4 ms·

If you want to answer this question, it's probably a mistake to look at Facebook itself. The biggest danger to successful technology companies is that the worl

by pg 16y ago

If you want to answer this question, it's probably a mistake to look at Facebook itself. The biggest danger to successful technology companies is that the world will change in a way that makes them irrelevant. The new thing, whatever it is, will initially seem unimportant. By the time the incumbent realizes how important it is, it will be too late. This sort of generic answer is not very exciting. It would be more exciting if you could say what the new thing would be. (To some people at least; to most it would seem a toy.) But that is quite hard to do.

raphar 16y ago
Being really hard to guess what would be a facebook "killer", do you have an idea of why none of the heavy weights were unable to at least compete with Facebook. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google tried for sure (each in its own way), but they are far away from facebook current popularity and success. Also, do you think it's all Facebook merit or there is also some "people" thing helping them, and not their rivals? [Perhaps some novelty factor, a (n unknown) social economic factor, whatever, I dunno].
- pg 16y ago
  I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect that once Facebook had about 5-10 universities they were unstoppable. Once you have 5-10 universities, you're going to get all the rest. Once you have all the college students, all you have to do to get HS students is allow them in. And you can get everyone post-college by simply not kicking people off when they graduate. If only I had realized that at the time, though. I remember thinking that a social network for college students sounded about as exciting as yet another used textbook exchange, but without the revenue.
  - dasil003 16y ago
    That makes a nice narrative but I don't think that the strategy made them unstoppable. MySpace had a huge head start and what happened? They got steamrolled because Facebook had better privacy, better design, better performance, and more features. Facebook's secret sauce is its engineering organization. Sure a lot of good ideas went into it, but lots of companies have good ideas, very few have the technical ability (or the balls) to roll them out as quickly as Facebook has.
  - bootload 16y ago
    "... I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect that once Facebook had about 5-10 universities they were unstoppable. Once you have 5-10 universities, you're going to get all the rest. ..." It wasn't that easy according to "The Facebook Effect" ~ http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connecting/dp/1439102112/ref=pd_sim_b_2 http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connect... Competitors existed but Facebook had 2 things going for them that the others did not - a) A fast school addition tool allowing Facebook to quickly add new universities & b) A strategic thinking founder who realised if you added universities around existing sites (friends, associates of the target university) you could pull in enough of the users of their competitors sites to render them ineffective. Such is the power of the "social graph" and relentless determination.
twidlit 16y ago
But Facebook has proven to be very vigilant on potential competitors and has been effective in snuffing it out by not just cloning them but improving the (feature based) startup's concept. Or they acquire them or its next smaller competitor startup. My money is either in 1 of the 3 giants (GOOG, APP, MS) finally getting the social web right or Twitter. But the problem with Twitter is it has fumbled countless times already and is only growing due to the strength and type of its community. So i have no confidence they can catch up to Facebook. So Im guessing if its not the 3 giants, it will be an inter-operable social layer and a thousand private social networks.
- pg 16y ago
  Whatever it is won't seem like a competitor. It will seem as unrelated to Facebook's business as Google seemed to Microsoft's business in 1998.
  - twidlit 16y ago
    IMHO it will be related in a way that it will still be around replicating social interactions offline online. The way i predict success in online businesses is how well they can replicate real-world actions and dynamic. The bigger and better the set of real human actions a startup can build a online counterpart for, the stronger it becomes. Facebook is building online equivalent of verbs or actions you can do with people. so the more verbs it can do the more unstoppable it becomes. What if someone can build the Facebook+ phone? i would also bet on that.
  - gcb 16y ago
    This may be the standard answer for x-killer in any useful product talk. but facebook is a social time sink. we all seen many came and go. in brazil facebook is just now dethroning Orkut. wich had just before dethroned photolog, or something. They are all the same. it's just the latest momentum. Facebook just overcome them now by sending more lobster-trap-email-spam then any other managed to send before. So the answer: it will be any other social time sink clone (they're all the same as friendster or other anyway) that manages to send your friends SMS every 5seconds. There you go. build it and give me 4%.

by pg 16y ago

raphar 16y ago

Being really hard to guess what would be a facebook "killer", do you have an idea of why none of the heavy weights were unable to at least compete with Facebook. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google tried for sure (each in its own way), but they are far away from facebook current popularity and success. Also, do you think it's all Facebook merit or there is also some "people" thing helping them, and not their rivals? [Perhaps some novelty factor, a (n unknown) social economic factor, whatever, I dunno].

pg 16y ago
I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect that once Facebook had about 5-10 universities they were unstoppable. Once you have 5-10 universities, you're going to get all the rest. Once you have all the college students, all you have to do to get HS students is allow them in. And you can get everyone post-college by simply not kicking people off when they graduate. If only I had realized that at the time, though. I remember thinking that a social network for college students sounded about as exciting as yet another used textbook exchange, but without the revenue.
- dasil003 16y ago
  That makes a nice narrative but I don't think that the strategy made them unstoppable. MySpace had a huge head start and what happened? They got steamrolled because Facebook had better privacy, better design, better performance, and more features. Facebook's secret sauce is its engineering organization. Sure a lot of good ideas went into it, but lots of companies have good ideas, very few have the technical ability (or the balls) to roll them out as quickly as Facebook has.
- bootload 16y ago
  "... I'm not 100% sure, but I suspect that once Facebook had about 5-10 universities they were unstoppable. Once you have 5-10 universities, you're going to get all the rest. ..." It wasn't that easy according to "The Facebook Effect" ~ http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connecting/dp/1439102112/ref=pd_sim_b_2 http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Effect-Inside-Company-Connect... Competitors existed but Facebook had 2 things going for them that the others did not - a) A fast school addition tool allowing Facebook to quickly add new universities & b) A strategic thinking founder who realised if you added universities around existing sites (friends, associates of the target university) you could pull in enough of the users of their competitors sites to render them ineffective. Such is the power of the "social graph" and relentless determination.

twidlit 16y ago

But Facebook has proven to be very vigilant on potential competitors and has been effective in snuffing it out by not just cloning them but improving the (feature based) startup's concept. Or they acquire them or its next smaller competitor startup. My money is either in 1 of the 3 giants (GOOG, APP, MS) finally getting the social web right or Twitter. But the problem with Twitter is it has fumbled countless times already and is only growing due to the strength and type of its community. So i have no confidence they can catch up to Facebook. So Im guessing if its not the 3 giants, it will be an inter-operable social layer and a thousand private social networks.

pg 16y ago
Whatever it is won't seem like a competitor. It will seem as unrelated to Facebook's business as Google seemed to Microsoft's business in 1998.
- twidlit 16y ago
  IMHO it will be related in a way that it will still be around replicating social interactions offline online. The way i predict success in online businesses is how well they can replicate real-world actions and dynamic. The bigger and better the set of real human actions a startup can build a online counterpart for, the stronger it becomes. Facebook is building online equivalent of verbs or actions you can do with people. so the more verbs it can do the more unstoppable it becomes. What if someone can build the Facebook+ phone? i would also bet on that.
- gcb 16y ago
  This may be the standard answer for x-killer in any useful product talk. but facebook is a social time sink. we all seen many came and go. in brazil facebook is just now dethroning Orkut. wich had just before dethroned photolog, or something. They are all the same. it's just the latest momentum. Facebook just overcome them now by sending more lobster-trap-email-spam then any other managed to send before. So the answer: it will be any other social time sink clone (they're all the same as friendster or other anyway) that manages to send your friends SMS every 5seconds. There you go. build it and give me 4%.