4 ms·

I'm convinced that Facebook took over messaging because it has one killer feature the 90s didn't: real names. Contact points on Facebook are discoverable by re

I'm convinced that Facebook took over messaging because it has one killer feature the 90s didn't: real names. Contact points on Facebook are discoverable by real name based on the social graph, which is kind of a first in the history of communication. If someone mentions a John Doe in conversation, I can get in contact with the correct John Doe with a very high probability of success and no effort. The PSTN, email, AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc. didn't offer that. They could have, but their communities developed with different norms. Facebook managed to get people to use their actual identities. That's a remarkable feat - not even Google could replicate it. But it's what made Facebook so useful and so addictive - it's about the actual lives of people I actually know. Facebook does contain an analogue of "Web 1.0" personal webpages, but the action on Facebook is centered on the News Feed, which was sort of a new class of thing. Few people actually have profile information filled out; going to someone's Facebook page is just a way of filtering the News Feed to only content related to that person. The real "Web 1.0" equivalent to Facebook would have been an RSS reader for all your friends' blogs. But for people to be comfortable blogging, they had to be able to (feel like they were) in control of their audience. Though Blogger, Wordpress, etc. supported user authentication, it would have been incredibly onerous compared to centralized identity. Which is more or less what Facebook became. A truly open, distributed Facebook based on the "Web 1.0" would probably have looked something like an RSS reader that could authenticate to each friend's blog with OpenID. But it still would have lacked the ability to discover and search for people by real name that makes Facebook so useful.

bane 12y ago
Yeah, absolutely. The centralized index of people is as critical to Facebook's growth as DNS is to the Web. You don't have to remember 198.41.190.47 to get to everybody's favorite tech discussion forum, you just have to remember news.ycombinator.com. So I wonder how hard it would be to setup a DNS-like searchable index for an e-mail like replacement? Instead of having to remember guy@foo.com I just have to remember 'John Doe' he works for Foo Inc. and I can probably narrow it down from a list of other John Does. If not, I can always call him and ask him for his explicit address as a fallback. > but the action on Facebook is centered on the News Feed It really seems that, much more than Twitter has ever managed to be. People's News Feeds are really their microblogs. For many of my FB friends, I can go to their feed and read back a few months to see what's going on in their lives. Just as if they had been keeping a blog. But the convention on FB seems to be short posts, so I don't have to read long-form posts, but they also aren't restricted to a tiny string of characters. I actually think the news feed reminds me quite a bit of the finger protocol and .plan files. (there's commenting and likes and such of course also). So what core distributed communication and web presence technologies already exist that could approximate Facebook and what and how would they have to be modified to work at least as well as Facebook? What new things would have to be created from wholecloth? Would it be possible to integrate all this mess tightly enough that a person could set up their own "Social 2.0" node without too much fuss?
- superuser2 12y ago
  >So I wonder how hard it would be to setup a DNS-like searchable index for an e-mail like replacement? Instead of having to remember guy@foo.com I just have to remember 'John Doe' he works for Foo Inc. But Facebook's power is the social graph. I don't have to remember "he works for Foo Inc." and I can always find him even if he's long since moved on from Foo Inc. Rather, he ranks highly in the search results for "John Doe" because we have friends in common.' What you're describing might be better for, e.g. professional contacts you meet at conferences (which seems like LinkedIn's territory) but for organic friend-groups based on high school, college, location, etc. then mutual friend count (or degrees of separation, if no mutual friends) is a damn good indicator of relevance. Is there a way of doing a distributed social graph with some degree of privacy and no central authority?
lmm 12y ago
Nah. I had the same conversations on Facebook, with the same people, and initially under much the same pseudonyms, as I had on MSN 5 years previously. Excessive insistence on real names is what killed google+. Facebook succeeded, initially, by being livejournal but not letting people customize how their profiles looked. (News Feed really wasn't big in the early days). Everyone's page looked the same, and it was a good look; you immediately knew where to see interests, where to see favourite movies and so on. It also had better-integrated photo sharing functionality than any of its rivals. And it was a much better interface for organizing parties than anything else: a big chain of email CCs gets unwieldy fast (and is irritating to anyone who can't make the party but still sees all the messages). AIM/ICQ/MSN/* never really handled groupchat properly. Jabber screws up if you want to sign in from more than one place. IRC gets the groupchat part right, but relies on everyone leaving their computer on the whole time, or doing something even nerdier like setting up a bouncer. Skype would eventually solve the problem, but it wasn't in the picture when Facebook started out.
prostoalex 12y ago
And yet Snapchat took over messaging by reverting back to arbitrary usernames, AOL styles.
- superuser2 12y ago
  Snapchat bootstraps its social graph on top of the already-existing social graph of "people who have each other's cell phone numbers." Actually learning and typing in people's Snapchat usernames is possible but not common. Exchanging phone numbers is already integrated into the social fabric of our society as a step in escalating a friendship or asking for / receiving the opportunity to date someone. It's a somewhat intimate act, and appropriate for a communication mechanism that's basically only used between people who are already friends. Snapchat doesn't have the ability to discover acquaintances / friends-of-friends nearly as easily as Facebook does. I also wouldn't say it "took over messaging." People don't really have actual conversations on Snapchat, they send photos of themselves making weird faces or Twitter-style status updates. New class of thing.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

