17 ms·

Facebook is the new Excel

565 points by AlexMuir 11y ago

emilecantin 11y ago
That's been true for a few years now. We've faced it when trying to launch a ridesharing startup (before Uber was a thing); everyone was already organized around Facebook groups.
savanaly 11y ago
A very astute and logical analogy that hadn't occurred to me. Thanks for the nice, concise write up.
hackaflocka 11y ago
Facebook's real identity concept works well when communicating with ones family and friends. However, most of everything else, people will slowly come to the realization that it's not a good idea to use real identities. Reviewing a restaurant or small business? Probably not a good idea to leave a lifelong trail of clues about oneself.
api_or_ipa 11y ago
Excellent article Alex! I'm actually rather amazed that this connection wasn't more readily apparent to me. Nonetheless, I think you didn't address the distinction between B2C and B2B business models. Excel is both a B2B and B2C product, where Facebook almost exclusively serves just B2C (who among us solicits business deals using Facebook?). If your SaaS is targetting B2B then Facebook is a non-issue. It goes almost without saying that Facebook has no teeth to eat your lunch.
- emartinelli 11y ago
  The B2B Facebook solution: https://work.fb.com/ https://work.fb.com/
lukasb 11y ago
dude! rss feed!
overgard 11y ago
With the Excel metaphor, I wonder if a better comparison might be craigslist. That's more of a utilitarian swiss army knife that's generally overlooked, but which a lot of social services are indirectly competing with.
- mynegation 11y ago
  Relevant poster: http://www.businessinsider.com/craigslist-versus-startups-chart-2014-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/craigslist-versus-startups-ch...
- joslin01 11y ago
  I agree. My first startup I worked on while in college was "beating cragslist." We looked at it and laughed and said this is so old! As we went about our business, we realized there was no way we could reasonably change the world's habit of going to craigslist for {X}. That was ~8 years ago and it's still going strong. Many a start-ups have come and gone trying to revolutionize house/apt hunting. If they try to incorporate craigslist, craigslist shuts 'em down; if they try to get organic listings, craigslist beats 'em.
  - qq66 11y ago
    Craigslist still has a lot of traffic but it's dying a death by a thousand blows. AirBnB ate the temporary housing section, OKCupid and Tinder etc. ate the dating sections, and the 1099-companies like Homejoy ate the services sections, StubHub ate the ticketing sections. Now I find myself going there mainly if I need to buy something that doesn't need a company guaranteeing the transaction, and doesn't make sense to buy online, like a vintage stereo amplifier that I can inspect on the spot.
    - joslin01 11y ago
      You're not wrong, but I don't think organic shopping with other strangers is under any threat (currently). For example, I just sold my PS4 to some stranger for cash. I would be intrigued if a company could beat them there because that would likely be the final blow.
exolymph 11y ago
I think this is a serious overestimation of how much people use Facebook as a piece of professional software. And no serious business is going to have a Facebook page without a website -- your competitor there is self-hosted WordPress, not Facebook.
- AlexMuir 11y ago
  I know many small physical businesses who get almost nothing from their website, and a huge amount from their 10,000 followers on Facebook. Coffee shops, tradesmen, bars. Facebook isn't a competitor to most B2B products, but it's defintely the Excel of the B2C world.
  - tsurantino 11y ago
    This is completely anecdotal. I could just as easily argue that the vast majority of businesses across cultures, demographics, socioeconomic factors use a variety of tools to promote themselves. In Canada, we have plazas, traditional websites, and more to get the word out. B2B, B2C, whatever you want to call it. For the other cases you mentioned: Groups to collaborate, Events to organize - these are all completely underwhelming alternatives to other market products. The biggest tragedy of Facebook is that it has enormous scale but it can't write comprehensive products that satisfy all of that scale uniformly. You get the lowest common denominator, which is why customers go for niche alternatives. Excel is not Facebook. Yes, Facebook is big. Excel is big in its industry. However, Excel has just enough of a balance between niche and scale. Excel is about computation and reporting. It solves a very specific need that is fortunately applicable in all types of applications. As soon as you try to go outside the bounds of what Excel can do (large data analytics, more customized reporting, interactive applications) you stop trying to rationalize Excel and start using other tools. People do the same with Facebook. More people do it with Facebook because Facebook doesn't effectively solve as many core needs.
- planetjones 11y ago
  Unfortunately especially with restaurants i am seeing more and more have only a Facebook page. I really don't like this trend. For example the format is stale and the information is often poor - many whom only have a Facebook site don't even publish a menu!
jasode 11y ago
I didn't perceive the author's comments to be discouraging but if anyone else is feeling bummed out by the Facebook juggernaut, keep in mind what happened to IBM, Microsoft, and Google. When IBM built the original PC, they let Microsoft keep the rights to the operating system software. In hindsight, it was a massive miscalculation as Microsoft's "software-without-the-hardware" business went on to earn more profits than IBM's hardware. IBM's later weak attempt with OS/2 to beat Windows failed. Microsoft's then CTO Nathan Myhrvold (who Bill Gates considered one of the smartest guys on the planet) was on a phone call with Larry and Sergei and yelled into the phone that "Search is NOT A PRODUCT!!!". (Probably their MSN hubris speaking.) Microsoft's later attempt with Bing has hardly dented Google's search marketshare. Google didn't notice the importance of social networking before Facebook did. Google's later attempt with Google+ Circles failed to trigger a mass exodus from Facebook. Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> but the same thing will happen to them. Somebody will come up with something that blindsides them. Or it might not even sneak up on them. Mark Z himself may look at the early-stage product and conclude that it's not anything special. There are plenty of untapped business ideas that Facebook will misjudge and dismiss, leaving others to win that market. But to the author's point, it will suck if you create a product that paints a bullseye and it lines up in Facebook's crosshairs. Microsoft couldn't beat Intuit Quicken with MS Money but they did crush Netscape with IE. They lose some, they win some.
