Facebook Is Not Really That Special
Sometimes I think Silicon Valley believes its own hype just a bit too much. People with straight faces predict $2,000 shares of Google in the not too distant future, OSX overtaking Windows, and, most commonly, Facebook taking over the internet. “The next Google” is tossed about lightly in regard to them.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I just don’t see it, and here’s why. When I first used Google, I had this sort of aha moment. I saw a glimpse of the future. I saw a world with extremely large quantities of information available 24/7. And, for the first time, they were easy to find. Of course that was before blogs and Wikipedia and cell phones with half-decent browsers, so if anything, I think I underestimated the impact it would have. But I knew it would be huge. I knew Google was, in a way, similar to Yahoo (which everyone had been using up until then) but took one very critical step further. It was clearly a paradigm shift, the difference between a propeller and a jet engine.
I’m not alone in that. Everyone who used Google a couple times never went back. And I never would have guessed at some of the other game changing products they’d introduce (AdSense and Maps being two of the biggest). But, from the very first search I got a glimpse of the future, and it was good. I didn’t know whether someone else would deliver it better than Google, or if they’d be bought by Yahoo, and I certainly could have never seen coming the monster that is GOOG, but I saw information marching inexorably forward.
I’ve gotten that a few other times. Napster for instance. I used that back when only a few thousand people did, but immediately discovered that I could download any song I wanted for free in a couple minutes. It was immediately apparent that the music industry’s golden seal had been broken, and there would be no more holding it in, no matter how much the record companies shook their collective leg.
I can think of a few others. Using Wi-Fi at my college’s library. Surfing the web on my Treo 4 years ago. That mobile internet still hasn’t fully materialized, but nobody doubts that it’s coming. Movable Type (the software, not the centuries-old invention).
But when I look at Facebook or MySpace, I don’t see that. I see a nifty little utility that, at its best, makes it easier for me to keep in contact with people I know and like, but don’t really care about enough to just hang out with, IM, or call. Maybe I can play some games, or send someone a tropical fish for their tank. Or I could reconnect with someone I haven’t spoken to since high school, but then, as one such person told me, if I really cared, I wouldn’t have lost that connection to begin with. It’s not as if it were ever hard for people my age to do so.
And with social networking, that’s it. That’s all that’s there. It’s a glorified Classmates.com. For all the hype about the “social graph” that’s the most it will ever amount to because there’s nothing social about the internet. The internet is the most anti-social invention of all time.
Socializing is all about real world interaction. The internet is all about doing things at home in your boxers. Humans are hard wired a certain way, and social interaction just can’t be represented in bits and bytes. It’s analog. It’s visual and auditory, and has to be both to truly function. Even phone calls, which are still far more social than the internet, pale in comparison to real live interaction. If they were not, long distance relationships would have a better track record.
I do think the internet can serve to augment social relationships, and Facebook is very good at that. But that’s not a new paradigm. It’s just a slightly better version of the tools we already had. And it never will be anything more.
I think in all reality, and my distaste for hype aside, Facebook is pretty good at what it does. But what it does just isn’t important. What Google does is extremely important. Google is the biggest advance in information distribution since the printing press. Facebook is a convenient way for you and a friend to decide which bar to go to tonight.
And nobody has yet given me a single example of anything massively important Facebook might have in store. “Oh, they’ll have chat soon!” Hooray, now I have an 8th way to contact every single person in my buddy list there. Not to mention that anyone I would want to chat in real time with either has IM (and lists their screen name on their Facebook profile) or isn’t logged on to Facebook more than once in a blue moon anyway.
“Oh, they’ll have social search.” What the hell is that? It’s like Google I guess, but instead of searching everything put online by the 1 billion people who use the internet, it searches the status updates of your 50 Facebook friends. At best they’ll have some Yelp-like functionality, minus the wisdom of the crowds that makes Yelp useful.
