6 ms·

Matt Maroon: The Anti-Social Graph

63 points by joshstaiger 18y ago

rms 18y ago
This is pretty misanthropic. I enjoy using Facebook.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  Matt didn't say you shouldn't enjoy using Facebook. He said that it's not worth 15 billion dollars, and that many of the things people suggest will make it worth 15 billion dollars are hogwash.
cstejerean 18y ago
I couldn't agree more. Glad to see someone make the point clearly though, I wouldn't have wasted as much time on the topic.
bosshog 18y ago
More classic MM haterade fuelled ranting. keep swigging. (with credit to aston) But I like the article a lot. Facebook now feels like the warm up to something greater. (and probably smaller) The identity thing is no longer an advantage for them since they opened up beyond schools and coroporates. It is socially engineered toward real identities, but that's all.
- yters 18y ago
  That's the problem with getting greedy. They had a great thing going when the community was more closed, in fact that was their selling point for me. Opening up like this seems very short sighted, but I guess that's what you get with the flipper ethic.
jgrahamc 18y ago
I think he makes a good point about the apps. There are literally thousands of apps and when I was involved in Facebook app development I saw _nothing_ that used the social graph for anything interesting. I actually started a social news system inside Facebook (called Wildfire), the idea was that stories would only get voted up if people passed them from friend to friend. It went nowhere, perhaps that was my fault. Has anyone seen a really cool Facebook application?
- yters 18y ago
  I haven't but I've had two ideas I thought were fairly interesting. 1. Tomagochi app where your creature's features are representative of your friends friends. I.e. people with fewer friends will contribute more unique and interesting features to the creature and people with many friends contribute more material for making bigger creatures. This would motivate people to seek both ends of the spectrum. 2. Trusted distributed computing. People would bid for users' cpu time, and users choose who they want. Bids can either be money or promise of payout from the job's results.
- danw 18y ago
  I like the dopplr facebook app. It let's you know if any of your facebook friends are on dopplr as well as dropping your dopplr status into your minifeed. Simple and effective.
rokhayakebe 18y ago
MM is doing the wrong startup. He should be writing more and I bet he will have a decent size audience. Although i think he mostly likes to be on the opposite side just for the hell of it, i still like to read his post and sure knows how to defend his views by backing them with data. MM is sure making or writing "something people want": controversy.
- mosburger 18y ago
  I agree. He's the reason I joined tipjoy.
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  Thanks, I've been told that a lot lately. I kinda like keeping it as a hobby though. Not sure it would be as fun full time. I already took one hobby and made a living from it and it ruined that. I don't set out to play devil's advocate. I just don't find it interesting to write about the things that I agree with everyone else on. I won't bother with an article on how the music industry should give up DRM, for example, because it wouldn't be anything thought provoking to anybody anymore. Hell, even the record companies seem to have figured that out by now. And I don't have much perspective on programming. I couldn't write anything of use on the merits of RDBMSes vs. SimpleDB (though I appreciate some of the articles from people who can). But I feel like I have a pretty good perspective on people and how they use the internet.
blader 18y ago
"That’s true, but it’s even more fashionable (at least in tech circles) to say that Facebook is the next Google, or that Facebook is building the social graph which is worth a lot for some unknown reason and they’ll monetize it later." I submit the comments on this very thread, and this previous thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160408 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160408) as countering data points. It's extremely fashionable to call Facebook a spammy, me-too, useless, overhyped social network that has jumped the shark. At least in tech circles.
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  That was my point. Both are very fashionable because they're the only two extreme opinions on a very talked about topic. I'm sure there are plenty of people with opinions in the middle, but moderates never speak out much.
SwellJoe 18y ago
I'm always hesitant to bet against anything Buchheit says. But, I really don't get the appeal of Facebook (this is probably why I do systems management apps instead of social network thingies). I do know, however, that many large companies have historically paid very large amounts of money to know as much about people as Facebook got people to volunteer to give them. There probably is significant value in this information. It's stupid to think that the #2 social network is worth 30 times the #1 social network, but it'd also be dumb to wholly discount the value of all of that data.
- blader 18y ago
  This makes sense though. By virtue of being users of this site and knowing how them 'puters work, we are almost certainly outliers in the general population. 'Things people want' and 'things we want' are likely to be different.
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    Very much so. I've been working sporadically on an article on that topic for 6 months. Still isn't good enough to click publish yet.
- angstrom 18y ago
  Maybe, but for all the hype over Facebook I find it ironic that Amazon probably has more valuable information via Wedding/Baby shower wishlist registeries than all of the social graph in Facebook is worth.
  - aswanson 18y ago
