

Facebook Is Evil and Its Strategy Is Obsolete - colortone
http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2007/09/research-note-facebook-perestroika-vs.cfm

======
karzeem
People make way too much of the Facebook platform. The part that's relevant to
innovation is allowing third-party apps access to a list of who and what a
user likes. It's silly that people are obsessed with building those apps
inside Facebook, though. Look at use rates for the various apps. Facebook
could get rid of every app except the basic profile, Photos, messages, the
Wall, and Events, and it would be just as popular. The rest isn't nearly as
promising.

~~~
colortone
I agree. It's a shame they're not doing something truly valuable, like getting
inside-out with all that user information.

It's especially easy to get dark on them because of the attitude: "We're
marginally more forward-thinking than MySpace, so think of us in terms of
Google."

------
Goladus
One of the main differences between the facebook platform and the windows
platform is that on the web, it costs very little cash for users to leave for
something new. When desktop hardware and OS installations were involved,
people stuck with their first choice (which was in large part determined by
what was available in local retail stores).

It looks like people do the same thing for social networks, because they do
invest time into their profiles and connections and such; but it's still far
less of an investment than someone typically would have made in a PC back when
Microsoft became the dominant desktop platform. It takes all of 5 minutes and
zero dollars to switch from Facebook to Myspace, or Orkut, or whatever. Even
if you had a desktop that could run all of the other competing desktop OS
platforms(which wasn't possible for most people) it took a lot of work to
switch between them. If you were already using windows, you didn't even think
about using anything else.

