Facebook Is Not Really That Special

by mqt • 18 years ago

95 119 18 years ago

bdr• 18 years ago

It was a good post, but the phrase "smelling their own dog shit" was a pretty awkward change of tone and contradicts "Facebook is pretty good at what it does". It kind of came out of nowhere at the end.

mattmaroon11• 18 years ago

You know, you're right. Long story as to how that got there, but it should have gotten edited out with what preceded it. I'll fix that.

alfredp• 18 years ago

For some reason, I am reminded of this article: Social Software: Stuff that gets you laid http://many.corante.com/archives/2005/02/16/social_software_...

mwerty3• 18 years ago

Did you buy into the google IPO? I ask because its not clear how special you thought Google was. It's easy to remember stuff this way and not count all the failures you also had a good feeling about.

xlnt11• 18 years ago

you should try reading his post before criticizing him.

he literally said he couldn't foresee GOOG in particular getting so big, just that type of thing in general.

mwerty3• 18 years ago

Buying into the google IPO is one event that would signal a money-where-my-mouth-is kind of commitment to this 'type of thing'. There might be other activities (buying yahoo+google) that signal some strong sense of special. I too can recall being moved by the successes since they survive - I don't have to note this down somewhere. It's harder to remember the companies that fail into obscurity that you had a good feeling about.

mattmaroon11• 18 years ago

Exactly. His argument is fallacious. I never would have guessed GOOG in particular would get to where it is today.

aston2• 18 years ago

I love how Matt Maroon's post titles always sound like he prepared for blogging by swigging Haterade.

xlnt11• 18 years ago

What part of his post, specifically, do you disagree with?

(If what he said is true then it's pretty ridiculous to call it hate.)

cglee2• 18 years ago

Doesn't look like a disagreement, but just an observation/opinion.

allenbrunson• 18 years ago

for starters, the title. "not really that special" is the sort of passive-aggressive thing someone says that often leads to flamewars. the text of the article continues in that same vein.

blader4• 18 years ago

I'd parody this with 'Email Is Not Really That Special', but I'm too busy building a profitable company on Facebook.

xlnt11• 18 years ago

being able to make money off something is different than it being important. and the sense of important Matt meant was made pretty clear in his post.

jmzachary3• 18 years ago

Chia pets were profitable. The pet rock, too. That doesn't mean they were important, except to the people who realized the profits.

mattmaroon11• 18 years ago

Email was clearly a paradigm shift, but I wasn't there during its inception. It was well established by the time I got wise.

blader4• 18 years ago

Okay, that was a little flippant on my part.

I agree with the other two guys that there isn't a whole lot of correlation between profitability and importance.

I just think you're underestimating the importance of social tools that help people communicate more efficiently. I could replace 'Facebook' with 'email' and 'Google' with 'the telephone' and your rant would make about as much sense, but it'd be just as wrong.

jacobolus2• 18 years ago

“paradigm shift”

You should look that up (i.e. read Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions), because it does not mean what you think it means. (Except when used as a bullshit buzzword by “enterprise” software executives)

axod5• 18 years ago

Email has become a broken platform for spam - similar to facebook.

aneesh• 18 years ago

"Facebook is pretty good at what it does. But what it does just isn’t important."

Maybe not important to him (or me, for that matter), but there are definitely people out there to whom it's important. But facebook needs to find a good way to monetize all those page views before the hype wears off.

xlnt11• 18 years ago

he agreed it was convenient for them, but said it's not important in some directly world-changing sense. you haven't contradicted this.

sgibat4• 18 years ago

it _is_ world changing for them. it completely restructures their social lives and the opportunities available to them for both serious and non-serious social interaction. facebook has had a larger impact on many people's lives than google. do you think most people really care about somewhat better search results and somewhat better webmail over having access to four times (pulled that number out of my ass, but you can bet that it's a multiplier) as many social events and people as they did before?

ed2• 18 years ago

It took nearly 1000 words to say this is all a gut feeling?

Can you dismiss their 65 billion page views a month? The fact that half of their users return daily? Can you explain why it's not valuable to essentially own most interpersonal relationships on the web?

xlnt11• 18 years ago

pokemon is popular too. that doesn't make it important in the sense matt means.

ed2• 18 years ago

But it's not just popular. Almost any undergraduate in the US will tell you that facebook is already an essential social resource. That isn't trivial nor is it easy to dismiss.

cglee2• 18 years ago

I have a fairly young sister. Just a few years ago, she was absolutely obsessed with pokemon. The only way we could get her to do math was with pokemon flashcards. To her and her friends, pokemon was their life.

