Is Mark Zuckerberg the Next Steve Case? 470
theodp writes "With all signs for Facebook pointing up, author Douglas Rushkoff goes contra, arguing that Facebook hype will fade. 'Appearances can be deceiving,' says Rushkoff. 'In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren't the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.' Rushkoff, who made a similar argument about AOL eleven years ago in a quashed NY Times op-ed, reminds us that AOL was also once considered ubiquitous and invincible, and former AOL CEO Steve Case was deemed no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg. 'So it's not that MySpace lost and Facebook won,' concludes Rushkoff. 'It's that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They'll go down in the same order.'"
Dead on. (Score:5, Interesting)
In my network, posts are getting sparser and sparser. Just like the end of Freindser, or Orkut, or any other social network system. People get bored and stop. It the infusion of new users that drives their survival, and Facebook my be nearing the end of people willing to sign up.
Boring (Score:5, Interesting)
People are already getting bored of Facebook. It's just there and taken for granted now.
What has been lost with Facebook is the spirit of social networking. It's more a site where you add all your friends or people you have met in real life. Other sites allowed you to make new connections with people you didn't know.
I put this down to Facebook's ability to enter all your details, name, address, phone number and so on. It was pretty obvious once your profile allows you to add some very specific information that is valuable for ID theft that people would then lock down their profiles and no longer be networking outside of their group of friends.
facebook owns eveyones real identity online (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure this guy properly understands that Facebook is not just a website that someone can make a better alternative to and everyone will ditch. Facebook knows who everyone actually is online and everyone has invested time into building their profiles on it. Thus people value their Facebook profiles and are much less likely to spam, say obscene things, troll and generally be a total idiot on the internet if it is tied to their Facebook profile. This one thing is priceless and subject to massive network effects making it very hard for a competitor to enter.MySpace fell due to being offline and not being an adequate website.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are 3 stages.
Early adopters: It is the new hip thing to do. Also this is where the zealots and the big fans come in. This was the area when face book was considered a social network for college kids.
Middle adopters: This is where the product gets it's name recognition. And big envesters come in. This is where it really grows. you don't need to be hip to use it it is mostly expected.
Late adopters: Ok it isn't a fad. That is when grandma gets an account. It is big and the early adopters start leaving to the next big thing.
So even when you go from stage 2-3 you are still growing. But you are approaching the end.
Second life (Score:5, Interesting)
And how will this affect me? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:facebook owns eveyones real identity online (Score:4, Interesting)
Having your name attached only shuts up the moderately sane.
The Next Steve Case? Try Kenneth Lay (Score:5, Interesting)
Comparing Zuckerberg to Case is an insult to Case. AOL wasn't the best internet service - what with being a kind of walled garden - but it was built on providing internet services to novice customers. Zuckerberg on the other hand built a service based on selling profiling data to advertisers. Zuckerberg would be lucky to be compared to John Sculley (or if you want scumbags, try Kenneth Lay), let alone Steve Case.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd really like to see the demographic of the msot active accounts. Just from my own anecdotal evidence. the vast majority of facebook users seem to be teen girls. Most adults I know use Facebook as a specific tool; to get name recognition for an election, to spread word of an art show, etc.
The teen girls seem to use it for social networking the most.
Teen girls grow up, get boyfriends, move on. Adults, with few exceptions, don't really use facebook in a way markedly different from a blog or even an email newsletter.
So a demographic would really be instructive.
Re:Dead on. (Score:5, Interesting)
I would disagree.
I don't post on facebook much but it has gotten me in touch with a lot of past friends.
It is an easy way to post pictures of the family without clogging people e-mail box.
Also, and most important to me, if I have a situation where people wants regular updates(my kid deathly sick in the hospital),
it is an easy way to send them without annoying people.
I can also follow friends and family with annoying them.
Re:Wishing won't make it so. (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe Facebook sers will migrate to The Real Internet too? Facebook chat and picture hosting seem to be the two killer features that people (at least, people I talk to) seem to want. Facebook chat is just a non-federated Jabber server with a web interface. Google and others provide a federated Jabber server with a web interface for free.
Picture hosting is just a special-purpose web server; when Internet connections get slightly faster I can imagine this being a built-in feature in consumer routers. Don't upload your pictures to a remote server, just copy them to your own web server and send people links. A competent ISP could start offering this service now and run a transparent reverse proxy so anything people actually download is cached and doesn't use the last-mile upstream.
Re:Dead on. (Score:5, Interesting)
New users spend a lot more time on the site, post more content, send more messages, etc.