- wfunction 11y ago
  > Google didn't notice the importance of social networking before Facebook did. Google Buzz? Wave? Orkut? Don't remember the exact timeline for all of those (maybe some were slightly after Facebook?) but I find it difficult to suggest they were late to the game. It was more like they didn't figure out how to play it well.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    slightly? Wave was 6 years later, Buzz was 7.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
ebbv 11y ago
I mean this is true, but it's always been true of the internet. Pre-web: Usenet Early web: Bulletin Boards Mid-Late 90s: Yahoo Early 00s: Myspace/Livejournal Now: Facebook So, yeah, it's not so much Facebook is the new Excel as it's just the current "place where the average person is going to post things/look for things."
- ltz 11y ago
  I agree with the comparisons given here until we get to Facebook. I think the main difference here is the increased saturation the internet in developed countries and the market penetration FB has obtained. Facebook has achieved 1.6 billion users a month compared to Myspace's 76 million at its peak. It will be hard to supplant such a behemoth that's willing to absorb the obvious threats it perceives (e.g. Instagram and WhatsApp).
DanitaBaires 11y ago
For me at least this has been so since around 2008. I was working on a startup whose product was a "social network for travellers". Every single feature we came with, Facebook implemented it and reimplemented it faster and better. Likes, pages, reviews, photo albums, messenger, etc. You name it. At one point we would think "why bother", we couldn't compete with that with a team of 3 developers.
- 5ilv3r 11y ago
  It's not what they can't do, it's what they WON'T do. They must decide your idea is bad and you must prove them wrong.
minimaxir 11y ago
Excel is ubiquitous because, as noted, it is an incredibly powerful tool. Facebook is ubiquitous because of network effects. It's not a straight analogy. Specialized use cases can coexist with Facebook, otherwise half the Social-Network-for-X or Facebook-but-not-Facebook startups wouldn't exist. Productivity applications in contrast have an uphill battle and tend to stray away from anything even remotely resembling a spreadsheet UI.
- AlexMuir 11y ago
  I think a lot of the successful Social-Network-for-X apps hit a critical mass before FB groups became popular. It's going to be much harder to do that now because now Facebook for X is the X group on Facebook.
- debacle 11y ago
  Maybe we need the ability to use VBScript in Facebook status updates.
- mzs 11y ago
  Excel is ubiquitous because you were much more likely to have it bundled for low cost on your new 2MB RAM Packard Bell with Windows 3.0 than Lotus123.
harigov 11y ago
The idea that partially-structured or unstructured Facebook could be a _serious_ competitor for a website that enforces some structure and provides services that can only work with that structure sounds a little stretch to me. It seems to me that the direction we are moving is towards more structured, purpose oriented websites that provide better services.
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  Yep. If you think in terms of the long tail, Facebook takes care of the people who have super generic needs on the spike side and they take care of the markets that are too small to pay attention to on the tail side but in the middle is a lot of space for competitors to do what you are saying and charge for a little structure.
nsgi 11y ago
> You can guarantee that Facebook has already signed up 99% of your potential userbase. That's only true if your userbase is relatively young. Facebook is far from ubiquitous among middle-aged people who still have smartphones, etc.
- majewsky 11y ago
  It also depends on the region. In Germany, Facebook's market penetration is much lower than in the US. In my circle of acquaintances, only about half of them have a Facebook account, and even less admit using it regularly. And to give some evidence beyond my obviously skewed social context, most restaurants have a simple static website with a menu and map, instead of a Facebook page (or in some cases, in addition to a Facebook page).
Johnie 11y ago
Reddit is likewise another competitor. I've always looked at many of the subreddits as a potential for different products or a channel to access customers of that interest. For example: * r/RedditGetsDrawn -- Marketplace for artists and users * r/SomebodyMakeThis -- Request for product * r/DataIsBeautiful -- Collection of people passionate about data visualization * r/IAMA -- Ask Me Anything -- many other community sites have copied this concept.
- heydenberk 11y ago
  Facebook is 1 year older than reddit and makes 2,000x the revenue.
  - untog 11y ago
    I don't see anyone suggesting that the two are equivalent.
    - lowellbander 11y ago
      I think Johnie sees them as competitors, sips tea.
      - Johnie 11y ago
        I meant that Reddit is another Excel-esque competitor to your startup. Or another way to look at it is that Reddit is your early validation for demand.
  - untog 11y ago
    I don't see anyone suggesting that the two are equivalent.
  - pmlnr 11y ago
    Revenue is not everything. There are things on the internet, old as country roads, operating on minimal revenue, still alive; while younger things which believed revenue is the way to go, are long forgotten.
hudell 11y ago
And at the end of the post, a twitter handler.
bitL 11y ago
