4 ms·

I wonder when the next "facebook" will come along. I predict people will abandon facebook just as they did with myspace, as soon as something new, cleaner and

I wonder when the next "facebook" will come along. I predict people will abandon facebook just as they did with myspace, as soon as something new, cleaner and with less spam will be available to migrate to. Of course after some period of time the new service will also end up filled with memes and ads and the cycle will continue once again.

dazc 9y ago
Isn't it more a case of facebook's audience fragmentation towards snapchat, whatsapp, etc?
- cx_in_the_chat 9y ago
  Perhaps, but snapchat and whatsapp are more specialized services eg. with focus on stories or messaging whereas facebook offers the whole package so to speak. That's something people will always value I think.
kristianc 9y ago
The MySpace comparison is a little tired. MySpace felt big, but even at its peak, only had 75m MAUs. Even Pinterest today has over twice as many, between 175m and 200m. Facebook is at 2.2bn, and its DAILY active users are 184m. Extrapolated over a month, this blip accounts for half of MySpace's MAUs. There's some pretty serious network effects there, to the point where building a slightly better mousetrap is not going to work. 2009 was also a loooong time ago: the App Store had just been born, people were just starting to use Twitter, the Android platform was just getting going and 25% of all PC sales in Europe were netbooks. MySpace was barely even accessed by people using smartphones.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  Network effect isn't that relevant since people don't actually have a ton invested in Facebook beyond just the social graph and that social connectivity. It is thus rife for a preference cascade if it turns out a competitor hits all the right buttons with some other compelling reason to switch. All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits (so, not something like google plus that was mostly the same and in many ways actually worse) and then a critical mass to start forming there. Once the "well, I guess I should have an account over there just to keep up with my friends X, Y, and Z every once in a while" cycle starts and that becomes common then a preference cascade becomes possible. Nobody really understands social media very well today, which is odd considering its age, so nobody is really hitting all the right notes with an offering but the potential exists.
  - kristianc 9y ago
    The social graph and the social connectivity is huge. You're asking people - 2.2bn of them - to incur the overhead of another platform to check, which they're not going to do unless all of their friends are already on that platform in the first place. And those people (and the advertisers that pay for the servers, the hosting) are not going to turn up unless ... well you get the picture. And the reason why advertisers pay to advertise on Facebook is because of the strength of their social graph in identifying people's preferences and profile of device usage, which Facebook has because they already have all the users. Facebook is already 'good enough' in so many areas, and for the areas that the core FB app is not so strong (visuals, low friction messaging, short form communication), guess what, Facebook has already bought a competitor.
    - orbifold 9y ago
      I think you are missing the point, you don't need to get 2.2 bn to migrate to your new platform, just "strongly connected components". This is why for example Discord or Slack can exist even though they have some overlap with Facebooks functionality (mostly messenger and groups). I don't really know what the value of facebook is to most people, I've heard that it has groups for almost everything, but most other features I would guess are easily "unbundled" as Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat are evidence for.
      - kristianc 9y ago
        Facebook's value is in the 2.2bn figure - its value to advertisers is in its identity graph. To displace FB as FB did MySpace, you need some way of replicating that. The value of that identity graph to advertisers (which is how you keep the lights on) works in exponents - if you have 10% of Facebook's graph, you don't have something that is 10% as useful, you have something that is 1% as useful. You can get some of the way by unbundling FB's core feature set and innovating on a particular feature, but your upper limit for that is probably a product that is used by hundreds of millions of people, not a Facebook killer. Slack's moat is that it is socially unacceptable to use Facebook at work, which is a nice one to have but sets up an entirely new set of challenges trying to get people to adopt it outside. Discord, similarly is almost entirely limited to gaming. Number of PC Gamers worldwide total tops out at about 800m. WeChat is a special case: Owned by Tencent, operates in a market that Facebook is completely locked out of, and operating on a completely different set of cultural assumptions.
- icantdrive55 9y ago
  I don't think the comparison is tired. It's the psychology of of not using the product that interests me. My internal dialogue, and I imagine others: 1. Oh--you are not just a casual user of Facebook? 2. Wow--you're fishing for compliments, and posing in every picture. 3. You're listing way too much information about yourself? 4. You have way too many friends. 5. You are not the person I thought. I don't want to know you, and I don't feel sorry for you in that he's/she's probally lonely, and has no self-esteem. You're coming across as just irritating/tedious. I better delete my account again. Will this time be the last? (I do think the next big thing will be a site kinda like FB, but people will be given a percentage of the ad revenue. They will pose. They will brag. But they will justify, with "Oh--it pays me." And they will continue being irritating, but have a monetary reason to explain their posturing.)
jimmies 9y ago
I think there is definitely a potential for such a competition. And people, such as diaspora and mastodon lately, have attempted so but failed. I have put some thoughts into it, and I think the reason diaspora failed is because they focused too much on federation and technology. The core issue of Facebook isn't that it is not federated. It is that it is too greedy, no one trusts it. I'd think if someone like Jimmy Wales created a non-profit social network with clear ethical guidelines, I'd be very much interested to join and donate to. Trying to make something decentralized for the crazy cost of deployment difficulties seems like one unworthy tradeoff.

