(http://siliconangle.com/ver2/sabackchan/2009/08/24/why-is-fa...)
MySpace and other startups succeed because they’re small and nimble – why the heck is Zuck on a mission to hire as many people as possible? It sounds like a recipe for failure. Am I wrong?
And then, of course, you see the posts at Valleywag and ATD showing them doing little more than playing ping-pong and video games all day, and I'm left wondering if this talent grab ploy over there isn't just turning good coders into good slackers.
I'm not saying FB's a titanic, but they do an awful lot of deck-chair re-arranging there, it seems like.
Also, Valleywag is not a very reliable news source.
EDIT: Toned down my post, sorry I was being obnoxious.
Valleywag isn't exactly the best hard news source, but when it comes to corporate culture type stuff, which is what i'm referring to, they're generally not bad, particularly in their hey-day when Boutin, Owen and the rest of the gang were still there.
EDIT: Read your other comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=784433). Well explained points!
I trust Facebook's developers to know what's best for their company, at the moment. I doubt they've missed thirty-plus possibilities for monetization without thinking very carefully about all of them. Meanwhile, Facebook's making money without letting more than a handful of users slip out of its walled garden, so I think they're doing a good job so far.
And then, of course, you see the posts at Valleywag and ATD showing them doing little more than playing ping-pong and video games all day, and I'm left wondering if this talent grab ploy over there isn't just turning good coders into good slackers.
Do you expect people to sit in front of a screen for sixteen hours a day, being constantly productive? I've got a limited work experience, but one of the things I noticed instantly going between jobs is that the better people are working at a job, and the more they're trusted, the less they're expected to spend all their time working. It's assumed that they know themselves how much time they'll need to get their work done. (As an anecdote, I'll provide the story of the people at the close-knit writing program I attended a few years ago. We were given eight hours a day to write, probably spent two hours writing at most and six hours on Youtube.)
If I can do it, so can they. Perhaps not for 16 hours a day. I tend to cut myself off at 12 or 14 (call me a slacker). A smaller dedicated staff with an ethos of accountability beats out a large supposedly genius and top notch staff that has a reputation for playing games during the majority of their shift.
"It's evolving faster as a site than any other web site that large."
Constant change does not equal success, either in UX or fiscal reward. They've yet to be decidedly in the black, they've yet to find a solid business model, and they've yet to find dedicated evangelists in the tech blogosphere at large. They're simply growing because they're growing, and that momentum won't last forever (again, ask FriendFeed, Myspace, Friendster, Six Degrees of Seperation, Orkut, Yahoo 360, and the rest of the zombies beckoning from the graveyard).
If I can do it, so can they. Perhaps not for 16 hours a day. I tend to cut myself off at 12 or 14 (call me a slacker). A smaller dedicated staff with an ethos of accountability beats out a large supposedly genius and top notch staff that has a reputation for playing games during the majority of their shift.
I'm not a programmer, but I'll tell you that this is a belief that's widespread throughout almost every industry and it's one that's very rarely accurate. The man who's most indicative of the flaws in this thinking is Ricky Gervais, the man who probably influenced highbrow comedy more than any man in the last 20 years. The DVDs to The Office include lots of behind the scenes showing Ricky dawdling during the writing process (he plays a rubber band, shoots it at his cowriter, spills coffee on the script, mashing napkins into his mouth and throwing them up), and then again during the process of directing/acting, essentially sabotaging things to have fun with the process. His work ethic is famously bad, yet the products he puts out are more tightly made than nearly anything else I've seen.
The creative process - and making a huge web site like Facebook is absolutely a creative process - is not one that can be forced out. Creative minds work to their own schedules. Some people are capable of churning out a dozen hours of work every day. Others procrastinate and still end up with great pieces of work.
(again, ask FriendFeed, Myspace, Friendster, Six Degrees of Seperation, Orkut, Yahoo 360, and the rest of the zombies beckoning from the graveyard)
It's not worth the time it would take to argue with you, but I've spent a lot of time in this particular medium and you are dead wrong comparing Facebook to these.
