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You mean you think someone could take significant users away from Facebook? It's hard to see how Facebook can lose out, this generation at least. People seem t

by davi 17y ago

You mean you think someone could take significant users away from Facebook? It's hard to see how Facebook can lose out, this generation at least. People seem to like using the internet that way, and all their friends are there. Maybe the next generation, who grows up watching their parents using Facebook, will think of it as boring and passe, and there will be room for someone else. What happened when people starting liking Japanese cars, and American cars just started to seem big and ugly and crappy. Unless Facebook screws it all up (still could happen I guess).

electromagnetic 17y ago
We have to define what we mean here, this isn't a Gen X or Gen Y or whatever shit issue. This is likely a 10 year cycle going on. I remember catching the blurred end of chatrooms, where AOL and Yahoo had untold numbers of chatrooms. These seemed to die off rather fast when MSN and AIM messengers appeared on the scene, although I believe I had ICQ when it was still in its first version, which puts a good 8 years between the founding of ICQ and the founding of Facebook, and I'd say roughly a 10 year gap between the popularity of IM and fully formed social networking sites like Facebook. I bet between 2015-2020 there will likely be a new upheaval in the social networking area, likely due to a major change in the way we access the internet. Just how growing internet usage made usenet and chatrooms impractical due to connectivity issues. Usenet users typically either only knew people who were online or didn't know anybody online. Chatroom users might have only known a handful of people with an internet connection, which made it easy enough to coordinate meeting up online. This died when people knew 50+ people who were online, and ICQ, AIM and MSN with contact lists made it easy to organise. Now virtually everybody you know is online, and a site like Facebook allows you access to all of them. The revolution now is likely to be access to the internet, things will revolutionise when people spend a large proportion of their time online with full unrestricted (IE no office firewall) and portable internet access (a la iPhone and Blackberry).
- dan_the_welder 17y ago
  I agree with you totally, there is a cycle and walled garden social networking is the current phase and will fade into the background. Not go away mind you, because nothing ever really does,it just changes. I think that personal websites will surge and be augmented with social networking modules that adhere to some sort of standard. Something like encrypted RSS linking private content for your 'friends' and public content for the rest of the people. I think the popularity of social networking over the current definition of personal webpage is driven by three things, ease of use, the ability to define public/private content and cost. There are plenty of niches in such a model, pure self owned/hosted (Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal etc with plugins), advertising supported we make it easy for you (Tripod, Geocities), free(Blogger, Livejournal), subscription (pay to ditch ads), and even old guys interconnecting with the new (a fancy Facebook Connect). Benefits that I look forward to are my ability to control my interface and not have it change on someone elses whim, complete ownership of my personally generated content and an end to the serial monogamy of having to move to the new-new thing when the old-new thing inevitably dies.
  - dan_the_welder 17y ago
    Hmmm, thinking here. It's basically distributed Friendfeed which already seems to have all the functionality I'm describing.Except you can host your own stuff and adhere to a common API.
- davi 17y ago
  This is likely a 10 year cycle going on That's why I say "Maybe the next generation, who grows up watching their parents using Facebook" ... I bet between 2015-2020 Maybe not even that soon. I think things are getting entrenched. The mainstream switches more slowly than early adopters. Until the last few years, it's all been early adopters, and we've gotten used to things changing incredibly quickly. Also, there are strong network effects in play for Facebook, not so much for e.g. Google.
ivankirigin 17y ago
I've been using LaLa a lot - mainly on their site because their facebook app doesn't show the content on lala.com. You can gift songs on facebook using them. I think this isn't as good as a proper music service. If everything on lala.com were available on facebook, I'd use that more. Their fb-connect integration is really great. All that to say that the service doing well on facebook is just an application on the facebook platform, and one focused on fb-connect off facebook.com That means it is currently all up for grabs. Any application could do the same thing. I don't think LaLa replaces the myspace experience because the fat middle and long tail of bands aren't curating the experience for the band themselves. Myspace is dwindling in popularity, with a replacement yet to be determined.

by davi 17y ago

electromagnetic 17y ago

We have to define what we mean here, this isn't a Gen X or Gen Y or whatever shit issue. This is likely a 10 year cycle going on. I remember catching the blurred end of chatrooms, where AOL and Yahoo had untold numbers of chatrooms. These seemed to die off rather fast when MSN and AIM messengers appeared on the scene, although I believe I had ICQ when it was still in its first version, which puts a good 8 years between the founding of ICQ and the founding of Facebook, and I'd say roughly a 10 year gap between the popularity of IM and fully formed social networking sites like Facebook. I bet between 2015-2020 there will likely be a new upheaval in the social networking area, likely due to a major change in the way we access the internet. Just how growing internet usage made usenet and chatrooms impractical due to connectivity issues. Usenet users typically either only knew people who were online or didn't know anybody online. Chatroom users might have only known a handful of people with an internet connection, which made it easy enough to coordinate meeting up online. This died when people knew 50+ people who were online, and ICQ, AIM and MSN with contact lists made it easy to organise. Now virtually everybody you know is online, and a site like Facebook allows you access to all of them. The revolution now is likely to be access to the internet, things will revolutionise when people spend a large proportion of their time online with full unrestricted (IE no office firewall) and portable internet access (a la iPhone and Blackberry).

dan_the_welder 17y ago
I agree with you totally, there is a cycle and walled garden social networking is the current phase and will fade into the background. Not go away mind you, because nothing ever really does,it just changes. I think that personal websites will surge and be augmented with social networking modules that adhere to some sort of standard. Something like encrypted RSS linking private content for your 'friends' and public content for the rest of the people. I think the popularity of social networking over the current definition of personal webpage is driven by three things, ease of use, the ability to define public/private content and cost. There are plenty of niches in such a model, pure self owned/hosted (Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal etc with plugins), advertising supported we make it easy for you (Tripod, Geocities), free(Blogger, Livejournal), subscription (pay to ditch ads), and even old guys interconnecting with the new (a fancy Facebook Connect). Benefits that I look forward to are my ability to control my interface and not have it change on someone elses whim, complete ownership of my personally generated content and an end to the serial monogamy of having to move to the new-new thing when the old-new thing inevitably dies.
- dan_the_welder 17y ago
  Hmmm, thinking here. It's basically distributed Friendfeed which already seems to have all the functionality I'm describing.Except you can host your own stuff and adhere to a common API.
davi 17y ago
This is likely a 10 year cycle going on That's why I say "Maybe the next generation, who grows up watching their parents using Facebook" ... I bet between 2015-2020 Maybe not even that soon. I think things are getting entrenched. The mainstream switches more slowly than early adopters. Until the last few years, it's all been early adopters, and we've gotten used to things changing incredibly quickly. Also, there are strong network effects in play for Facebook, not so much for e.g. Google.

ivankirigin 17y ago

I've been using LaLa a lot - mainly on their site because their facebook app doesn't show the content on lala.com. You can gift songs on facebook using them. I think this isn't as good as a proper music service. If everything on lala.com were available on facebook, I'd use that more. Their fb-connect integration is really great. All that to say that the service doing well on facebook is just an application on the facebook platform, and one focused on fb-connect off facebook.com That means it is currently all up for grabs. Any application could do the same thing. I don't think LaLa replaces the myspace experience because the fat middle and long tail of bands aren't curating the experience for the band themselves. Myspace is dwindling in popularity, with a replacement yet to be determined.