18 ms·

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 I

• 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
      You left out the one that was founded the same year as FB.
  • scholia 11y ago
    Google launched Orkut at almost exactly the same time as Facebook, and it was initially much more successful. (Google was a huge company, not a dorm-room start-up, and nost people couldn't join Facebook even if they wanted to.) Friendster and, later, MySpace were popular before Orkut and Facebook, so social networking was already a thing. Facebook was just much better than MySpace, Orkut and G+. And it still is.
    • smitherfield 11y ago
      >[M]ost people couldn't join Facebook even if they wanted to. This was the brilliance of early Facebook. By initially limiting membership to only hip young influencers, and only gradually expanding to less hip/young/influential groups, they successfully created scarcity and huge word of mouth. It made the news every time a new group was allowed to join Facebook. People were coming banging at the gate to be let out of the "MySpace ghetto." People want what they can't have; Bernie Madoff created the most successful Ponzi scheme ever by making people have to come to him and beg to be allowed to invest. The other brilliant idea of early Facebook, unlike Friendster/MySpace/Orkut, was that it was a disguised dating app (remember pokes?), but one that eliminated the gender ratio issue by being disguised, and the creepy old guys problem by limiting its membership to young people and limiting most interactions to "friends." Later, only after it had built up a critical mass of a large and loyal userbase, it was able to become even bigger by gradually pivoting to becoming a more traditional social network/blogging platform. And Instagram now exists to fill the disguised-dating-app role in their product portfolio. Snapchat is pivoting much the same way, albeit more jarringly.[0] [0] http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-business/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-...
      • mseebach 11y ago
        > limiting membership to only hip young influencers That may have been an unintended consequence, but the genius move was to bootstrap the online social network with existing offline social networks (and getting the date integration - email addresses - for free!). Somewhat ironically, privacy (such as it follows strict exclusivity) was a central feature of early Facebook. No other social network did anything like it, they were all free-for-alls.
  • jarjoura 11y ago
    I remember getting pulled into Facebook because classmates tagged me in photos. Then when I signed up, it was extremely useful because you could see and meet other people in classes for study groups, etc. It was also great at delivering status updates, well at least until people started saying "John Smith is." lol. The other powerful thing Facebook did that no other social network did was handle growth. Friendster and Orkut, they were painfully slow to use even in their early days.
  • holografix 11y ago
    Very very true. Orkun was HUGE in Brazil. I had immigrated to Australia when it became popular and no one in Aus had heard of it, Facebook started surfacing a least 18 months later and for a time I had Brazilian friends on Orkut and everybody else on Facebook. What convinced most of my Brazilian friends to switch was the ability to tag people in photos and poke people. Yep, poking was really important.
  • thanatropism 11y ago
    Orkut was hugely succesful in some places. Yuuuge.
• gukov 11y ago
  Facebook has been doing a good job trying to disrupt itself. I"m talking about the acquisitions of Instagram, WhatsApp, and, probably most importantly, Oculus.
• johnchristopher 11y ago
  I could imagine Mark Zuckerberg yelling into a phone that "Privacy is NOT A PRODUCT !!!".
  • jessaustin 11y ago
    IDK for him it may be more of a commodity: he buys it low and sells it high. Unfortunately once you've traded yours to him for some beads and colorful trinkets, you can't buy it back.
    • criley2 11y ago
      I mean let's not crucify Zucky for being a faithful adherent of the Google Gospel on Privacy. Everything Facebook learned about mining and selling -- they learned from Googs.
    • zappo2938 11y ago
      "Beads are worth more than money on Bourbon Street."
    • seizethecheese 11y ago
      They don't buy low-sell high like a simple trader, they are more like a manufacturer buying the raw material and processing it by adding context and selling the material as a finished product.
• TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > "Search is NOT A PRODUCT!!!" I suppose they were right in one way. Google's product is search advertising.
  • gboudrias 11y ago
    Yep. In an absolute sense, Google's search engine is nothing but the honey that attracts what Google is actually selling. More or less a tourist attraction (albeit useful in its own right). This is supported by the fact that Google has started to diminish the integrity of the results to "sell" more to advertisers (by adding more sponsored results over time).