April 10, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Great points. Yet arguably mapping the social graph is important for sharing services we haven't (and Facebook hasn't) thought of yet. See my blog post at http://mathoda.com/archives/160
April 10, 2008 at 3:52 pm
That's exactly the problem I'm addressing. With Google, nobody said “this will be important for reasons nobody has thought of yet.” They said “this is hugely important, and the only thing I don't know is just how important.”
You can't call a company the next Google if nobody yet has any idea why it will be important. The article you linked to is just more of the mindless hype you find everywhere else.
April 10, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Well said. Personally, I take it even further. Anything bad happening to Facebook is good news for me. Why? Zuckerberg. Too full of himself. I despise of people like that. He would eat his own excrement and say it tasted good. For me that matters — personality behind the brand.
April 10, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Facebook tries to efficiently notify you of news about your friends that's relevant to you. The criticism you are making of Facebook is that many of the events they report aren't relevant to you or there are better more personal ways to learn about them. Fair enough. The types of events that are reported on the Internet are still immature. Google would have been pretty useless if there were no web pages with a complex set of links between them yet. That doesn't mean that the problem Facebook is trying to solve is a bad one to solve or that their solution sucks for everyone (even if you find it useless).
April 10, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Insightful analysis. Its basically an extrapolation of what I thought. In fact I deactivated my account few days after registering because of the spam application invites and the clutter all around. Never saw any big deal in it.
April 10, 2008 at 4:55 pm
wow you got a lot of hostile and badly thought out replies on yc. i sympathize (and replied to a bunch).
April 10, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Preach on brother! The point about the Internet being the most anti-social tool is spot on. People will forget how to socialize with other humans, and then we will be in trouble.
April 10, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I don't believe that. It's instinctual. That would be like forgetting how to breathe.
April 10, 2008 at 5:37 pm
What news? That your friend got a new virtual drink? Or their status update that they're going to a baseball game. That may be nice, but it's very rarely important.
April 10, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Friendships are often formed and improved by unimportant activities or sharing trivial matters. Look at the way people now invest so much time in witty IM away messages or spend time drafting a blog post rant that only their friends and a few strangers are likely to read. Hardly important, but it helps connect you to those who feel the same way and your friends find it more interesting than most because it makes them feel they know you better. Facebook's photograph application is extremely limited, but because you can tag the people in it and that auto alerts them to the photograph, it's extremely popular.
April 10, 2008 at 5:58 pm
I'm surprised you don't see the transformation of how people access the web through their Social Network and the fundamental shift that occurs. These services created two constants; one: I can create/share/comment on an ever growing base of user generated content, where the value prop for creating the content lies not in a revenue model, but in the social-celebrity, however small that status is, and two: I am able to enjoy this with an extremely low cost to play – FREE.
The millions of MySpace and Facebook and all the other soc-net's are the new portals, the users decide whats on the front page, not Yahoo or MSN. People begin and end their day through these sites, and that changes everything.
April 10, 2008 at 6:02 pm
I don't know Zuckerberg at all, so can't really comment on him personally.
April 10, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Ha, yeah. As usual a lot of people misunderstood the argument.
April 10, 2008 at 6:17 pm
What is this content? It's generally trivial status updates, pictures, and comments on walls. It might be fun, but it's almost never important. And lately, in a feeble attempt to monetize, it's become inundated with spam.
People who want to be internet celebs don't do so on Facebook or MySpace. They write blogs or make video blogs. Or they participate in a forum. Or a social news site. Social networking helps, but it isn't their primary focus.
Portals come and go like nightclubs, with the difference being that nightclubs often make money while portals always seem to hemorrhage it. But Google (which I suppose you could say has a couple portal-ish products, but really isn't one in general) and search in general will be there for a long time.
April 10, 2008 at 6:41 pm
A year ago when Facebook launched their SDK I was excited that they were turning it into a platform. And then the junk apps started to fly like so many winged monkeys.