bane 12y ago

Yeah, absolutely. The centralized index of people is as critical to Facebook's growth as DNS is to the Web. You don't have to remember 198.41.190.47 to get to everybody's favorite tech discussion forum, you just have to remember news.ycombinator.com. So I wonder how hard it would be to setup a DNS-like searchable index for an e-mail like replacement? Instead of having to remember guy@foo.com I just have to remember 'John Doe' he works for Foo Inc. and I can probably narrow it down from a list of other John Does. If not, I can always call him and ask him for his explicit address as a fallback. > but the action on Facebook is centered on the News Feed It really seems that, much more than Twitter has ever managed to be. People's News Feeds are really their microblogs. For many of my FB friends, I can go to their feed and read back a few months to see what's going on in their lives. Just as if they had been keeping a blog. But the convention on FB seems to be short posts, so I don't have to read long-form posts, but they also aren't restricted to a tiny string of characters. I actually think the news feed reminds me quite a bit of the finger protocol and .plan files. (there's commenting and likes and such of course also). So what core distributed communication and web presence technologies already exist that could approximate Facebook and what and how would they have to be modified to work at least as well as Facebook? What new things would have to be created from wholecloth? Would it be possible to integrate all this mess tightly enough that a person could set up their own "Social 2.0" node without too much fuss?

superuser2 12y ago
>So I wonder how hard it would be to setup a DNS-like searchable index for an e-mail like replacement? Instead of having to remember guy@foo.com I just have to remember 'John Doe' he works for Foo Inc. But Facebook's power is the social graph. I don't have to remember "he works for Foo Inc." and I can always find him even if he's long since moved on from Foo Inc. Rather, he ranks highly in the search results for "John Doe" because we have friends in common.' What you're describing might be better for, e.g. professional contacts you meet at conferences (which seems like LinkedIn's territory) but for organic friend-groups based on high school, college, location, etc. then mutual friend count (or degrees of separation, if no mutual friends) is a damn good indicator of relevance. Is there a way of doing a distributed social graph with some degree of privacy and no central authority?

lmm 12y ago

Nah. I had the same conversations on Facebook, with the same people, and initially under much the same pseudonyms, as I had on MSN 5 years previously. Excessive insistence on real names is what killed google+. Facebook succeeded, initially, by being livejournal but not letting people customize how their profiles looked. (News Feed really wasn't big in the early days). Everyone's page looked the same, and it was a good look; you immediately knew where to see interests, where to see favourite movies and so on. It also had better-integrated photo sharing functionality than any of its rivals. And it was a much better interface for organizing parties than anything else: a big chain of email CCs gets unwieldy fast (and is irritating to anyone who can't make the party but still sees all the messages). AIM/ICQ/MSN/* never really handled groupchat properly. Jabber screws up if you want to sign in from more than one place. IRC gets the groupchat part right, but relies on everyone leaving their computer on the whole time, or doing something even nerdier like setting up a bouncer. Skype would eventually solve the problem, but it wasn't in the picture when Facebook started out.

prostoalex 12y ago

And yet Snapchat took over messaging by reverting back to arbitrary usernames, AOL styles.

superuser2 12y ago
Snapchat bootstraps its social graph on top of the already-existing social graph of "people who have each other's cell phone numbers." Actually learning and typing in people's Snapchat usernames is possible but not common. Exchanging phone numbers is already integrated into the social fabric of our society as a step in escalating a friendship or asking for / receiving the opportunity to date someone. It's a somewhat intimate act, and appropriate for a communication mechanism that's basically only used between people who are already friends. Snapchat doesn't have the ability to discover acquaintances / friends-of-friends nearly as easily as Facebook does. I also wouldn't say it "took over messaging." People don't really have actual conversations on Snapchat, they send photos of themselves making weird faces or Twitter-style status updates. New class of thing.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]