

Facebook Is Kinda OK but Largely Overrated : Matt's Homepage - brett
http://mattmaroon.com/?p=277

======
greendestiny
It seems to be the big question of the internet at the moment doesn't it... is
facebook worth that much, or really anything?

Firstly I think anytime there is a whole bunch of people communicating you
should never ask yourself what the point is. Communication is a fundamental,
it _is_ the reason.

Second there's the big draw cards of social networks - an easy lightweight way
to connect and reconnect. Its a great big people directory - and connections
are very low social risk - much easier than emailing that person you haven't
seen in years. And how are you going to get their email address anyway, any
public directory would be spam central.

Of course myspace or any site has that much going for it. So that leaves the
final facebook draw card - facebook apps. I totally understand the skepticism,
but apps offer lots of different shared activities. Lots of little quizzes and
games, very much like the kind of structured getting-to-know-you party game
type activities. Its actually very difficult for these kinds of applications
to exist without incorporating the friend networks that facebook offers.

Its a platform that allows a kind of lightweight, asynchronous and with easy
opt-outs and opt-ins, shared online experience. I think it actually threatens
to become the internet for a lot of people.

~~~
Goladus
Facebook has apps, sorta like Myspace has music.

The rub is that people keep comparing facebook to Google, without seeming to
have any idea how it'll get that far beyond a vague notion of connecting
people. The only person I know who doesn't use Google search is my grandma,
who doesn't use a computer. In contrast, not even half the people I know my
age use facebook, and essentially no one older than me uses it or seems at all
likely to ever bother.

_Its a platform that allows a kind of lightweight, asynchronous and with easy
opt-outs and opt-ins, shared online experience. I think it actually threatens
to become the internet for a lot of people._

It's not there yet, though. The login requirement is a barrier. The interface
is still pretty complicated and it's not much faster(if it's faster at all)
than its competitors. There's still nothing so compelling that people can't
break a Facebook habit if they want to.

Facebook has a lot of potential, and of course millions of users count for
something, but it's not a Google and really doesn't seem to be headed that
way.

~~~
greendestiny
Facebook sucks in a lot of ways. I'm not a fan, in fact I'd actually quite
enjoy seeing Zuckerberg crushed. There is just very little else online that
facilitates shared experience.

Myspace has zero interest or ability to push itself further. Google hasn't
really thrown its full weight behind orkut, not least because they have a much
better money maker they need to protect. So the next generation facebook
killer will probably have to be a startup - which means they have to be
significantly better to attract users and reach a critical mass.

~~~
Goladus
Orkut is quite possibly the worst name for a social network that I've heard. I
have no idea why it was chosen, or what significance it has, but it's
definitely not an advantage. Nobody I know would hear Orkut for the first time
and think either "Social Network" or "Google." (In contrast to, say, "gmail,"
which immediately evokes email and google).

~~~
pg
"Orkut" is the first name of the guy who wrote it.

~~~
aston
Not only that, it's what everyone calls him because no one can say his last
name.

------
garbowza
If you talk to college and high school students, they will have a completely
different opinion about Facebook than Matt's. For many of them, it is their
primary form of communication - above email and oftentimes even cellphones. To
some extent, there's a large generational gap on Facebook with respect to its
hardcore users. To high schoolers, us professionals "just don't get it."

~~~
rms
Facebook came out at my school during October of my freshman year. It's a
whole lot more compelling when everyone you know is truly on it, except for a
couple luddite hold-outs.

------
chaostheory
"Also contributing to the hype is the Facebook platform... whose existence Joe
Average is now and ever shall be blissfully ignorant."

Matt may have some good points but I strongly disagree on this one. Joe 6pack
is not ignorant of the FB Platform. Joe 6pack just sees it as: "Mary has
offered you a 'long island'", "Jack want's to play poker with you", "You are
67% compatible with Ann in movies", and so on...

I could be wrong but what keeps people coming back on Myspace is just messages
either on their wall or in their inbox. In FB this is on steroids, allowing
users to do that interaction in a potentially infinite amount of ways. As
techies we may think that 98% of these apps suck, but hundreds of new ones
come out every week. Even if only a few catch Jill Average's attention for
just a few days, it's good enough to keep her and her friends coming back
regularly; since there's something new and novel everyday.

FB's platform is perfect of our modern "everything is disposable", attention
deficit society.

~~~
mattmaroon
The middle part of that sentence which you ...ed out was kinda important. I
meant that platforms in general have not and will not reach the popular
consciousness. People in the tech world today think they're far more important
than they are.

Facebook apps have definitely made themselves known to Facebook users, but far
from indispensable.