Facebook is unbelievably limited for any signs of creativity - even MySpace was like a generation ahead comparing to what Facebook is nowadays. Most creatives/content producers use it as a glorified Twitter; women use it for bragging about status/observing status of others and everybody else seems to have relegated it to the most banal things (hi family!). If you pay for ads, some strange Italian or Asian company does all the clicks on your ads, so unless you have a sure way to attract people with herd-mentality to your ads, B2C is useless as well.
vermontdevil 11y ago
NextDoor is a competitor I think. It's quite popular in my neighborhood and works pretty good as a way to share issues, things for sale, lost pets, etc. Doubt FB can replicate this unless they set up the verification by postcard process.
- melvinmt 11y ago
  What would you get from Nextdoor what you couldn't get from a Facebook group for your neighborhood?
  - vermontdevil 11y ago
    Verified neighbors and they live within a certain # of neighborhood. I was part of a garage sale private group on FB for two towns and it sucked. On next door they actually live in the area and are more authentic I guess.
    - melvinmt 11y ago
      Yes, but is that enough to overcome Facebook's pull?
  - moosey 11y ago
    I've gotten far more use from Nextdoor than facebook. I generally use it to find local services for my house, and whenever I have, I have gotten better service and lower prices than when I went calling around myself. Excellent service, IMHO. The interface is a bit ... unpolished -- trying too hard to be polished? I only say that because of the high degree of polish I see elsewhere, but I guess that really isn't of that high of importance. I guess, in the end, I want all services to work like reddit & HN, minimal and usable, maximum text on screen.
- nradov 11y ago
  I don't think the verification by postcard process is essential. Most Nextdoor users are confirmed through other techniques such as IP address geolocation, SMS, referral from existing users, etc.
Mikeb85 11y ago
So Facebook is the new hammer used to smash everything that isn't a nail? Or is it the new software no one likes but everyone uses?
- marmoto 11y ago
  Reading the article might answer your question :)
  - Mikeb85 11y ago
    I did, and still think it's a bad analogy.
bikamonki 11y ago
"Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> but the same thing will happen to them." I believe the story is already out there: FB saw the threats coming and just bought them. Whatsapp is a particularly clear example, I have about a dozen groups of friends, family, hobby, work, etc. On these groups is where we share pictures, memes, links; we plan meetings, meals, outings; we invite and are invited to events, etc. In fact: I already closed my FB account b/c I no longer need/use it. Then there's the fact that soon Whatsapp will be open for business, chat bots will come. Ordering food? Selling a house? Transferring money? Whatsapp is the new social net and FB already bought it. So the story to be written is who or what will take over Whatsapp.
- thanatropism 11y ago
  One thing about the success of Whatsapp mystifies me: it's tethered to a cellphone. I have a four-year-old smartphone that's basically dead, but works for getting emergency calls. I also have multiple laptops, a tablet, etc. and keep encouraging people to use FB chat (since I've given up on converting folks to Slack) to talk to me.
  - bikamonki 11y ago
    No mistery here: ppl are glued to phone screens.
known 11y ago
Can we run Pivot tables in Google docs?
- azurezyq 11y ago
  https://support.google.com/docs/answer/1272900?hl=en https://support.google.com/docs/answer/1272900?hl=en Yes, it can.
torus 11y ago
> People are increasingly using Pages, Groups and Albums for all kinds of things that would previously have justified a whole startup This is a snarky comment, but if a company can be replaced by a facebook page then it isn't adding much value.
- 27182818284 11y ago
  No, that's kind of the point of the article. You might have a nice SaaS for someone to manage pot-lucks at the office, but if someone in the office just passes around an Excel spreadsheet, your startup is going to go. I think we're both just re-iterating the point of the author--maybe slightly differently
ausjke 11y ago
Really? I'm not a facebooker per se. However I do use nextdoor that I check once or twice a day for community related news/events/etc.
jeeyoungk 11y ago
"Facebook is the Facebook for X" is way I summarize it.
vtlynch 11y ago
This article is bad. The "threshold of utility" that you have to cross is VERY low. If you previously could justify a startup that competed withe very minimal features of many of these facebook products, than that says more about the startups market than anything else.
p4wnc6 11y ago
I successfully avoided ever working in Excel when I worked in quant finance, and I also do not have a Facebook account. So... for me anyway, the title checks out.
jorgecurio 11y ago
how many of you use fb? I removed all social media 2 years ago
- logicallee 11y ago
  you didn't get any responses but I would venture to say that 90% of the people whose eyes glanced over your question (which is not necessarily who you intended to hear from, it sounds like you would have liked to hear confirmation from others who are the same) have exchanged at least 1 facebook message in the past week. Facebook has 1.591 billion monthly active users, whereas the grand total of anyone connected to the Internet in any way is 3 billion users, obviously almost all of them outside of the English-speaking world. there was indeed a movement to "remove all social media" a couple of years ago, but it ran out of a lot of steam: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22delete%20facebook%22 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22delete%20facebook... There are a lot of privacy settings you can utilize, and you are probably missing out on a lot of opportunities by not being on Facebook: it's costing you. I was hugely against facebook for a very, very long time. But the fact is, some people simply do not use email, and you can ask for their facebook and communicate with them and build an acquaintanceship, or not do so. The opportunity cost to not using facebook is too much for me: I "can't afford" not to use it in fostering new acquaintanceships with people I meet in passing. Events are another huge thing that is exclusionary and costs me if I am not on facebook.
  - travelbyphone 11y ago
