22 ms·
Will MySpace ever lose its monopoly? (2007)
- heckless 9y agoPedant alert: "it's" -> "its" :)
- jpm_sd 9y agoGoogle+ is going to take over the world any day now!
- johnhenry 9y agoI'm sticking with Facebook. They're the only social network with whom I can trust my private data.
- klez 9y agoSaid no-one ever. Seriously, I'm too biased now to remember, but was there ever a time this was the feeling about FB?
- johnhenry 9y agoIt was never even a consideration. Social network are still a relatively new phenomenon for the world and few people thought seriously about their implications. In retrospect, more of use should have thought about how our data is bing used. Hopefully we can learn from our mistakes.
- wu-ikkyu 9y agoAccording to Zuck, yes. >They "trust me". Dumb fucks.
- 0xcafecafe 9y agofamous last words
- chrisseldo 9y agoI hope the posting of this article isn't some insinuation of FB's fate.
- influx 9y agoWhy do you hope that? Are you a FB shareholder?
- chrisseldo 9y agoPerhaps I should rephrase to what I meant to imply: I find it funny that people think Facebook is going away / will fade into irrelevancy.
- JohnJamesRambo 9y agoThe whole point of posting this article is that people felt exactly the same about MySpace, Ford, Atari...
- onychomys 9y agoFord sells hundreds of thousands of vehicles a month. I wouldn't put them in quite the same boat as MySpace.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoCars also get replaced regularly and have practically no network effect (for the typical user). Every time your Tacoma frame rusts out you're presented with an opportunity to switch to a differen't company's product.
- emodendroket 9y agoThey may not have much network effect, but I am quite confident that a lot of people buy the same manufacturer's car (or, hell, even the latest model of the same vehicle) every time they are in the market for a new car. Like, there are people who just buy a new Camry every four or five years.
- acheron 9y agoI love this article. I think I submitted it to HN myself a couple years ago during some other Facebook news cycle. I'd call it "Peak Guardian", but they keep outdoing themselves, so there may never be a Peak Guardian.
- JBReefer 9y agoCan you explain stereotypes of the Guardian? The article is pretty over the top, but as an American I am not intimately familiar with them like, say, the Journal.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoThe Guardian is generally a mildly left-ish, middle-class-ish kind of paper. I would say in the UK it tends to conjure up an image of a well-meaning, slightly naïve, hand-wringing sort of readership, though of course it’s base is likely wider than that. What particularly makes it stand out is it has quite an open comments policy; it quite often publishes fairly ludicrous points of view from a variety of commentators. I’d say on the whole that’s quite a good thing, though it does tend to result in some absolutely preposterous headlines from time to time.
- dazc 9y agoExcept, post Brexit and post Trump, it has become something of a parody of itself. The headlines seem to be intentionally troll-baity of late?
- dazc 9y agoSigh
- confounded 9y agoIt's also sometimes referred to as The Grauniad, as it has traditionally had the worst reputation of a UK newspaper for copy-editing. They also occasionally take articles from Richard Stallman and Cory Doctrow, often about free/open-source software, DRM, etc. https://www.theguardian.com/profile/stallman-richard https://www.theguardian.com/profile/stallman-richard https://www.theguardian.com/profile/corydoctorow https://www.theguardian.com/profile/corydoctorow
- arnaudsm 9y agoBreaking monopolies is always a good thing for consumers. Anyone knows a Social network with solid features, perfect UI and good privacy ?
- M4v3R 9y agoI hear Mastodon [1] is getting traction, though for me the UI is a bit unintuitive. [1] http://joinmastodon.org http://joinmastodon.org
- theptip 9y agoIIUC Mastodon is a twitter alternative; https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/ is more targeted at replacing FB.
- taborj 9y agoDiaspora has been around for a while; I remember joining about 6-7 years ago, but it suffered from the problem all new social networking sites suffer from -- nobody I knew or wanted to follow was there, so I abandoned it. I've since come to the conclusion that I'm not really a social networking type of person.
- ams6110 9y agoBoth Mastodon and Diaspora suffer from absolutely horrible names.
- zaarn 9y agoIf you don't like the UI there is Pleroma ( https://pleroma.social/ https://pleroma.social/ ) which is compatible with the Fediverse so you can interact with Mastodon instances.
- reitanqild 9y agoYou aren’t asking for perfect security so I'll just mention Telegram. I use it with my friends and family after WhatsApp betrayed us. Works really well for us but isn't like Facebook at all. The differences is it isn't broadcast-focused or build-huge-networks focused but is more organic.