I'll simply let you have the last word on all of these threads since I'm not worth arguing on it. You're obviously much more qualified, and I unequivically accept your summary judgement that Facebook is superior to everything else ever.
Sorry.
If you don't see a reply button (I think that's a glitch in the site; happens to me all the time), then you click the "link" button up top, next to "parent". That'll give you a box in which to reply.
I'll apologize for the abruptness of my last comment to you. Hopefully you'll understand there was a reason behind it, and that reason is: This debate springs up once a month, and every time somebody new comes up saying Facebook is like MySpace is like Friendster, and every time I feel the need to explain why they're wrong, and it takes an hour and leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. I'm a bit of a Facebook fan, and I figure that since most HN users aren't I might as well step in and shout my things.
If you'd like to, I can craft a response to you that addresses that one point specifically. As it is, I spent a good twenty minutes looking for previous things I've said in the hopes that you can get the gist of my argument, and hopefully respond in a non-arsewipe way that leads to fun conversation that leads to us each enjoying the sight of our respective names in future debates.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=513550
In 2005 I was working on the quality assurance team for a social network start-up with a pretty neat set of technologies. Part of my goal was to get other people to move off MySpace. The site I was with, Zoints, had a cleaner design, more features, and some parts of it were much more intuitive. People refused to switch. They had friends on MySpace, and they had nothing to gain from switching. Social networks are all about the users, and they were in one basket.
This is important not just as a lesson of how hard it is to make people switch, but of how good Facebook is. Everybody had a MySpace, but they switched over to Facebook anyway. By the time Facebook let high schoolers register, they had 85% of all college students as active users, and half of those were active daily. Now I would suspect it has more than just 85% of all high schoolers registered, and it's leaking down to middle school registration. People at work use it a lot, and as a result entire families are signing up.
Many people here don't ask themselves just how that happened, which is damn shortsighted. I mean, my mother signed up. My grandfather signed up. He comments on my Facebook statuses. My young cousin got an account. And it's not like Twitter, where people want to "tap into a network". It's not like getting a blog. Simply put, Facebook keeps people in contact better than any other application does. It provides an incredible interface. People who know nothing about tech just "get it". They figure out how to write photos and write notes and update statuses and make friends. It's that easy. It's so easy, and so universal, that middle schoolers get them, not just to be cool, but to talk to other kids. Older family members get them to talk to their relatives. My mother currently has a network of 39 friends, including mothers in the neighborhood and friends at work. That's pretty damn impressive.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=255532
Facebook becomes just a point for those few times you want to plan things way in advance, or when you just need to vent to friends. It becomes useful in a way. Not productive, but useful. And what makes it useful are the things Facebook built itself: photos, events, notes. Any applications beyond that are only good for amusement's sake. The top app developers get that.
I've been pretty anti-Facebook for quite some time, far before it was cool to be anti-Facebook, so I'm probably carrying some baggage there as well.
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To your points - I think that MySpace v. Any Other Social Network in 2005 and MySpace v. Facebook in 2009, 2008, or 2007 are two different situations entirely.
MySpace WAS Facebook in 2005. Facebook was something else entirely - some sort of exclusive social network you had to be a college student to use. I didn't fall into that demo, so I couldn't use it at the time, being far past college age.
If you compare the two networks now, it's hard to imagine that they're both supposed to be the same class of website. MySpace has let design-rot take root like a bad termite infection. It has problems going back to its inception with spammers.
Facebook doesn't have those problems, and it's working well to ingrain itself to the fabric of the web... but it's not making money, and they seem to have the same disease Twitter has, which is this lack of hunger for picking the low hanging fruits in terms of viable tried and true monetization methods.