  • function_seven 11y ago
    No, their (main) product is search. Advertising is how they monetize it. The Tribune Co.'s product is news, monetized through advertising. Conde Nast's product is magazines, monetized through advertising. Just because advertising pays for the operation of a service, doesn't make the service not the product. And yeah, I understand that Google also sells advertising as a separate item from their search engine, but that's not what parent anecdote was referring to.
    • zepto 11y ago
      Not really - their search product is optimized to be better for advertisers - not for consumers. If it wasn't about advertising, search would put a lot more advanced capabilities for analyzing the index and the results into the hands of users.
      • manigandham 11y ago
        What search features are you missing?
        • jhasse 11y ago
          searching for special characters, e. g. ~=
• djyaz1200 11y ago
  "Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> but the same thing will happen to them." -amen! Their big screw up is not supporting a vibrant market for apps. Zuck says he wants "to be electricty" but it seems he also wants to tightly control what is plugged in and how it's used. How come I can't access messenger with a 3rd party app? Why can't all kinds of cool startups build their business on the FB "platform"? Why not be more open, when Apple allowed Google Voice in the App Store all the carriers had to hasten their move to data based pricing... it was a revolution but Apple allowed it. Facebook will not ever let their power, position or business model be challenged by apps in any serious way.
  • jchendy 11y ago
    > How come I can't access messenger with a 3rd party app? Can't you? Adium claims it supports FB: https://adium.im/ https://adium.im/
    • mikehollinger 11y ago
      The real question is whether I can access and present a Facebook newsfeed via 3rd party application. For example: Can I create a "1337h4x0rbook.io" that contains a hacker-focused social network, but feeds / filters based on things that are tech-y. Can I?
      • wfunction 11y ago
        Should be possible with FQL I think? Just query the stream table.
        • tobilg 11y ago
          FQL has been deprecated since Graph API v2.1 (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog#v2_1 https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog#v2_1), and will only be usable with <=v2.0 apps until October 30th 2016 (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog). The Graph API has not longer the ability to retrieve the /home endpoint which contained the newsfeed, since v2.0. The only this a app can retrieve is the user's own posts.
• SriniK 11y ago
  > Mark Z may look at the early-stage product himself and conclude that it's not anything special. I think he already did and bought Instagram & Whatsapp. Yea real threat is when they miss the opportunity.
  • djyaz1200 11y ago
    Good point!
  • Elepsis 11y ago
    Of course, Microsoft itself bought into many markets once upon a time. While Excel isn't one where that was the case, its sister app PowerPoint started as Microsoft's first major acquisition. The point is, you can have that vision for a while, but eventually the market changes such that the threat (or opportunity) to your business isn't so direct to be obvious like Instagram was to Facebook.
    • SriniK 11y ago
      > but eventually the market changes Yup. Classic example of innovator's dilemma. These are the opportunities startups need to constantly find and solve. Proof that simple ideas seem so simple on the surface yet become these big opportunities. What you do with the idea/initial success is what separates these successful companies.
• over 11y ago
  > Bing has hardly dented Google's search marketshare. Bing has 21% market share vs. 64% for Google.
  • yesco 11y ago
    This is surprising, I guess having it has an IE default really has more of an impact then I expected. I wonder how much the amazon gift card thing helped as well.
    • drzaiusapelord 11y ago
      Not really. Before Bing had 20%, Yahoo had 20%. Now Yahoo search is powered by Bing. MS pretty much bought the marketshare with the Yahoo deal and Yahoo was happy to have someone else do the heavy lifting on search. I believe Yahoo search is also the default on Firefox now. IE defaults can only take you so far.
  • IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    As far as I'm aware of the data, Bing's mostly been eating non-Google market share, e.g. Yahoo, rather than denting Google significantly. Back in 2008 Google was also at 64%, but Yahoo was at 20%. Now it's Bing.
    • basch 11y ago
      default windows search. people who never change it because it just works (well enough)
  • scholia 11y ago
    Only in the US. World-wide, Google's search market share is around 90%.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • babuskov 11y ago
• gist 11y ago
  > In hindsight, it was a massive miscalculation as Assumes the OS would have been as widespread as it was w/o the licensing that MSFT ended up doing (and it would not have been). That is what it made it the defacto standard operating system.