    Amen. I look at Amazons revenues, and the way I act when I buy stuff on the site (piling up more and more from their recommendations) and wonder why they are not cleaning GOOG's clock. Profit margins seem to be the key.
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    No one is arguing that Amazon isn't worth a very large fortune, and that a big part of their value is in the data that they have about customers and the reviews that customers have written for them for free. But that doesn't really alter Facebook's value (there have always been multiple sources of data about consumers...and yet it is still valuable data).
aswanson 18y ago
I have to agree with Matt on a lot of points here. As soon as I heard the phrase social graph, my BS buzzphrase filter peaked. Never been on facebook and I wouldn't say they are worthless, but $15 bill valuation for a second place player doesn't make sense to me. Then again, a lot of other things don't either.
axod 18y ago
Good point about spam. Facebook turns your friends into spammers, which isn't helpful.
- pfedor 18y ago
  I don't really use Facebook so I may not really appreciate the problem, but I don't think you can call messages from people you actually know and sent specifically to you "spam", for any reasonable definition of spam.
brlewis 18y ago
Matt, here's an example of money in the social graph: What movies have your friends and their friends put in their netflix queue? Friends of friends might have interests similar to yours, and you might end up renting a movie you might not otherwise have rented. Friend-of-friend recommendations have a tremendous commercial potential, whether Facebook or FriendFeed have realized them or not. My example above is actually from FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=&service=netflix http://friendfeed.com/search?q=&service=netflix Beware of using "If P then the Facebook guys aren't imaginative" as proof of not P. Also, don't use examples of the usefulness of the anti-social graph to negate the usefulness of the social graph.
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  But does this beat Netflix's recommendation service that uses data from all Netflix customers? I'd love to see someone explore that. I've read a lot on the Netflix prize and it leads me to guess it wouldn't, but I would love to find out if I'm incorrect.
  - brlewis 18y ago
    If Netflix doesn't keep social graph data, then they won't know the probability of you ending up in a conversation about a particular movie. That alone might make a lot of people choose the social recommendation. But keep in mind, to be valuable the social recommendation doesn't have to be more accurate than the anti-social recommendation. It doesn't even need to be chosen by more people. All you need is for some people to prefer it and it's valuable.
    - mattmaroon 18y ago
      But they can take the many movies you rate, find people who rate similarly (which may be way closer to your taste than your friends') because of the large data set. Making money off of it and justifying a $15 billion valuation does require a lot more than for some people to prefer it. Also, even if they did beat Netflix at recommendations, how does that monetize?
meat-eater 18y ago
facebook has become a useless spam machine. Doesn't work for me anymore.
aston 18y ago
There're only two questions that are important for trying to put a price on Facebook: 1) How much are Facebook users worth to advertisers (brand and/or CPC) on average and in aggregate? 2) How much is the data Facebook has (the social graph, demographic information) worth to third parties? Matt's answer to both, based on his recent two articles, is "right now, not much relative to the internet heavyweights." That actually isn't controversial at all. There's a lot of optimism about Facebook's future, however, that allows people to argue against Matt based on the "just wait until you see what they come up with" line of reasoning. I'd be interested in hearing from both sides about this future Facebook. As in, what facts, specifically, might change about the world that would make Facebook worth $15 billion, and how likely is it that those changes will come about?
- cstejerean 18y ago
  so facebook has nowhere to go but down. if they do find a magical solution they get to keep their 15 billion valuation (since the valuation is based on them finding said solution), but if they fail their value will drop rapidly to several hundred million at best. not the kind of bet I would want to make as an investor.
- noid 18y ago
  2) How much is the data Facebook has (the social graph, demographic information) worth to third parties? To the right third party -- very. One sinister example is the government. Nice way to track dissenters, or round up everyone of religion/political party/group X, ala WWII. Trying to get away, because of deserting the army/dodging the draft/avoiding arrest for civil disobedience? They have a convenient list of all your friends and family you might stay with. Did you win the lottery? Someone can worm their way into your social circle by befriending the right people on your list. Or an entrepreneur might get an introduction to a VC that way. But the main thing is it can be abused to surveil people. Do you trust your government?
- Goladus 18y ago
  There's a third question, though, with regard to optimism about Facebook's future, and that's the quality of its end-user experience and the likelihood it will retain its current users and traffic and continue growing.
jkkramer 18y ago
New Onion headline? "Area man constantly bringing up how overhyped Facebook is"
utnick 18y ago
Question to Matt: How much do you think your yc startup draftmix is worth? How much would it be worth if it came preinstalled on every facebook users profile... with social aspects built in... and with the name brand of facebook behind it? Facebook is worth a ton of money because people under 30 with money visit it several times a day... and its not like other sites like cnn or espn.com or whatever because there friends are on it and there is an emotional attachment to it.

