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Hacking together a microblogging system out of RSS and Atom with a little network glue is fine for a prototype. But in the long run you won't beat Facebook and

Hacking together a microblogging system out of RSS and Atom with a little network glue is fine for a prototype. But in the long run you won't beat Facebook and Twitter by merely replicating their functionality.

joering2 14y ago
hm, don't be so sure. I was of your opinion and recently changed that when learnt about Instagram success. It seems like internet is still a very young thing and people jump the ship or move on to a new thing very often, without much sentiment, like a child on a playground going from one toy to another. Twitter introduced photos sharing long time ago, but it didn't stop guys from Insta to literally rip it off (adding "follows" and similar features). Where one thought "well I cannot build photo sharing service because the giant in the room (twitter) just introduced it" -- the others just continued pushing the code and eventually exit for $1B. I think at some point users will move on from Facebook like they did from MySpace. MySpace biggest problem was javascript, audio and graphical clutter that rape you fresh out of the screen once the page finished loading. So others (hello Facebook) took advantage of it and come up with similar page but this time nice fresh and cleancut. So let's move further and ask ourselves a question: what is the biggest Facebook problem? I believe right now it is overclutter with irrelevant info served from your network. Having more than 100 "friends" makes your wall so clutter than no information is of value anymore. So you want to come up with Facebook killer? no problem -- just build a system (whether mechanical or manual) where users can take real advantage out of their network, not miss important update from important friends and miss the unnecessary garbage they are not interested in. Don't be fooled by "oh they wont come because they did all this work building up their facebook profiles". Not only there is FB Api that you can connect to and download all FB user data in minutes, but if FB would close that gate, you can still program a info scrapper that would do so. Bottom line: Facebook won't be here forever, and next stage of social is million connected friends but only relevant info rendered.
davewiner 14y ago
Beating them is not in the cards. If you look at tech industry cycles the leaders don't get beat, they run out of room to grow, or evolve into something less monolithic. Hegemony is always short lived. Once you get on top of the heap it's usually a short time before there's a new generation rising up.
- smoyer 14y ago
  You HAVE been reading Orson Scott Card! ;) But you're right and for a very good reason. The barrier to entry has dropped to the point where a single guy in NYC (or elsewhere) can challenge the status quo.

joering2 14y ago

hm, don't be so sure. I was of your opinion and recently changed that when learnt about Instagram success. It seems like internet is still a very young thing and people jump the ship or move on to a new thing very often, without much sentiment, like a child on a playground going from one toy to another. Twitter introduced photos sharing long time ago, but it didn't stop guys from Insta to literally rip it off (adding "follows" and similar features). Where one thought "well I cannot build photo sharing service because the giant in the room (twitter) just introduced it" -- the others just continued pushing the code and eventually exit for $1B. I think at some point users will move on from Facebook like they did from MySpace. MySpace biggest problem was javascript, audio and graphical clutter that rape you fresh out of the screen once the page finished loading. So others (hello Facebook) took advantage of it and come up with similar page but this time nice fresh and cleancut. So let's move further and ask ourselves a question: what is the biggest Facebook problem? I believe right now it is overclutter with irrelevant info served from your network. Having more than 100 "friends" makes your wall so clutter than no information is of value anymore. So you want to come up with Facebook killer? no problem -- just build a system (whether mechanical or manual) where users can take real advantage out of their network, not miss important update from important friends and miss the unnecessary garbage they are not interested in. Don't be fooled by "oh they wont come because they did all this work building up their facebook profiles". Not only there is FB Api that you can connect to and download all FB user data in minutes, but if FB would close that gate, you can still program a info scrapper that would do so. Bottom line: Facebook won't be here forever, and next stage of social is million connected friends but only relevant info rendered.

davewiner 14y ago

Beating them is not in the cards. If you look at tech industry cycles the leaders don't get beat, they run out of room to grow, or evolve into something less monolithic. Hegemony is always short lived. Once you get on top of the heap it's usually a short time before there's a new generation rising up.

smoyer 14y ago
You HAVE been reading Orson Scott Card! ;) But you're right and for a very good reason. The barrier to entry has dropped to the point where a single guy in NYC (or elsewhere) can challenge the status quo.