It seems to be the big question of the internet at the moment doesn't it... is facebook worth that much, or really anything?
Firstly I think anytime there is a whole bunch of people communicating you should never ask yourself what the point is. Communication is a fundamental, it is the reason.
Second there's the big draw cards of social networks - an easy lightweight way to connect and reconnect. Its a great big people directory - and connections are very low social risk - much easier than emailing that person you haven't seen in years. And how are you going to get their email address anyway, any public directory would be spam central.
Of course myspace or any site has that much going for it. So that leaves the final facebook draw card - facebook apps. I totally understand the skepticism, but apps offer lots of different shared activities. Lots of little quizzes and games, very much like the kind of structured getting-to-know-you party game type activities. Its actually very difficult for these kinds of applications to exist without incorporating the friend networks that facebook offers.
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.
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.
Facebook sucks in a lot of ways. I'm not a fan, in fact I'd actually quite enjoy seeing Zuckerberg crushed. There is just very little else online that facilitates shared experience.
Myspace has zero interest or ability to push itself further. Google hasn't really thrown its full weight behind orkut, not least because they have a much better money maker they need to protect. So the next generation facebook killer will probably have to be a startup - which means they have to be significantly better to attract users and reach a critical mass.
Orkut is quite possibly the worst name for a social network that I've heard. I have no idea why it was chosen, or what significance it has, but it's definitely not an advantage. Nobody I know would hear Orkut for the first time and think either "Social Network" or "Google." (In contrast to, say, "gmail," which immediately evokes email and google).
One way Facebook can be very useful is by providing trust and accountability for distributed/social applications.
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.
If you talk to college and high school students, they will have a completely different opinion about Facebook than Matt's. For many of them, it is their primary form of communication - above email and oftentimes even cellphones. To some extent, there's a large generational gap on Facebook with respect to its hardcore users. To high schoolers, us professionals "just don't get it."
Facebook came out at my school during October of my freshman year. It's a whole lot more compelling when everyone you know is truly on it, except for a couple luddite hold-outs.
"Also contributing to the hype is the Facebook platform... whose existence Joe Average is now and ever shall be blissfully ignorant."
Matt may have some good points but I strongly disagree on this one. Joe 6pack is not ignorant of the FB Platform. Joe 6pack just sees it as: "Mary has offered you a 'long island'", "Jack want's to play poker with you", "You are 67% compatible with Ann in movies", and so on...
I could be wrong but what keeps people coming back on Myspace is just messages either on their wall or in their inbox. In FB this is on steroids, allowing users to do that interaction in a potentially infinite amount of ways. As techies we may think that 98% of these apps suck, but hundreds of new ones come out every week. Even if only a few catch Jill Average's attention for just a few days, it's good enough to keep her and her friends coming back regularly; since there's something new and novel everyday.
FB's platform is perfect of our modern "everything is disposable", attention deficit society.
The middle part of that sentence which you ...ed out was kinda important. I meant that platforms in general have not and will not reach the popular consciousness. People in the tech world today think they're far more important than they are.
Facebook apps have definitely made themselves known to Facebook users, but far from indispensable.
"Also contributing to the hype is the Facebook platform. Platform is the Bubble 2.0 buzz word, which everyone talks about but of whose existence Joe Average is now and ever shall be blissfully ignorant."
was that you thought Joe 6pack doesn't know anything about it. All tech enthusiasts talking about it is a well known fact (everyone on yc knows about it). Was there something that I missed in that fragment?
"I meant that platforms in general have not and will not reach the popular consciousness."
I could be wrong, but I feel that my non-technical friends and family that I have FB food fights or Mafia games with would disagree. They may not know what it's called, but they do see it and enjoy it.
That sentence "Platform is the Bubble 2.0... was speaking about platforms in general. Average Joe doesn't know or care about platforms. Average Facebook user (who is far from Average Joe) may know about some of the apps on Facebook, but has yet to find anything compelling and never really will.
I could be wrong but to me without the platform the apps don't exist, and I still feel that the majority of ppl under 30 care about facebook apps: mostly college, high school students, or semi-fresh out of college ppl.
speaking of platforms, doesn't joe 6pack use windows at the very least?
But what if having a facebook profile becomes like having an email address? I'm sure early emails and early web searches were frivolous b/c people had been getting along fine w/o them. Early cell phone calls were, "OMG!! I'm walking down the street talking on the phone!!! This is so cool." etc.
At the same time I agree w/ maroon. Social networks are not my thing. Think about how you meet and maintain relationships with people in the real world. You're usually talking to someone you know and they introduce you to someone else. The conversation naturally veers toward common ground where a relationship can be built. I haven't seen a company reproduce this.
I never met anyone new on a social network. I never had the nuggets to ask anyone out and the ones who asked me out were either no-go's or bonafide prostitutes (yes I was on myspace for a few months.)
One of my co-founders said it best. "Facebook is for maintaining aqaintences."
"You're usually talking to someone you know and they introduce you to someone else. The conversation naturally veers toward common ground where a relationship can be built. I haven't seen a company reproduce this."
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.