So what if they create a search, stock-market simulators, movie listings, games, photo-sharing aps, etc. until the cows come home? At some point all they've done is create a smaller, crappier version of the www. So why bother? So everyone I've ever kinda sorta met can tell how much time I waste? It burns me just a little more every time I log in to FB to check all the useless spam that my 100 friends have generated and there's one more jackass selling me some pepsi or real estate tips or concert tickets I don't want because he's ripped my info off of someone's app. Or basically cold calling me because I'm a “friend” of a “friend”.
Great innovations are things that solve problems. Google solved the problem of how to find info. Facebook creates at least as many problems as it will ever solve. There will be a tipping point where just enough people will say “fuck this” and Facebook will sink like the Titanic. Let's just hope the next friendster/myspace/beebo/orkut will be… well what? more of the same? A talking phone book? An embedded chip that vibrates every time someone whose name I know changes their socks? Do we really need to all belong to one big social network? Maybe the future will be more about services that actually solve problems. When the novelty honeymoon of everyone being online (not just your other 2 geek friends) wares off, everyone will come back to the basic question: what do I need this for?
April 10, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Very much agree with your thinking here. I've been on Facebook for a while but I just don't do anything on it because, effectively, there's nothing I really need to do. So far as I can tell it just has no particular functionality at all. Sure there are various “entertaining” (to some people) applications, but it doesn't even really have an effective blogging section for personal updates. At best I might use Facebook to link up with someone I lost touch with, but if that's the case and we start talking again the likelihood is that our relationship will quickly move off Facebook and on to IM or email.
It seems to me that Facebook is actually among the weakest of the various social networking sites in terms of any wider functionality. I use StumbleUpon, which gives me both interesting and worthwhile content relevant to my interests, and which I can also blog to. I use LinkedIn for professional contacts and for discussion on specific aspects of business. And then I have something like Livejournal which I monitor randomly because it seems to be where my friends arrange the “hey, we're going out for a drink at blah pub tonight at 8, turn up if you see this” kind of gatherings.
Facebook just seems a bit like the emperor's new clothes, pretty and high publicity but no real substance.
April 10, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I think its the subtle point of celebrity you miss. Its not true celeb status, its a celeb of the moment amongst a group. Its a chance to be in a unique and powerful way.
I don't buy the nightclub analogy either, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, all seem pretty solid to me in terms of longevity (in net time at least).
I'll give on the spam issue, something will will have to work out for it to stay viable. But how can you dismiss the Soc-Nets as a fad? Their impact on news, whats popular, and politics should alone show the possibilities of the market.
As for search yes its key, but until the rise of Google we all just accepted search as a standard net tool, so who's to say that won't shift again?
April 10, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Yahoo and AOL are abortions right now. One's scrambling to avoid bankruptcy, the other is being ditched by its owner. MSN I'm not sure about, but I'd guess it's not faring too great either, otherwise they wouldnâ??t be trying to buy Yahoo.
I don't dismiss them as a fad. I just don't think they are important. They don't change how we live. They just augment it a little.
April 10, 2008 at 7:21 pm
Interesting mix. My digital life includes Google Docs, Blogger, GTalk, and other Google tools, msn messenger (but only because my wife's company is affiliated with Microsoft so she's on msn all day), Delicious, and my beloved blackberry. I get my news through Google Reader and lots of time on Wikipedia.
Facebook is a bit interesting in the way they've managed to “humanize” the internet somehow if that's the right word. It's easy enough to use, and seeing pictures of people you know makes people trust it enough to use it. There are so many better tools out there, but FB is where 99% of my social graph is because FB is accessible to the masses. I think the seeds of their demise may lie in making people comfortable enough with being online that people will discover other, more useful software outside of FB. Facebook might be the gateway drug that people don't come back to once they've found a better buzz… but for now everybody's doing it.
April 10, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Its easy to point the finger @ Yahoo and AOL, they are struggling, I think in part because of the shift in web user behavior due to the Soc-nets. But you can't dismiss the portal as the primary web play since 2000. They have been the primary core of the web sphere from a userbase and traffic perspective.
