

Is Facebook Really Just AOL 2.0? - cocaman
http://www.centernetworks.com/welcome-to-aol-facebook

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ryandvm
Yes - Facebook will become the next eBay or AOL.

Facebook does not actually do anything particularly well. Indeed, I'd go as
far as saying they succeed in spite of themselves. Their interface is busy.
Their app is always spamming me. The messaging infrastructure sucks. They have
confusing privacy policies (and underhandedly change them). Their photo
management is weak. I'm constantly being petitioned for scammy quizzes and
second-rate games. The list goes on...

The _only_ thing Facebook has, and it's tremendously valuable, is the social
graph. They really were just at the right place at the right time.

Over the next few years people are going to gradually decide that dealing with
all the shit and cruft of Facebook isn't worth the diminishingly interesting
experience of half-heartedly stalking the people you thought were fascinating
10 years ago. And since the value of Facebook is the social graph - once the
graph starts contracting, it will do so at an accelerating rate.

The social web will likely continue to be a growing plain, but it won't really
get interesting until it starts dealing in standards and decentralization.

~~~
dasil003
_Facebook does not actually do anything particularly well._

I largely agree with your sentiments about the spamminess of Facebook, but you
got this very very wrong.

Facebook has astonishingly well-run engineering and design operations. What
they do in terms of scalability makes Google's operations look like child's
play. They are web UI design leaders, and they keep rolling out changes at an
amazing pace (they push significant changes multiple times per week). The
interface is cluttered yes, but it's cluttered in the same way Photoshop's UI
is cluttered, that is it caters to the needs of heavy users.

It's okay and maybe even a moral obligation to hate Facebook for its time-
wasting banality, but don't hate them for being good at what they do. Claiming
it's all luck is like some kind of playground taunt; their operations blow the
vast majority of tech companies out of the water (look at how they ran circles
around Twitter). It's good discipline to recognize greatness in companies you
don't like, and Facebook has a lot of important lessons for any tech startup.

~~~
swernli
I agree with you: there is a lot to dislike about facebook if you prefer to,
but there is also a technological achievement there that is frustratingly
difficult to deny. But I don't think they will go the way of AOL (at least not
for many more years) for two major reasons: address book and photos. I know
plenty of people who have two contact lists: the numbers in their phone and
the people they are friends with on facebook. Sure, systems like the one Palm
has let you download your contact list from facebook, but until most people
are aware of that option, they will continue to use facebook as the way to
keep track of people. And photos. Man, was that a killer app for that site. I
personally know several friends who never wanted to sign up for facebook, but
ended up having to do it so they could see their friend's wedding pictures or
baby pictures or vacation pictures. And I also know friends who put their
pictures on facebook and nowhere else, because they don't do back-ups or have
a consistent place to store them locally and assume facebook will always have
their pictures for them.

Until people can easily get contacts and pictures off of facebook and onto
another accessibly sharing service in an automated fashion, they will continue
to depend on it.

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mtomczak
There are similarities between Facebook and AOL. But one significant
difference is the interface. AOL had a proprietary client to access its
service network. It made sense at the time, but it was often clunky, had not-
insignificant bugs, and generally behaved like an application separate from
the rest of my user experience. The client also wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as
a web browser (though AOL CD's were so common that we used them as coasters
and frisbees).

Facebook itself may be a closed network, but it's a closed network running in
an open client---my web browser, which works on all my computers and my
cellphone. Since the Facebook team doesn't have to build the end-user
software, they can focus on their core competencies of the network and the
user experience inside the browser. That takes a lot of the complexity off of
them that AOL had to embrace (in my experience, the Mac client was never as
reliable as the Windows client, for example).

Facebook could go into the business of making its own client apparatus (such
as a branded phone), but why bother? The web is serving quite well for them as
a transport medium. I think that AOL suffered badly when the state of the
internet became "There are these closed networks, and then there is everything
else, and you need two end-user clients to access the two separate systems."
As walled-in as facebook is, I still use the same client to access it as I use
to access the rest of the web, and hyperlinks inside facebook and the larger
web can still interoperate between each other seamlessly. That's an
architectural strength that AOL didn't get to leverage.

------
deathbyzen
Other similarity: I've used Facebook free for 1000 hours.

~~~
lurkinggrue
At least I don't keep getting facebook cd's in the mail.

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DenisM
I just realized that because Facebook makes "unfriending" so public most
people never do that, which leads to an ever-growing circle of friends. You
can hide people, but you can't hide yourself form them without them knowing
it. The only way to politely terminate unwanted relationships is to quit using
facebook and move on to something where you have more control, or at least
something fresh.

~~~
tocomment
I didn't think unfriending was public. Is that a new thing?

I've done it before and never noticed any public announcements.

~~~
iaskwhy
It's not public in that way, i.e., people don't get notified you "unfriended"
someone but you can show up in the "unfriended" person sugestions when you
"unfriend" that person. If that person is also friend with some of your
friends then it's almost sure you'll show up on the sugestions box thus making
it public. My workaround: I have a list named "Not really friends" with people
I can't afford to delete (think big company employees for example).

~~~
DenisM
Oh I had no idea! It turns out they have a black-list: you can create a group
and then hide any post you make form that group! This is so awesome. I take
back what I said above.

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zandorg
No, because AOL made a s __* load of money, leeching 30 dollars a month from
millions of people, where Facebook is trying to monetize.

There's a reason it merged with Time Warner: AOL was making tons of raw cash.

~~~
abstractwater
With that many users, Facebook can also make tons of money if they choose to
do so. They are simply focused on other priorities at the moment.

~~~
zandorg
But whereas AOL had paid subscriptions (and some adverts), Facebook appears to
only be able to serve adverts. Would Facebook survive if they charged $30 a
month?

Also, AOL made money from dial-up - now, everyone's on 'the Internet' which
various phone companies provide - not AOL.

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tjoozeylabs
How are you going to move ~400 million people to a new social network?

~~~
sstrudeau
How many people used AIM at its peak? How many use it now vs. Skype / GTalk /
etc.? Watching the shifting sands of Friendster / Orkut / MySpace / Facebook
has made me believe that Facebook's hold on its currently vast user-base will
always be tenuous. It will never be entirely irrelevant (same can be said for
AOL) but has no guarantee that it will continue to dominate.

