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Is Mark Zuckerberg the Next Steve Case?
theodp writes "With all signs for Facebook pointing up, author Douglas Rushkoff goes contra, arguing that Facebook hype will fade. 'Appearances can be deceiving,' says Rushkoff. 'In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren't the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.' Rushkoff, who made a similar argument about AOL eleven years ago in a quashed NY Times op-ed, reminds us that AOL was also once considered ubiquitous and invincible, and former AOL CEO Steve Case was deemed no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg. 'So it's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won,' concludes Rushkoff. 'It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order.'"
In my network, posts are getting sparser and sparser. Just like the end of Freindser, or Orkut, or any other social network system. People get bored and stop. It the infusion of new users that drives their survival, and Facebook my be nearing the end of people willing to sign up.
Except that when AOL was deluging the world with free installation CDs, it was clear that most of AOL's users would migrate to The Real Internet as soon as they got a clue. I don't see a successor to Facebook on the horizon just yet. Not that it can't happen.
He has a point in that in there are some unknown quantities in Facebook's revenue model. We don't know how valuable all the information they've collected on users will turn out to be in terms of actually increasing the effectiveness of advertising. We know that it is desireable to marketers at the moment, but marketing trends change.
People are already getting bored of Facebook. It's just there and taken for granted now.
What has been lost with Facebook is the spirit of social networking. It's more a site where you add all your friends or people you have met in real life. Other sites allowed you to make new connections with people you didn't know.
I put this down to Facebook's ability to enter all your details, name, address, phone number and so on. It was pretty obvious once your profile allows you to add some very specific information that is valuable for ID theft that people would then lock down their profiles and no longer be networking outside of their group of friends.
There are 3 stages.
Early adopters: It is the new hip thing to do. Also this is where the zealots and the big fans come in. This was the area when face book was considered a social network for college kids.
Middle adopters: This is where the product gets it's name recognition. And big envesters come in. This is where it really grows. you don't need to be hip to use it it is mostly expected.
Late adopters: Ok it isn't a fad. That is when grandma gets an account. It is big and the early adopters start leaving to the next big thing.
So even when you go from stage 2-3 you are still growing. But you are approaching the end.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When I read the headline I thought huh, he's going to pose for Playboy and marry John Romero?
AOL died because it was impossible for them to transition from dialup to broadband. While they could easily serve the entire country with dialup, it was impossible for them to do the same with broadband because broadband access is controlled by an oligopoly of companies who knew it was in their interest to keep tight control.
AOL died when the open access rules died.
There is no parallel to facebook because there is no oligopoly who can keep facebook from upgrading their website.
Actually, that may turn out to be the dumbest thing I've ever written. The lack of net neutrality rules could kill facebook just like the lack of open access rules killed aol.
Even if that doesn't happen, I would not eagerly invest in facebook. Of course, I said the same thing about Google when they IPO'd, so what do I know?
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Does anyone remember it? Even real companies were spending money to build their spaces there. How long ago was that? And now? Just tumbleweed...
Why do you think my computer is facebook.com?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
When you get down to it, there are several multi-billion dollar industries entirely based around things we don't really need, and many that have been around for a good while. Music, film, drugs, sports, perfume, computer games... In fact, in first world countries, stuff people don't need probably accounts for the majority of economic activity*. Facebook is hardly unique in that respect.
*Disclaimer: this claim is a wild guess based on no actual statistics, and what people "need" is arguable anyway.
What an idiot. He just says "MySpace falls first, Facebook falls second" without even attempting an analysis into why MySpace fell to Facebook. It's not the definitive analysis, in fact it's off-the-cuff, but here's mine:
MySpace was infantile. It encouraged aliases, whereas Facebook encouraged valid names. MySpace also had GeoCities personalization. There's nothing wrong with infantile if that's what you want your market to be. Facebook appeals to people of all ages, and that is one of the main reasons it won.
Now that Facebook has its installed base of the whole world, it's not going anywhere.
For some reason, the author of this article has AOL on the mind. He mentions "AOL chat rooms" as being in the same spectrum as MySpace and Facebook. Never mind that AOL chat rooms, by being on AOL, limited the potential audience to those on dial-up. More interesting to me is why Facebook has replaced UseNet or even the blogs that supplanted UseNet. The reason is that Facebook is people-centric while UseNet and blog are topic-centric. There is a reason why we call it "social networking". It's different.
