Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?

http://blogmaverick.com/2010/04/22/is-facebook-the-new-internet-and-how-soon-before-microsoft-tries-to-buy-it/

by Anon84 • 16 years ago

17 26 16 years ago

Though I'm not ready to call facebook a fad, or undercut it's significance, I will go out on a limb here and say the way the website works was pretty novel for a while, but it's lacking in innovation.

The ability to check your friends status? Ok, pretty cool. Connect with old HS and college friends? Ok, that's sort of cool too. But more and more I find myself withdrawing from actually participating in the micro of the site, and using it more as a macro tool for my own identity. I don't have a facebook now because I actually use it, or gain much from it, rather I simply have it because, well, everyone else does. And it comes up on Google when people search my name.

In other words it's a part of my general online identity, along with my personal website, twitter, posterous, etc. I'm not saying I use these tools like a lot of others might, but I'm also trying to drive home the point that it's just another of many identity tools that I have at my disposal.

Now I'm not sure about Facebook taking over my complete identity, as in being my de facto online presence, because I have huge issues with the way facebook is going about retaining its control over the data generated from their users.

I think if facebook wants to stay relevant they'll have to keep entering new domains on the web, and certainly they have plans for location-based services, and other stuff down the road.

For the time being now though, the entertainment of watching status updates on my phone, or browsing peoples wall streams just doesn't seem economic to me in terms of building something people would use on the order of a Google search engine. Sure some people may be spending a lot of time on there, but to me it looks more like an illusory fixation with comparing oneself to others than something that I can get real use out of.

(With my Mac I run a business and organize my entire personal and professional life, with Google all of the worlds information is literally at my finger tips, with Facebook I just found out that Stacey's new dog took a leak on the carpet and that Steve thinks avatar was a great movie; there's a big difference there.)

tokenadult2• 16 years ago

As I have related in another HN thread, I actually enjoy the friend-mash-up aspect of Facebook. I am more than twice as old as the median HN participation age (I'm pretty sure), and I have lived in more than one country, so I have friends from various eras of my life and various places. Now on Facebook I post a lot of links (some of which I learn about here on HN, with a hat tip in gratitude) and friends comment about those links, with all sorts of interesting discussions with diverse viewpoints. Friends of mine who have never, ever met one another are good virtual friends as they meet up in my discussion threads. There are even FB friends of my FB friends who have asked me to become directly FB-friended by me (a request I have honored) so that they can get in on all the link postings. This has been a fun and unexpected aspect of FB for me. I block ads on Facebook and all other websites, and I use Facebook Purity to block other FB annoyances. I never, ever play FB games or do anything on FB that directly costs me money. I like the way I can free-ride on FB and enjoy a service monetized by people who have less intellectual ways of having fun.

sunchild2• 16 years ago

"If you are like most, you kill more time hopping around on Facebook than you do exploring the Net."

Uhhh...not even remotely applicable to me, unless by "the Net" he is referring to a Sandra Bullock movie.

rbanffy• 16 years ago

I think I spent 90 minutes on that movie. That's probably more than I have spent on Facebook.

timcederman• 16 years ago

The article did say "like most", not "like all".

sunchild2• 16 years ago

I think it's safe to say more people click "the Net" than Facebook all day.

ct4ul4u• 16 years ago

I don't think Facebook is buyable right now. Consider how wide the PDF of its future values is. There is a chance that Facebook will be bigger than Google. I'm sure many of you have reasons why it won't happen, but it is plausible. It's certainly what Facebook management is shooting for.

Alternatively, Facebook could be out of fashion in 2 years. Don't forget that we work in a fashion industry. It wouldn't even be worth its last post-money valuation.

So the expected value of Facebook lies somewhere in between and that expected value is radically short of management's dreams. They don't need cash and they seem to be executing well. This is not a recipe for strategic acquisition.

I think Facebook will remain private and independent for as long as it can. If they are on a path to success and need more cash, they'll IPO (remember those?). If they keep their user base, but can't scale their monetization, they'll be bought by somebody who can (a search engine). The worst case isn't pretty because they don't have the backstop that has been supporting MySpace through its troubles (music).

robryan• 16 years ago

No they have a better one (connect).

loup-vaillant4• 16 years ago

> Facebook knows more than all of us like to admit about its users. They have our personal information […]

People will eventually realize what a dystopia this is. So my guess is that Facebook (and similar services) will become obsolete soon (within a decade or two). Just sell easy to use personal web servers[1] that you just plug into the wall, and they are toast ($99 is much cheaper than my privacy).

[1] By "easy", I mean esier than Facebook itself. By "personal", I mean at home (virtual private hosting is not personal).

JeremyBanks• 16 years ago

> $99 is much cheaper than my privacy

To you and many of us certainly, but do you really think that's true of the average user? Especially given the tradeoffs (most residential internet connections would be terribly slow and unreliable for such a purpose) it seems very unlikely that the average person, who has only the vaguest understanding of technology and probably hasn't given much thought to their privacy, would be enthusiastic enough about this idea for it to take off.

loup-vaillant4• 16 years ago

Fixing the asymmetry of our internet connections will require political effort. But we don't need the reliability. We already know how to make suitable backups, like fall-back MX.

"Average user" mostly means "clueless user". This is unacceptable. Everyone should know a minimum, like the difference between a web browser and a search engine. When they do, they will easily see the privacy problems.

I agree $99 is too much for most people. But this is only the current price of a Sheeva plug. I think we can eventually lower it down to $30, which would be more like it.

