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Ask HN: what could kill Facebook?

• petervandijck 16y ago
  Could a consistent effort by a deep-pocketed competitor kill them, if they can't find a good way to monetize (which seems unlikely)? The same way Bing is attacking Google search: just spend heaps of money on it, and wait for the other party to make a mistake?
  • adrianscott 16y ago
    I'd bet on a competitor without deep pockets unseating them.
• petervandijck 16y ago
  Google's attack on identity seems to consist of making it more open, through various standards. Hasn't succeeded yet, but it's possible that, once identity settles down in a form that's stable (there's too much innovation still going on), the open formats will become more attractive and eventually win. So that's how identity might play out, although it would take time.
  • Volscio 16y ago
    They're going to have to hire more people who can increase their "social" DNA.
• petervandijck 16y ago
  If Google can somehow get access to the data they need to make search social, enough of it to make sure facebook's search isn't better, then they might not need to kill fb, they may not be threatened.
• jorangreef 16y ago
  Facebook won't be "killed". It probably won't disappear in an instant. But it may most likely fade away in time due to a confluence of many factors, not just one: 1. early adopters growing up, 2. decreasing marginal utility, 3. failure to directly align revenue with consumers, 4. lack of vision, 5. corporatism, 6. solipsism, 7. something better coming along. See: "How the Mighty Fall" by Jim Collins (http://www.amazon.com/How-Mighty-Fall-Companies-Never/dp/0977326411 http://www.amazon.com/How-Mighty-Fall-Companies-Never/dp/097...).
  • petervandijck 16y ago
    How would decreasing marginal utility apply? (Trying to understand the concept)
    • jorangreef 16y ago
      Facebook gives you utility the first time you use it. It gets better as you figure it out and your friends join. So your marginal utility is increasing. But then after a while, all things being equal (i.e. Facebook makes no upgrades), your marginal utility must at some point start to decrease in accordance with the law of diminishing returns. It's like eating an ice cream. Maybe you have another ice cream and then another but at some point you're going to get sick. In Facebook's case, there's only so much Facebooking you can do before you start getting bored. Unless Facebook manage to keep launching new features, improving things to counteract this. And doing that is no easy task. As your user base grows, your software has to become even more and more addictive to compensate. I think there's more a problem with diminishing marginal utility with Facebook than there is with Amazon or Google or Apple or maybe even Twitter since the latter seem to serve a more direct, simpler, more basic need.
      • kilian 16y ago
        Unless you get bored with your friends, I don't know if this much applies apart from the facebook apps.
        • 16y ago
• adrianscott 16y ago
  What could kill Facebook would be a solution that respects people's privacy needs and doesn't try to change people in this respect. This is obviously only one piece of the solution, but Facebook are setting themselves up for this market entrypoint / wedge (recall Friendster's war on Fakesters). Facebook is trying to change people rather than serve their needs.
  • MisterWebz 16y ago
    A social network, that relies on its good privacy options to attract visitors, would definitely not compete with Facebook. In fact, i'm pretty sure most people on Facebook don't even care that much about their privacy.
    • loup-vaillant 16y ago
      That they care or not is often irrelevant. People often don't even know about Facebook's privacy issues.
    • adrianscott 16y ago
      agreed. people do care about 'uncomfortable' moments though... your friends' mom sees your embarassing pics and tells your mom... those photos of your lawyer in a bikini getting sent around the industry...
  • alain94040 16y ago
    No one cares about privacy. At least no significant number of the 500M users of Facebook. At best, maybe a million cares? And I'm being generous. Not even a thorn on Facebook's side.
    • evancaine 16y ago
      I disagree. People do care about privacy, they just have no way to show it other than to quit facebook and that's something they're not prepared to do. They'd rather put up with poor privacy controls and keep their account than have no account at all. Just because they're not leaving now, doesn't mean they won't leave when a viable alternative to facebook comes up.
• rick_2047 16y ago
  The only thing that can kill facebook (if nothing changes about the product itself, i.e. the same growth and same increasing utility) would be people losing interest in social interaction.