    I'm usually an early adopter, and was for fb, but recently I noticed my life is much better without fb/messenger/Instagram on my phone. It's been 6 months and whenever I go to fb web to check out I have hundreds of notifications and messages, but never once lost something truly important. They have my number for that. I sense a social media burn out on a lot of people lately. We're not built for this crazy amount of interactions on a single day.
    - jorgecurio 11y ago
      it gets better and better. I'm in my 2nd year without fb and haven't looked back since. Removing linkedin was great too. I never had instgram or snapchat. I had twitter but found it largely the most useless out of them all. I use skype for chat. I like reddit and sometimes HN when there are interesting discussions going on.
olivermarks 11y ago
Speaking as someone who does restore and modify old cars I can say as a FB user that there are really no groups with any in depth practical help. FB tends to be a 'look at the car I just bought' or 'look at the project I just finished' or 'the event I was just at' ego space. The vertical, model specific forums continue to be the place to go if you are diving into detail via searches of existing threads and people helping each other in response to specific questions and more importantly problem solving. IMO FB tends to be the place to share the superficial, and to reduce sophisticated ideas to ephemera. A significant challenge on the internet generally and particularly FB is uninformed advice - youtube for example is full of parts life endangering how-to videos. FB is more of a casual after hours clubby bar atmosphere rather than a serious forum in my experience, and i wouldn't go there for advice.
- dgudkov 11y ago
  Facebook is a social network for extroverts. I guess the spot for a social network for introverts is still vacant.
  - Redoubts 11y ago
    Isn't this Blogs + Link Aggregator/Forum ?
  - wordbank 11y ago
    Nope, Tumblr is already up.
- guessbest 11y ago
  It is really Facebook's own fault. The way their comment system is setup is awful compared to anything else out there, even Digg's version in 2006. And searching by page or group for a topic is just useless. It is just people's profiles, and pages aren't separated into subpages like forums are. Everyone I know uses forum software like phpbb or Wordpress comments to connect. Facebook is mostly just for family photos and baby pics.
- jarjoura 11y ago
  You are free to create a FB group for more serious enthusiasts.
tangled_zans 11y ago
Obvious question, but which one of you here actually uses facebook groups and what for? I'm sure I'm a member of a whole bunch, but aside from using them to coordinate society activities back at uni, I haven't really used them in years. I always found the interface to be ugly as hell, and if I want to join a large thriving community on topic X then I just go on /r/topicX.
- patrickgordon 11y ago
  I'm a pretty avid cyclist and there are marketplaces for second hand bikes & accessories that I look at almost daily. I have also bought quite a few things through there too. Interface has definitely improved of late - Facebook clearly are prioritising adding in functionality like being able to give reviews on sellers etc.
- whateveracct 11y ago
  The super smash bros melee tournament scene is pretty reliant on facebook. Every region/area has its own facebook group where people post about events and find each other. Tournaments (both large ones* and small, local ones) typically use facebook events as their primary page (I'd even go as far as to say that facebook events help drive up attendance. I've seen local tournaments get more attendance because the TO made a fb event). I think fighting game communities in general make solid use of facebook groups and events. * smash.gg is also used heavily for majors as of late though
- eitally 11y ago
  My local gym has running & cycling clubs and uses fb groups to coordinate events, provide a social area for members to share stuff, and maintains pages where they curate important information for the group. FB isn't the only way to do this, of course, but it's certainly low friction for most members, since they generally already are guaranteed to have a personal FB account.
- Scarblac 11y ago
  There is a Dutch Facebook group for determination of plants and animals, people post pictures there and there is always a real expert around who can actually identify your bird feather / tiny spider / insect / fungus / etc often down to the exact species (out of 800 in some group of beetles, say). It's a wonderful group to lurk in.
zeveb 11y ago
He's not wrong, but I hate it. Facebook pages are walled gardens, and I certainly don't want to have to use the Facebook client to fetch them. This continue destruction of the open Web must end.
karmajunkie 11y ago
Interesting premise. Excel is my number one indicator for what could be a startup—if you find a complex spreadsheet that's an important part of someone making money, you have a good shot at doing it better. Businesses don't use Excel because its good at solving their problem. They use it because they don't know how to do it with anything else.
sleepychu 11y ago
This was really hard to read because it scaled to my 27" 1440p screen and that's really wide for so little text.
jgalt212 11y ago
I dunno. My perception of facebook users in the US is it's mostly suburban moms. So I guess if you target that demo, then FB is your Excel. Away from that demo, I think you can still build a service for a community.
Animats 11y ago
Trying to organize anything, even a meeting, over Facebook is a huge pain. Facebook is not a collaboration system. It's just not designed for that.
wslh 11y ago
I think Facebook is the new Internet [for many people]. The worst thing about this is not the competition with other companies but the competition with core Internet protocols and its meaning. All this while they have an embedded search engine that sucks!
thanatropism 11y ago
Here's the comparison with Excel: it has eliminated thousands upon thousands of low-end coding jobs. But now knowing anything else carries a huge premium. It used to be the case that if economists who wanted to do any quantitative analysis at all had to know Fortran 77 - and punch cards in batch mode. Now people in my field who know some Matlab are already seen as wizards.
elcapitan 11y ago
Twitter is the new Powerpoint.