63 points by joshstaiger 18y ago

rms 18y ago

This is pretty misanthropic. I enjoy using Facebook.

SwellJoe 18y ago
Matt didn't say you shouldn't enjoy using Facebook. He said that it's not worth 15 billion dollars, and that many of the things people suggest will make it worth 15 billion dollars are hogwash.

cstejerean 18y ago

I couldn't agree more. Glad to see someone make the point clearly though, I wouldn't have wasted as much time on the topic.

bosshog 18y ago

More classic MM haterade fuelled ranting. keep swigging. (with credit to aston) But I like the article a lot. Facebook now feels like the warm up to something greater. (and probably smaller) The identity thing is no longer an advantage for them since they opened up beyond schools and coroporates. It is socially engineered toward real identities, but that's all.

yters 18y ago
That's the problem with getting greedy. They had a great thing going when the community was more closed, in fact that was their selling point for me. Opening up like this seems very short sighted, but I guess that's what you get with the flipper ethic.

jgrahamc 18y ago

I think he makes a good point about the apps. There are literally thousands of apps and when I was involved in Facebook app development I saw _nothing_ that used the social graph for anything interesting. I actually started a social news system inside Facebook (called Wildfire), the idea was that stories would only get voted up if people passed them from friend to friend. It went nowhere, perhaps that was my fault. Has anyone seen a really cool Facebook application?

yters 18y ago
I haven't but I've had two ideas I thought were fairly interesting. 1. Tomagochi app where your creature's features are representative of your friends friends. I.e. people with fewer friends will contribute more unique and interesting features to the creature and people with many friends contribute more material for making bigger creatures. This would motivate people to seek both ends of the spectrum. 2. Trusted distributed computing. People would bid for users' cpu time, and users choose who they want. Bids can either be money or promise of payout from the job's results.
danw 18y ago
I like the dopplr facebook app. It let's you know if any of your facebook friends are on dopplr as well as dropping your dopplr status into your minifeed. Simple and effective.

rokhayakebe 18y ago

MM is doing the wrong startup. He should be writing more and I bet he will have a decent size audience. Although i think he mostly likes to be on the opposite side just for the hell of it, i still like to read his post and sure knows how to defend his views by backing them with data. MM is sure making or writing "something people want": controversy.

mosburger 18y ago
I agree. He's the reason I joined tipjoy.
mattmaroon 18y ago
Thanks, I've been told that a lot lately. I kinda like keeping it as a hobby though. Not sure it would be as fun full time. I already took one hobby and made a living from it and it ruined that. I don't set out to play devil's advocate. I just don't find it interesting to write about the things that I agree with everyone else on. I won't bother with an article on how the music industry should give up DRM, for example, because it wouldn't be anything thought provoking to anybody anymore. Hell, even the record companies seem to have figured that out by now. And I don't have much perspective on programming. I couldn't write anything of use on the merits of RDBMSes vs. SimpleDB (though I appreciate some of the articles from people who can). But I feel like I have a pretty good perspective on people and how they use the internet.

blader 18y ago

"That’s true, but it’s even more fashionable (at least in tech circles) to say that Facebook is the next Google, or that Facebook is building the social graph which is worth a lot for some unknown reason and they’ll monetize it later." I submit the comments on this very thread, and this previous thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160408 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160408) as countering data points. It's extremely fashionable to call Facebook a spammy, me-too, useless, overhyped social network that has jumped the shark. At least in tech circles.

mattmaroon 18y ago
That was my point. Both are very fashionable because they're the only two extreme opinions on a very talked about topic. I'm sure there are plenty of people with opinions in the middle, but moderates never speak out much.

SwellJoe 18y ago

I'm always hesitant to bet against anything Buchheit says. But, I really don't get the appeal of Facebook (this is probably why I do systems management apps instead of social network thingies). I do know, however, that many large companies have historically paid very large amounts of money to know as much about people as Facebook got people to volunteer to give them. There probably is significant value in this information. It's stupid to think that the #2 social network is worth 30 times the #1 social network, but it'd also be dumb to wholly discount the value of all of that data.

blader 18y ago
This makes sense though. By virtue of being users of this site and knowing how them 'puters work, we are almost certainly outliers in the general population. 'Things people want' and 'things we want' are likely to be different.
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  Very much so. I've been working sporadically on an article on that topic for 6 months. Still isn't good enough to click publish yet.
angstrom 18y ago
Maybe, but for all the hype over Facebook I find it ironic that Amazon probably has more valuable information via Wedding/Baby shower wishlist registeries than all of the social graph in Facebook is worth.
- aswanson 18y ago
  Amen. I look at Amazons revenues, and the way I act when I buy stuff on the site (piling up more and more from their recommendations) and wonder why they are not cleaning GOOG's clock. Profit margins seem to be the key.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  No one is arguing that Amazon isn't worth a very large fortune, and that a big part of their value is in the data that they have about customers and the reviews that customers have written for them for free. But that doesn't really alter Facebook's value (there have always been multiple sources of data about consumers...and yet it is still valuable data).