We have both the hardware and the software. Packaging the whole only takes a dedicated GNU/Linux distribution (or even just a meta-package). So, without the political and teaching issues, Facebook and Gmail could be made obsolete within the year. With them, we'll need a decade. But, to quote Eben Moglen: "It's not that it can't be done".

dasil0032• 16 years ago

That's a nice utopian vision from someone aware of our eroding privacy, but the only way the average consumer would care enough about privacy for that to be viable in the market would be for Facebook's data to grow a couple orders of magnitude more comprehensive then it is now over the next decade. Then if the US government were replaced by east-german style totalitarian regime to the point that violent revolution was eventually necessary, then, at that point people would be ready for their own private hosted service appliances.

loup-vaillant4• 16 years ago

Do you have any Idea of the current comprehensiveness of the data they have? Do I have to remind you how they use it? Facebook is already spying it's users (for censoring and commercial purposes), and Google do semantic analysis of your e-mail (to send you ads).

So I don't think we need a totalitarian regime for people to realize they might want a personal server. It just takes a little teaching. Personally, as soon as I have a provider which let me send mail on my own, I will buy one.

timdellinger• 16 years ago

I suppose Mark Cuban thinks Facebook is going to turn into a 1991 AOL: a one-stop shop for all things internet, a lens through which you experience everything. This is the same Mark Cuban who said that Twitter will replace Google for searching... I think he's a little out of touch with how people use these services.

Facebook is attempting to expand in scope because they're ambitious, but at the end of the day, they're just a social networking site. As a matter of fact, they're really just a template for people who don't want to go to the trouble of designing their own webpage. Which is a great service, but that's all it is. Oh, and it's easy to link to other people's web pages.

Facebook and social networking are exciting today the same way EBay was in 2000: the medium is the message. You went to EBay because it was novel and fun. Soon enough, Facebook will have reached it's potential the way EBay has.

ekanes• 16 years ago

They're pretty different actually. eBay is a website that stopped evolving, whereas Facebook is a platform that's evolving at a decent pace without signs of slowing down.

roc• 16 years ago

> I suppose Mark Cuban thinks Facebook is going to turn into a 1991 AOL: a one-stop shop for all things internet, a lens through which you experience everything.

For everyone I know that actually uses Facebook [1], this is essentially true. FB users don't do things on the net. They do things on FB. Excursions to sites/services outside of Facebook are the exception.

I've been calling it "AOL all-over-again" for a few years now. (I'm behind the curve, I'm sure; I don't do social networks).

[1] Subtracting out those who use it for professional reasons.

SanjayU• 16 years ago

Gotta agree on this one.

jamesjyu• 16 years ago

The difference between Facebook and eBay is the overwhelming success of the FB platform. Yesterday, Mark said that it only took a fraction of the time to get to 100MM connect users than it did for normal FB users. They are betting big again on the platform by basically giving publishers even more power with social plugins and the graph api.

You are trivializing FB by saying it's just a templating engine for people who don't want to design their own webpage. FB is much more than that, and they will be even more interesting if they prove their graph api idea.

In this way, FB is more like a Google than an eBay.

ajju• 16 years ago

"Google has minimal if any connection to their users."

I think, at the very least, almost every Gmail and Android user would disagree. Not to mention users of search, docs, voice etc. etc.

Carcarius• 16 years ago

So, will Facebook destroy the Internet or simply change it's identity? Change it's identity, haha, get it ... ahem... (:P

Personally, I don't like where this is heading. I deactivated my account (can't delete it outright for some reason!) so I should no longer have a presence on facebook. However, this is not the case since I can log back in and my account is instantly re-activated. Whatever I shared on that site previously will always be there.

The privacy concerns are a serious problem and I think people need to critically look at this and decide if this is what they want their Internet experience to be going forward.

olefoo• 16 years ago

> can't delete it outright for some reason!

The hotel California approach to growing your userbase.

tokenadult2• 16 years ago

I deactivated my account (can't delete it outright for some reason!)

I haven't tried this myself, but here

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=16929680703

is supposedly advice on how to permanently delete a Facebook account. Maybe some HN participant will do the experiment and report back to us how it goes.

I do know (from my son trying the experiment) that Facebook account deactivation is very rapidly reversible.

eplanit• 16 years ago

When was the last time you surfed the net? 5 seconds ago.

Can you remember when you just clicked around looking to discover new sites or a site to occupy your time? Yes, I remember this morning.

Now ask yourself when was the last time you sat on your couch or laid in bed clicking the remote looking for something to watch on TV? I remember last evening quite well.

Finally, how long do you regularly spend on Facebook ? Zero, nada, nuttin'.

How much time do you spend checking out your Wall, your friends’ Wall and hopping from profile to profile checking people out? First, I thought the previous question was "finally"...Still, Zero, nada, nuttin'

And, I'm not alone, not by a longshot.

I've heard non-tech news commentators make the mistake that Facebook is somehow a distinct technology than the Internet on which it lives. I think the author of the article is similarly confused. Does he/she see cars as the new freeways?

Facebook loves to try and define itself as "a platform". I guess to see one's self that way, one must deny or ignore the actual platform on which one depends. For the gullible in its ranks, that characterization seems to work well.

Perceval• 16 years ago

Microsoft already bought a chunk of Facebook—$240 million worth back in 2007. That purchase gave Facebook an implied valuation of $15 billion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/technology/24cnd-facebook....

Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?

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