be headed that way.

For example, if everyone did email through facebook, then you could restrict incoming email to within 6 degrees of your friends. If spam starts being sent because of one of your friends, you have incentive to cut off that friendship before you get cut off from your social network.

Like that article awhile back talked about, Facebook is another step in automating the way we build trust. And trust is the bedrock of a cohesive and effective society.

Facebook apps have definitely made themselves known to Facebook users, but far from indispensable.

It happens a lot on LiveJournal. I'm still in touch with some of the folks I met 5 years ago on there. I've met them in real life. Some of them have introduced me to all their friends, who I'm also still in touch with (in some cases, moreso than the original friend). A couple of my now-RL friends met on LiveJournal; they're now married. The wedding pictures tagged guests with their LiveJournal usernames instead of their real names.

FaceBook and MySpace spread largely through existing social networks, which is why their growth was so fast. LiveJournal, blogs, webcomics, and the myriad niche forums have been forming new social networks, which is much slower and doesn't get as much press attention. It's there, though, if you're looking in the right places.

Facebook has been around a long time and still has nothing more compelling than turning people into vampires, and they have a ton of geniuses trying to figure it out. Its not only a perpetual novelty, but one which is apparently wearing off if you look at average visits per day per user.

"The web, after all, vanquished proprietary online services like America Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve -- the so-called "walled gardens" -- in large part because the web is a platform and the walled gardens were not."

Umm, no. Broadband vanquished them. They allowed unfettered internet access long before they began their downward spirals. I had AOL in high school, when they were approaching their zenith, and never used any of the walled features, just internet and IM.

When you phrase platform the way he does, it sounds superior. When, in reality, you have people piling layer on top of layer until what remains is something so complex and unreliable that few people can understand or tolerate it, you end up with something nobody wants.

And honestly, anything is a platform once somebody turns it into one. Myspace most definitely is. People make good livings just making layouts for it. Photobucket got rich off of it. Lots of indie bands sold concert tickets and CDs thanks to it. Dane Cook owes it his entire career.

So in the platform race, Facebook is losing. They're a more restrictive platform built onto a smaller one.

In other words, never.

LinkedIn is.

... and the vast majority of trivialities remained just that, trivialities. Looking at a handful of successful technologies and then tracing them back to when they were trivial is vulnerable to selection bias.