July 6, 2009 | In: Uncategorized
Facebook Isn’t Going Anywhere
I recently had an interesting conversation with some friends about the future of Facebook. One friend of mine who works at a hedge fund was comparing Facebook to AOL. His argument was that Facebook, for many, is the portal to the wide social web that is now emerging. Over the next few years, other services that do what Facebook does best (share photos, status messages, etc) will be replaced by services that specialize in these fields, Flickr, Twitter, etc. He believes that as the Facebook community realizes they don’t need Facebook to fulfill their need for an online social graph, they will flee, as did AOLers when they realized they don’t need AOL to access the internet or their email.
My rebuttal to this argument was that comparing AOL in the 90′s and Facebook now, I think, is ridiculous. AOL was a gateway to the web. It was, as time went on, an unnecessary barrier. The death of the modem sealed the deal for AOL. Facebook, on the other hand, is on the forefront of the social web. While other services do things better, none connect people like Facebook. And while people talk about the services that Facebook provides, the only real service I see is the network. I can’t think of one company that provides a service as valuable to a user as their Facebook network. The switching costs are astronomical. Facebook is over the mountain. There isn’t room for another Facebook-like company that provides similar services slightly better. Facebook, in my opinion, isn’t going anywhere….unless they still can’t figure out how to make money in 10 years, which is possible.
4 Responses to Facebook Isn’t Going Anywhere
nafnosseb
July 13th, 2009 at 6:48 am
I think your friends are right. At some point the services that allow data potability as niche competitors will form inter-compatible custom networks or the social network aggregators will be adopted as the people who facebook “taught” to use social networks then build on their learning.
For a long while still facebook will grow, but when the first networks begin to allow a message to be sent between services with no “special actions” like for instance you send a direct message to a buddy from twitter and it is automatically routed to plurk which he uses. Then we will not need to choose one social network almost exclusively because every other person does. A brand new service would be able to compete with facebook even if it only has 1000 users because a person would only have to prefer the service based on features. At the moment, my criteria for choice was “which service is used by the most people”.
Ely Rosenstock
July 15th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
@nafnosseb While I agree with you that the services/features of Facebook (chat, photo sharing, etc) will become more open and be used by other companies, I disagree that this will hurt Facebook. It’s like saying the Twitter API hurts Twitter. Opening up their services will just make a Facebook account (to make those connections) essential, which it already is really. While the average time per user on Facebook’s site may go down, the growth of the company’s membership will make up for these lost pageviews. Facebook isn’t going anywhere.
You might not go to Facebook.com that often in 10 years, but I guarantee that you and almost everyone you know will have a Facebook account and use its connections daily.
nafnosseb
July 23rd, 2009 at 8:40 am
I am just going to explain what I was saying in more detail because according to what I wrote it will not be necessary to join any particular social network.
I will use google profile for my hypothetical example.
1. You have a google profile which “plugs into” all the services(email/micro-blogging/status updates)
2. You have a set of lists(professional/friends/family)
3. you befriend someone’s profile and assign them to a list.
4. You send an e-mail to that person’s profile and depending on your list allocation the email is forwarded to that person’s email address.
It is not necessary to even know what social network the other person uses. You can change social networks, update your profile and continue as normal using the new social network.
Gregor
October 17th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
“The death of the modem sealed the deal for AOL”. Not exactly a cause:effect. AOL’s original business model failed due to competitors like AT&T Worldnet that offered a direct link (via modem or leased line) to the IP network. AOL filtered access to the open Internet, and time metered your access using the old telephone model. Once services like Worldnet (all you can eat pricing) allowed direct access and more content proliferated on the net, AOL’s fate was sealed.