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>I strongly disagree especially in the case of social networks. First movers in such spaces have incredible advantages and one of them is a lock-in effect. Coun
by ameister14 9y ago
>I strongly disagree especially in the case of social networks. First movers in such spaces have incredible advantages and one of them is a lock-in effect. Countless follow-up social sites have come and gone that either had feature parity or better offerings than Facebook, but failed to get a foothold because of the fact that everyone already had Facebook. Why switch when everyone can already talk and plan?
Sure, and that applied to Friendster and Myspace and others as well, until Facebook came along.
- scott_s 9y agoI don't like the term "first mover", because in practice, I think it's rare for the actual first to win. Friendster was the first friend-oriented online social network. They were the first mover, but the site performed terribly. MySpace and Facebook beat Friendster because they were better at doing what people wanted. There are other examples. The iPhone was not the first smart phone, but it was better than all of the others when it came out. It dominated for a while, and even though it's no longer the dominant smart phone (I believe there are more Android phones), all smart phones are derivatives of that first iPhone. Google beat Yahoo and AltaVista. Historically, I think it's usually second-movers that win, because they tend to benefit from the first-movers defining the problem, and one of the second-movers solves it better.
- ExactoKnight 9y agoFacebook was first in getting real identity on the internet right. The other social media sites before them never understood this well -- many had visions of people taking on avatars of other creatures, or defining their life around one myopic interest (in the case of MySpace: music).
- aswanson 9y agoWhat do you think Twitter got right? I think real identity was a part of it, but fake identity abounds there as well.