What do you base importance on? If its online usage, the soc-nets destroy all competitors on a user time and pageview basis. If its impact on the social landscape how can you dismiss Tila Tequila, Ron Paul, et all?
I think your point about relevance is your personal connection, I actually have a hard time seeing the value in the time spent by users on social sites, the crap drives me crazy. But to say that its not important is shortsided. The market has spoken, and it loved to create/share/comment on a wide variety of what can easily be called meaningless.
April 10, 2008 at 8:05 pm
by now.. similar to your analogy of classmates.com to facebook, I'd say that Google is only marginally better than what Yahoo or other search engines have. How is developing a better way to advertise so important?
I for one, hopes Yahoo does not become part of Microsoft.. I've changed my default search on my browsers to Yahoo.. Try it.. i think you'll find it's as good if not better than google.. and not only that.. you'll be supporting the folks that started this all and keep them out of the clutches of microsoft.
April 10, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Fuckin' saved! About social search: I was talking with a friend today, and we decided the only way social search is gonna work is when laptops and wifi are so pervasive that every hobo is lying in the gutter, drunkenly editing wikipedia. Then social search MIGHT work.
But you'll be relying on drunken hobos.On the plus side, shit like the Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com) will probably work much smoother. (Mechanical turk is kinda weird right now: people want you to do waaaay too much for waaaay too little. Registering an account on a forum and making 10 posts for 10 cents? Come on!)
Also, if my email isn't shown, why is it required to comment?
April 10, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Twitter does that way better than facebook, anyway. I used to like facebook, but I'm starting to get annoyed at constant appspam.
April 10, 2008 at 8:17 pm
The PORTAL? Maybe for your technically challenged grandparents. I taught MY grandmother how to google
Also your last paragraph begs the question: how is facebook different from livejournal or myspace?
April 10, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Completely agree, and conveniently just wrote a piece about it. See link in message.
April 10, 2008 at 8:32 pm
Search, not portals, has been the defining paradigm of this century on the internet. Also I don't have to explain Ron Paul, the guy got like 8 votes. He was a fad. And what, Tila Tequila got a show on cable? I just watched, not two channels away from that, a biography about a guy who makes cakes.
April 10, 2008 at 8:36 pm
You know, I had flock for awhile, which has Yahoo as its default search. I did a few side by side comparisons and still liked Google much better. Might just be my preferences/habits, but I still find them more relevant. The gap has definitely narrowed though.
April 10, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Many people's entire social lives revolve around Facebook. Facebook doesn't replace face-to-face social interaction, it catalyzes it. Not only can I see what events are coming up (and when and where), I can see what my friends are doing too. And most FBers have friend lists of many many people who are not more than mere acquaintances, people whose events FBers wouldn't become aware of without it. You're right that Facebook isn't really profoundly important in and of itself, but social networking is. It's a complete paradigm shift in how people structure their social lives, and Facebook's execution and timing gave it the only thing that matters: the most people (forget MySpace, it's worthless and unusable). And is that what Google really did? They executed search better than anyone, and they've continued to do so.
Just because _you_ don't use Facebook doesn't mean that it's not a complete shift in the everyday lives of millions and counting.
April 10, 2008 at 9:03 pm
Ok, so what do you define as important? I offered a few options, pick one or use your own.
As for Ron and Tila, how can you diminish the fact that they came from no-where to significant public awareness.
Soc-nets are a phenomenon, have become a serious part of a huge consumer base's everyday lives. Just because you don't like the trivial pursuits of the conent doesn't diminish their impact on the world we live in.
For the record, Search has become the defining paradigm or the net in the last 3-4 years, portals that included search with content drove the traffic and user base. They defined the first 4 years. Now free content and user gen content (including blogs like this one) are the new paradigm. Thats why they get so much press and such huge valuations.