565 points by AlexMuir 11y ago

That's been true for a few years now. We've faced it when trying to launch a ridesharing startup (before Uber was a thing); everyone was already organized around Facebook groups.

savanaly 11y ago

A very astute and logical analogy that hadn't occurred to me. Thanks for the nice, concise write up.

hackaflocka 11y ago

Facebook's real identity concept works well when communicating with ones family and friends. However, most of everything else, people will slowly come to the realization that it's not a good idea to use real identities. Reviewing a restaurant or small business? Probably not a good idea to leave a lifelong trail of clues about oneself.

api_or_ipa 11y ago

Excellent article Alex! I'm actually rather amazed that this connection wasn't more readily apparent to me. Nonetheless, I think you didn't address the distinction between B2C and B2B business models. Excel is both a B2B and B2C product, where Facebook almost exclusively serves just B2C (who among us solicits business deals using Facebook?). If your SaaS is targetting B2B then Facebook is a non-issue. It goes almost without saying that Facebook has no teeth to eat your lunch.

emartinelli 11y ago
The B2B Facebook solution: https://work.fb.com/ https://work.fb.com/

lukasb 11y ago

dude! rss feed!

overgard 11y ago

With the Excel metaphor, I wonder if a better comparison might be craigslist. That's more of a utilitarian swiss army knife that's generally overlooked, but which a lot of social services are indirectly competing with.

mynegation 11y ago
Relevant poster: http://www.businessinsider.com/craigslist-versus-startups-chart-2014-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/craigslist-versus-startups-ch...
joslin01 11y ago
I agree. My first startup I worked on while in college was "beating cragslist." We looked at it and laughed and said this is so old! As we went about our business, we realized there was no way we could reasonably change the world's habit of going to craigslist for {X}. That was ~8 years ago and it's still going strong. Many a start-ups have come and gone trying to revolutionize house/apt hunting. If they try to incorporate craigslist, craigslist shuts 'em down; if they try to get organic listings, craigslist beats 'em.
- qq66 11y ago
  Craigslist still has a lot of traffic but it's dying a death by a thousand blows. AirBnB ate the temporary housing section, OKCupid and Tinder etc. ate the dating sections, and the 1099-companies like Homejoy ate the services sections, StubHub ate the ticketing sections. Now I find myself going there mainly if I need to buy something that doesn't need a company guaranteeing the transaction, and doesn't make sense to buy online, like a vintage stereo amplifier that I can inspect on the spot.
  - joslin01 11y ago
    You're not wrong, but I don't think organic shopping with other strangers is under any threat (currently). For example, I just sold my PS4 to some stranger for cash. I would be intrigued if a company could beat them there because that would likely be the final blow.

exolymph 11y ago

I think this is a serious overestimation of how much people use Facebook as a piece of professional software. And no serious business is going to have a Facebook page without a website -- your competitor there is self-hosted WordPress, not Facebook.

AlexMuir 11y ago
I know many small physical businesses who get almost nothing from their website, and a huge amount from their 10,000 followers on Facebook. Coffee shops, tradesmen, bars. Facebook isn't a competitor to most B2B products, but it's defintely the Excel of the B2C world.
- tsurantino 11y ago
  This is completely anecdotal. I could just as easily argue that the vast majority of businesses across cultures, demographics, socioeconomic factors use a variety of tools to promote themselves. In Canada, we have plazas, traditional websites, and more to get the word out. B2B, B2C, whatever you want to call it. For the other cases you mentioned: Groups to collaborate, Events to organize - these are all completely underwhelming alternatives to other market products. The biggest tragedy of Facebook is that it has enormous scale but it can't write comprehensive products that satisfy all of that scale uniformly. You get the lowest common denominator, which is why customers go for niche alternatives. Excel is not Facebook. Yes, Facebook is big. Excel is big in its industry. However, Excel has just enough of a balance between niche and scale. Excel is about computation and reporting. It solves a very specific need that is fortunately applicable in all types of applications. As soon as you try to go outside the bounds of what Excel can do (large data analytics, more customized reporting, interactive applications) you stop trying to rationalize Excel and start using other tools. People do the same with Facebook. More people do it with Facebook because Facebook doesn't effectively solve as many core needs.
planetjones 11y ago
Unfortunately especially with restaurants i am seeing more and more have only a Facebook page. I really don't like this trend. For example the format is stale and the information is often poor - many whom only have a Facebook site don't even publish a menu!

jasode 11y ago

I didn't perceive the author's comments to be discouraging but if anyone else is feeling bummed out by the Facebook juggernaut, keep in mind what happened to IBM, Microsoft, and Google. When IBM built the original PC, they let Microsoft keep the rights to the operating system software. In hindsight, it was a massive miscalculation as Microsoft's "software-without-the-hardware" business went on to earn more profits than IBM's hardware. IBM's later weak attempt with OS/2 to beat Windows failed. Microsoft's then CTO Nathan Myhrvold (who Bill Gates considered one of the smartest guys on the planet) was on a phone call with Larry and Sergei and yelled into the phone that "Search is NOT A PRODUCT!!!". (Probably their MSN hubris speaking.) Microsoft's later attempt with Bing has hardly dented Google's search marketshare. Google didn't notice the importance of social networking before Facebook did. Google's later attempt with Google+ Circles failed to trigger a mass exodus from Facebook. Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> but the same thing will happen to them. Somebody will come up with something that blindsides them. Or it might not even sneak up on them. Mark Z himself may look at the early-stage product and conclude that it's not anything special. There are plenty of untapped business ideas that Facebook will misjudge and dismiss, leaving others to win that market. But to the author's point, it will suck if you create a product that paints a bullseye and it lines up in Facebook's crosshairs. Microsoft couldn't beat Intuit Quicken with MS Money but they did crush Netscape with IE. They lose some, they win some.

