Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/25/facebook-juggernaut/

by danparsonson • 16 years ago

36 37 16 years ago

techcrunch.com

Kilimanjaro• 16 years ago

Time.

People get bored. People grow up. People move on.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

My mom is on Facebook (sorry, not a joke) but even if her age was the limit, that still means that Facebook will be relevant for 20+ years.

So I doubt that is what is going to kill Facebook.

hugh3• 16 years ago

I think the fact that "my parents are on facebook" might be what kills facebook. Thankfully mine aren't, but I know some of my friends do have parents who are their friends on facebook, and I have to watch my mouth accordingly. (Luckily my own wall is still a haven for all sorts of filth which will never be shared with my relatives or workmates.)

If you've ever seen lamebook.com, a fairly high proportion of the entries involve inappropriate comments by young folks being intercepted by aged relatives. Sure, you can block certain things from certain people, but those controls are pretty unwieldy. Eventually the young folks will have to find somewhere to hang out without their parents.

groaner• 16 years ago

If William Gibson calls Facebook a mall, I suppose Neal Stephenson would call Facebook a Burbclave [1].

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=RMd3GpIFxcUC&pg=PA191

dirtyaura• 16 years ago

Facebook doesn't have ambitious projects? Wtf?

Facebook's instant personalization is the most interesting piece of web infrastructure since, well, advent of the web itself. It's scary too, but big, fundamental improvements usually are.

If they succeed, Facebook will become something much more important than a giant walled garden. Walled gardens wither eventually, but being a critical piece of web infra, that's something huge.

nostromo• 16 years ago

> the most interesting piece of web infrastructure since, well, advent of the web itself

That's a tad bit hyperbolic, no?

exit• 16 years ago

> Facebook's instant personalization is the most interesting piece of web infrastructure since, well, advent of the web itself.

i haven't had a single instant personalization "moment" since it launched. mostly i'm just reminded to log out of facebook when i see my name on some random website.

sahaj• 16 years ago

you may want to look into facebook disconnect.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ejpepffjfmamnamb...

cletus• 16 years ago

It's one of the fallacies of human psychology that people, particularly young people, have a false sense of urgency.

10-15 years ago Microsoft was an unstoppable behemoth. Many--me included--had a hard time seeing how they wouldn't completely dominate the computing landscape.

Since then Microsoft is still a behemoth but this is largely based on inertia.

I don't fear Facebook becoming or owning the Web. In time there will be a new meme that will unseat Facebook.

This inevitable decline is also part of the human condition. Facebook is still in this nascent period of growth. At some point they'll become so large that there really is nowhere to go. So then instead of playing an offensive game, they'll play a defensive one. Every new idea will be a threat to their turf. It happened to Microsoft. It'll happen to them.

Microsoft, as it exists now, is a vehicle for selling Windows and Office licenses. Nothing else matters. Look at the disastrous Kin. You take the successful Sidekick (which MS bought) and then spend two years rewriting the OS to be some flavour of Windows. And it dies.

Look at Sony. The PS3 is/was a weapon in the next-gen optical format wars. This delayed its launch giving the Xbox360 a huge first-mover advantage. The cost of the Blu-ray drive gave the Xbox360 a price advantage.

I call this the advantage of singularity of purpose. The more you try and do, the greater disadvantage you're at. It's why small startups can succeed against behemoths. It's not just that they're more agile. It's that startups don't (generally) have conflicting goals (eg Microsoft's phone division wants to make great phones but Microsoft wants to sell Windows licenses).

Facebook is already showing signs of defensiveness typical of behemoths. Just look at their reaction to Twitter and them co-opting basically everything else anyone else does (eg Places a la Foursquare).

Foursquare may well be dominant for the next year. It's valuation in that time may go 5x or even 10x its alleged $35 billion valuation. But something will unseat it eventually. Even the Roman Empire died eventually.

One of the biggest use cases for Facebook seems to be for games and this is where I think they're weakest. It's something for which your social graph has very little meaning most of the time. I've played 1-2 of these games and typically you find a bunch of random people to neighbour/ally/etc with rather than people you know.

What value does this have being inside the Facebook ecosystem? None other than possibly discovery.

One thing worth noting is that valuation really means anything but. Valuation in the classic sense means the ability to generate income. Valuation in terms of the stockmarket, VCs and investors is something else entirely. It's nothing more than an opinion or expectation on future value.

Google makes more money than ever yet it's value peaked in 2007. At that time the sky was the limit (or so it seemed). Now? It's not seen as being as sexy as it once was.