Note: she's since outgrown it and is now obsessed with anime and gaiaonline (i'd never heard of the thing until recently -- apparently VERY popular).

webwright• 18 years ago

He's not dismissing it or saying that it's not valuable.

And, for the record, AOL had a staggering percentage of eyeballs at their peak.

I think the distinction is that Google is a technological advancement/phenomenon which seems lasting. Facebook is a SOCIAL phenomenon which (to Matt) does not.

I'm inclined to agree with him. I think we'll be talking about Facebook in a few years the way we talk about AOL right now.

mattmaroon11• 18 years ago

I think they have legs. I mean, I think people will still use social networking in 5 years. And they may do it primarily on Facebook. I'm not trying to say that it or Facebook are a fad, or that Facebook isn't very good at it.

I just don't think their value at the time will even be 1/10th of Google's because of the distinction you accurately summed up.

wumi5• 18 years ago

a lot of users return daily to check their messages and wall posts, sorta like email

run4yourlives2• 18 years ago

Can you explain how they make money?

yters4• 18 years ago

In a purely technical sense, none of the web 2.0 phenomena is special. What are blogs, social networks, and the like? Merely the web pages that we nerds have been messing with since the dawn of the internet.

However, the real "technology" is how the popular perception of this tech has been (purposefully?) changed so it is no longer "techie."

On the other hand, the fundamental problems of the internet are not inherently technological anyways, but based on social dynamics and trust. That is why things like facebook and myspace are important.

What I would like to see some genius do is figure out what the "purpose" of the internet is. By this, I mean what is the compelling, concrete, and feasible potential of the internet? Sounds like a facile question, but it isn't. I don't mean something like "communicate faster, broadly, and more efficiently" or "watch porn."

There is a deep, underlying motivation that compels us to interact and be social, to avoid loneliness and the like, despite all the narcissistic toys we surround ourselves with. Why, and what does the internet do for this motivation?

xlnt11• 18 years ago

facebook makes no interesting steps forward in solving trust problems. i made an account. people give facebook their email password and thus entire address book (this amuses me when the topic is setting up reasonable trust system), and thus i sometimes get friend requests from acquaintances. which i ignore.

all they came up with is letting you make one type of connection with other people with an account. nothing to see here. the only thing that makes it notable is the large amount of data put into it.

yters4• 18 years ago

Yes, I think facebook started out right, but now the pressure to profit is causing them to make stupid decisions.

The key is to allow the kind of control people have in real relationships. From what I understand, it isn't possible to terminate facebook friendships, and that eliminates the basis of accountability needed for a good trust relationship.

xlnt11• 18 years ago

someone thought facebook was special?

bosshog3• 18 years ago

It is, but not because of the technology.

http://www.horsepigcow.com/2008/02/23/social-capital-and-the...

mrtron• 18 years ago

A lot of backlash coming from here, but I absolutely agree with this post.

jmzachary3• 18 years ago

I agree with it, too. I don't see the big deal with myspace or facebook, in a big picture kind of way. Now that people are on it and have built out some social graphs, they're asking "now what?" and there is no good answer. What is the big itch that facebook scratches?

sgibat4• 18 years ago

The demand for the fast, free flow of information about your friends' and acquaintances' lives and events, not only to tell you about who and what you already know, but about who and what you'd like to know; And it works.

pg• 18 years ago

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.

Wasn't Yahoo using Google to generate search results when you first saw Google?

greendestiny• 18 years ago

And before they were using Google they were using Altavista, I don't think Yahoo were using their own search results for very long. I remember switching to Google from Altavista. Mostly people changed to Google because it indexed more stuff (hence Google) not because of the better search results. The importance of better search ranking became apparent later, initially you just tended to try to come up with better search terms.

angstrom• 18 years ago

There was also Inktomi in there somewhere too. They were eventually acquired by Yahoo.

To be fair, Yahoo had a winning strategy of just licensing the search tech from other companies all the way up until Inktomi. Which is part of why it's funny they didn't buy the Google search when it was handed to them on a silver platter.

mattmaroon11• 18 years ago

I don't think so. I'm not clear on the timeline exactly, but weren't they open to the public for some time before Yahoo licensed their technology?. I know I must have found out about Google in 99 or early 2000, because I was living by Akron U at the time. When did they partner with Yahoo?

