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Facebook is for grandparents: What we need in a next-gen social network
- rayiner 13y agoHey guys! The old people found us. Time to head somewhere more hip!
- zht 13y agohave you guys heard of this great thing called myspace? None of my relatives on there, and I hear Justin Timberlake owns a stake in it. it's super cool!
- sliverstorm 13y agothe circle of liiiiiifeee...
- yen223 13y agoFriendster shall rise again!
- daegloe 13y agoAhem. Anyone remember Six Degrees?
- halostatue 13y agoYup.
- 72deluxe 13y agoBebo anyone?
- emp_ 13y agoA see a huge problem with the shared profit thing, with virtual worthless points like Likes you already have all sorts of retardness from people dying to pull a hit stunt to profile for a dead baby mummy, can you imagine if the users were paid for the attention their posts get? "A thousand likes or this kitty goes in the microwave". I think the nice new place to be would be one where you are not the product, doesn't matter if you are being paid or not, or if you are paying or not.
- ananth99 13y agoI find Path(www.path.com) to be promising. Pretty neat and intuitive.
- torbit 13y agoIsn't closed to your social circle? OP wants something that helps you expand to other social circles. Arrive to a new city none of your friends are in, and have an app tell you what is around you based on your interests and posts.
- erichocean 13y agoYou just described the social network I'm working on now, and like a couple of other posters have mentioned, our entire userbase is teens and college aged people at the moment.
- ananth99 13y agoYeah, true. OP expresses his concern over Facebook's ad revenue system, the clutter it creates and how it spoils his entire Social Network experience. Path, on the other hand gives a user a rich and a personal experience. I guess that's the trade-off there. For getting recommendations based on location and interests, I use Circle(discovercircle.com). Works fine for me. :-)
- skeletonjelly 13y agoThey don't exactly have a clean history https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5632934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3563016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3563016
- ananth99 13y agoWoah! Didn't know about this at all.
- marban 13y agoYou should read valleywag
- AndrewKemendo 13y ago>I’m a business man and a family man. I love collecting chairs and getting drunk on the weekends. I want to introduce all of these aspects to my network...Combining your identities, creates a synergy and depth to your online persona. Isn't this what Google+ has been trying to do from the start?
- j546 13y agolt30.com (if they accept you)
- kevin818 13y agoNot really sure why this was downvoted - the site is legit and much better than facebook.
- oneeyedpigeon 13y agoprobably because it30.com is a squatter, and it's difficult to distinguish between the two - terrible domain-name choice there.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- unclebucknasty 13y agoI wonder how they intend to monetize?
- wuschel 13y agoNothing new - it sounds like the german schuelerVZ (facebook for pupils). I always wonder what happens to a user base of such a website once it gets older and crosses the magic line - in this example, if maximum of the user distribution gets older than 30.
- cft 13y agoThe social networks are like TV shows. They have a limited run. This is because it's entertainment, rather than tech. Hollywood knows how this works, and they do not incorporate or IPO each individual TV show: instead they incorporate studios, that produce many different shows. Facebook is forced into this model too by reality, thus they bought Instagram, and tried to buy Snapchat. Those shows will also have a limited lifetime. Facebook will fail, because they do not recognize that they are in the entertainment business and they will cling to their one single show. Someone needs to create a non-gaming software studio, that is tooled to make or to buy Instagrams for less than $1bn, knowing that they constantly need to retire the old shows and come up with the new ones.
- ericmsimons 13y agoThat's an interesting analogy. However, I don't think that Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc are as easy to replicate as a TV show. Empirically, social products are exceptionally difficult to 'manufacture' and are usually the result of side projects and early stage startups.
- adventured 13y agoBig hit TV shows are extraordinarily rare. Most fail; most fail quickly. You can just about list on one hand every decade, the number of shows that last more than five years and bring in big ratings (audience / users). Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Roseanne, Mash, etc. Hit TV shows are extraordinarily difficult to 'manufacture.' Out of thousands proposed and scripted by writers, one or two per year are hits if you're lucky. Out of those, a few survive five or seven years. And that's all true even with the huge built-in audiences that companies such as NBC, ABC, CBS have that show up every night waiting to watch content. There aren't 100,000 other apps to compete with, just a few major deliverers of TV shows / networks; and the failure rate is still that high.