• Mark_B 16y ago
  I don't know if it would completely "kill" Facebook, but there would be a dramatic drop in usage if Zynga (Farmville,Mafia Wars,etc.) fell off the face of the earth.
• SkyMarshal 16y ago
  Time.
• alain94040 16y ago
  If you had asked in 1994 what would kill Windows/Office, would you have understood the answer of "people want to socialize with their friends"? The same thing will happen here for a timeline of 5-10 years: Facebook will likely be the dominant player in an old and boring space called social networking. Maybe virtual reality will be big (people walking around with really helpful devices in their pockets/on their eyes), or something you can't even think of.
  • techiferous 16y ago
    What killed Windows: the Internet and mobile devices have made the desktop OS less relevant, combined with healthy competition from Apple. What killed Office: once again, the Internet is making desktop applications obsolete. Enter Google docs. Socialization is in a different market than office productivity, so "people wanting to socialize with their friends" killing "Windows/Office" seems a non sequitur.
    • robryan 16y ago
      Both office and windows are still massive cash cows for Microsoft, I guess Facebook could do the same thing, slowly become less relevant while still controlling a massive market and turning massive profits. Of course Facebook still seem much more nimble in their space, maybe they will be able to jump in early on the next big thing.
    • codingthewheel 16y ago
      The only problem with this argument is that Windows and Office are both more popular than they've ever been and industry-wide, people are purchasing more desktop/laptop/notebook PCs per year than ever before. So if by "dead" you mean "more popular than ever" then I guess this argument holds water. http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/26/microsoft-numbers/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/26/microsoft-numbers/ It's true that of late the focus has been mobile, mobile, mobile, and Microsoft missed the boat here to a degree, but only in comparison to what Apple did, which is start a revolution around the idea of easy, mobile devices. This is a completely different market than the desktop market, and the popularity of one doesn't mean the death of the other. By the way, people have been calling for the death of the desktop since the 80s. 90s. 00s. Hasn't happened yet. Down the road...who knows.
• twobar 16y ago
  Here in Germany studiVZ is the leading social platform. studiVZ started off as a clone of facebook and they're still pretty much stuck on the initial version. facebook only recently started to slowly gaining traction here. Given that facebook is functionally (news feed, apps) and visually (less obtrusive adds) way superior to facebook the main reason for the slow adoption is surely that "everybody" is on studiVZ. Given that facebook is real good executed I don't see any way it's getting serious competition anytime soon.
• kqueue 16y ago
  An asteroid.
  • paul 16y ago
    That's actually the most accurate answer here.
• TomOfTTB 16y ago
  Honestly I don’t think Facebook will be that hard to kill because at its root it is a social movement and all social movements die based on two basic facts. 1. Kids rebel against their parents and don’t want to use the same things their parents use. Ironically this issue will be exacerbated by Facebook’s desire to force people to make everything public (“I’m grounded because my Mom saw those pictures you took at the party last night”). 2. The young are still building their social graph and can be more open to new things. So all those things that tie people to Facebook won’t be relevant to kids growing up today. So new generations come into the market both inclined and able to pick new movements and hence unseat the existing ones. Right now Facebook looks invincible because they have no real competition. They did a very smart thing in creating an API. In doing so they’ve tricked startups into making Facebook stronger with apps rather than creating competing solutions. So all Facebook has to do now is fend off the pathetic attempts at competition from large companies who aren’t agile enough to compete. So they have no real competition and kids have no real alternative. But if an industrious startup with innovative ideas comes to market targeting the youth demo I think they could kill Facebook pretty quickly among that group and become dominant as that group grows up.
  • callmeed 16y ago
    I like your points but I'm not sure FB is just a "social movement". We are on the 2nd generation of mobile phone users. My 15 yo daughter didn't forsake a cell phone because I have one.
    • dirtyaura 16y ago
      Mobile phones/contracts aren't social graphs in a similar sense that Facebook or IM networks are. If Facebook can become a utility in a similar sense that email and mobile phones are, then it can survive the generation problem.