Also if I remember correctly, when you searched on Yahoo for, say, poker, you saw whatever was in their directory first, and then any further results were from whoever their provider was (I want to say it was Inktomi before Google). Am I wrong about that?

fallentimes2• 18 years ago

Matt,

You're right. Inktomi powered their search results before Google.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2162831

boredguy8• 18 years ago

I "discovered" google when a search on Yahoo that used to bring me to a certain site no longer returned on the front page. I saw "powered by google" rather than "powered by yahoo".

sah• 18 years ago

There's a somewhat spotty timeline here: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

I started using Google in the first half of 1998. When people talk about these things, I'm always shocked to learn how early to the party I appear to have been. It felt like it was already a big deal when I first saw it, maybe because it was so shocking to see that search wasn't as doomed as it had seemed to be.

aswanson• 18 years ago

I remember Yahoo coming in very late, after the G had started to seriously kick their ass; maybe 2001?. I went straight from infoseek to google around 2000. Yahoo was never the engine for me.

Goladus6• 18 years ago

I rarely used Yahoo, but I used metacrawler. It claimed to gather results from a half dozen different engines. But it was still a fundamentally different way of using the web. When I first started using the internet, which was when I was in high school, I'd log in, go to a search engine, and just think of something to type in. I'd just go exploring, basically. I'd gather a big list of websites and visit them one at a time, generally reading each one. I was young, and absorbing information like that was easy and I enjoyed it.

As I gradually shifted from browsing aimlessly towards finding something specific, I began to appreciate Google's advantages of speed and reliability. The only time I ever tried another engine after trying Google was if I didn't find what I was looking for. That wasn't very often, and usually the other engines didn't turn up anything interesting either, so I gave up after awhile and just used Google for everything.

menloparkbum3• 18 years ago

He's wrong because for most people, their friends and their social life are more important than the rest of the stuff on the internet. You can't google your friend's birthday. You can look it up on Facebook. You can't google for photos of what happened at the bar last saturday. You can look it up on facebook. Oh, you didn't get that cute girl's number last night? She's a friend's friend right? Sweet, she accepted the friend request. You can't do that on google, and previously, if you forgot to get her number on the spot, you were out of luck in real life, too. You can't google for "what should I do friday night" but you can use facebook to find out what people you know might be doing. If you are already anti social and simply sit at home in your boxer shorts, then yes, Facebook makes no sense. But if you actually have friends and do stuff with them, it is a very useful tool. I'm almost certain that 90% of anyone that went to college in the USA in the past 5 years has 2 sites they visit every day: facebook and google. There is no other way at the moment to use the internet to do the things I mentioned above.

On the other hand, the applications can be overwhelmingly irritating. The news feed is a blessing and a curse. I like to know when there are new photos of my friends to check out, but I don't care about what Zombie they just became. And regarding the app signup notifications in the feed: there are some things I'd rather not know about my friends, and one of them is how much time they are spending goofing off on Facebook...

Note to startup hackers: if you're on facebook and more than 50% of your news feed is your CEO's random facebook activity, it might be time to look for a new job (or start your own thing.)

volida4• 18 years ago

The serious question is if it can be replaced not if its currently popular.

there are already so many social networks, so facebook is not dominant where as Google has penetrated globally due to its quality.

geeky3• 18 years ago

I'd say that for most people on facebook, it's easier to replace google than to replace facebook. You can always use Yahoo or MSN for search, they might not be as good, but they're good enough. You can use Yahoo maps or Live Earth. And you can use Yahoo email, which is getting really good recently. But it's hard to leave facebook unless all your friends leave with you at the same time to a new social network.

menloparkbum3• 18 years ago

I'd argue that Facebook has the best 'quality' when compared to the other social networks in the USA. The UI and feature set are much better than any of its competitors. Facebook is dominant in the USA; the only competitor is MySpace which seems to fill a different niche.

Facebook = keep tabs on people you know, or sorta know.

MySpace = meet random people you don't know, get spammed by porn bots, irritate your ex by posting salacious photos of yourself with a new fling, browse photos of potential mates in a criminally inappropriate age bracket from yourself, etc.

halo• 18 years ago

Whether Facebook can be replaced is an interesting question.

I'm leaning towards "no". For any site to replace Facebook it would require either many, many users to make the transition to another site or to outright leave making the site less useful for its users, and I honestly don't see that happening. Facebook is honestly nicely designed, has plenty of users and I can't see any killer app or nicer equivalent of Facebook appearing to make moving worthwhile.

The only thing that could replace Facebook is an unprecedented sharing of data between many significant players allowing interoperability between sites much like how E-Mail works. The existence of DataPortability may be a slow but sure approach towards this goal but there's too many factors to consider influencing whether this will ever actually happen. I certainly hope so in the long run - one site having the amount of influence that Facebook potentially can worries me.