• mcknz 11y ago
  > Microsoft couldn't beat Intuit Quicken with MS Money but they did crush Netscape with IE. Microsoft tightly integrated IE with Windows, leveraging their OS monopoly in order to beat Netscape. I don't believe MS built a superior product.
  • ksk 11y ago
    >I don't believe MS built a superior product. Whether you do or don't believe it, it's whether they did, and yes they did. Users overwhelmingly chose to not purchase Netscape products which killed their revenue and shut down the company. The competition was free vs paid, and as often happens, paid will fail. If it was free vs free, maybe Netscape would have had a shot.
    • mcknz 11y ago
      Microsoft had the luxury of offering it for free because of revenue from Windows and Office. I could agree that the browsers were at least comparable, until Netscape disappeared and MS had little incentive to improve IE. Which led to feature stagnation until the Firefox rose from the ashes...
  • smitherfield 11y ago
    It has a well-deserved bad reputation now, but Internet Explorer 3-6 were, pretty indisputably, far superior products to the competition from Netscape. And not just because they were free and bundled with Windows. Of course the undead Netscape-as-Firefox would later end up for its own part becoming far superior to IE6 back in IE's near-abandonware period.
  • blakeyrat 11y ago
    IE won the competition on Apple Macintosh where both browsers were competing on even footing. (Neither was associated with the OS maker; Apple shipped both on system CDs.) I 100% believe IE 5 was a far superior product than the competing Netscape 4.x. Previous to IE 5, maybe it's debatable.
  • cmrdporcupine 11y ago
    I don't know if you were around then, or just speaking out of MS hate... but in the late 90s IE was the superior product. So much so that I often missed it because I was a Linux user and so didn't have access to it; Netscape had gotten really really terrible. Until Firefox came out the better option was IE. I worked in a shop in 2000/2001 that was doing early Ajax type stuff (for a dashboard that controlled some embedded hardware.) It wasn't possible to port it to Firefox even at that point, even at that point IE had some leg up. Later, MS let IE6 bit rot forever. And it was loathsome.
• jdhzzz 11y ago
  Still a fan of OS/2!
  • yuhong 11y ago
    Yea, the fiasco with OS/2 2.0 in particular is more complex than this, with both Microsoft and IBM being involved. It used to be my favorite topic.
• EastSmith 11y ago
  > Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> That WhatsApp acquisition ($19 billion) must have been made exactly because Facebook was thinking that WhatsApp really could have been their Facebook (for Google), their Google (for Microsoft) and their Microsoft (for IBM).
  • joslin01 11y ago
    I would argue that was more of an expensive land-grab. Whatsapp was/is not an existential threat to Facebook. If a messenger could overcome FB, snapchat might actually have a chance, but the key value proposition that FB offers is that it's your online persona. You have pictures up from all the years you been around, you have your friends' profiles to go check out at will, you can start a group, or make an event and know all your friends are already on Facebook to see it. So why buy? Messengers have the highest retention rate. You can see them expanding upon it by integrating FB profile + allowing you to install "apps" or "plugins" that do X/Y/Z. There is a Chinese company, WeChat, that has made billions on this model. I'm sure FB would like to as well, but with it integrated with FB login etc.. Downvoters: Genuinely curious how I'm wrong if you feel like throwing in your 2 cents.
    • ves 11y ago
      I think you mean tencent/ wechat
      • joslin01 11y ago
        Thanks, yes I did (edited)
    • sundarurfriend 11y ago
      I don't know, WhatsApp actually has mostly replaced Fb in my friends and family circle at least. I think it was a smart and timely acquisition (whether overpriced, I cannot say.) > You have pictures up from all the years you been around, In practice, people care very little about this - they want the world to know they were in the Taj Mahal last Sunday or their baby started walking yesterday, but older pictures are generally forgotten, and sometimes even a nuisance for various reasons. > you have your friends' profiles to go check out at will, and yet almost never do > you can start a group, as you can on WhatsApp > or make an event and know all your friends are already on Facebook to see it. This is one use case that is indeed better on Fb, though just posting and gathering replies on WhatsApp seems to suffice in 80% of cases. (Btw, I'm not among the downvoters.)