I wrote on this at some point when I was at Mashable - when we were all theorizing as to what Project Beacon was going to end up being. My theory, which was way off as it turns out, was that they were building an offsite behavioral ad network that webmasters could use in the same way they use AdSense. They're slowly crawling to this now, I hope, but they're a long way from it, and it's the one killer app that could strike a blow at Google's AdSense and capture a SIGNIFICANT share of the worlds web ad market.
Instead, their content to run what basically amounts to poorly targeted remnant ads INSIDE THE SITE, where they're least effective.
I'll put it this way by giving you an example from an unrelated series of posts I did way back when splogging was a majour scourge on the net. Remember those search engine results we were all getting several years ago that look like a monkey wrote the blog posts? You'd search for "underwater basket weaving" and you'd get a splog with that as the title, and nonsensical computer generated blog posts surrounded by adsense ads?
They worked and made money for the sploggers because the content wasn't what the user wanted to see, and most surfers are as likely to click a relevant link as they are to hit the back button.
Facebook content is too good for ads to work. When I log into Facebook, I'm looking at what I'm there for because it's content tailored to me. All those pageviews mean nothing for ads because I never get bored enough with the content to click on them.
The wilds of the web are much different - content on the web coming from search engine results has varying degrees of relevance to me as a searcher, and ads are much more likely to be clicked.
All this to say that Facebook may be great and all, and they may have the greatest momentum ever, but if they don't get serious and look at the BASICS of how their monetization model works, they're not going to get anywhere. I've been banging this drum since early 2007, and it's frustrating as hell to see so much squandered opportunity. Going on a hiring spree and re-arranging the UX won't fix that problem, and that problem is the crux of what makes a business... money.
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I see where you're coming from re:Facebook's money. I never gave it much thought what Facebook was doing: I just sort of innocently assume businesses will find a way to survive somehow. So when I was thinking of you saying Facebook wouldn't last, I was thinking only in terms of eyeballs and not in terms of making money. What you just mentioned - MySpace's design-rot - was what made Facebook the superior site once they opened up past colleges. I think that that, along with Facebook's feed, are the two core parts of the social network business, and once Facebook had that, they made themselves hard to unroot by some follow-up act.
I wrote on this at some point when I was at Mashable - when we were all theorizing as to what Project Beacon was going to end up being. My theory, which was way off as it turns out, was that they were building an offsite behavioral ad network that webmasters could use in the same way they use AdSense. They're slowly crawling to this now, I hope, but they're a long way from it, and it's the one killer app that could strike a blow at Google's AdSense and capture a SIGNIFICANT share of the worlds web ad market.
Huh! I'd never thought of that, but you're right: Implemented right (that is, actually getting ads that people click on), they could provide a moderately attractive, supremely targeted ad network. I could see myself using that on a site.
All this to say that Facebook may be great and all, and they may have the greatest momentum ever, but if they don't get serious and look at the BASICS of how their monetization model works, they're not going to get anywhere. I've been banging this drum since early 2007, and it's frustrating as hell to see so much squandered opportunity.
That makes sense. I'm very sorry. I thought you were saying something other than what you were actually saying.
And trust me, if they implemented this, you'd see me do a complete 540 on Facebook. That's right - I'd do a 360 spin plus another 180 just so I'm facing firmly in line with the Facebook supporters.
I love Google, but AdSense needs some real competition on the publisher front to get them to respect publishers ... something like this that was effective and had momentum enough to seize marketshare with web publishers would be the kick in the pocketbook Google needs to shape up and fly right.
The "large sites" you're comparing too very well could be large and not evolving because they've found a reasonably successful way to make money and they've honed in on something that works. This may mean that those sites that are still "evolving" have not found success yet.
Facebook has grown large enough now that engineering is not their most difficult task - that's a solved problem now. Now staying useful without becoming a slow, bloated stupid company is their biggest challenge.
See myspace for an example of exactly how not to do this.