Disclaimer: I don't actually use Facebook, and probably never will.

edw5192• 18 years ago

"most people"

I would amend that to "some people". Just seems like "most people" to you.

Even if 50 million Americans are on Facebook, then what are the other 250 million doing?

dcurtis3• 18 years ago

150 million are slightly too old to understand it, internet illiterate, or poor. And the other 100 million are too young, or haven't graduated from MySpace yet.

menloparkbum3• 18 years ago

I didn't mean that Facebook itself was more important to "most people." I meant that friendships and socializing in general are close to the top of the list of what most people consider important in life. Thus an online tool that helps people stay in touch with their friends and socialize is perceived as being very important, even though it seems like a trivial thing.

hooande• 18 years ago

I think Matt's point wasn't that facebook was worthless, just that it's nothing special.

There are definitely services besides facebook that will let you do all of the things you mentioned (looking up a birthday, pictures from the bar, contacting a friend of a friend). In fact, you can do those things on pretty much every social networking site. Facebook just happens to be the popular one right now.

When it first became popular, Google was a one of a kind. The other search engines have since caught up, but initially they didn't even compare. I think that's what makes a website really special, and that's kind of what I think facebook is lacking. There's nothing inherently special about fb other than the large number of people that use it.

Goladus6• 18 years ago

The problem is that Facebook isn't good at anything other than being a social network, and it's not even amazingly good at that in the same way that Google was amazingly good at search or the original Macintosh was amazingly good at being a personal computer.

There is no other way at the moment to use the internet to do the things I mentioned above.

My friends prefer evite for organizing things. It uses email, there's a thin layer of privacy, and you have a space to include details and RSVPs and such. It's not great, but it's less complicated than Facebook and you don't have to be a member of the site for it to work.

You can't google for "what should I do friday night" but you can use facebook to find out what people you know might be doing.

I like yelp for help with the question "what should I do friday night." It's a social network where members actually create useful content for anyone to use.

mattmaroon11• 18 years ago

Also you can Google for what bar/restaurant to go to. Or movie show times/reviews. Or how to get there.

axod5• 18 years ago

"facebook friends" != real friends

truebosko• 18 years ago

I don't know when/why this became reality. On my facebook account, I only have people I know pretty well, many of them lifelong friends. It keeps my list short (Something like 40 I think) but it doesn't crowd it up. I guess that's not the norm

Spyckie• 18 years ago

Google is the 'ahha' tool for introverts. Facebook is the 'ahha' tool for extroverts.

alex_c• 18 years ago

One counter-example: would you dismiss Flickr, and the entire photo hosting industry, as not that special, or unimportant?

Facebook likes to brag that they host more photos in the US than Flickr and the other competitors COMBINED (I'm trying to find a linkable source for this - maybe someone has more luck?). That seems pretty special to me, especially since all those photos can be found in a strong social context, unlike on most other hosts.

I also wouldn't dismiss "a convenient way for you and a friend to decide which bar to go to tonight" as unimportant. For the majority of people it's more important than "the biggest advance in information distribution since the printing press". Sad, but true.

It feels weird defending Facebook, since I resisted signing up for it, I'm not a constant user, and yes, there IS a lot of hype. But I don't think it can be dismissed as easily as "I don't get it".

run4yourlives2• 18 years ago

>Sometimes I think Silicon Valley believes its own hype just a bit too much.

Understatement of the 21st century right there.

h34t• 18 years ago

Was the pet rock Special and Important?

Well, for whom? For its creator it was obviously both. For a few happy customers it was at least special. For society at large, who gives a shit?

I think this would be a much clearer discussion if we defined "Special" and "Important" properly (and realized that they mean very different things to different people).

There are a lot of people on HN/YC who are trying to hack together a successful internet company. For them, I don't think Matt's definitions of Special or Important are all that useful, because they ignore a lot of viable business ideas -- ideas that fill a niche which is inane by itself, but economically important to a few focused souls. If you make your living building Widget X, then no matter how trivial that widget is to its users lives, it is everything to the people who devote their lives/company to producing it.

The better our economy evolves to allow niche ideas to make money, the harder time we're going to have figuring out how to define "Important". It is increasingly possible to earn a living doing something that's entirely trivial from a "big picture" point of view... but as soon as you're earning a living from it, it's become important (to you).

schammy• 18 years ago

Totally agree. FB is a complete waste of time and I wish TechCrunch would stop writing about it 50 times per day.

randomhack• 18 years ago

Facebook is not really that special.

1) Facebook, unlike Google is not a technological advance. It means that copying Facebook is easier.