• BHSPitMonkey 11y ago
  People I know under 18 seem to barely even use Facebook. They instead heavily use more segmented apps like Snapchat and Kik to constantly engage with their friends. This is just my observation, but perhaps Facebook will soon be thought of as something only used by the out-of-touch older generation.
  • scholia 11y ago
    The under 18s eventually become the older generation ;-) They leave college, get married, and within a few years they are posting baby pics.....
    • Someone 11y ago
      But will they do that on Facebook, if none of their friends are on it? Possibly, but that's not a given. Hm, maybe, they will get on Facebook because that's what the grandparents know and use, and Facebook will draw in a generation of parents that way??
      • scholia 11y ago
        Hard to say. I can actually see it happening at the moment (my son's school friends are having babies now). Whether that will transfer to the next generation is another matter, but Facebook's user base and engagement levels are still growing. Something with 1.5 billion users isn't likely to disappear in a hurry. Since Facebook already owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus Rift, and can afford to buy any startups it wants, even a decline in core Facebook use wouldn't be terminal.
• pfarnsworth 11y ago
  I'm actually getting pushed away from Facebook. Nothing in my feed is particularly interesting anymore to me, it's about 50% political opinion, 20% ads, and the rest is usually nonsense. Facebook is generally a place where people post to show off about something, it's not entertaining anymore. I'm sure over the next few years, there will be alternatives that will schism the markets so there is always an opportunity for a startup with a good, catchy idea.
  • kross 11y ago
    After I unfollowed all the irritations, I too found myself simply irritated with my facebook feed. I started asking myself, "Did this experience make my life better in some way?". After a few uses, I determined quite quickly that my life was indeed not better with it. I haven't deleted my account, but I did remove it from my phone because it started aggressively notifying me of bogus status updates after it noticed my absence. After a few days, I asked myself, "Is my life better without it?" Yes, no irritations from ego, politics or ignorance anymore.
    • Mahn 11y ago
      Facebook has its uses (acquaintance address book, private message with people you know or knew, local groups) but don't try to make sense of the feed because it's hopeless, no matter how many tweaks they do to their algorithm it can never be more than an amalgamation of the lowest common denominator, IMO. Though I guess YMMV if you have extremely interesting acquaintances, but I'd be surprised.
      • zeveb 11y ago
        Heh, I still remember how much I disliked the Feed when they introduced it. In retrospect, of course, I was wrong: no matter how much I thought it was a disaster, it was a huge reason for Facebook's rapid growth. It'd be a bit amusing if what has been the reason for their growth eventually ends up being the reason for their decline.
      • kbenson 11y ago
• 4lejandrito 11y ago
  > Mark Z himself may look at the early-stage product and conclude that it's not anything special. And maybe he is even using it right now... I am thinking about Slack...
• cm2187 11y ago
  That's basically the wonder of capitalism. An accelerated form of Darwinism. People try random things, until someone tries the right thing at the right time, and it succeeds and takes over. That person is then labelled a genius, everyone think he knows what will happen next, he thinks of himself as a genius, and he will give his opinion on everything, until someone else hits another sweet spot and takes over...
  • i2shar 11y ago
    You put into exact words what I always had in my head but hadn't articulated. So very true about all products and companies around us.
    • md224 11y ago
      Just remember that Darwinism is a morally neutral process: evolution only cares about the survival of the entities in question. Likewise, capitalism thrives when businesses thrive; everything else is just a means to an end. Not saying it's bad... just neutral. And it may have very good consequences for society as a whole. The only danger is believing the process is "good" in of itself.
      • mjburgess 11y ago
        Capitalism isn't morally neutral because it concerns collectives of moral agents (companies), their goals and the goals of their customers and those they interact with. Evolution operates on genes, an amoral physical process. Capitalism is the operation of people, a morally-laden process.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      • Retra 11y ago
        The only thing evolution and markets have in common is that the terms 'selection process' and 'organism' apply to both. And even then, they mean different things. Don't take the analogy too seriously.