    • TomOfTTB 16y ago
      In my mind it's an issue of "Enabling Device" vs "Venue". Put it this way. Say your hang out as a kid was a bowling alley you used to drive to every weekend. As you grew up and had kids you took them to that same bowling alley for Family Night. When your kids become old enough to drive they'll probably still use a car but they probably won't choose their parents' bowling alley as their hangout. Same here. Kids will still use Laptops, PCs and Cell. Phones but probably won't use the same sites as their parents when going on the web. Because the PCs are enabling devices that get you some place while the sites themselves are venues that you go to.
• jrnkntl 16y ago
  International privacy regulations.
• astartup1 16y ago
  Facebook was good to keep track of friends but as friends and applications are increasing, I am seeing high noise to signal ratio. I think if Facebook doesn't manage that part it is going to be like Altavista of search. Lots of people used it but they didn't know what they were missing until Google came along. We need something that adds value in peoples lives along with entertainment and socialization. Facebook killer would not be something having more features and something more shiny than facebook but it rethinks how people should socialize. Not just serve as platform for viral marketing and time sinking games.
• holman 16y ago
  There's a number of angles of attack available. It's certainly hard to top Facebook purely on the social graph (as you mentioned, everyone is on it). But I think you can attack Facebook on areas they lack and areas they've fallen down on. 1. Mobile. Facebook does have one of the top mobile apps on the planet, with its iPhone app at the top of the download list for quite some time. But I think it's fair to say Facebook doesn't really care about mobile; the iPhone app languished with overt bugs for half a year before they fixed some of them recently. They have no iPad app. They no longer innovate in this arena (more on that next), and while that probably won't be the case forever, there's a great opportunity for a network with a best-in-class app to take the lead here. 2. Innovation in social. Take, for example, geolocation. Foursquare and Gowalla have definitely found some new niche that will be here to stay: people like to know where friends are, where the currently happening thing is. I've tried those services three or four times each and, while interesting, still aren't compelling enough. Facebook has done nothing here. Yet. 3. Out-facebooking Facebook. I'm a member of the initial Facebook group: my school was something like the fifth school on the site. Things have changed dramatically from those humble beginnings. It's much harder for me to cut through all the Facebook app bullshit today and actually find out what's going on with my friends: status updates, photos, events, that sort of thing. Things that actually matter. People still will want to play games, but I think there's a huge part of the population that just want a clean, social network again. I've expanded on this on a short blog post last month, if you're interested in reading more (and I apologize if you're not): http://zachholman.com/2010/05/rebuild-facebook http://zachholman.com/2010/05/rebuild-facebook While I don't think Facebook will die a Friendster death in a poof of magic scaling sprinkles, I do think there's opportunity yet for a small outfit to out-innovate them, out Facebook them, or just otherwise carve a lucrative niche for themselves in the market.
  • neutronicus 16y ago
    Completely with you on point 3. I know a lot of people who do one thing on Facebook: spy on people. Facebook singlehandedly turned "stalk" into a word for a socially acceptable activity. Every new feature that got added after "look at people's photos so they don't realize it, with better web design than myspace, and the assurance that you actually know your 'friends'" has been grumbled about in my social circle. Any product that preserves that essential capability while cutting out the BS has a shot. Honestly, I think explicitly billing yourself as a recreation of "the old facebook" is not only a good idea, but the best idea, from this standpoint. Perhaps "Ye Olde Tome of Countenance: A Throwback to the Days When Facebook Didn't Suck - Click here to import your profile and photos"
• edge17 16y ago
  I'm thinking a Facebook IPO might change the pace of things a bit. Once they're answerable to shareholders and wallstreet and people that are more concerned about profit than social media, their tune may change slightly. I'm sure they'll do okay, but being a public company and answerable to shareholders does make things different. Recall the outrage when YHOO refused to sell to MSFT, who was offering an above market value per share. No one cared about the well being of either company. Certainly not the shareholders and certainly not wallstreet.