You do make an excellent point about how intelligence is not enough to succeed, however Facebook has already demonstrated its ability to penetrate and hold a large portion of an incredibly large market. This, along with the high quality software they've released publicly, gives me enough confidence in their ability to succeed. It's true that Thinking Machines achieved a large market share in supercomputers, but it's my understanding that this was largely because of the fact that DARPA made Thinking Machines their biggest client for a long time. When DARPA started to spread out their orders, Thinking Machines went bankrupt. Facebook has been able to capture market share on its own.
Facebook is more ambitious, more talented, and more successful than MySpace. Their goal is to make a web site that revolutionizes how the world interacts with itself, and they've been doing an astonishingly good job at it. When I deleted my presence online, I kept Facebook, because it was capable of adapting to the lifestyle I wanted to lead.
Perhaps one day Facebook will meet a challenge it cannot overcome. Until then, it hasn't failed with practically everything, and it's steamrollering every would-be competitor. It has every reason to expand.
I'd be happy if half the social networks I love could do the same, so I could quit worrying if they're doomed to shut down as soon as the VCs get bored with them.
Facebook, meanwhile, has no competition. None. They are free to expand as they see fit, and currently they're in the black and so can afford expansion.
Citation please. They owe a lot of people a lot of money.
I don't know where you're getting this Facebook has no competition business. Everything on the web has competition, and Facebook is no exception.
That implies that they're making an impressive revenue. Right now, Facebook has money to burn. If they find that they can't increase revenue, they'll be able to significantly cut back and make a profit, similar to what MySpace did recently. For now, they don't need to worry about that.
I don't know where you're getting this Facebook has no competition business. Everything on the web has competition, and Facebook is no exception.
According to Alexa, Facebook has five times the daily reach of MySpace, which is its next-closest competitor. It's got six times the reach of Twitter, which is called its competitor even though it's not. It's fifteen times larger than the number three network, which is Hi 5.
That's user interaction. Facebook also has more pictures than any other web site in existence, more than Flickr, which is the largest photo storage site in existence.
Barack Obama, who may not be the largest Facebook page, has twice the followers of APlusK on Twitter, and on Facebook he has vastly more functionality than APlusK does on Twitter: he can push nearly anything at users directly from the site, no third-party needed.
It's hard to track Note use and Video use since Facebook's based on privacy. However, I'd make a bet that Facebook's videos are enough to place it in the Top 10 for video sites worldwide. I don't know how I'd compare notes.
Google Search has competition, because it's possible to force search engine use through products. (I've used Bing a few times in the last month because I see it when I search on Facebook.) Yahoo Mail has competition, because its service has certain aspects that are unpleasant. (Email ads, for instance.) Facebook has none. In fact, because Facebook's core service is so incredibly tight, I'd bet that Facebook could upgrade nothing for two-three years, and it would still maintain its lead over competitors, solely for the reason that it can't lose that lead unless users see something elsewhere that's so compelling it makes them switch. I can't think of anything that compelling, save perhaps mobile networking, and Facebook's already the top phone-based social network despite not yet having location-based technologies.
They are making impressive revenue, but impressive revenue is a relative term. Impressive compared to their pageviews? Not really. Impressive compared to what MySpace is making? It's about the same. Impressive compared to what my blog makes on a monthly basis? Hell yes.
For now, they don't need to worry about that.
If I'm an investor in any tech startup, those are the words I never want to hear from my investment. Being cavalier about squandering my success is the quickest route to being broke. Shrewd investment of time, resources, and expertise is the only way to succeed long-term.
Act like a bootstrapped startup, and you'll never be wanting for cash. Apple and Google both know this - they have money to burn, but they build up large cash reserves. This is smart.
Spending everything in the hopes of netting a couple of smarties is like paying for a superbowl ad to sell your couch.
According to Alexa...
Let me stop you right there. Alexa is as reliable for webstats as Valleywag is reliable for fact verification.
Granted, Facebook has outclassed in terms of attention and traffic every other social network out there. When you're in the number one slot, you're not looking out for number two, you're looking out for numbers two through two million.
In other words, Facebook is competing with the rest of the web.