I see Facebook as being the Microsoft Word that beat out WordPerfect, WordStar, and a host of platform-specific predecessors to those. Once Microsoft reached the installed base of the whole world, the whole world wasn't about to switch, at least not for a few decades. There was an ultimate and lasting victor in that chain of previous market failures. In the analysis of trends of word processors, it was a case of "Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results".
It's not so much companies as communication models. Initially, any new form of communication is dominated by incompatible proprietary systems. Then these give way to some form of standard and the market is either filled by government monopolies that interoperate at a national level or by smaller companies that interoperate at a smaller scale. We've seen this with postal systems, telephones, electronic mail, computer networks, and instant messaging. Social networking might be the one that breaks the trend, but it seems unlikely.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The info FB has collected on EU citizens may be valuable to marketers, however they won't get their hands on it. Thus the value of it to FB's bottom line is very nearly zero.
Basically FB and similar huge online sites collecting personal info, like Amazon and eBay, would run afoul of EU's Data protection Directive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive if they start sharing their databases with third parties. FB has specifically been told by the EU that they, FB, will be blocked in most EU member states at the firewall level if they do this.
The background is that the data FB is likely to have, in many cases will include particularly sensitive information relating to gender, sexuality, political observation and more. This type of data are especially sensitive in the view of EU law and subject to extremely strict restrictions on how it can be used and shared. In particular some kind of click-through EULA absolutely isn't sufficient to consider the user to have given consent to sharing of data. Please see this page for more info: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/policies/privacy/index_en.htm
Also check the last paragraph in the section marked 'Scope' if you wish to argue that FB isn't based in the EU. The short answer is that - as far as EU law is concerned - this doesn't matter. The service provider, FB in this case, will by definition need to use electronic equipment, IE. networking equipment, inside the EU to reach their users.
So now you know why the info collected by, say, eBay isn't already used for marketing purposes by third parties.
All this was made clear to FB in no uncertain terms not too long ago, and may be one reason why people try to cash in on FB. Once the market realizes the collected EU info is worthless, then things may change a bit on the valuation front...
There are people uploading their photographs to Facebook and not keeping backups, without realising that Facebook can permanently remove their ability to access them on a whim.
And there are people putting their photographs into binders and not making scans, without realizing that mother nature can permanently remove their roof and dump a bunch of water in their house on a whim. The problem here is the mentality of not making backups, not failbook.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When you say it that way, Google's chance don't sound all that good.
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This spectrum of interaction styles, including email, usenet, web forums, and facebook et al. makes me wonder if there is an underlying sociological or psychological message or two...
As a recently graying beard myself, I know I miss the days when usenet and email worked and were assumed to be the right solution. I still vaguely despise these new-fangled web forums for replacing usenet with more of a walled garden, where the forum operator can wield their little powers and also siphon ad revenue out of the cosmos. And I despise facebook et al because they go a step further, encouraging a narcissistic world view within a continuation of the web operator's unnecessary concentration of power.
But these are two different dimensions: greed drives the commercialization that works very hard to dismantle the decentralized nature of early Internet communication and replace them with walled gardens where ads and analytics can run wild---the conversion of the populace into a market/product. On the other dimension, the communication styles still range from personal 1:1 or 1:many (email, informal email lists); to celebrity-oriented broadcasts or cliques (email newsletters, blogs, conventional web columns); to topical forums (usenet before it rotted out, discussion forums like slashdot, research via search engine).
Those of us who despise the new social networking the most are often more academic- and engineering-oriented users. I think we secretly want to retain the web as a worldwide library where we can research whatever we need and possibly publish if and when we have something worth publishing. Meanwhile, we've got other users who want it to be some version of gossip circle, whether fitting the template of the town square, cafe, pub, school house, or street corner. And of course we've got greedy fuckers who don't care about any of that, really, as long as they can figure out how to exploit it---this includes the big corporations trying to control the market, the small sites living on ad revenue, the kids fantasizing about launching the next big thing, and the users hoping to get their big break and transcend to celebrity status.
I have a strict policy for people who do this to my wife and I. They get told *last* if they get told at all from that point on until we receive an apology. This applies to parents, siblings, and everyone else. I have no time for anyone who thinks they "deserve" priority in how I disclose facts about my life.
Dear friend "sjbe (173966)". I am upset that you didn't notify me first about this policy... I had to hear about it via Slashdot and I'm sitting here crying and wondering what I did to sjbe (173966) to deserve this awful treatment.
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.