• gdilla 11y ago
  Meh? Their business is getting your attention so they can sell it to advertisers. They're also not stupid. That attention doesn't have to exist on FB. They can just acquire it - whatsapp, instagram, etc.
• pitchups 11y ago
  I think it also addresses a very crucial point often overlooked: the market will adopt & adapt the easiest tool to satisfy a need, rather than the best tool for the job. Databases are far better suited to maintaining - say a membership list, and FB Groups are far inferior, but are much easier - hence will be adopted, tweaked and repurposed in a hacky way to accomplish the task. The tool is adapted to the job at hand because you already know how to use it. Yes, it is true - when you have a hammer everything does look like a nail.
• bossx 11y ago
  Facebook is already being displaced by Snapchat, people don't want to share their lives with every single person they meet, Snapchat solves this problem. It's also a mobile-first social network and difficult enough to keep the older crowd away, while building a massive user base of the younger generation. The facial filters feature will 100% try to be copied by Facebook with their recent acquisition of MASQRD, but it's too late, because they don't fundamentally think of social networking the same way. I was at the airport and I spotted at least 3x as many people using Snapchat over Facebook. If you don't have it already, do yourself a favour and read this http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-business/ http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-...
• rebootthesystem 11y ago
  The Innovator's Dilemma: http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-Business/dp/0062060244/ http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chang...
• executesorder66 11y ago
  I wonder if every time Nathan Myhrvold googles something he thinks, "... fuck".
• shard972 11y ago
  > Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> but the same thing will happen to them. One thing to consider is that Mark is very aware of this based on his purchases of companies like Instagram. At the moment it seems like facebook wants to try and buy anything they perceive to be that new up and comer.
• babuskov 11y ago
  But this does not mean that the Facebook will fail in its current use case. You are most likely currently using an IBM-compatible PC running Microsoft Windows on which you run Google for searches and Facebook to reach friends. There are some losers in those stories and they are losing to direct competition: IBM is losing on profits because they made their system open and anyone can build IBM compatible PCs, Microsoft is losing because people were for some strange reason ok with Apple creating a closed operating system (iOS) where they take 30% of any transaction that runs on it. Microsoft are trying to change this with Windows 10 and UWP, but hopefully it will fail just like Bing.
• hellbanner 11y ago
  "blindsides [Facebook]"? How about brain-playback of emotional states with VR experiences to relive your friend's lives?
• exelius 11y ago
  You're right -- this has always been true. The only people bummed out by it are the people trying to recreate Facebook's core value proposition (maintaining a digital representation of our meatspace relationships) themselves. But the reality is that the available market space for "social" is very small because Facebook occupies so much of it with a very general purpose product. This has always been the case in the startup world too: you always look at markets over $10B with caution, because that's big enough to interest AGAF (Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook) if they're already in an adjacent market. Your only hope is to target a less-profitable sub-sector of that market, develop expertise and hope that AGAF didn't bring their A game to that market (in which case, your company makes an excellent acquisition target at crazy valuations as AGAF bid against each other!)
• shthed 11y ago
  What's your source for that "Search is NOT A PRODUCT!!!" quote?
  • jasode 11y ago
    I read a dozen books about Google's origins many years ago and I thought I got it from that. Searching for it today, the closest equivalent source I could find was Myhrvold talking to Joe Kraus in 1995[1]. It's possible that Myrhvold repeated that lecture again to Larry and Sergei which I read in the Google books, or I misremembered and shifted the target of that quote from Excite to Google. I didn't read any book specifically about Excite so not sure why I would have done that. However, it's also possible the authors writing about Google weaved in a side note about Excite which my brain merged into the "Google story". Hopefully, my imperfect recall does not detract from the point that the smart guys at Microsoft misjudged what "search" could become. [1]https://books.google.com/books?id=ktm885vGIXEC&pg=PA68&dq=google+%22search+is+not+a+business%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjVpeXJ6MrLAhXiuoMKHRDSCRsQ6AEINDAA#v=onepage&q=google%20%22search%20is%20not%20a%20business%22&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=ktm885vGIXEC&pg=PA68&dq=go...