

Facebook Toast? Hot Today, Dead Tomorrow--Like AOL? - wave
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/facebook_the_next_aol_

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tptacek
Article thesis: though Facebook exceeds expectations on the only established
empirical metric for its success, it fails all the author's subjective
metrics, like "thrilling older people".

Eagerly awaiting news of Google's imminent demise as well; yes, it makes huge
amounts of money, but the graphic design minimalism so crucial to its success
has been slipping.

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astine
I think that the author's point is that even though Facebook has a huge number
of users, they haven't yet figured out a way to properly monetize their
business. They're making peanuts compared to Google and income is a very well
established metric for success.

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hugh
It's not that hard to monetize: just stick ads on pages and sell them. If they
had been happy with a billion-dollar valuation, they could simply do that, and
everybody would have been happy, including their blissfully unzombified users.

Unfortunately, they're not happy being a billion-dollar company, they want to
be a 15-billion dollar company, or perhaps a hundred-billion-dollar company.
To justify that kind of size they need to think up all sorts of new ways to
monetize their users (e.g. Beacon) at the possible cost of annoying their
users (e.g. Beacon).

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astine
Yes, I think that is the point of the article.