~~~
chaostheory
Well to me the most important part of:

"Also contributing to the hype is the Facebook platform. Platform is the
Bubble 2.0 buzz word, which everyone talks about but of whose existence Joe
Average is now and ever shall be blissfully ignorant."

was that you thought Joe 6pack doesn't know anything about it. All tech
enthusiasts talking about it is a well known fact (everyone on yc knows about
it). Was there something that I missed in that fragment?

"I meant that platforms in general have not and will not reach the popular
consciousness."

I could be wrong, but I feel that my non-technical friends and family that I
have FB food fights or Mafia games with would disagree. They may not know what
it's called, but they do see it and enjoy it.

~~~
mattmaroon
That sentence "Platform is the Bubble 2.0... was speaking about platforms in
general. Average Joe doesn't know or care about platforms. Average Facebook
user (who is far from Average Joe) may know about some of the apps on
Facebook, but has yet to find anything compelling and never really will.

~~~
chaostheory
I could be wrong but to me without the platform the apps don't exist, and I
still feel that the majority of ppl under 30 care about facebook apps: mostly
college, high school students, or semi-fresh out of college ppl.

speaking of platforms, doesn't joe 6pack use windows at the very least?

------
uuilly
But what if having a facebook profile becomes like having an email address?
I'm sure early emails and early web searches were frivolous b/c people had
been getting along fine w/o them. Early cell phone calls were, "OMG!! I'm
walking down the street talking on the phone!!! This is so cool." etc.

At the same time I agree w/ maroon. Social networks are not my thing. Think
about how you meet and maintain relationships with people in the real world.
You're usually talking to someone you know and they introduce you to someone
else. The conversation naturally veers toward common ground where a
relationship can be built. I haven't seen a company reproduce this.

I never met anyone new on a social network. I never had the nuggets to ask
anyone out and the ones who asked me out were either no-go's or bonafide
prostitutes (yes I was on myspace for a few months.)

One of my co-founders said it best. "Facebook is for maintaining aqaintences."

~~~
nostrademons
"You're usually talking to someone you know and they introduce you to someone
else. The conversation naturally veers toward common ground where a
relationship can be built. I haven't seen a company reproduce this."

It happens a lot on LiveJournal. I'm still in touch with some of the folks I
met 5 years ago on there. I've met them in real life. Some of them have
introduced me to all their friends, who I'm also still in touch with (in some
cases, moreso than the original friend). A couple of my now-RL friends met on
LiveJournal; they're now married. The wedding pictures tagged guests with
their LiveJournal usernames instead of their real names.

FaceBook and MySpace spread largely through existing social networks, which is
why their growth was so fast. LiveJournal, blogs, webcomics, and the myriad
niche forums have been forming _new_ social networks, which is much slower and
doesn't get as much press attention. It's there, though, if you're looking in
the right places.

------
jsmcgd
I personally think that in someways facebook is over hyped, especially
regarding the apps which are largely superflous however I use internal
facebook messaging more than I use email now.

So perhaps until almost everyone you know has a regularly used facebook
account, it will be hard for people to fully appreciate the value of it.

Interesting anecdotal evidence: A lot of people leave Myspace and Bebo to join
Facebook. I've never heard the opposite of this happening.

~~~
edw519
"until almost everyone you know has a regularly used facebook account"

In other words, never.

~~~
derefr
I'm not sure about that. Picture some widely-used public school management
package written to be used over the Facebook API. Suddenly, every new student
[high school students, remember, not college] _has_ to get Facebook, as part
of the enrollment process. Then, since all the friends they make at school
already "use" the service, they start really using it.

~~~
mgummelt
I'm in a class in college where we have to have a facebook in order to
participate.

------
akardell
This is the second time I've read something recently that Facebook will never
be MySpace because MySpace has more users. I disagree. One of the articles I
read made it's point by showing a graph that showed Facebook is clearly
catching up. It's a few months old, but Andreesen had a really good post on
why the platform will always win:
<http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html>

~~~
mattmaroon
Andreesen is wrong on so many fronts. The biggest is

"The web, after all, vanquished proprietary online services like America
Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve -- the so-called "walled gardens" -- in large
part because the web is a platform and the walled gardens were not."

Umm, no. Broadband vanquished them. They allowed unfettered internet access
long before they began their downward spirals. I had AOL in high school, when
they were approaching their zenith, and never used any of the walled features,
just internet and IM.

When you phrase platform the way he does, it sounds superior. When, in
reality, you have people piling layer on top of layer until what remains is
something so complex and unreliable that few people can understand or tolerate
it, you end up with something nobody wants.

And honestly, anything is a platform once somebody turns it into one. Myspace
most definitely is. People make good livings just making layouts for it.
Photobucket got rich off of it. Lots of indie bands sold concert tickets and
CDs thanks to it. Dane Cook owes it his entire career.

So in the platform race, Facebook is losing. They're a more restrictive
platform built onto a smaller one.