April 10, 2008 at 9:11 pm
The pet rock achieved significant public awareness. That doesnâ??t make it important. Ron Paul was a curiosity to the mainstream. The general population (which doesnâ??t use Digg regularly) knew his campaign would amount to nothing. The betting markets never had him at above 10% to win the Republican nod, at least that I saw.
User generated content is driven entirely by search. Blogging (which wouldn't exist without it) is far more of a paradigm shift than social networks, which was why I mentioned Movable Type. You can't lump in status updates and photos that nobody outside of your buddy list can see with blogging, which has upended the entire media industry as we know it.
All user generated content is not created equal. This sort of dialogue with an article and dozens of comments following it does not happen on Facebook.
April 10, 2008 at 9:59 pm
So lets start with I agree that not all UGC is equal. But interest levels are.
Just as some blogs achieve amazing levels of interest (techcrunch is a great example) others are more like buddy lists in terms of unique readers daily.
I agree with Movable Type too, BTW. I no weird, I agree with you.
So while I think its huge that a guy can basically garner 10% of a party through social networking and individual donations, I'll put it aside. Right after I say that Google hasn't gotten a party rep 10 points that I know of……
What about the long tail theory?
Basically we apply it to media normally, right. It basically says that the re are significant markets beyond hits. That there are huge volumes of transactions/revenues/opportunities for the bottom 95% of the market.
Soc-nets are the UGC playground of the long tail. More importantly the cost of generation of the content does not fall on the soc-net but the user, and is checked more frequently than any other media type by its audience than any other form of online content.
You said previously that you didn't see facebook as a fad, but you reference the pet rock (fad). You still don't define what's “important” from your view. If its not a fad, that means its relevant enough to stick around, and by the shear nature of the size and growth rates of the model, how can it not be important?
April 10, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Sorry for the no instead of know, ya know?
April 10, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Youtube has been instrumental to Barack Obama's success. It's impossible to quantify what % comes from what. How many people Googled his name (he was one of last year's top searches and is presumably so this year), read what he had to say, and decided they liked him? It's unknowable, but I'd bet it's far more than voted for Ron Paul in total. And I'm sure some of Ron Paul's fans (and to my knowledge he didnâ??t get 10% of the vote overall, that was just the highest I saw betting markets place him at, and he was generally well below even that) came from sources other than Digg as well. And Digg isnâ??t social networking, it's social news.
The long tail argument works even more for search. In fact, it exists because of search. Without search I couldn't find those books on Amazon that are too unpopular to make it into every B&N. I search Amazon for them. Small niche blogs get their traffic largely through search.
I'll explain the importance thing in the next blog entry.
April 10, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Cool, and hey good discussion
great tagline, it sucked me right in!
April 10, 2008 at 10:35 pm
I knew it would.
April 10, 2008 at 11:03 pm
I totally disagree – fb build something people want simple as that. you may not like it / get it, but their growth and engagement metrics are simply off the charts, they have deep, deep talent and plenty of growth paths left. im surprised your not considering doing a fantasy sports app on fb – its a winning space.
as for overall utility fb's platform is the major innovation on the web in the last 5 years and its still very young (less than a year). Additionally photo, mobile, media sharing, and virtual goods apps are both technically powerful and very easy to use.
they are aggregating the primary social activities on the web and a wrapping them together in one box that people are familiar with.
there is a lot of hype in the valley, yes or course, but dismissing fb as a fad is a bit shortsighted. with the level of traction they have achieved to date and the opportunities ahead fb is in a very good spot.
April 11, 2008 at 1:31 am
For those of us over 30, Facebook and its usage looks very, very much like BBSs and the way we used BBSs in the 1980s. Consequently, it's difficult for me not to view it as simply a fad, as opposed to an actual, fundamental shift in the way people communicate with one another.
April 11, 2008 at 3:49 am
The real reason facebook is valuable at the moment.
What do you think of this Matt?
http://www.horsepigcow.com/2008/02/23/social-ca…
April 11, 2008 at 4:08 am
I've been calling FaceBook the “Geocities” of web2.0 for a while now.