• alexgartrell 16y ago
  Facebook most powerful use case was that of doing social research. You want to know who your future employee, classmate, brother-in-law, etc. is. It made all of us our own private investigators, and allowed us to make judgements from the comfort of our own homes. With a [rightfully] increased consciousness of privacy (the backlash of the consequences of all of this "research"), Facebook is going to be less and less useful for this task moving forward. Now that I've got a year of undergrad left, I can safely say that my two uses of Facebook are Tetris and connecting with family. For Facebook to succeed, it needs to get better at intentional information sharing (writing on walls and messages do not encompass the ideal experience) as opposed to the passive information sharing that we've all used it for for so long. I don't think it's possible for Facebook to pivot (and, basically, abandon a whole lot of work) to just being a way to share pictures, messages, and plans with friends and family (which, I believe, will be what people want moving forward).
• codingthewheel 16y ago
  Facebook could die a slow death when the world figures out how to create an open, federated version of Facebook. Instead of placing central control of our social graph with an organization that believes people are essentially targets on the great Advertising Dartboard of the future, you could distribute control of that graph. Instead of logging into Facebook to connect to your friends, you'd simply have your "profile"--your web page or other net identity--and things like status updates, tweets (because this is also how you "kill" Twitter), likes, groups, friends, etc., would be handled by the protocol. In short: you kill Facebook by building an open protocol that does the same thing.
  • dotBen 16y ago
    "Facebook could die a slow death when the world figures out how to create an open, federated version of Facebook." So my whole career in this industry is helping companies 'get open' and embrace 'open'... and I can tell you this is not what will kill Facebook. Being 'open' isn't a feature consumers directly care about. The teenager on the street corner, the mom in the grocery store, the middle-aged office worker... they are not going to use Service X over Facebook "because it is open". That means nothing to them. There's nothing in there which explains to a normal person why there is any problem in making their tweets, likes, groups, etc on Facebook. Further more, disparate services which rely on users having their own control of their node (Dispora, DiSo) make no sense when 99% of most normal people have no web hosting or other way of hosting such a node. If there's one thing we've learnt from recent Facebook debacles, it is that people appreciate a level of privacy and control around their profile data. Now, open doesn't equate to no privacy - but you have to expect and assume that all nodes will treat privacy the same, otherwise the system fails. With a closed system you simply have to trust one actor with your privacy - the host network. Finally, the 'dartboard of advertising' is what gives companies like Facebook the resource to outcompete their rivals. If an alternative service doesn't have that kind of advertising strategy then it's going to find it hard to compete with the might of FB. Open may form part of the ultimate successor to Facebook, but it is just as likely to be something totally closed as Facebook. Open/closed is [sadly] not what consumers care about.
    • 16y ago
• DanielBMarkham 16y ago
  Facebook's weakness is that it thinks it is an owner instead of just an enabler. So instead of just easily enabling you to keep track of your friends and your communication with them, FB thinks it owns all of this -- a crazy idea that any 12-year-old would reject. The only reason they've gotten away with it is because legally they have some basis to work with, and socially they haven't annoyed their users. FB will die when somebody launches a new browser that takes all of your social information and copies it to an open, secure, and non-proprietary format -- perhaps in addition to posting it on FB. This poses no pain for the user, yet allows others to participate in their social graph without having to use FB. It's also the thing FB fears the most. Other than that, not much. As more and more people get sucked into FB by their friends, the service becomes more and more ingrained in the psyche of the users. Just guessing here, but I don't see product X coming out with a few new whizbang features and putting much of a dent in that.
• akrymski 16y ago
  An open / distributed alternative. Facebook today is like some initial proprietary version of email. Sooner or later, an open standard protocol for "sharing" and "social networking" (EMAIL + FOAF?) will take over. (And it has to be distributed, like email) That's what we're building at the mo :)
• roboneal 16y ago
  What about a well funded startup that allows developers to port existing Facebook apps with little or no modifications?
• uast23 16y ago
  I would say, practically nothing! FB already has a mammoth number of users hooked to it and don't forget the ever increasing population as well as number of internet users in countries like India. So there still are more number of people joining FB than leaving it.