wfunction 11y ago
> Google didn't notice the importance of social networking before Facebook did. Google Buzz? Wave? Orkut? Don't remember the exact timeline for all of those (maybe some were slightly after Facebook?) but I find it difficult to suggest they were late to the game. It was more like they didn't figure out how to play it well.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  slightly? Wave was 6 years later, Buzz was 7.
  - jessaustin 11y ago

ebbv 11y ago

I mean this is true, but it's always been true of the internet. Pre-web: Usenet Early web: Bulletin Boards Mid-Late 90s: Yahoo Early 00s: Myspace/Livejournal Now: Facebook So, yeah, it's not so much Facebook is the new Excel as it's just the current "place where the average person is going to post things/look for things."

ltz 11y ago
I agree with the comparisons given here until we get to Facebook. I think the main difference here is the increased saturation the internet in developed countries and the market penetration FB has obtained. Facebook has achieved 1.6 billion users a month compared to Myspace's 76 million at its peak. It will be hard to supplant such a behemoth that's willing to absorb the obvious threats it perceives (e.g. Instagram and WhatsApp).

DanitaBaires 11y ago

For me at least this has been so since around 2008. I was working on a startup whose product was a "social network for travellers". Every single feature we came with, Facebook implemented it and reimplemented it faster and better. Likes, pages, reviews, photo albums, messenger, etc. You name it. At one point we would think "why bother", we couldn't compete with that with a team of 3 developers.

5ilv3r 11y ago
It's not what they can't do, it's what they WON'T do. They must decide your idea is bad and you must prove them wrong.

minimaxir 11y ago

Excel is ubiquitous because, as noted, it is an incredibly powerful tool. Facebook is ubiquitous because of network effects. It's not a straight analogy. Specialized use cases can coexist with Facebook, otherwise half the Social-Network-for-X or Facebook-but-not-Facebook startups wouldn't exist. Productivity applications in contrast have an uphill battle and tend to stray away from anything even remotely resembling a spreadsheet UI.

AlexMuir 11y ago
I think a lot of the successful Social-Network-for-X apps hit a critical mass before FB groups became popular. It's going to be much harder to do that now because now Facebook for X is the X group on Facebook.
debacle 11y ago
Maybe we need the ability to use VBScript in Facebook status updates.
mzs 11y ago
Excel is ubiquitous because you were much more likely to have it bundled for low cost on your new 2MB RAM Packard Bell with Windows 3.0 than Lotus123.

harigov 11y ago

The idea that partially-structured or unstructured Facebook could be a _serious_ competitor for a website that enforces some structure and provides services that can only work with that structure sounds a little stretch to me. It seems to me that the direction we are moving is towards more structured, purpose oriented websites that provide better services.

erikpukinskis 11y ago
Yep. If you think in terms of the long tail, Facebook takes care of the people who have super generic needs on the spike side and they take care of the markets that are too small to pay attention to on the tail side but in the middle is a lot of space for competitors to do what you are saying and charge for a little structure.

nsgi 11y ago

> You can guarantee that Facebook has already signed up 99% of your potential userbase. That's only true if your userbase is relatively young. Facebook is far from ubiquitous among middle-aged people who still have smartphones, etc.

majewsky 11y ago
It also depends on the region. In Germany, Facebook's market penetration is much lower than in the US. In my circle of acquaintances, only about half of them have a Facebook account, and even less admit using it regularly. And to give some evidence beyond my obviously skewed social context, most restaurants have a simple static website with a menu and map, instead of a Facebook page (or in some cases, in addition to a Facebook page).

Johnie 11y ago

Reddit is likewise another competitor. I've always looked at many of the subreddits as a potential for different products or a channel to access customers of that interest. For example: * r/RedditGetsDrawn -- Marketplace for artists and users * r/SomebodyMakeThis -- Request for product * r/DataIsBeautiful -- Collection of people passionate about data visualization * r/IAMA -- Ask Me Anything -- many other community sites have copied this concept.

heydenberk 11y ago
Facebook is 1 year older than reddit and makes 2,000x the revenue.
- untog 11y ago
  I don't see anyone suggesting that the two are equivalent.
  - lowellbander 11y ago
    I think Johnie sees them as competitors, sips tea.
    - Johnie 11y ago
      I meant that Reddit is another Excel-esque competitor to your startup. Or another way to look at it is that Reddit is your early validation for demand.
- untog 11y ago
  I don't see anyone suggesting that the two are equivalent.
- pmlnr 11y ago
  Revenue is not everything. There are things on the internet, old as country roads, operating on minimal revenue, still alive; while younger things which believed revenue is the way to go, are long forgotten.

hudell 11y ago

And at the end of the post, a twitter handler.