Seems like a neat/new concept at first, but in the end is really nothing special.
April 11, 2008 at 4:51 am
The most important thing about Facebook, which you failed to mention, is that everyone I know is using it.
April 11, 2008 at 5:52 am
It would appear that Microsoft maybe in danger of being overrun by OS X yet. At least if you believe the Gartner Group.
http://www.macworld.co.uk/business/news/index.c…
April 11, 2008 at 8:03 am
I agree, and that is hugely important. But in the 1980s, *everyone* who owned a modem was on the BBSs. Now, where the analogy breaks down of course is that there's a big difference between “everyone who had a modem in the 1980s” and “everyone”. Nevertheless, I am not yet convinced that we're seeing something fundamentally new and permanent.
April 11, 2008 at 8:49 am
Let me guess, you're in college or a recent grad.
April 11, 2008 at 9:15 am
Socializing is all about real world interaction.
Easy to say when you're of our generation, but this is increasingly not true. Amongst the locked-up-till-they're-16 modern generation of youngsters, online interaction is incredibly popular outside of school. Indeed, I'd go as far to say digital forms of interaction make up the majority of child-to-child social interactions, certainly in the UK.
April 11, 2008 at 9:22 am
keep drinking the kool aid brother. I think most people they sign on to FB that arent a college kid or a TechCrunchie like the service until they connect to everyone possible and look over all their photos etc. Then their activity dies off dramatically (mine did). Also Facebook Apps are worthless and plain silly in my opinion.
Its also interesting to see that many of people that work at my company that recently graduated college greatly slow their FB activity the further they get from school. Once you arent looking to hook up or party every night the service becomes less functional.
April 11, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Facebook is special in the sense that it is not going away. Ever since we climbed down from trees (and even before then) we have been obsessed with social hierarchy, staying on top, in touch and in control. Facebook is just another way to interact with our fellow humans.
It may not have the profound, society shaking impacts that Google has, but it does cater to a fundamental human desire – societal interaction. And, as such, it is special and not going away.
April 11, 2008 at 5:17 pm
BOTTOM LINE:
Facebook appeals to people with alot of time on their hands. Who has time to update photos, read trivial things, etc? People in college, stay-at-home mothers, unemployed folks looking for jobs, people not staffed on projects – these are the people who use Facebook on a constant basis. I have NO time for that type of time-wasting. Getting and sending pokes? What a complete waste of time. Email is the ultimate personal Facebook and will be for the future. If you have no time – YOU WANT PUSH, not PULL.
Someone made the following statement to me: “Well, Facebook is better than Linkedin!”
I totally disagree. I love the fact that Linkedin takes NO TIME. People send invites, I accept and now I have a contact list that stays updated with any effort on my part. I only accept PEOPLE I actually know. Not random people who like my picture or something else that is irrelevant. This is valuable – not all the time – but when I want to find someone with a certain skillset or I'm looking for a job. Then the information is there – waiting for me to use it.
Once the younger generations starts seeing how valuable time is (due to opportunity costs of other activities) – Facebook loses its value entirely. Not to mention the fact that the people that have alot of time on their hands also happen to have little or no money. That is why FREE (from a DOLLAR perspective) appeals to this audience – they have plenty of TIME to spend and that's all that is paid. For those of us who are time-strapped, time is MONEY…giving time to something as trivial as Facebook is EXPENSIVE.
This has several implications – first of all, the audience will not be clicking on much, unless it's just time the advertisers are asking for. My blog serves a much smaller niche – time-strapped travelers. My historical click-through rate is about 2.32%. Compare this to Facebook's CTR of 0.04% <== how do you make money off of this? Someone may say – get 100 million of user which Facebook will have soon. But, there is one-more factor to consider – that's the earnings per CPM – I bet you this will be very low for Facebook users.
Facebook targets the lowest common denominator with regards to dollar income – if you're spending alot of time on Facebook, you can get there is opportunity costs for not spending that time elsewhere (like working and making money).
