MattMaroon.com

Interesting post on Facebook by Paul Buchheit. I have to say though, I disagree with most of it.

It’s very fashionable to declare that Facebook is an over-hyped fad and will never make any real money, certainly not enough to justify it’s insane $15 billion dollar valuation.

That’s true, but it’s even more fashionable (at least in tech circles) to say that Facebook is the next Google, or that Facebook is building the social graph which is worth a lot for some unknown reason and they’ll monetize it later. In fact, Facebook is so talked about that the only unfashionable position I can think of is that it’s actually run by extra-terrestrials who are using the social graph to infiltrate our society with their humanoid robots, of which Zuckerbot3000 was the prototype. Come to think of it, that’s my new official stance on the matter.

I get a lot of messages on Facebook, but unlike email, I have yet to receive any spam. That’s pretty remarkable.

Really? Because ever since they launched their platform, and then their groups, I’ve gotten at least 5 pieces of what I consider spam a day. And everyone I know who uses the site has the same complaint. They aren’t messages in my inbox I suppose, but they’re still spam. And I get more of it from Facebook than from email that gets through my filters (about one a day, on average) which is even more impressive given that I have three addresses written publicly on the web for any spambot to harvest.

Worse yet, I greatly prefer the email spam. I see a subject line of “HAVE tHE MORE ENERGIZES FOR YOU PEN1S!!!” and I click one button and it’s gone. I don’t have to think about it, other than maybe to wonder how the hell that got through a filter. But I see “this guy you met one time and who is a friend of your friend (or worse yet, is dating them) wants to be your friend” and I have to think about it. “I don’t want to friend this guy, but we have close mutual friends, and I might run into him somewhere. That could get awkward. Maybe I better just limited profile him, then go turn down the dial so I don’t have to see his updates.”

Or maybe you have that one friend who is a really nice person, maybe a friend of whoever you’re dating/married to, who keeps sending you drinks and fish and hugs and everything else. You don’t want to be mean to her, but you damn sure don’t want to install every variant of the poke ever made. Will she be offended if you ignore it? That certainly happens.

Or what about the friend who asks you to join some group for the business he owns/is promoting? You want to help him, but is being one more fan on a list really going to do anything for his chances of success? Are you just going to get spammed all to hell with group messages when you do? Will he be pissed at you if you don’t?

I use email all day every day, and log into Facebook maybe 2 times a week. Yet I’d say Facebook spam annoys me at least 10x as much as email in total, and it does so because I know the people sending it. It’s the fact that I can verify their identity that makes it such a pain. I greatly prefer random strangers from the Third World trying to sell me Viagra and almost always ending up in my junk folder to worrying over who I will offend if I don’t become a vampire.

Perhaps a people directory doesn’t seem terribly valuable, but if you can’t imagine how to make money from knowing everyone’s identity and trust networks, then you aren’t being very imaginative.

Really? Then I guess I’m not very imaginative, nor are the tens of thousands of app developers, because I don’t see anything taking significant advantage of this. All I see are things that are dopey and maybe fun (pokes, games, etc.) depending on your perspective, or things that just aren’t very useful (like classifieds/ auctions) relative to the open market and don’t seem to gain much traction because of it.

The guys at Facebook apparently aren’t very imaginative either, because all I see are ads for t-shirts and dating. I’m seeing social networks attempt to find some great ways to monetize (music for instance might work) but none that really involve the social graph.

One of the best examples of this problem on the internet is eBay… With reliable identity information, most of these fraud schemes would become impractical, which would obviously be a real advantage for an eBay competitor.

I’m lost as to how Facebook provides reliable identity information. I’ve seen impostors on there plenty of times. I was a friend of a friend of a fake Steve Wozniak for months. Might still be.

For this entry I nearly set up a Paul Graham Facebook account and friended everyone in YC just to see what would happen. I didn’t because he might not like that and I didn’t want to risk upsetting him, but I’d be willing to bet I could have gotten to over 50 friends in a day. And I realize he is a special case, but I think the principle applies to anyone.

If you set up a fake account and just start friending people at random, surprisingly many will accept. I know, I’ve done it. And then you’re a friend of a friend to anyone on their buddy list. Is that any harder to abuse than eBay, where one must somehow fake their identity by using a stolen credit card or PayPal account? It seems much easier to me.

Also, even if it were a perfect form of identity verification, eBay works solely because of its lack thereof. Everybody who wants to buy something from an online auction shops there because everybody who wants to sell something in an online auction sells there. It functions because of its enormity, and its size dictates that not everyone can be accounted for through personal relationships.

And fraud really doesn’t matter much at all. They have a reputation system that is certainly not perfect, but is quite helpful. And while scams do occur on eBay, they’re not that high a percentage of total transactions, and even when they do, you can generally just get your money bank from your credit card issuer or PayPal. I’ve been using that site for a very long time and have been burned twice, but I just got my money back anyway. I went on shopping as before.

But imagine an eBay that consists only of people you know. What would be the point? Even if you know 200 or 300 people, good luck buying that Wii for Christmas. eBay works because total strangers can buy or sell to or from each other. It’s a market, and a giant one, so though I may not know how much I’ll have to pay for it, I know I’m going to be able to get that Nintendo there.

If you’re an average person, who has, let’s say, 100 friends, and they each have 100 friends, that’s still only slightly more than 10k people in your extended network. How many of them could possibly be selling Wiis? And we can’t go any further degrees of separation without ruining the whole identity verification thing that the social graph is predicated upon. Contrast 10k people that to the millions of buyers/sellers on eBay and it’s still a no-brainer as to where you’ll find what you want at a fair market price.

What could work is actual, direct, human involvement by the users. In fact, it’s already helping in a very limited form — Wikipedia pages are written and edited by random people on the internet and they frequently occupy the top spots on Google (and I always click on them).

I’m trying to imagine a Wikipedia edited only by my friends. It would have very detailed entries on a lot of tech startups and every form of gambling known to man. But search for Louis XIV and it would come up blank. Or try to find the episode list for Family Guy. (Hilariously, since I download the few TV shows that I watch, that is probably my most common use for Wikipedia. It’s the best TV Guide ever made.)

Just today I was reading fantastic articles on Operation Downfall and the Pacific Theatre of WWII. How good would those articles be if the editors consisted only of people whose identity I could verify? Would they even exist? Seems unlikely.

And I think that most of the applications people hypothesize will be built around the social graph just aren’t that valuable for the same reason. What makes Wikipedia, eBay, and the rest of the internet so wonderful is that hundreds of millions of very different people that you don’t know use it. The people you know who use Facebook and are your friend there are too few and too similar to you to be of much value, and always will be.

It comes down to a saying I’ve heard a lot lately, which I’ll bend to fit here. “More data beats better algorithms.” Getting your restaurant reviews from trusted friends might be a better algorithm than getting them from random web surfers. But I have a few hundred friends, and there are a few hundred million random web surfers, so there are many orders of magnitude more data on Yelp than will ever be on my Facebook friend list.

And that’s why I don’t believe in the social graph. It will rarely be of any use when compared to the good old internet. I’ll stick with the anti-social graph, the hundreds of millions of randomly scattered data points on which search engines, eBay, Wikipedia, and just about everything else we’ve come to know and love in the Web 2.0 era are based.