One last thing: the social space is (clearly) "hot" at the moment. In my opinion I think there is a definite "social bubble" that will at some point burst. A lot of importance is placed on the "social graph". This is particularly true when it comes to the (currently unrealized) future of "social search".

Personally I don't think this idea has nearly as much potential as some seem to think it does. Some think that Facebook's ownership of the social graph will eventually give it a competitive advantage against the likes of Google. I disagree. What's made search successful is scale. What's the advantage of limiting that to the people you know rather than everyone in the world?

Anyway, Facebook will eventually be another Yahoo.

pyre2• 16 years ago

Social search has limited applications, but it does have applications. You may want search results to somehow be weighted by your 'social graph'. On the other hand, you may be doing searches for things that your social circles aren't necessarily into, and the weighting system may actually hinder your searches. That said, I agree that just searching the sites that you friends (or friends of friends) know about is rather limiting.

jacques_chester• 16 years ago

> Even the Roman Empire died eventually.

The Roman Empire last the better part of a thousand years.

In popular history folk ask "how did it fail?"

In professional circles they ask "how the heck did it last so long?"

joegaudet• 16 years ago

While I am no history scholar (most of my info comes from reading the Wiki and watching the history channel) I think the 1000 year thing is a bit of an overstatement. The western roman empire (The part that actually had rome in it) only lasted ~450 years (fell in 476), and really it reached it's peak long before that.

As I understand it the Rome that tends to captivate people's imaginations is the era between Julius Ceasar (Rome the TV show) and Marcus Aurelius (Gladiator). Lasted about 150 years.

Rome didn't really fall, it more so decayed slowly over a long period of time, which I think is probably more suited to the point of this article with regards to LJ, and a future vision of Facebook.

_cbsz• 16 years ago

> Microsoft, as it exists now, is a vehicle for selling Windows and Office licenses.

What about the (rather successful) Xbox 360, which you mention in the very next paragraph?

codelust• 16 years ago

Agree on most of the points, will add a few more:

1. There seems to be a lot of confusion between the platform generating revenue (FB Credits) and revenue generated from being on the largest platform (using your Twitter/FB account to generate leads). The latter will massively overshadow the former and yet the latter will have a greater impact in the enforcing the hype/bubble that is connected to social.

2. If you look at the Top 50 for Comscore October, 2010 for US, you can count about 5 companies that belongs to the 'social' genre. Assume that each of them are doing a billion in revenue a month. That is still an $60 billion a year annually for a domain in which a single company is valued at well over $40 billion. A bubble? Certainly. Is it a bad thing? No; as long as you don't wind up being the sucker at the end of the line, which none of the current investors are going to be.

lukev• 16 years ago

Facebook could very well be dead in just a couple years.

Social networking is very trend-driven. If something new and exciting comes along, or even if cultural views shift and facebook is no longer considered cool, it could die almost overnight. Of course, due to it's huge user base, it would take a while to die (like myspace).

gallerytungsten• 16 years ago

Can Anything Stop Facebook? Absolutely.

Facebook is the new AOL. A "training wheels" site for the rest of the internet.

The cycle of new sites taking market share away from the leaders will be a regular ongoing event, much like the boom-and-bust cycle in silicon; and like the weather.

As interoperability increases, as it has been doing with emulation layers, virtual machines and dual-booting, new sites will offer "translation stages" to help everyone keep possession of their data.

This day is here already, with "inter-CRM" transfer sites. The scrapers and data-porting sites will stay on the attack; each new market leader will have to win on their merits, rather than according to their walls.

Walls, dang. That went out with East Germany, one would hope.

Here's to a better future, to all 450,000 of my best friends.

parenthesis• 16 years ago

Facebook can be seen as the new AOL.

  "Hey, there's this thing I can use on my computer to keep in touch with friends,
  events/celebrities/companies of interest to me, and where I can play games …"

  "Oh, yeah, I've got that too; you mean the internet, right?"

  "Duh, I mean Facebook!"

However, I think there's a proper place, and need for something like Facebook.

Going to a blog, or a company's website, or a forum, or whatever, is like reading a particular magazine, or going into a particular shop, or going to your usual club, or whatever. You know exactly what you want, and you go do it.

Going to Facebook is like walking along the corridor, or street, or hanging out in the staff room, or town square. You randomly bump into friends, co-workers, acquaintances, and just say hi, or exchange gossip, or recommend to each other whom to talk to too, what events to attend, where to shop, what was on TV last night, the weather … . And then you go back to doing proper, specific stuff.