Something to think about.
April 11, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Great post. Facebook reminds me of the Seinfeld “The Show about Nothing” episode. It was a very meta take with the show talking about the show itself. I personally couldn't find what to *do* once I got into FB. I have tons of “friends”, of course, 90% of them I don't know, some I have *no clue* at all how they found me. Makes for great “social” networking, I suppose.
To be fair to FB, LinkedIn is only marginally less useless. Lots of sales guys trying to “network”.
April 11, 2008 at 8:34 pm
so that you can know when someone replies to your comment
April 11, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Great post. Loved this quote:
“I see a nifty little utility that, at its best, makes it easier for me to keep in contact with people I know and like, but don’t really care about enough to just hang out with, IM, or call.”
The people I really keep in touch with is over email, IM and the phone (or, heavens forbid, hanging out in person). Facebook is an interesting diversion, but I have trouble seeing myself using it in 5-10 years (unlike Google, which I consider a basic utility).
April 11, 2008 at 11:06 pm
its about advertising. and advertising depends on data about users. with google, advertisers know what a user wants to find (i.e., the user entered keywords on google.com or the user visited a site with adwords). with facebook, advertisers know who the user is (e.g., male, 23 y/o, from boston, went to college, likes XYZ music,), and what the users' friends like/bought. the combination of google data (what someone wants) + (someone's past attributes and behavior and their friends past) is incredibly valuable to advertisers
April 11, 2008 at 11:09 pm
its about advertising. and advertising depends on data about users. with google, advertisers know what a user wants to find (i.e., the user entered keywords on google.com monetized by bids or the user visited a site with certain content monetized by adwords). with facebook, advertisers know who the user is (e.g., male, 23 y/o, from nyc, went to college, likes XYZ music), and what the users' friends like/bought. the combination of google data (what someone wants) + facebook (someone's past attributes and behavior and their friends past behaviors) is incredibly valuable to advertisers.
April 12, 2008 at 1:39 am
'mapping the social graph'? I don't think so. FaceBook is simply providing tools for an insanely large amount of people to waste insanely large amounts of time on virtually useless activities. Hooking up with an old school-mate, sending someone a virtual fish, etc isn't providing a map to anything. I'm not even sure if FaceBook is developing any useful social interaction paradigms, or processes – I haven't heard of any.
April 12, 2008 at 2:23 am
I was never a finance major, but can you explain how the following:
7 Bil revenue
4 Bil profit
2 Bil cash on hand
750 mil debt
qualifies Yahoo! as “scrambling to avoid bankruptcy”?
Also, you completed misunderstand the term “social search”. It takes all of about five minutes to do a little reading and find out what the term refers to, but apparently you were too busy trying to see how many times you could use the word paradigm to do a little research.
Lastly, how exactly was google maps a game changing product?
April 12, 2008 at 6:13 am
I don't see the Silicon Valley hype around Facebook that you mention, however, I do see that facebook itself is pure hype.
I agree with your argument that they are not the next Google, but who is saying that they are?
Consider..
Every single digital marketing agency in the world and all of their employess are pushing facebook and my space and whatever to all and sundry in the hope to be able to elevate some silly marketing campaign, that they are charging their clients millions for, to the masses.
You'd be hard pushed to find a marketing strategy presentation deck that doesn't include social networks , viral marketing and a facebook / digg marketing strategy.
I think you are missing the point semantically with the use of the word social. Social is not the purpose of these apps, and a paradigm shift in social interaction is not what they promise.
What they do promise is a network of net users collective attentions, which happens to be worth a lot of money.
And by the way the nested replies on your blog are just not doing it for me
April 12, 2008 at 10:00 am
You may not find Facebook particularly useful, but social network software can be very powerful for a political campaign. My.barackobama.com has been used very successfully by the Obama campaign, and potentially a future President could use Internet tools to efficiently reach and organize their supporters to bring pressure on Congress while in office, as I describe in my essay The coming Digital Presidency: http://mathoda.com/archives/189
April 12, 2008 at 11:00 am
I couldn't agree more. After marketing in the Social Media industry for two years now I can honestly say that there really isn't that much to it. Don't get me wrong, its cool but they are just “feature heavey” message boards.