2) People can also jump ship en-masse from one social network to another within a few years. Many people migrated from Myspace to Facebook. Its not limited to social networking sites. I was amazed when almost everyone of my friends migrated from Yahoo Messenger to Google Talk within about a month. I had about 30-35 regularly online friends at Yahoo and suddenly almost all of them migrated to Google Talk. This was when GTalk didnt even have emoticons. Of course Yahoo Messenger is still ahead of Google Talk in terms of users but this was just an example to show that even if a previous communication medium has all your friends, that does not mean you are locked in. It may so happen that suddenly everyone just simply without explanation migrate to another platform. This process is not very rational and completely unpredictable.

3) Also consider the fact Facebook does not seem popular in countries like India and China. Within some years these countries will be far bigger in terms of number of users compared to the US.

Mistone3• 18 years ago

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.

Mistone3• 18 years ago

im so ready to switch from google

ntoshev2• 18 years ago

More fluff from Matt Maroon. This is starting to irritate me. Matt is probably a nice guy, but does this article contain any insight for anyone?

If not, why exactly is it the top story?

rms• 18 years ago

It makes for decent discussion.

ntoshev2• 18 years ago

It makes for some discussion, but it doesn't start at a particularly high point. I have read much more interesting articles about social networks on this very site, stuff written by Marc Andreesen and Paul Buchheit.

For example, the potential of social networks as consumer distribution model or as magnifying social capital is completely ignored here.

yters4• 18 years ago

Matt's ability lies in catalyzing conversation, which is more important than making an article with 100 points but 0 comments.

jacobolus2• 18 years ago

This rant is uninsightful and frankly pointless: it boils down to “I don’t find Facebook very useful for me, therefore there’s nothing to it,” with added bitter invective.

Matt should go read some of danah boyd’s sociology papers about social networking sites, if he wants to be convinced that there’s more than just a “nifty utility” there. She does a much better job exploring their significance than random unsubstantiated comments in this rather inane discussion.

lbrdn• 18 years ago

Google made information as easy to come by as air. Fb made it easier to know who your girlfriend is thinking about cheating on you with. In the scheme, fb will be a great scrapbook for historians to peruse but Google will have changed the way we learn.

ssharp• 18 years ago

Facebook & MySpace have managed to get people on the internet who wouldn't normally be on it. If you sampled random college students, I wouldn't be surprised at all if most of them care very little (or not at all) about blogs. However, most of them probably use Facebook or MySpace. It's hard to get the perspective when we're some encompassed in what we do. Personally, I rarely sign onto Facebook but am reading blogs daily. I know very well that I'm the exception.

I don't think Facebook is worth $15 billion but I wouldn't trivialize it too much - it's becoming the de facto online personal communications tool.

bosshog3• 18 years ago

You could replace "Facebook" with Hacker News in your argument.

It's not the technology, but the community.

fallentimes2• 18 years ago

No one is calling Hackers News a paradigm shift.

jbrun• 18 years ago

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.

gojomo• 18 years ago

Way late to the thread, but anyway -- here's why Facebook is special for me:

I had at least a little 'aha' when first encountering buddy-list instant messaging; and again when it added a bit of activity awareness (like twitters or Facebook statuses).

Another little 'aha' was when seeing the convenience of Friendster for both self-publishing to friends and expanding one's social vision.

Another little 'aha' was encountering easy group-forming via the net, via anything from eGroups to the super-easy affiliation groups of early Orkut/Tribe (when Friendster fumbled affiliations).

Yet another was the benefit of online event invites/planning/followup, as through Evite and Meetup and Upcoming.

And another was the fun of casual or cooperative games with friends and strangers, as through IGZ/Excite Games/Yahoo Games/etc.

The special thing about Facebook is that it has a reasonable chance of subsuming all those, and more, based around the shared and reasonably defensible core, the 'social graph'.

That same graph offers a good hope of dealing with the 'trust' problem that's attacking the utility of the net on every front -- email spam, web spam, anonymous harassment, phishing, malware trickery, vandalism, payment/sales fraud, impersonation, libel. People are justifiably retreating to circles of trust, and a well-groomed, jealously defended, authentic 'social graph' is a plausible antidote to all those problems.

For example, email was a giant 'aha' when it was young and strong -- but it's dying under the weight of abuse and generational change. Social graph messaging has already replaced email for some people, maybe a whole generation of net users, and social graph messaging might topple (or save!) email in the near future.

Of course Facebook isn't the first social network, but it's mostly been doing the right things to be the 'last', the one that you never need to leave because it overlooked a new opportunity or forgot to defend its core trust value.

Facebook Is Not Really That Special

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