- justherefortart 9y agoAll the cool kids were on facebook. I remember signing up in 2005 because I was taking German for my future trip to the World Cup (pointless as 95%+ will reply in English (edit), unlike those darn French!). As it grew in size and popularity, the limited nature of it really made those that couldn't get in jealous. I remember all the kids screaming about the feed when it went live, how they'd leave. Then once it opened to everyone, they'd leave then. WhatsApp seems to be the new kid's playground, so facebook buying it was a smart move. There will be another. Hell, maybe I'll make it :-) Dropped out of my (still better IMO) Telegram style program after worrying about N$A fallout.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rco8786 9y agoYou mean 95% respond in English?
- justherefortart 9y agoYeah, I should proof read :-)
- ryandvm 9y agoThe per university rollout of Facebook was genius. Actually keeping people from signing up until there is critical mass is, I suspect, crucial for building a social network. There's nothing to discourage me from coming back quite like the feeling of signing up and finding out I'm the only one I know.
- justherefortart 9y agoWell it was based off Harvard's yearbook which was called facebook. At least that was my understanding.
- SippinLean 9y ago
- JohnJamesRambo 9y ago"It did." -Ron Howard narration
- magic_beans 9y agoI can hear it perfectly.
- phil248 9y agoComedy doesn't seem to fair well on HN, but at least Arrested Development is still sacrosanct.
- phil248 9y agoAhem, fare well.
- JustAnotherPat 9y agobravo
- legitster 9y agoThis is a perfect summation of how people feel about Google and Amazon, or Sears in the 1920s and Kodak in the 1960s. And it's a perfect reminder that monopolies are much more fleeting than people realize.
- twiceaday 9y agoI have a sneaking suspicion that with every dissolved monopoly future monopolies get stronger. They must religiously case study all prior cases and strengthen the right areas.
- tantalor 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
- falcolas 9y agoWell, yes. Evolution is heavily influenced by survivorship biases.
- nostrademons 9y agoI don't think that's true. We speak of AppAmaGooBook now (i.e. an oligopoly of 4 major players), while in the 1990s it was "Wintel" (2 players, one a hardware monopoly and one a software monopoly) and in the 60s it was "IBM and the 7 dwarfs" (i.e. IBM was the only relevant computer company). IBM controlled 70 percent of the whole computer market, around what Google controls of the Search market now, which is a small subfield of computation. And these all pale in comparison to 19th century monopolies, like Standard Oil (90% of U.S. refining capacity in 1880) or American Tobacco (100% of the tobacco market in 1900). I think the reason they seem bigger is because the economy is bigger, and so in dollar and output terms they are bigger. But that also means there are more niches and greater complexity, and it becomes harder to sustain a monopoly against multiple competitive threats over time. While the playbook of monopoly managers has expanded since 1900, the number of adversaries they face has expanded faster.
- psychometry 9y agoWas this article supposed to be a joke at the time it was written? Facebook had been open to the public for a year at that point and it was clear that Myspace didn't even have a monopoly left to lose.
- dazc 9y agoI think the turning point was the acquisition by Murdoch. Up to then nobody was taking much notice.
- incompatible 9y agoThere's another article from a few months later about Facebook "opening up" their platform with apps. They were taking over fast at that point. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/may/31/newmedia.media2 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/may/31/newmedia....
- Girlang 9y agoYes!
- clairity 9y agomany years ago, i had bet a friend that facebook would begin to decline in 2016. seems like i might have been off by two years. shucks my bet was predicated on (1) people realizing the insidiousness of facebook, (2) the cool kids moving on to other platforms, and (3) mobile communications being omnipresent and eclipsing facebook (solid but not earth-shatteringly original reasons). i'd attribute the demises of friendster and myspace primarily to #2 (with underlying product and marketing issues exacerbating it). but more than that was required to topple the massive network effects moat that facebook built. notice that it wasn't another social network (e.g., snapchat) that will have overtaken it but rather a confluence of other issues striking in concert (some self-inflicted).
- tomhschmidt 9y agoWhat exactly is declining? Their MAU, Time Spent, # Advertisers, and Revenue numbers are all increasing (https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/). Maybe they're just declining in eyes of SV bubble residents.
- ajkjk 9y agoWell, their widespread acceptability seems to be declining, as indicated by all these articles and quittings lately. Presumably widespread quitting of users would only come after, not before, some high profile upsets and mistakes. And # of Advertisers and Revenue are proportional to how people think they're doing, not how they're actually doing, and would presumably only decline after a mass exodus.
- emodendroket 9y agoYes, people are grumbling about them, but how many of them are leaving?
- clairity 9y agoi didn't make a strong claim that they are declining right now, but sentiment really seems to have taken a dive in the past few weeks, which could be a leading indicator of a decline. (and your linked article is 9 months old talking about even older data so is not really relevant to the current state of affairs.)