The reason social networking continues to be the buzz of the day is that adults are just picking up on what “kids” started doing 5 years ago.
For every 45 year old that opens an account on Facebook with a smile on their face, preparing to throw buzz-words around at the water-cooler the next day……. there is also a 20-something that is abadoning their MySpace or plain exhausted with Facebook.
Facebook came out my first year of college and it was like…… “yeah cool” and then we would slowly log-in less and less often to the point that noone really cared.
Little did we know that when the 30 was to get interested 5 years later it was going to be the most exhaustive, over-exaggerated frenzy I have ever beared witness to.
April 12, 2008 at 11:29 am
That is a brilliant use of the web, but has nothing to do with the big social media sites in general.
April 12, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Hey Matt,
I really enjoyed this, especially after the Fortune profile came out about COO Sandberg. Interesting dichotomy of viewpoints.
April 12, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Cannot agree with you more. Also, if you try to advertise inside facebook, you'd think they would really target your ads pretty well… the reality as it is now (Apr 2008), their ad system sucks, they only target your ad on the person's interest, and basic info, you'd think they'd do smarter things… the results, very low clickthrough rates, and given the hype, the bidding is way too expensive. Putting banners in google adwords is way more cost effective and has a much broader audience.
Facebook being called a “Social Operating system”, is such a ridiculous hype phrase, to me, it's nothing but a social networking site that allowed people to create their own plugins to their CMS, how the hell can that be called an operating system.
Now, if you consider the initiatives of google, releasing distributed technology of their caliber, such as BigTable, Google File System, and maybe in the future MapReduce, now that's something that could live to the hype of a “Web Operating System”, or a “WebService Operating System”
Facebook just has great backing behind it, lots of pageviews, but it's nothing but a time waster, you get nothing out of it, except getting back with old friends, and there's many sites that could do all of that.
We need money invested in things that have real value to human kind, finding new energy sources, finding a way to use CO2 in a beneficial way, colonizing the moon, thinking of the big picture as a species.
April 12, 2008 at 10:36 pm
@Hasan
“as for overall utility fb's platform is the major innovation on the web in the last 5 years”
You gotta be kidding me…
Where do you leave stuff like semantic web, virtualization, distributed virtual machines, p2p video (joost), p2p telephony (skype), new advances on HCI, google earth, google maps.
that's real innovation, not a social networking site that lets others pollude it so that they can generate more pageviews.
April 12, 2008 at 10:40 pm
The only way I see facebook being a real social networking breakthrough, is if it makes it to everyone's phones in such a way that you get to a bar, run a peer to peer search among all the phones available in the bar, and you find 3 or 4 candidate people to do what you want with them. Now that would revolutionize the way people meet, know each other or get laid.
Imagine not having to waste energy with a girl on a bar to which you'll never have the slightest chance of getting laid, while all that time there was a girl that you may have liked and she would've totally taken you back to her place.
You'd walk into bars, and there would be a lot more people hooking up with their best matches. That would be the next sex revolution, straight from your phone. Then you'd have another one of thos “aha” moments.
April 12, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Isn't that Loopt?
April 12, 2008 at 11:12 pm
I mean, the first paragraph anyway.
April 14, 2008 at 10:43 am
hey, pretty interesting.
i added the post to http://www.tectrnd.com
cheers
August 12, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Matt, just wanted to pass along some of the latest stats on facebook growth.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/12/facebook-i…
always good to check in a few months after the media fervor has died down and revisit the numbers.
August 12, 2008 at 1:43 pm
@Gubatron – wondering how valid you are finding my comments after every major social network now has a developer platform for 3rd party apps, and Apple opened its app store. There is no doubt that 3rd party networks are directly influenced by fb's platform.