I've been on facebook for years. I rarely update my status or post photos now. All of my friends who have been on there for a while are the same. Sometimes I meet someone who just got on facebook and they post more messages so I load up facebook more often to see what messages they've posted to me. But after a while they get bored too, post less often, and so I have less need to go to facebook.
Facebook became the most popular website due to the network effect, but they will become less popular due to the boredom effect. As more people become bored with facebook they stop posting and just go to read what everyone else is up to. But as more people transition from adding content to just viewing content, there is less content and less reason to go there to view content. And now that more people are becoming aware of privacy issues with facebook it becomes even less likely they will post stuff there.
So it has a big userbase, but a lot of that userbase is bored. When the next cool thing comes out that "everyone" is using, they will just use that and not bother with facebook anymore.
Re:Can't wait (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Facebook doesn't fill a necessary role (Score:2, Interesting)
I had the Farmville virus for a few months last winter, until the program got impossible to load. Fast forward 6 months, I decided to try again just for the heck of it. I had something like 30 neighbors at my peak, but when I looked around about 80% of the farms were withered, fallow, or plowed with nothing planted. Same with Mafia Wars, which I had also given up on and not really looked back. Got tired of all the stupid stuff the games put up on your wall if you want the game to help you. The messages sent to friends that have already quit the game are an annoyance to them as well.
I still check in daily, mostly for a few characters that tend to put up entertaining links or posts. Mostly I am a lurker, but I occasionally comment on someone else's post, but 90 percent of the stuff in my Top News is trashable.
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I noticed that bored stay at home mothers seem to dominate the majority of my Facebook posts. They just LOVE posting pictures of their kids doing stupid stuff, and sharing parenting tips that they found online.
Marketing value of EU data: Zero. (Score:5, Interesting)
The info FB has collected on EU citizens may be valuable to marketers, however they won't get their hands on it. Thus the value of it to FB's bottom line is very nearly zero.
Basically FB and similar huge online sites collecting personal info, like Amazon and eBay, would run afoul of EU's Data protection Directive: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive [wikipedia.org] if they start sharing their databases with third parties. FB has specifically been told by the EU that they, FB, will be blocked in most EU member states at the firewall level if they do this.
The background is that the data FB is likely to have, in many cases will include particularly sensitive information relating to gender, sexuality, political observation and more. This type of data are especially sensitive in the view of EU law and subject to extremely strict restrictions on how it can be used and shared. In particular some kind of click-through EULA absolutely isn't sufficient to consider the user to have given consent to sharing of data. Please see this page for more info: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/policies/privacy/index_en.htm [europa.eu]
Also check the last paragraph in the section marked 'Scope' if you wish to argue that FB isn't based in the EU. The short answer is that - as far as EU law is concerned - this doesn't matter. The service provider, FB in this case, will by definition need to use electronic equipment, IE. networking equipment, inside the EU to reach their users.
So now you know why the info collected by, say, eBay isn't already used for marketing purposes by third parties.
All this was made clear to FB in no uncertain terms not too long ago, and may be one reason why people try to cash in on FB. Once the market realizes the collected EU info is worthless, then things may change a bit on the valuation front...
Re:There's one BIG difference. (Score:5, Interesting)
TIME Covers: Case/AOL 2, Zuckerberg/Facebook 2 (Score:4, Interesting)
Sep. 22, 1997: AOL's Big Coup [time.com] ("The Web was going to kill it. Microsoft was going to bury it. But by grabbing CompuServe, America Online keeps on growing."). Jan. 24, 2000: The Big Deal [time.com] ("How the AOL-Time Warner merger happened. Does it make any sense?"). May 31, 2010: Facebook ...and How It's Redefining Privacy [time.com] ("With nearly 500 million users, Facebook is connecting us in new (and scary) ways"). Dec 27, 2010: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg [time.com] ("Person of the Year. The Connector").
Re:Wishing won't make it so. (Score:4, Interesting)
I would like to agree with you, but I think the issue is the more bullet-proof, federated architectures of piece-parts that are readily available otherwise. If that were the case, neither MySpace nor Facebook would have come to prominence. AOL died because the internet became a superset of what AOL contained, could be accessed equally from school campuses, work, and home, and opened the door for cheaper and higher-bandwidth providers. Content providers couldn't restrict themselves to a service that most people couldn't get to from work or school, so they published at least on the internet and maybe AOL. That was the key nail in the coffin IMO.
On user provided content, the trend seems clear enough from geocities/angelfire, to myspace, to facebook. Each required less and less work from users (by sacrificing customization capability). Also, as they ditched customization, one navigating content provided by several friends is faced with a more and more consistent set of data. Of course, much of this could be hypothetically reproduced by a near monopoly releasing a distributed approach to this, but it would *have* to be on some embedded device that people wouldn't tend to sleep/turn off, eliminating the most likely candidate for that.