- bchjam 13y agoisn't that what Obvious is? https://medium.com/obvious/3cb1d19eae8 https://medium.com/obvious/3cb1d19eae8
- nickconfer 13y agoI think the obvious answer here is there won't be a next-gen social network that is Facebook. Instead there will be several social networks that are laser focused on being the best for X. Ala Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Vine, Pinterest, Path, OKCupid, Github, etc...
- mattquiros 13y agoAnyone else feel that no one knows this "next-generation social network" better than, well, the next generation? I'm talking about today's young teens and little kids. Facebook took off during our time because we were the cool demographic back then. It was everything we wanted and needed that MySpace and Friendster failed to give. I think it's difficult for us to comprehend what the next-gen social network will be because we think differently. We didn't exactly grow up with touch-screen devices and mobile internet, for one.
- mahyarm 13y agoMobile messaging apps seem to be the way forward for this. They are starting to integrate social networking features into it.
- unclebucknasty 13y agoI agree with this. I'm not sure that the next-big-thing is even imaginable yet. I don't think it will be just a product or service like Facebook. I think it will involve a complete paradigm shift, and perhaps some tech that we haven't yet envisioned. This article makes some interesting points and, perhaps, the next generation will incorporate some of these ideas. But, it feels like a modest iteration over the current state of affairs. And, much like the current landscape (FB, Vine, Instagram, SnapChat, etc), the article feels fragmented. It consists of a lot of related ideas, but there's no real cohesion or unifying theme.
- fourstar 13y agoIs it a coincidence that most of the partners (YC in particular) aren't teens (or in that potential demographic)? If you're good enough, you can spot a hot/interesting product. You raise a very valid point, however, and that's part of the reason why the internet is so rad -- it's ever-evolving.
- MisterBastahrd 13y agoFord is for great, great grandparents. It's still around.
- byoung2 13y agoThe new social network should share profits with users who create the content. In fact, it shall only take a small commission, and offer the option to convert the commission to a fixed monthly sum in exchange for the technology services it provides. An interesting idea, but won't that encourage spam?
- unclebucknasty 13y agoYeah, variations of this have been tried repeatedly and failed. Refer.ly is one of the most recent that comes to mind. The whole point of social networks is to be social with people you enjoy. As soon as you provide financial incentive, then things get skewed. Maybe there's a model or variation under which this could work. But, simply allowing people to monetize interactions, the stuff they share, etc. will pervert the incentive and devalue the platform.
- Amadou 13y agoAs soon as you provide financial incentive, then things get skewed. I would go so far as to say that what is required is something that discourages financial gain. Money perverts social relationships. Long before the internet people were saying things like "never lend money to a friend because you won't be friends any more." The green card lawyers were among the first to abuse the net for financial gain and that model of spam has gone on to be an enormous drag on the utility of the net.
- fauigerzigerk 13y agoIf there's a 10% commission to earn spam would be the least of their problems. No one would buy anything expensive any longer without making sure their spouse or a friend recommends it to them.
- brudgers 13y agoBeing for grandparents makes Facebook stable - at least in markets like the US with greying demographics. Heck, the people who were on it when it was student-oriented invite-only and hook-up driven are pushing 30 these days. And that means they''re headed into life phases where they buy high profit goods and services like stroller systems and financial services. And old folks like grandpa? Well he's buying pharmaceuticals and taking cruises.
- mtgx 13y agoSo is the iPhone at this point.
- onedev 13y agoWe actually don't "need" anything more social.
- hacknat 13y agoThank you!
- onedev 13y agoBetween my Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, iMessage, SMS, and phone, and whatever else I'm forgetting... I'm all socialed out. Do I, or for that matter anyone else, really need another way to communicate with social circles? Do I personally want another one? Well not me, but other people might. Does anyone need another one? I highly highly doubt it.