~~~
pg
I agree with Marc. What made the web win was that random people could make web
sites. So there started to be way more stuff on the web than on AOL. By late
1995, the main reason people were signing up for AOL was to get access to the
web.

~~~
mattmaroon
Right. Which didn't ruin AOL (the company) it made it better. What ruined AOL
was the shift away from them to broadband.

~~~
pg
He's talking about an earlier and much more ambitious AOL than you are. AOL
once hoped to _be_ what later turned out to be the web. But because they
weren't open enough, the web grew faster, and they became merely an on-ramp
for it.

(Then after a few years of being a quite prosperous on-ramp, they lost even
that, which is the vanquishing you're thinking of.)

~~~
mattmaroon
Aha. Guess I'm too young to have known that.

------
henning
He doesn't get it! Does. not. get. it.

It's an online rolodex! A REPLACEMENT for a real rolodex! Isn't that fucking
outrageously brilliant?

It's clear how a rolodex web application with messaging and a full-featured
API is worth nearly as much as GFS + PageRank + MapReduce + BigTable + 450,000
commodity servers + thousands of motivated engineers.

~~~
mattmaroon
That would be Plaxo.

~~~
mattmaroon
Not to mention, nobody has bought an actual Rolodex in 10 years. You can't
build a business by replacing a product that has already been replaced.

~~~
chaostheory
maybe it's trying to replace your web mail for personal use...

------
mariorz
the google comparison is so idiotic I don't know why you even brought it up,
they are different things and will have different values. That being said you
talk as if things were static, "fb apps are far from indispensable" uhh that
doesn't mean other better apps won't come... your issue there isn't really
with the platform is with current app developers I guess, or is there
something particularly wrong that will prevent interesting software from being
written for this platform?

"Platform is the Bubble 2.0 buzz word"

first there is no bubble2.0 at least not even close to the extent of the last
bubble, bad investments/ventures will fail as they always have and will, there
are no crazy IPOs with ridiculous valuations. there won't be massive lay-offs.

"It's also yet another way in which MySpace is superior. They have always
allowed you to stick JavaScript in your profile page, so it has always had a
platform."

uhhm the platform is more than sticking widgets on your profile, if you're
writing an opinion piece on this maybe read up? I mean just that you don't
come out sounding like a complete idiot.

------
sbh
The last comment about people's status message is funny. Gave me an idea to
write a script, which hides people's status messages, avatars, music they
currently listen to, and all similar forms of self-expressing-annoyance, on
gmail chat, meebo and all similar.

------
awt
Many of the most useful technologies started out as trivialities.

~~~
nanijoe
Really? Name a few...

~~~
chaostheory
Ebay: a place to sell PEZ dispensers that used to crash every second

Internet: a place that used to only be mainly useful for looking at free pr0n

Post it notes: its adhessive was a "failed" project. Its value was only found
after an employee started using it on paper to use as temporary bookmarks for
gospel music

"From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroups:
comp.os.minix Subject: What would you like to see most in minix? Summary:
small poll for my new operating system Message-ID:
<1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI> Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system
(just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT
clones...."

~~~
mattmaroon
eBay was not started to sell Pez dispensers. That's a marketing myth they
perpetuated which has since been recanted. A brief Wikipedia search shows that
it was story crafted by a brilliant P.R. agent a couple years after they'd
launched.

~~~
chaostheory
ok, then i guess you could replace PEZ dispenser with "broken laser pointer"
or any other misc item, and the rest is still valid. it was still a dinky site
in the beginning that crashed often

------
plusbryan
matt: I admire your ability to look at things differently and express those
beliefs among a crowd that in all likelihood might burn you at the stake for
them. People fall into herd mentality much too often.

~~~
mattmaroon
You know, despite the fact that the tech community flocks where the sheepdogs
tell them to as much as any other, maybe more, they seem more open to
dissenting opinions. Especially when they're well expressed and come from
someone who agrees with them 90% of the time anyway.

~~~
chaostheory
yeah I do like posting here a lot better than other places

even when I don't agree with people here, at least they have valid logical
arguments as well; i don't miss debate class anymore

------
alaskamiller
AOL was the internet to a lot of people. Why we regressing? We used to make
fun of AOL people.

~~~
chaostheory
until something like open id becomes more mainstream, I guess it's probably
because we have to login to so many different sites...

------
lst
Facebook is wrong by definition:

virtual contacts are virtual, real contacts are real (no joke! Try the
difference!)

------
benn
That is a retarded blog post with lots of errors. Good job on getting on
ycombinator - but that's a dumb dumb post.

~~~
chaostheory
I disagree with Matt too on this one, but it's a bit rough calling someone an
idiot without at least telling him why...