bitL 11y ago

Facebook is unbelievably limited for any signs of creativity - even MySpace was like a generation ahead comparing to what Facebook is nowadays. Most creatives/content producers use it as a glorified Twitter; women use it for bragging about status/observing status of others and everybody else seems to have relegated it to the most banal things (hi family!). If you pay for ads, some strange Italian or Asian company does all the clicks on your ads, so unless you have a sure way to attract people with herd-mentality to your ads, B2C is useless as well.

vermontdevil 11y ago

NextDoor is a competitor I think. It's quite popular in my neighborhood and works pretty good as a way to share issues, things for sale, lost pets, etc. Doubt FB can replicate this unless they set up the verification by postcard process.

melvinmt 11y ago
What would you get from Nextdoor what you couldn't get from a Facebook group for your neighborhood?
- vermontdevil 11y ago
  Verified neighbors and they live within a certain # of neighborhood. I was part of a garage sale private group on FB for two towns and it sucked. On next door they actually live in the area and are more authentic I guess.
  - melvinmt 11y ago
    Yes, but is that enough to overcome Facebook's pull?
- moosey 11y ago
  I've gotten far more use from Nextdoor than facebook. I generally use it to find local services for my house, and whenever I have, I have gotten better service and lower prices than when I went calling around myself. Excellent service, IMHO. The interface is a bit ... unpolished -- trying too hard to be polished? I only say that because of the high degree of polish I see elsewhere, but I guess that really isn't of that high of importance. I guess, in the end, I want all services to work like reddit & HN, minimal and usable, maximum text on screen.
nradov 11y ago
I don't think the verification by postcard process is essential. Most Nextdoor users are confirmed through other techniques such as IP address geolocation, SMS, referral from existing users, etc.

Mikeb85 11y ago

So Facebook is the new hammer used to smash everything that isn't a nail? Or is it the new software no one likes but everyone uses?

marmoto 11y ago
Reading the article might answer your question :)
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  I did, and still think it's a bad analogy.

bikamonki 11y ago

"Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> but the same thing will happen to them." I believe the story is already out there: FB saw the threats coming and just bought them. Whatsapp is a particularly clear example, I have about a dozen groups of friends, family, hobby, work, etc. On these groups is where we share pictures, memes, links; we plan meetings, meals, outings; we invite and are invited to events, etc. In fact: I already closed my FB account b/c I no longer need/use it. Then there's the fact that soon Whatsapp will be open for business, chat bots will come. Ordering food? Selling a house? Transferring money? Whatsapp is the new social net and FB already bought it. So the story to be written is who or what will take over Whatsapp.

thanatropism 11y ago
One thing about the success of Whatsapp mystifies me: it's tethered to a cellphone. I have a four-year-old smartphone that's basically dead, but works for getting emergency calls. I also have multiple laptops, a tablet, etc. and keep encouraging people to use FB chat (since I've given up on converting folks to Slack) to talk to me.
- bikamonki 11y ago
  No mistery here: ppl are glued to phone screens.

known 11y ago

Can we run Pivot tables in Google docs?

azurezyq 11y ago
https://support.google.com/docs/answer/1272900?hl=en https://support.google.com/docs/answer/1272900?hl=en Yes, it can.

torus 11y ago

> People are increasingly using Pages, Groups and Albums for all kinds of things that would previously have justified a whole startup This is a snarky comment, but if a company can be replaced by a facebook page then it isn't adding much value.

27182818284 11y ago
No, that's kind of the point of the article. You might have a nice SaaS for someone to manage pot-lucks at the office, but if someone in the office just passes around an Excel spreadsheet, your startup is going to go. I think we're both just re-iterating the point of the author--maybe slightly differently

ausjke 11y ago

Really? I'm not a facebooker per se. However I do use nextdoor that I check once or twice a day for community related news/events/etc.

jeeyoungk 11y ago

"Facebook is the Facebook for X" is way I summarize it.

vtlynch 11y ago

This article is bad. The "threshold of utility" that you have to cross is VERY low. If you previously could justify a startup that competed withe very minimal features of many of these facebook products, than that says more about the startups market than anything else.

p4wnc6 11y ago

I successfully avoided ever working in Excel when I worked in quant finance, and I also do not have a Facebook account. So... for me anyway, the title checks out.

jorgecurio 11y ago

how many of you use fb? I removed all social media 2 years ago

logicallee 11y ago
you didn't get any responses but I would venture to say that 90% of the people whose eyes glanced over your question (which is not necessarily who you intended to hear from, it sounds like you would have liked to hear confirmation from others who are the same) have exchanged at least 1 facebook message in the past week. Facebook has 1.591 billion monthly active users, whereas the grand total of anyone connected to the Internet in any way is 3 billion users, obviously almost all of them outside of the English-speaking world. there was indeed a movement to "remove all social media" a couple of years ago, but it ran out of a lot of steam: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22delete%20facebook%22 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22delete%20facebook... There are a lot of privacy settings you can utilize, and you are probably missing out on a lot of opportunities by not being on Facebook: it's costing you. I was hugely against facebook for a very, very long time. But the fact is, some people simply do not use email, and you can ask for their facebook and communicate with them and build an acquaintanceship, or not do so. The opportunity cost to not using facebook is too much for me: I "can't afford" not to use it in fostering new acquaintanceships with people I meet in passing. Events are another huge thing that is exclusionary and costs me if I am not on facebook.
- travelbyphone 11y ago
  I'm usually an early adopter, and was for fb, but recently I noticed my life is much better without fb/messenger/Instagram on my phone. It's been 6 months and whenever I go to fb web to check out I have hundreds of notifications and messages, but never once lost something truly important. They have my number for that. I sense a social media burn out on a lot of people lately. We're not built for this crazy amount of interactions on a single day.
  - jorgecurio 11y ago
    it gets better and better. I'm in my 2nd year without fb and haven't looked back since. Removing linkedin was great too. I never had instgram or snapchat. I had twitter but found it largely the most useless out of them all. I use skype for chat. I like reddit and sometimes HN when there are interesting discussions going on.

