5 ms·

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 a

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.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    By your logic facebook shouldn't be popular since it was too difficult to start. The thing is, you absolutely 100% don't need a competitor to spring forth fully formed with 2.2 billion active users on day 1 as Athena leaping out of the head of Zeus. You just need enough of a community to exist for it to be viable on its own (and there are already many not-facebook killers who are at that level). What's missing right now is a compelling experience that fully competes with facebook. Everything else out there is either in a smaller niche such as instagram (which is owned by facebook) or snapchat or what-have-you or doesn't cover all of facebook's core featureset or is a worse experience or is run incompetently in some way (/cough/twitter/cough/). The way that these switchovers happen is early adopters start doing lots of cool shit somewhere else and then a subset of people start following them there. You act like it's an onerous thing to do so, but this is meat and potatoes run of the mill shit for digital natives in the 21st century. Almost no one on planet Earth has a single social media account. If you have one you likely have several. Facebook, instagram, tumblr, twitter, snapchat, slack, discord, whatsapp, groupme, hangouts, AND SO ON. You will use whatever means is most convenient for keeping up with your friends, that's just the nature of life today. If your best friend starts using "something else" a lot then you are going to be incentivized to check it out. If you're young you are even more likely to invest the time and energy in exploring new platforms, if you're older it may take more effort but it's just a matter of how much. If some other platform is truly more compelling than facebook then people are going to engage with each other more there, which will encourage more people to check it out, more people to adopt it as one of their primary modes of keeping in touch, and a preference cascade to start. What all this means is that facebook's marketshare of the social media landscape is actually surprisingly tenuous. A truly superior competitor could unravel their entire market in a single year, perhaps. That may be unlikely (it's hard to say without specific examples) but it's the sort of thing that is well within the realm of possibility. Remember, people thought that myspace, blogger, flickr, etc. all had nearly unassailable locks on their respective marketshares too, but those crumbled almost overnight. Given that a lot of people use facebook right now who are nevertheless very dissatisfied with the experience of using facebook I think the situation is ripe for a turnover.
- oblio 9y ago
  > All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits Yes, cause we all know that in tech, having a superior product guarantees success :) On top of that, let's say you're right. The product has to be radically better, people won't move for 5-10-20% better.
- dingaling 9y ago
  > beyond just the social graph and that social connectivity And Facebook Groups. That was one of Facebooks genius moves, there is so much local information locked-up in those silos out of sight of Google and other search engines. It is Facebook's treasure-trove that keeps people engaged, particularly for hyper-local news and interests not covered by the media. And no hosting costs, nor time spent on admin tasks. I'm active on a locality-based special-interest forum that after a decade of slow growth has around 600 total members and about 20 posting-active. Anyone can come along and look at it, and sign-up if they like. The equivalent Facebook Group has 2,000+ members in just a couple of years, and no way for non-members to view it.
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.)

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.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  By your logic facebook shouldn't be popular since it was too difficult to start. The thing is, you absolutely 100% don't need a competitor to spring forth fully formed with 2.2 billion active users on day 1 as Athena leaping out of the head of Zeus. You just need enough of a community to exist for it to be viable on its own (and there are already many not-facebook killers who are at that level). What's missing right now is a compelling experience that fully competes with facebook. Everything else out there is either in a smaller niche such as instagram (which is owned by facebook) or snapchat or what-have-you or doesn't cover all of facebook's core featureset or is a worse experience or is run incompetently in some way (/cough/twitter/cough/). The way that these switchovers happen is early adopters start doing lots of cool shit somewhere else and then a subset of people start following them there. You act like it's an onerous thing to do so, but this is meat and potatoes run of the mill shit for digital natives in the 21st century. Almost no one on planet Earth has a single social media account. If you have one you likely have several. Facebook, instagram, tumblr, twitter, snapchat, slack, discord, whatsapp, groupme, hangouts, AND SO ON. You will use whatever means is most convenient for keeping up with your friends, that's just the nature of life today. If your best friend starts using "something else" a lot then you are going to be incentivized to check it out. If you're young you are even more likely to invest the time and energy in exploring new platforms, if you're older it may take more effort but it's just a matter of how much. If some other platform is truly more compelling than facebook then people are going to engage with each other more there, which will encourage more people to check it out, more people to adopt it as one of their primary modes of keeping in touch, and a preference cascade to start. What all this means is that facebook's marketshare of the social media landscape is actually surprisingly tenuous. A truly superior competitor could unravel their entire market in a single year, perhaps. That may be unlikely (it's hard to say without specific examples) but it's the sort of thing that is well within the realm of possibility. Remember, people thought that myspace, blogger, flickr, etc. all had nearly unassailable locks on their respective marketshares too, but those crumbled almost overnight. Given that a lot of people use facebook right now who are nevertheless very dissatisfied with the experience of using facebook I think the situation is ripe for a turnover.
oblio 9y ago
> All it really takes is for a competitor to be actually superior on the merits Yes, cause we all know that in tech, having a superior product guarantees success :) On top of that, let's say you're right. The product has to be radically better, people won't move for 5-10-20% better.
dingaling 9y ago
> beyond just the social graph and that social connectivity And Facebook Groups. That was one of Facebooks genius moves, there is so much local information locked-up in those silos out of sight of Google and other search engines. It is Facebook's treasure-trove that keeps people engaged, particularly for hyper-local news and interests not covered by the media. And no hosting costs, nor time spent on admin tasks. I'm active on a locality-based special-interest forum that after a decade of slow growth has around 600 total members and about 20 posting-active. Anyone can come along and look at it, and sign-up if they like. The equivalent Facebook Group has 2,000+ members in just a couple of years, and no way for non-members to view it.

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.)