Facebook doesn't hold a huge appeal for me personally, since I don't do much of the real world things it provides the online equivalent of. But for most people, doing those things, whether on or offline, is an essential sauce to their lives.

bcrawl• 16 years ago

Simple. Apple will unseat Facebook. Just the number of people working with Apple devices is mind boggling and Google comes way second with Android devices.

Just like everything, Steve Jobs will redefine how social networking should be done and people will agree. Steve is definitely itching to making strategic partnerships and spend some of that 50+ billion cash reserve.

ImperatorLunae• 16 years ago

Apocalyptic articles like these only continue to be published because people read them; they rarely reflect anything real except a linear projection of current trends.

Take, for example, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/poll/2008... http://www.noozhawk.com/mark_shields/article/1109_mark_shiel...

These predictions have clearly proven false; they are mere protractions of two recent events glued together.

lkrubner2• 16 years ago

Articles like this define corporate or national peaks.

In 1986 IBM recorded the largest profit ever recorded by any corporation in the the history of the world. Nothing would ever be able to compete with IBM. The media was in a swoon about how amazing IBM was. But IBM was already losing ground in the PC market, and they were losing ground in electronics to the Japanese. In 1993 IBM was struggling to avoid bankruptcy.

Circa 1991/1992 there were articles about how Japan was taking over the world and nothing could ever compete with them because they were relentless. But the early 90s marked the beginning of global retreat for many Japanese companies (with a few exceptions, like Toyota).

In the late 90s nothing could stop Microsoft, yet the late 90s marked the beginning of the era when Microsoft's momentum began to fade.

Somewhere around 2006/2007 Google was the most perfect collection of human beings that had ever thought to work together and nothing anywhere, ever, would ever be able to even conceive of an idea that could compete with Google.

In 2010 Facebook is an unstoppable juggernaut and nothing will ever be able to match the unbelievable genius that runs this organization.

In 2014 MingaMingaYXZ corp is run not by mortals like you and me, but by people so inhumanly smart they must really be gods that have temporarily taken human form.

Then in 2016 we will be told that MingaMingaYXZ secretly had problem abc the whole entire time, and so they never really had what they needed to compete against ZunkZunk corp.

Around that time, the media will tell us that ZunkZunk corp is, of course, run by people of such incomparable brilliance that aliens from the future travel back in time to beg for advice to deal with the problems they face a million years from now.

joe_the_user2• 16 years ago

The idea that Facebook could peak before even going public is interesting...

When people talked about Microsoft, the Japanese corporations or Google taking over the world, they pointed to at least some real earnings... While Facebook allegedly has earnings, there's nothing that can be pointed to (given that it's private, doesn't submit to the SEC, etc)...

michaelchisari• 16 years ago

You need to post this to a blog so I can link to it every time someone tells me that nothing can stand up to Facebook.

lkrubner2• 16 years ago

Thanks, that is a good idea. I posted it to my blog:

http://www.smashcompany.com/business/excessive-praise-marks-...

ja27• 16 years ago

There are reasonable examples even on the web.

There was a time when 'the internet' meant AOL to most people. Creating a web site meant GeoCities. For a couple of years, everyone I know had their home page set to Yahoo. MySpace was the hot thing just a couple years ago. Three years ago if you wanted to sell your old laptop, you probably listed it on eBay.

neworbit• 16 years ago

What's replaced eBay? Craigslist? Just chucking the thing in a drawer because you can't sell it for squat?

philwelch2• 16 years ago

It's interesting how this Facebook backlash is so similar to the Google backlash, around the time Gmail came out. Back then people was terrified, not only that Google was an unstoppable juggernaut, but also that Google was a privacy threat.

Companies aren't armies and the internet isn't a battlefield. Facebook provides some services which you may find useful, just like Google or Amazon. You have alternatives and you have the freedom not to use a given company's services. It's really nothing more elaborate or sinister than that.

joe_the_user2• 16 years ago

Well, it's similar in that both are backlashes but...

I've never been bothered by Google because Google's business model is clearly leveraging the open Internet. I've been disturbed by Facebook for as long it has been on the horizon because it has had the opposite incentives to its business model...

philwelch2• 16 years ago

As I said, both are backlashes fueled by overhyped fears of the company's power and disrespect for privacy. All analogies break down somewhere, and you are correct in the fact that Google is a search engine (plus ancillary services) and Facebook is a social network.

vl• 16 years ago

I dislike Facebook because they’re mediocre.

Quote of the day - I never could clearly express what exactly I dislike about Facebook. It's just not joy to use. UI is mediocre, functionality is mediocre, even API is mediocre.

Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut?

Related Stories