- dvt 9y agoBack in 2003, I would've found it absolutely inconceivable to not chat with my HS classmates on AIM. For me, even bigger than MySpace dying was AIM dying. It still kind of blows my mind. AIM was the way you got social cachet back then. Everyone was on AIM. Young people were on AIM. I am completely convinced that FB will go the way of the dodo in the next decade, and it will take Snapchat and Instagram with it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dev1n 9y agoThe content stays the same, but the medium changes. Most content is either written word, voice (like radio) or video (television -> youtube). The medium that content lives in will always change. I think positioning a product that would allow you to move your content between the different mediums (i.e. myspace to facebook to ??? or blogger -> wordpress -> Medium) would be huge. Something like IFTTT but on steroids.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoTake a look at the W3 recommendation "ActivityPub" [1] which is a shred protocol for communicating not only across different servers of a social network but also across different social networks. I think using an interoperable protocol is better than having to move your content to another walled garden every few years. [1] https://activitypub.rocks/ https://activitypub.rocks/
- dev1n 9y agoawesome thanks for the link!
- bad_good_guy 9y agoI find it interesting you think the fall of Facebook-like platforms will affect Snapchat. As far as I'm aware Snapchat is popular for the same reason WhatsApp is - you send your updates to people you choose too, not some huge acquaintance-list or group of 'followers'.
- pdkl95 9y agoDan Rather, after offering sage advice[1] to Mark Zuckerberg regarding the recent FB/CA drama, concluded with: > This is about Facebook's survival, pure and simple. If you don't change things, people will leave faster than you can say "MySpace". [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kObNf_gUXxE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kObNf_gUXxE
- gtycomb 9y agoThis reads like a comedy now, the flow of logic faultless, reminding us how fleeting these technologies are along with the anxieties we have about them taking over the world.
- Nomentatus 9y agoRight, a social network gaining market power and maybe abusing that? Ha, those days are long gone, kappa.
- yuhong 9y agoPersonally I don't like the current debt-based economy where almost infinite money can be printed in the first place.
- blackoil 9y agoDo monopolies of this scale are ever overthrown? MS in desktop OS, Intel in desktop and server chips. IBM is still a monopoly in mainframe market(not sure). It's just that new powerful industry in terms of mobile, internet services, social media have come up. American Tobacco, Bell, Standard Oil and too some extent MSFT are all gone because of govt. actions. FB has already successfully maneuvered industry change to mobile. It bought in its way into mobile apps and communication platforms. So FB won't be replaced by mastodon or Signal, but by an industry level shift which FB misses and can't buy in.
- wilsonnb 9y agoYou're correct, IBM is more of a monopoly in the mainframe market now than ever before. As far as I know, no one else makes mainframe hardware anymore aside from storage racks you can use with an IBM mainframe.
- afsina 9y agoMy take is, The Guardian does not understand the concept of monopolies well.
- alangibson 9y agoAt 2B users, it's hard to imagine doing a faceplant as fast as MySpace did. But I can definitely see a situation where it is hollowed out in the short term, meaning that 'high value' demographics flee to some other service. If it's bad enough, it could drop their advertising revenue enough to hobble them and precipitate a slow decline.
- teleclimber 9y agoThe "face-planting" could be regional. It's possible North American and European users might drop off swiftly while FB continues to grow in other parts of the world.
- IronWolve 9y agoAnd to think Fubar.com outlived them all.
- rconti 9y agoFacebook was started in, what, 2004? It went mainstream on most college campuses in 2005. By 2006, MySpace was a place for the non-college educated; the older generation never used it, the college-aged users had switched (if they ever used it at all), and the younger generation either weren't on either, or were on MySpace but aspired to be on Facebook by the time they got to college. There were legions of people who couldn't handle how downright ugly and terrible MySpace pages were, and simply never used it, even when it was the only option. The idea that MySpace had a "monopoly" on anything, 2 years after Facebook went mainstream, is absurd. It never had anything like the market penetration FB has, even among those online and interested in social media, let alone the overall user numbers that FB has.
- slavik81 9y agoI was slow to join Facebook and I signed up in late 2006, several months before this article was written. The author here was just out of touch. In September 2006 Facebook opened to everybody. At the end of the year, Facebook had 12 million active users, roughly doubling their number from 2005. By April 2007 they had 20 million users. By the end of the year they had 50 million. The author wrote this piece right in the middle of Facebook's meteoric growth and they didn't even notice. The press had the same blindness over AOL Time Warner. To 13-year-old me, that merger sounded like a dinosaur from the Cretaceous combining with a dinosaur from the Jurassic, but for some reason all the papers thought AOL was the business of the future. They had no sense for what was cool.