dazc 9y ago

Isn't it more a case of facebook's audience fragmentation towards snapchat, whatsapp, etc?

cx_in_the_chat 9y ago
Perhaps, but snapchat and whatsapp are more specialized services eg. with focus on stories or messaging whereas facebook offers the whole package so to speak. That's something people will always value I think.

kristianc 9y ago

The MySpace comparison is a little tired. MySpace felt big, but even at its peak, only had 75m MAUs. Even Pinterest today has over twice as many, between 175m and 200m. Facebook is at 2.2bn, and its DAILY active users are 184m. Extrapolated over a month, this blip accounts for half of MySpace's MAUs. There's some pretty serious network effects there, to the point where building a slightly better mousetrap is not going to work. 2009 was also a loooong time ago: the App Store had just been born, people were just starting to use Twitter, the Android platform was just getting going and 25% of all PC sales in Europe were netbooks. MySpace was barely even accessed by people using smartphones.

InclinedPlane 9y ago
Network effect isn't that relevant since people don't actually have a ton invested in Facebook beyond just the social graph and that social connectivity. It is thus rife for a preference cascade if it turns out a competitor hits all the right buttons with some other compelling reason to switch. All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits (so, not something like google plus that was mostly the same and in many ways actually worse) and then a critical mass to start forming there. Once the "well, I guess I should have an account over there just to keep up with my friends X, Y, and Z every once in a while" cycle starts and that becomes common then a preference cascade becomes possible. Nobody really understands social media very well today, which is odd considering its age, so nobody is really hitting all the right notes with an offering but the potential exists.
- kristianc 9y ago
  The social graph and the social connectivity is huge. You're asking people - 2.2bn of them - to incur the overhead of another platform to check, which they're not going to do unless all of their friends are already on that platform in the first place. And those people (and the advertisers that pay for the servers, the hosting) are not going to turn up unless ... well you get the picture. And the reason why advertisers pay to advertise on Facebook is because of the strength of their social graph in identifying people's preferences and profile of device usage, which Facebook has because they already have all the users. Facebook is already 'good enough' in so many areas, and for the areas that the core FB app is not so strong (visuals, low friction messaging, short form communication), guess what, Facebook has already bought a competitor.
  - orbifold 9y ago
    I think you are missing the point, you don't need to get 2.2 bn to migrate to your new platform, just "strongly connected components". This is why for example Discord or Slack can exist even though they have some overlap with Facebooks functionality (mostly messenger and groups). I don't really know what the value of facebook is to most people, I've heard that it has groups for almost everything, but most other features I would guess are easily "unbundled" as Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat are evidence for.
    - kristianc 9y ago
      Facebook's value is in the 2.2bn figure - its value to advertisers is in its identity graph. To displace FB as FB did MySpace, you need some way of replicating that. The value of that identity graph to advertisers (which is how you keep the lights on) works in exponents - if you have 10% of Facebook's graph, you don't have something that is 10% as useful, you have something that is 1% as useful. You can get some of the way by unbundling FB's core feature set and innovating on a particular feature, but your upper limit for that is probably a product that is used by hundreds of millions of people, not a Facebook killer. Slack's moat is that it is socially unacceptable to use Facebook at work, which is a nice one to have but sets up an entirely new set of challenges trying to get people to adopt it outside. Discord, similarly is almost entirely limited to gaming. Number of PC Gamers worldwide total tops out at about 800m. WeChat is a special case: Owned by Tencent, operates in a market that Facebook is completely locked out of, and operating on a completely different set of cultural assumptions.
icantdrive55 9y ago
I don't think the comparison is tired. It's the psychology of of not using the product that interests me. My internal dialogue, and I imagine others: 1. Oh--you are not just a casual user of Facebook? 2. Wow--you're fishing for compliments, and posing in every picture. 3. You're listing way too much information about yourself? 4. You have way too many friends. 5. You are not the person I thought. I don't want to know you, and I don't feel sorry for you in that he's/she's probally lonely, and has no self-esteem. You're coming across as just irritating/tedious. I better delete my account again. Will this time be the last? (I do think the next big thing will be a site kinda like FB, but people will be given a percentage of the ad revenue. They will pose. They will brag. But they will justify, with "Oh--it pays me." And they will continue being irritating, but have a monetary reason to explain their posturing.)

jimmies 9y ago

I think there is definitely a potential for such a competition. And people, such as diaspora and mastodon lately, have attempted so but failed. I have put some thoughts into it, and I think the reason diaspora failed is because they focused too much on federation and technology. The core issue of Facebook isn't that it is not federated. It is that it is too greedy, no one trusts it. I'd think if someone like Jimmy Wales created a non-profit social network with clear ethical guidelines, I'd be very much interested to join and donate to. Trying to make something decentralized for the crazy cost of deployment difficulties seems like one unworthy tradeoff.