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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 n

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.

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.