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Switching costs are absolutely the thing to focus on here, but limiting the switching costs to a replication of the social graph may be understating the true co

Switching costs are absolutely the thing to focus on here, but limiting the switching costs to a replication of the social graph may be understating the true cost. Think of all the photos, and to a lesser extent, wall posts. I would imagine a lot of the time that's spent on Facebook is just browsing through photos (and again, to a lesser extent, people's wall posts). Much of it probably is just new photos, so obviously those don't need to be replicated since if you port the social graph over, people will start posting photos on the new site and people will just look at those, but a ton of the viewing is probably of legacy photos. That is, some of the viewing is seeing what's happening with your friends (the party last night) but a ton of it is just checking people out (facebook stalking). How can I stalk somebody without seeing all their past photos/videos/notes/posts/etc.?

wisty 16y ago
Everyone has a facebook account. If they want to look at old photos, they will look on facebook. Just like you used to be able to look at old blog posts on Geocities. People will post new photos and their favorite old photos on the next facebook, and stop looking at the old site. The old content sounds like a big deal if you are a geek who is worried about vendor lock-in, but I doubt that real people will really care. It's activity that matters, not membership. If facebook stops talking about activity, and only talks about membership, that's when you know there's a problem.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  Do you know how many times I've had to show my mom how to upload something to Facebook? A lot of times. Facebook upload support is baked into her photo manager (Shotwell), and it's as easy as clicking "Publish", and she still usually can't figure it out. Do you really think that many FB users are going to know how to move "their favorite old photos" from Facebook? Unless the next product includes an automatic importer, which Facebook would attempt to destroy as quickly as possible, and it would devolve into an arms race/lawsuits (as scraping Facebook has for people with much more innocent intentions), then I don't think that many FB users will be interested in coming over.

wisty 16y ago

Everyone has a facebook account. If they want to look at old photos, they will look on facebook. Just like you used to be able to look at old blog posts on Geocities. People will post new photos and their favorite old photos on the next facebook, and stop looking at the old site. The old content sounds like a big deal if you are a geek who is worried about vendor lock-in, but I doubt that real people will really care. It's activity that matters, not membership. If facebook stops talking about activity, and only talks about membership, that's when you know there's a problem.

cookiecaper 16y ago
Do you know how many times I've had to show my mom how to upload something to Facebook? A lot of times. Facebook upload support is baked into her photo manager (Shotwell), and it's as easy as clicking "Publish", and she still usually can't figure it out. Do you really think that many FB users are going to know how to move "their favorite old photos" from Facebook? Unless the next product includes an automatic importer, which Facebook would attempt to destroy as quickly as possible, and it would devolve into an arms race/lawsuits (as scraping Facebook has for people with much more innocent intentions), then I don't think that many FB users will be interested in coming over.