olivermarks 11y ago

Speaking as someone who does restore and modify old cars I can say as a FB user that there are really no groups with any in depth practical help. FB tends to be a 'look at the car I just bought' or 'look at the project I just finished' or 'the event I was just at' ego space. The vertical, model specific forums continue to be the place to go if you are diving into detail via searches of existing threads and people helping each other in response to specific questions and more importantly problem solving. IMO FB tends to be the place to share the superficial, and to reduce sophisticated ideas to ephemera. A significant challenge on the internet generally and particularly FB is uninformed advice - youtube for example is full of parts life endangering how-to videos. FB is more of a casual after hours clubby bar atmosphere rather than a serious forum in my experience, and i wouldn't go there for advice.

dgudkov 11y ago
Facebook is a social network for extroverts. I guess the spot for a social network for introverts is still vacant.
- Redoubts 11y ago
  Isn't this Blogs + Link Aggregator/Forum ?
- wordbank 11y ago
  Nope, Tumblr is already up.
guessbest 11y ago
It is really Facebook's own fault. The way their comment system is setup is awful compared to anything else out there, even Digg's version in 2006. And searching by page or group for a topic is just useless. It is just people's profiles, and pages aren't separated into subpages like forums are. Everyone I know uses forum software like phpbb or Wordpress comments to connect. Facebook is mostly just for family photos and baby pics.
jarjoura 11y ago
You are free to create a FB group for more serious enthusiasts.

tangled_zans 11y ago

Obvious question, but which one of you here actually uses facebook groups and what for? I'm sure I'm a member of a whole bunch, but aside from using them to coordinate society activities back at uni, I haven't really used them in years. I always found the interface to be ugly as hell, and if I want to join a large thriving community on topic X then I just go on /r/topicX.

patrickgordon 11y ago
I'm a pretty avid cyclist and there are marketplaces for second hand bikes & accessories that I look at almost daily. I have also bought quite a few things through there too. Interface has definitely improved of late - Facebook clearly are prioritising adding in functionality like being able to give reviews on sellers etc.
whateveracct 11y ago
The super smash bros melee tournament scene is pretty reliant on facebook. Every region/area has its own facebook group where people post about events and find each other. Tournaments (both large ones* and small, local ones) typically use facebook events as their primary page (I'd even go as far as to say that facebook events help drive up attendance. I've seen local tournaments get more attendance because the TO made a fb event). I think fighting game communities in general make solid use of facebook groups and events. * smash.gg is also used heavily for majors as of late though
eitally 11y ago
My local gym has running & cycling clubs and uses fb groups to coordinate events, provide a social area for members to share stuff, and maintains pages where they curate important information for the group. FB isn't the only way to do this, of course, but it's certainly low friction for most members, since they generally already are guaranteed to have a personal FB account.
Scarblac 11y ago
There is a Dutch Facebook group for determination of plants and animals, people post pictures there and there is always a real expert around who can actually identify your bird feather / tiny spider / insect / fungus / etc often down to the exact species (out of 800 in some group of beetles, say). It's a wonderful group to lurk in.

zeveb 11y ago

He's not wrong, but I hate it. Facebook pages are walled gardens, and I certainly don't want to have to use the Facebook client to fetch them. This continue destruction of the open Web must end.

karmajunkie 11y ago

Interesting premise. Excel is my number one indicator for what could be a startup—if you find a complex spreadsheet that's an important part of someone making money, you have a good shot at doing it better. Businesses don't use Excel because its good at solving their problem. They use it because they don't know how to do it with anything else.

sleepychu 11y ago

This was really hard to read because it scaled to my 27" 1440p screen and that's really wide for so little text.

jgalt212 11y ago

I dunno. My perception of facebook users in the US is it's mostly suburban moms. So I guess if you target that demo, then FB is your Excel. Away from that demo, I think you can still build a service for a community.

Animats 11y ago

Trying to organize anything, even a meeting, over Facebook is a huge pain. Facebook is not a collaboration system. It's just not designed for that.

wslh 11y ago

I think Facebook is the new Internet [for many people]. The worst thing about this is not the competition with other companies but the competition with core Internet protocols and its meaning. All this while they have an embedded search engine that sucks!

thanatropism 11y ago

Here's the comparison with Excel: it has eliminated thousands upon thousands of low-end coding jobs. But now knowing anything else carries a huge premium. It used to be the case that if economists who wanted to do any quantitative analysis at all had to know Fortran 77 - and punch cards in batch mode. Now people in my field who know some Matlab are already seen as wizards.

elcapitan 11y ago

Twitter is the new Powerpoint.