• yurylifshits 16y ago
  I think Facebook is very strong and unlikely to die anytime soon. One thing that can happen is HUGE breach in upcoming Facebook Credits platform. If they manage to loose a lot of money of their users and partners, it can be big. But I do not think it is likely.
• tarkin2 16y ago
  Decentralisation of social networks: A protocol built on top of email. All your info would be held by your email provider (gmail, say), and when your friends log onto their email (yahoo, say) your new updates are download for them to view. If problems with getting email providers to abide by protocols specs aren't too large, I really could see this working.
• benwr 16y ago
  I don't see any way of killing Facebook "at this point." Think about what Facebook does: It connects people, in a constant stream sort of way. And you can count on being connected to almost everyone you know through Facebook just by signing in (over 1/4 of everyone on the internet is on Facebook, and I imagine this fraction is much higher in The US and other English-speaking countries). How would one overcome this barrier? Another problem is that Facebook is responsive to market pressures. Despite the recent "Exodus" of privacy-aware folks being little more than a trickle, they made changes to the way their privacy works. They adapt, and any significant improvement offered by a competitor will be added to Facebook's arsenal (Tagging in statuses, for example). Finally, knowing all of this, it is much easier to simply include Facebook Connect in a social service than to leave it out. By including it, you get over that first critical-mass hurdle. The problem is that by including it, you are also putting no pressure on Facebook or increasing the drive to migrate to your service.
• richlittlehale 16y ago
  This is a great question, but I'm not sure "kill" is the right way to look at it. The better question might be, what makes it less relevant? I have a hard time believing that Facebook will ever "die." A lot of websites that were once hot and the leaders in their categories are pushed to the side as a somewhat tangential/very similar product is introduced. I'm thinking Yahoo and Myspace as two examples. Both Yahoo and MySpace are still around (and still very relevant for some), but have shifted as Google and Facebook respectively have come in. They've become less relevant in what we think as their core competencies - Yahoo for search (though their drive to be a portal might have done them in) and Myspace for social networking. What is interesting is how both of these companies have evolved into I would say more niche specialties. Yahoo has great finance and fantasy football tools. MySpace is now the place for music/bands to post their work (The first and probably only time I went to MySpace this year was when I stumbled on a link to the very popular TV show Glee tryouts (a friend was trying out I was supposed to vote for) on MySpace. It got me thinking, why wouldn't they do this on Facebook, soon recognizing that Facebook couldn't support the type of functionality required for the contest. Could that be potentially something Facebook will suffer for in the future? Probably not that one example, but maybe a suite of features. I guess my point here is that I doubt Facebook will ever "die." The only time that I could see it dying (nice post TomOfTTB) is as it's a complete generational shift where our generation's kids (I'm 23) use some wildly new disruptive technology that's more relevant for the time. My guess is, though, our generation will be using Facebook for many many years to come. I will be interested if and how it evolves like MySpace/Yahoo. Will it end up niching itself? I took an informal survey of friends who talked about using Facebook explicitly for "what's going on with my friends" (aka stalk their facebook albums and walls to get up to date on what's going on) as opposed to Twitter which is (for me and some of my friends at least) much more about "what's going on in the world? what articles did these cool people I respect find?" Pictures on Facebook are done very well and I could see that being a future niche. It's a fascinating time to be involved in the internet as it's still to young almost to have "history" or "throwbacks" (some might disagree, I know). I would guess that the "movements" TomOfTTB refers to will be happening throughout the history of the internet. To give an metaphor with the auto industry, it might be like the revival of the VW Beatle/Bug cars (popular in the 60s) get revived 40 years later. It might be that a website like MySpace (or even Facebook someday) goes out of style one decade, but then somehow comes back. It sure will be an interesting ride whatever happens!
• iterationx 16y ago
  Maybe Facebook will kill Facebook. Like how Winamp killed Winamp. Winamp is so bloated now that I can't believe anyone still uses it. Maybe there will be so much Farmville and other garbage that its more trouble than its worth.