aswanson 18y ago

I have to agree with Matt on a lot of points here. As soon as I heard the phrase social graph, my BS buzzphrase filter peaked. Never been on facebook and I wouldn't say they are worthless, but $15 bill valuation for a second place player doesn't make sense to me. Then again, a lot of other things don't either.

axod 18y ago

Good point about spam. Facebook turns your friends into spammers, which isn't helpful.

pfedor 18y ago
I don't really use Facebook so I may not really appreciate the problem, but I don't think you can call messages from people you actually know and sent specifically to you "spam", for any reasonable definition of spam.

brlewis 18y ago

Matt, here's an example of money in the social graph: What movies have your friends and their friends put in their netflix queue? Friends of friends might have interests similar to yours, and you might end up renting a movie you might not otherwise have rented. Friend-of-friend recommendations have a tremendous commercial potential, whether Facebook or FriendFeed have realized them or not. My example above is actually from FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=&service=netflix http://friendfeed.com/search?q=&service=netflix Beware of using "If P then the Facebook guys aren't imaginative" as proof of not P. Also, don't use examples of the usefulness of the anti-social graph to negate the usefulness of the social graph.

mattmaroon 18y ago
But does this beat Netflix's recommendation service that uses data from all Netflix customers? I'd love to see someone explore that. I've read a lot on the Netflix prize and it leads me to guess it wouldn't, but I would love to find out if I'm incorrect.
- brlewis 18y ago
  If Netflix doesn't keep social graph data, then they won't know the probability of you ending up in a conversation about a particular movie. That alone might make a lot of people choose the social recommendation. But keep in mind, to be valuable the social recommendation doesn't have to be more accurate than the anti-social recommendation. It doesn't even need to be chosen by more people. All you need is for some people to prefer it and it's valuable.
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    But they can take the many movies you rate, find people who rate similarly (which may be way closer to your taste than your friends') because of the large data set. Making money off of it and justifying a $15 billion valuation does require a lot more than for some people to prefer it. Also, even if they did beat Netflix at recommendations, how does that monetize?

meat-eater 18y ago

facebook has become a useless spam machine. Doesn't work for me anymore.

aston 18y ago

There're only two questions that are important for trying to put a price on Facebook: 1) How much are Facebook users worth to advertisers (brand and/or CPC) on average and in aggregate? 2) How much is the data Facebook has (the social graph, demographic information) worth to third parties? Matt's answer to both, based on his recent two articles, is "right now, not much relative to the internet heavyweights." That actually isn't controversial at all. There's a lot of optimism about Facebook's future, however, that allows people to argue against Matt based on the "just wait until you see what they come up with" line of reasoning. I'd be interested in hearing from both sides about this future Facebook. As in, what facts, specifically, might change about the world that would make Facebook worth $15 billion, and how likely is it that those changes will come about?

cstejerean 18y ago
so facebook has nowhere to go but down. if they do find a magical solution they get to keep their 15 billion valuation (since the valuation is based on them finding said solution), but if they fail their value will drop rapidly to several hundred million at best. not the kind of bet I would want to make as an investor.
noid 18y ago
2) How much is the data Facebook has (the social graph, demographic information) worth to third parties? To the right third party -- very. One sinister example is the government. Nice way to track dissenters, or round up everyone of religion/political party/group X, ala WWII. Trying to get away, because of deserting the army/dodging the draft/avoiding arrest for civil disobedience? They have a convenient list of all your friends and family you might stay with. Did you win the lottery? Someone can worm their way into your social circle by befriending the right people on your list. Or an entrepreneur might get an introduction to a VC that way. But the main thing is it can be abused to surveil people. Do you trust your government?
Goladus 18y ago
There's a third question, though, with regard to optimism about Facebook's future, and that's the quality of its end-user experience and the likelihood it will retain its current users and traffic and continue growing.

jkkramer 18y ago

New Onion headline? "Area man constantly bringing up how overhyped Facebook is"

utnick 18y ago

Question to Matt: How much do you think your yc startup draftmix is worth? How much would it be worth if it came preinstalled on every facebook users profile... with social aspects built in... and with the name brand of facebook behind it? Facebook is worth a ton of money because people under 30 with money visit it several times a day... and its not like other sites like cnn or espn.com or whatever because there friends are on it and there is an emotional attachment to it.