Well, the first time you use any given technology its a novelty, but that usually quickly fades. When I found Google I instantly thought "this is the greatest thing ever". Within a month of owning a cell phone I knew I could never go back.
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.
This is the second time I've read something recently that Facebook will never be MySpace because MySpace has more users. I disagree. One of the articles I read made it's point by showing a graph that showed Facebook is clearly catching up. It's a few months old, but Andreesen had a really good post on why the platform will always win: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html
Andreesen is wrong on so many fronts. The biggest is
"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.
I agree with Marc. What made the web win was that random people could make web sites. So there started to be way more stuff on the web than on AOL. By late 1995, the main reason people were signing up for AOL was to get access to the web.
He's talking about an earlier and much more ambitious AOL than you are. AOL once hoped to be what later turned out to be the web. But because they weren't open enough, the web grew faster, and they became merely an on-ramp for it.
(Then after a few years of being a quite prosperous on-ramp, they lost even that, which is the vanquishing you're thinking of.)
I personally think that in someways facebook is over hyped, especially regarding the apps which are largely superflous however I use internal facebook messaging more than I use email now.
So perhaps until almost everyone you know has a regularly used facebook account, it will be hard for people to fully appreciate the value of it.
Interesting anecdotal evidence: A lot of people leave Myspace and Bebo to join Facebook. I've never heard the opposite of this happening.
I'm not sure about that. Picture some widely-used public school management package written to be used over the Facebook API. Suddenly, every new student [high school students, remember, not college] has to get Facebook, as part of the enrollment process. Then, since all the friends they make at school already "use" the service, they start really using it.
It's an online rolodex! A REPLACEMENT for a real rolodex! Isn't that fucking outrageously brilliant?
It's clear how a rolodex web application with messaging and a full-featured API is worth nearly as much as GFS + PageRank + MapReduce + BigTable + 450,000 commodity servers + thousands of motivated engineers.
To be pedantic, no one is suggesting that FB is worth "nearly as much" as Google: even at an (absurd) valuation of $10 billion for Facebook, that is still less than 1/18th of Google's current market cap.
plaxo began to be free only recently... besides its audience is traditionally more slanted for business professionals. It's trying to change, but it has a long road ahead
i don't know. I'm not old enough to remember. I just equated a rolodex to an ancient address book... anyways my point is that plaxo just doesn't have the coolness factor that facebook for has personal use, though you're free to disagree
the google comparison is so idiotic I don't know why you even brought it up, they are different things and will have different values. That being said you talk as if things were static, "fb apps are far from indispensable" uhh that doesn't mean other better apps won't come... your issue there isn't really with the platform is with current app developers I guess, or is there something particularly wrong that will prevent interesting software from being written for this platform?
"Platform is the Bubble 2.0 buzz word"
first there is no bubble2.0 at least not even close to the extent of the last bubble, bad investments/ventures will fail as they always have and will, there are no crazy IPOs with ridiculous valuations. there won't be massive lay-offs.
"It's also yet another way in which MySpace is superior. They have always allowed you to stick JavaScript in your profile page, so it has always had a platform."
uhhm the platform is more than sticking widgets on your profile, if you're writing an opinion piece on this maybe read up? I mean just that you don't come out sounding like a complete idiot.
The last comment about people's status message is funny. Gave me an idea to write a script, which hides people's status messages, avatars, music they currently listen to, and all similar forms of self-expressing-annoyance, on gmail chat, meebo and all similar.
> Many of the most useful technologies started out as trivialities.
... 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.
Ebay: a place to sell PEZ dispensers that used to crash every second
Internet: a place that used to only be mainly useful for looking at free pr0n
Post it notes: its adhessive was a "failed" project. Its value was only found after an employee started using it on paper to use as temporary bookmarks for gospel music
"From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones...."
eBay was not started to sell Pez dispensers. That's a marketing myth they perpetuated which has since been recanted. A brief Wikipedia search shows that it was story crafted by a brilliant P.R. agent a couple years after they'd launched.
ok, then i guess you could replace PEZ dispenser with "broken laser pointer" or any other misc item, and the rest is still valid. it was still a dinky site in the beginning that crashed often
matt:
I admire your ability to look at things differently and express those beliefs among a crowd that in all likelihood might burn you at the stake for them. People fall into herd mentality much too often.
You know, despite the fact that the tech community flocks where the sheepdogs tell them to as much as any other, maybe more, they seem more open to dissenting opinions. Especially when they're well expressed and come from someone who agrees with them 90% of the time anyway.
Firstly I think anytime there is a whole bunch of people communicating you should never ask yourself what the point is. Communication is a fundamental, it is the reason.
Second there's the big draw cards of social networks - an easy lightweight way to connect and reconnect. Its a great big people directory - and connections are very low social risk - much easier than emailing that person you haven't seen in years. And how are you going to get their email address anyway, any public directory would be spam central.
Of course myspace or any site has that much going for it. So that leaves the final facebook draw card - facebook apps. I totally understand the skepticism, but apps offer lots of different shared activities. Lots of little quizzes and games, very much like the kind of structured getting-to-know-you party game type activities. Its actually very difficult for these kinds of applications to exist without incorporating the friend networks that facebook offers.
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.