You care about Facebook, you just might not know it yet

http://www.eflorenzano.com/blog/post/you-care-about-facebook-you-just-might-not-know-it/

by twampss • 17 years ago

30 23 17 years ago

eflorenzano.com

wmeredith• 17 years ago

A more accurate title would be You'll have to work with Facebook, you just might not know it yet.

I won't ever care. (Oh and by the way: http://www.facebook.com/wwmkc)

theli0nheart3• 17 years ago

ugh. As if. Check out this list: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0001/msg0008....

These are the results from Nielsen research listing the 25 most-visited websites in 2000. Remember Looksmart? Excite (which, BTW, hasn't seemed to have changed it's website since 2000)? These websites were relics of the time when web portals were a big deal, much like how social networking is today. Most of them have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

The crowd always seem to believe that somehow "this time is different". This is a naive behavior that is ubiquitous in finance, business, work, friendships, etc. The fact of the matter is that human nature doesn't change. People get bored of things and move on. The same will happen with Facebook, Twitter, etc. Better things will be made because of it, too.

natrius2• 17 years ago

Network effects make this time around substantially different. Note that some of the leading products from that era that benefited from network effects, such as AIM, are still around today.

theli0nheart3• 17 years ago

There we go again with "this time is different". Yes, AIM is still around today, but it's clearly nearing the end of its days: http://google.com/trends?q=aol+instant+messenger%2C+facebook....

This is a prime example of one technology replacing another. It's extremely naive to think that it'll stop with Facebook and friends.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

Actually, quite a few of the things on that list are still pretty damn popular. It's easy to pick out one category from the list and say "see, that category died, so social networking will too!"

We still have IM, search, browsers, email, content networks, etc, etc, etc. Some things are here to stay...deal with it.

ericflo2• 17 years ago

Please fully read my blog post next time. The last paragraph states that I wouldn't bet much on Facebook being around in 10 years.

graywh• 17 years ago

  Do I think that Facebook will be relevant in 10 years? Probably.

theli0nheart3• 17 years ago

In all fairness, the last paragraph read as if you didn't want to be in a position of having to eat your words, as the entire blog post was about how Facebook is super-duper important and no one can ever ignore it.

whatusername• 17 years ago

The switching costs for facebook are much higher than the switching costs for looksmart or excite. (I had/have an excite email - switching sucked)

Also - all your list of sites really shows is that some sites were able to grow and adapt with their audience (see Yahoo) while some didn't. Going on past performance - facebook is in that category.

forsaken• 17 years ago

I think that you care about facebook if you work for a web 2.0 company that needs users any way they can get it. I work for a local newspaper, and the value that we get from facebook is pretty small. Everyone who needs to know about our site knows it exists. Most of the community has accounts.

The only value we may get from facebook is allowing them to publish our events easily. However, their API and their walled garden make that less valuable.

erikwiffin• 17 years ago

I'm surprised you feel that way. I also work for a local newspaper, and a our largest demographic is the 55+ group. It seems like getting the facebookers (the under 30s) onto our site could really help.

That being said, I don't know how I'd do that, and we don't have facebook connect because the API is more effort than it's worth.

unalone3• 17 years ago

Make a Page, publish your stuff via RSS, start local Facebook conversations, ask people for local photos and for news of what's happening, possibly get them contributing ideas for stories. The more you can get people swept away into your cause, and that's not hard, then the more activity and attention and relevancy you've got.

Probably the most attention I've paid to a company beyond Facebook, Tumblr, and Reddit in these last few months has been to a clothing company with an excellent Facebook presence.

roc2• 17 years ago

Facebook exists due to a transient inefficiency in yesterday's applications.

The big 'hook', the reason it gets so much traffic, is that people use it as a proxy for the wider internet. It's many services funneled through one account. (As opposed to having a gmail account for email, an msn account for chat, a yahoo account for games, a flickr account for pics, a wordpress account for blogging, a twitter account, etc)

But what keeps it relevant tomorrow?

josefresco• 17 years ago

Interesting point, but you didn't mention the social aspect of FB and how powerful that is. It's why MySpace still lingers (massively) behind the scenes.