Another issue of this is the natural aggregation of information in facebook. The users look at one page and data provided by all of their 'friends' is aggregated into one apparent stream of data. This is the tricky part to do in a distributed fashion. Becoming a friend or fan of someone could hypothetically request an explicit push of data from one person to all friends/fans they have then and there even if that friend never reads it. However, this would scale worse than what a site like facebook deals with. The converse of scan on read would similarly be bad, with the additional problem that the experience would be apparently sluggish and miss/hiccup as peers are down. Approaches to make it appear responsive would cause 'invisible' gaps to be in the data where unavailable data is missing and magically appears when available. If not assembled by the home routers, it would have to be a federated set of content-providers. e-mail is probably the most similar model, and that carries the problem of inefficient storage. Each user gets a disparate copy of the data. Also, once out there, it cannot be edited in a single copy. Basically, people explicitly want to put all their data in a *single* authoritative place, which naturally leads to things like facebook.
Which brings us to another point, people are used to what datacenters provide in terms of reliable data delivery. Home routers would be subject to ISP outages (which are not infrequent in residential price points), power outages/blips, people just turning their stuff off, router hardware/firmware problems without elaborate failover or even someone paying particularly close attention. Rationally, a 'facebook' application isn't critical enough to consider an outage in a vacuum particularly important, but the emergent behavior of a few missing pieces would be perceived as garbage. Not to mention more work on the part of the participants to notice when their stuff isn't working and fix something.
I have dovecot, postfix, roundcube and squirrelmail running on my home system providing mail, and have other web content I share up too. I must confess I'm moving more and more of my email to gmail. My home system is pretty sufficient and I like the control, however when I'm on vacation I worry that something will happen that would require me to fix that would not be possible remotely. I also like doing a lot of things like upgrades and experimentation and the system with email responsibility I can't really mess with in a way that induces a long downtime. I would move my home domain to google and be done with it, except I use -<suffix> addresses and google only supports +<suffix> addressing.
I don't think facebook will continue indefinitely specifically.. It will be replaced by something
Re:There's one BIG difference. (Score:4, Interesting)
as someone who has half a dozen accounts under various 'names' I can tell you for a fact that there are lots of accounts that aren't under real names. I wonder how many of the 500 million accounts are genuine and how many are accounts like mine.
Complainers to the back of the line (Score:5, Interesting)
...nobody could complain that they weren't "told first" (something that happened when we announced our wedding)
I have a strict policy for people who do this to my wife and I. They get told *last* if they get told at all from that point on until we receive an apology. This applies to parents, siblings, and everyone else. I have no time for anyone who thinks they "deserve" priority in how I disclose facts about my life.
Usually I just designate someone I trust to be the point person and I relay all information to them if I don't have time to relay important information myself. They get it to the people who need/want to know. Most of the people I deal with do not use Facebook or Twitter (myself included) so if I used those services I would be de-facto prioritizing those few who use those services. Nothing wrong with doing it through Facebook if that fits nicely into your social network. Doesn't work for me though.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Dead on. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's funny how things transition, though. Email used to be the way you could easily contact everyone who might want to know about the birth of your child without bothering them. Then suddenly email became a defacto communication tool and we get offended if people send us things we don't want. I think it's because we now use email for work and most of the things that come in email are implicit action items, just like the regular mail is.
So, Facebook became that communication tool for some people but the same process is happening there too. I've had a couple of friends who were already habitual posters, but once they became new parents it started getting sickening. 2-3 posts per day about what the baby spit up on or what noise it makes. The first person who started doing that was just an acquaintance so after it got really annoying I just blocked her. Now one of my close friends is doing it so I feel bad hiding her messages, but I can't just hide the baby posts. Worse than that, she regularly gets 10-15 replies from other stay-at-home moms, family members etc, so I clearly don't have the right to tell her I think it's obnoxious. Some people love it. Facebook seems to prioritize her messages too because my usual wall page might be made up of 20% her messages.
I love seeing her and the kid and I want to know when there's something interesting happening with either of them. That's why I'm on Facebook. We just have a different opinion about what's interesting.
The reality is that Facebook isn't the problem. It's just that different people have different conceptions about what what/how much information to share and as long as we have publishing tools there will be debate about whether a particular piece of information should be recorded or distributed. Whether Facebook disappears or stops being the "appropriate" place for that type of information won't really matter, because we'll have something else that starts out as the best place for that information...until it's not.