- coldtea 13y agoThere's a distinct lack of a service that I can post filtered photos of the toilet bowl after crapping for my friends.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wmw 13y agoWe are building a platform network around this idea. we believe that a social network is defined by the places were you are regularly (sport club, work, bar). Our plattform lets you communicate with the people at those places even if you are at a rock concert.
- ohwp 13y agoAll the kids are already switching to WeChat, Vine, Flickr and others. With the mobile number as identifier, mobile is the next Facebook.
- Amadou 13y agoWhere is the disintermediation? All this talk of "products" seems to miss the root problem with these social networks - they aren't networks. They are centralized databases that are designed that way not for the benefit of the users but as means of simplifying the profit model. Because they all share that same inherent design, they will all share the same fate. The next generation in social networks will be something that is actually a network, until then all that's really going on is "rearranging deckchairs on the titanic."
- toadi 13y agoDon't see what 'radical' change there is to move to another social site. Besides my grandparents are using it so it's not cool.
- StavrosK 13y agoThis article surprisingly misses the fact that I want to communicate with my grandparents. Sure, I don't want them in the same circle as my friends, but communication there is important too. There are many social networks who aren't tailored to the older generation, so there's a bit of a problem there: My mom has no interest in Twitter. That's why I like attempts like togethera.com, I think there are plenty of alternatives for "the social network we think we want", but not enough for the ones we actually would find useful. "Faster horse", etc.
- coldtea 13y ago>This article surprisingly misses the fact that I want to communicate with my grandparents. Sure, I don't want them in the same circle as my friends, but communication there is important too. Which is beside the point he makes. You can always communicate with your grantparents on FB. Plus, on the scheme he presents, you can just make a personal profile for communication with your extended family and grandparents.
- sergiosgc 13y agoThe next paradigm shift in social networks is the distribution of the social graph. Ten years ago, this would seem unacceptable because of privacy issues. Today, we know people have learned to embrace the fact that once you publish it, it's public, so they do not care about privacy online. A truly open social graph, distributed so it isn't controlled by a single entity, is a game changer. It lowers the barriers to vertical oriented social networks, which wouldn't have the barrier of reconstructing every user's social graph. The trick is the transition. It's like we are stuck in a local maximum. Once we move to distributed social graphs we are obviously better, but I can't imagine how this transition would occur, other than Facebook itself having an amazingly long term vision and going all in with this vision. There's a lot to be gained from being the industry leader for 50 years instead of monopolist for 10...
- kreeben 13y agoFacebook is dying! New business idea: bitcoin-based social network! With bitcoins!
- samman 13y agoThe next social network should not be site or app at all, but instead be a protocol.
- amykhar 13y agoAs long as you can target your content to the various different types of people in your life, why does it matter if they are all in one place? You don't stop using your phone because your parents have a phone too. What Facebook needs is a good, reliable way to keep your conversations with your friends away from your conversations with your parents. Who wants to have to go to a bunch of different places to talk to the people you need to talk to?
- capsule_toy 13y agoThe problem is Facebook seems to want to do exactly the opposite: open up your life to as many people as possible. It's also shown that it wants to monetize your social connections i.e. beacon and endorsed ads. If Facebook was a service like a phone, then I'd have no issue with it, but it has shown that it wants to play a bigger and more opinionated part of people's lives.
- grantph 13y agoI'm enjoying the interesting analogies. I rather view the internet as a party where everyone is invited. The social networks are the loud attention seekers yelling "look at how cool we are". People are wow'd and sucked in. The problem is, it's a keg party and the only way they've been able to monetize is to sell ads at their party. Once the ads go up, the venue is no longer cool and the party moves to a new venue. Of course, there are other types of parties and my prediction is that quality is going to trump quantity in future networks. Who wants a keg party that sells advertising when the quality of the people I meet at a cocktail party could lead to new opportunities without advertising? The next wave will build on social and actually generate real value. Therefore, it'll have a new name and it won't be Social 2.0 It'll be something entirely new that addresses that value.