- pascalxus 9y agoIf FB declines completely and goes the way of my space, what will happen to all those 3 million dollar 100 years old, 1200 sq ft houses in palo alto?
- pcurve 9y agotheir value will plummet by half to one million dollar.
- IAmGraydon 9y agoFacebook != Palo Alto. The real estate in Palo Alto is propped up by far more than just Facebook. Mainly by massive amounts of venture capital flowing into startups.
- analogmemory 9y agoMaybe I can finally buy a house in the Bay!
- philwelch 9y agoIf Facebook goes away, MySpace is nowhere near an adequate analogy. Facebook has 2.2 billion monthly active users. In other words, there are more active monthly Facebook users in the world than: * Roman Catholics (1.2 billion) * People living in China (1.4 billion) * Total speakers of English, the most widely-spoken language in the world (1.4 billion) * Muslims (1.8 billion) * Viewers of the 2014 FIFA World Cup final (1 billion) * iPhones ever manufactured (1.2 billion; also, the top two most-used apps are Facebook and Facebook Messenger) * Windows users (1.4 billion) * Inhabitants of the European Union (508 million) * Cats (600 million) * Firearms (875 million) * Africans (1 billion) Now, obviously whether or not you use Facebook isn't as important to your identity or as hard to change as your religion or where you live, but it's also not something that's just going to suddenly disappear without some sort of replacement, or else if it does, it will be the first time in human history that two billion people all decided at once to give up on something.
- lev99 9y agoIf you assume 1 MOD account means one person 30% of the world's population uses Facebook. At one point 23% of the world's population belonged to the British empire [0]. Facebook falling would be similar to the British empire decline. [0] http://theunbrokenwindow.com/Development/MADDISON%20The%20World%20Economy--A%20Millennial.pdf http://theunbrokenwindow.com/Development/MADDISON%20The%20Wo... (page 97)
- rubidium 9y agoNo, it would be much less significant.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 9y agoFacebook's metric probably counts me as a user because once or twice a month I watch a video that happens to be on Facebook. Be careful about taking that number too seriously.
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- mkadlec 9y agoWait, MySpace is dead?!?
- submeta 9y agoI wonder if an open source platform and protocol for messaging and contacts would have the potential to confront all the Facebooks, Whatsapps, etc I am not talking about broadcasting / sharing. Just messaging and contacts (a listing where you can publish your latest contact data). So many people say that they would leave FB but they have no other means to contact many of their friends on their list. So is there anyone who can offer a solution for just this? Email is a protocol that works very good. So is sms. Platform and provider independend. - Something as successful as email with a listing of people and auto-updating contacts list (details only shown to someone that I allow).
- deadbunny 9y agoThere are a few projects that try and address this. The issue for 99% of the population is that you need to run it yourself (read run a server) or know someone who does. You could go the p2p route (I'm thinking Torrents + magnet links kind of decentralised) so you just run a client and connect to the network. Of course this then leads to the problem that users would have to backup their data (which they don't) and be online to participate with no real capacity for offline comms. Which leads back to needing to running a server of some kind.
- feelin_googley 9y agofacebook.com (1998) "With aboutface.com you can easily set up a directory for your organization in your own private location right on this Web site. If you prefer, we also offer a traditional, Windows-based product, AboutFace/Windows version 3.9, which you can use on your LAN. aboutface.com is a Web-based service that functions as a directory for your organization. aboutface.com maintains photographs and biographies of your employees and takes the place of your old-fashioned printed phone lists, address lists, facebooks, etc. aboutface.com is available for low monthly rates and resides in a secure, private location on our servers. We are the premier producer of electronic facebooks (online "names and faces" directories) for the business and academic communities." Source: http://web.archive.org/web/19981212013921/http://facebook.com:80/ http://web.archive.org/web/19981212013921/http://facebook.co...
- fourmii 9y agoIt's funny, I used to use MySpace to bookmark bands I liked or may like. Now I use FB for the mainly same thing, as well as keeping up on other interests like skating and surfing. Oh, how cyclical the world is...
- ggg9990 9y agoFacebook has long been losing its monopoly... to Instagram. They have enough money to keep buying the Next Big Thing.
- Double_a_92 9y agoBut isn't instagram (and also Snapchat) mostly photo sharing? How can that replace a communication tool? Do young people really like chatting in public comments and in that cumbersome Snapchat chat? Mostly I've seen teen girls just writing and "luv ya bb" under each others photos...
- m3kw9 9y agoThey lost it when they couldn’t scale
- LMMojo 9y agoDoes Diaspora still exist? (Answer is "yes") Does anyone use it? Asking because I have no idea, but the idea looks cool. [http://DiasporaFoundation.org http://DiasporaFoundation.org]