I used to think MySpace was for people who couldn't build their own website. With Facebook's success I'm changing that view. It's about the social connections not simply self publication.

unalone3• 17 years ago

That's what MySpace was for. They always were shitty at social. Facebook was the first network designed entirely for efficiency of communication; that's how it beat MySpace.

willwagner• 17 years ago

It's an interesting point but I don't think it's the total value. I'm in my early 40's and the attraction for me is reconnecting with old friends from high school and college ( I use linkedin for the equivalent reason with old colleagues and business acquaintances). To me, it's what classmates.com could have evolved into with different management.

I'm certain I'm not the average facebook user, but that's the value add for me.

glhaynes• 17 years ago

The network effect. All your friends, family, etc are on there. Using their real names.

You want to get back in touch with Joe that you knew in 5th grade? How are you gonna do that over SMTP/IMAP? Easy on Facebook.

Or think about it this way: your aunt wants to put out photos of her family's recent vacation for everybody she knows to see. Is she (if she can possibly help it) going to go into her email app (or, worse, webmail) and make sure she's got all the right names with their associated somewhat-cryptic (well certainly more cryptic than a Normal Human Name) email addresses selected from her address book? Her address book (if it's even populated at all) probably doesn't have 10% of the email addresses that she wants to send to. And 1/2 of those are out of date or mistyped.

There's still plenty of room for separate services that do things with more options and with a broader reach. But for the basic cases (which is a LOT), having a single shared service that nearly everybody's on (and on which they don't have to remember a username->Real Name mapping), is a tremendous asset.

roc2• 17 years ago

If the network effect alone was enough, we'd have never left Geocities, or Angelfire, or Hotmail, or ICQ, or MySpace... the network effect explains growth curves, little more.

The rest of your points were part of my point. "Real Names" vs "usernames" is a temporary inefficiency in the early services. It's a typical programmer's solution causing normal person frustration. No-one's making that mistake again. No-one's going to roll out, say, an email service without a profile page for each account or a White Pages feature. No-one's leaving out simple photo/file sharing, tweeting or blogging as an integrated service.

And everyone who isn't FaceBook has a huge incentive to support the first federated protocol that enables all that. (So they stand some chance at capturing internet traffic again)

Say, Google's Wave.

Does anyone think it won't roll out with support for a profile page, some sort of White Pages feature, simple blogging, twitter-esque status updates, etc? It's already got email/chat integration and simple photo sharing this early. Why in the world would they be testing photo sharing if they weren't looking to do much more than 'Email 2.0'?

julio_the_squid• 17 years ago

I personally don't care about having a Facebook account any more than I be buffing up my MySpace account or a WoW character anytime soon. This cartoon sums it up my attitude pretty well: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zp_eKXDTiU0/SiQyLywcJ7I/AAAAAAAAE7...

However, I agree that since so many people use Facebook, it's a useful and important place to promote your business and for which to offer services.

It used to be that when we released widgets it was important to test on Blogger, Typepad, etc. but these days more potential users are on Facebook than Blogger. Of course, Facebook makes you jump through hoops to integrate anything with their site, but the large potential audience makes it worth it.

unalone3• 17 years ago

Don't bother with widgets unless you know what you're doing. Creating an entire new site feature takes effort, and that's what coding for Facebook is. Farmville did it, those damn quizzes do it, but I haven't seen more than three applications in the last six months.

What you do is make a fan page for your product, and put everything you've got there. Fan pages are beautifully integrated and give you a lot of control over your audience. I used a fan page of myself to address young campers at a summer program and they're still talking to one another over it.

tomjen2• 17 years ago

I have seen how much time Facebook eats, so between Reddit and hacker news I don't have more to waste.

Granted I could properly just ignore it most days, but then people would be annoyed that I haven't friended them yet, send me messages that I would have to respond to, etc.

As for the "login using facebook", you can do the same with openid (heck facebook is an openid provider) - but without pissing of the part of your users that don't have an account or don't want to let you know it.

You care about Facebook, you just might not know it yet

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