

Ask HN: What will it take to topple Facebook (if anything)? - kloncks

With ongoing rumors about Google potentially working on a Facebook clone as well as the rise of other social endeavors like Twitter or FourSquare, it's cool to look at how this could affect Facebook.<p>Facebook's undeniably leading the Social Networking space. Is this going to be permanent?<p>Can it be toppled? What would it take to do so?
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jmcentire
Privacy is a major concern. But, also, functionality is very important. If you
want to topple Facebook do two things:

Guarantee privacy and revolutionize functionality. Here's how:

Privacy; The Zero-Knowledge Database. By relying upon the client to compute
deterministic indexes based upon user-input, you can abstract the relations
from the database into the client space. The result is that you have two
items, say a pet and owner that look like this: Pet: id afb142, name Spot
Owner: id dsf513, name Data

When Data logs in with his username and password, those values are never sent
to the server -- instead, they're used along with other information to create
keys <afb142> and <dsf513>. This process is deterministic given the sign-on
data, but difficult to reverse-engineer (a one-way, trapdoor function or
hash). So, Data knows his pet is Spot, but anyone else, even with full access
to the database, doesn't.

This database design facilitates collaborative filtering, demographics
analysis, et cetera.

On Functionality: Pro-active social networking. Facebook loses because it
tells you what you know (or what your friends know). We've seen that
globalization's promise of expanding our horizons is wrong -- we only become
more niched. Yet, despite being very focused on a few topics, no one is
exploiting this in a useful way. If you know that I enjoy older Country music
and that I like a well-made cocktail, why can't your social networking site
hook me up with a suggestion about what to do this weekend?

Right now, most people hear about new things through their contacts. But,
their contacts have to be introduced to them through exploration or diffusion
through their contacts. This process is slow and requires extensive contact
networks of people with similar interest to find one another. The system,
however, knows who likes Hank Williams and it knows who likes a perfect
Vesper. Through some basic analysis; why can't it suggest to me a bar and a
band this weekend based upon what other people with similar taste are doing?

Imagine waking up in the morning and logging into NotFacebook... it tells you
about a few articles on HN, Reddit, and a number of blogs. Some are bloggers
you know and love while others are new-to-you bloggers writing about subjects
you enjoy. The system also recommends dinner at a restaurant that's recently
enjoyed positive reviews from your fellow mushroom-hating, meat-loving
epicureans. I knows you and Sam are free (Sam has similar taste, after all,
and is a good friend of yours).

That would kill Facebook, I think.

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acgourley
They have firmly situated themselves as the dominant social network, and I
don't see this changing for a long time.

But even now, Facebook's influence on our lives is fading away. As nearly
everyone starts using it, and as everyone starts forming connections with
anyone they have briefly met, it's power becomes greatly diluted. In many
ways, it is becoming LinkedIn - a sterile place where everyone only puts forth
their public persona.

It's certainly more complex than that, to do a real analysis you need to go
feature by feature. Some become more useful as everyone connects (market
place, events, causes, messaging, chat) but other things clearly suffer.
Facebook used to be a place to share the kind of personal photos only your
good friends see, but no longer. Your status used to be a very personal
microblog, now you have to be much more careful.

Facebook used to be about your personal life, and more and more it's about
your public life. Most teenagers will probably reject using Facebook in
meaningful ways because of this. And that's the beginning of the end for
Facebook as we know it.

Soon it will be nothing but infrastructure for our public net existence. Sure
they will continue to make money, but I do expect the people who used to spend
hours a day on it to start channeling their attention elsewhere.

If you want to compete with Facebook, become the tool that lets people follow
each others' personal lives again. Let Facebook continue on it's trajectory to
become a digital address book.

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wdewind
Nothing is permanent, of course, and on the web things can change in a flash.

That being said, they are making obvious moves to continue to add to their
defensibility. Their understanding and manipulation of the network effect is
unparalleled by any other company out there. It will be a long time before
they go.

I would suspect the thing that replaces them is nothing we can quite imagine.
I do think facebook has probably "won" social networking in the browser space,
the company that beats facebook will have to have a product that connects
people better, and I would argue one that offers an experience that transcends
what is possible in the browser. Within the current browser-based paradigm
facebook is extraordinarily competitive and I do not expect them to lose
there, but of course that goes without saying. The key to replacing a company
like facebook is finding a new space where it is too big to pivot to compete
in, and dominating that space. Right now facebook's organization and processes
are setup to completely dominate the browser and innovation in that sector
(from recruitment to product design). You'd need to force them to shift gears
more quickly than they could, and I think a new platform would probably be the
best bet.

But anything anyone says on this thread is wild speculation and should be
taken with a grain of salt.

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wmeredith
I don't have a direct answer to the first part of your question, but as for
the, "if anything?" part...

It's a sure thing. Remember when people used to talk about what could possibly
unseat MySpace, if anything?

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iamdave
30 days since the last blog post, and nearly $180,000 later we still wait for
Diaspora. However, you can get a t-shirt they've apparently been pimping out
on twitter (<http://twitter.com/joindiaspora/statuses/16711664582>).

I hate to be debbie downer on this one, but ~$180,000 is a lot of money to be
contributed to a project like this, which from the technical aspects that we
know _so far_ (which of itself does not say a lot for something with it's
ambitions, and given the name which seems to be almost a southpaw sucker punch
to Facebook with the exodus/diaspora of users), might not even gain any sort
of mainstream traction to be worthy of more than a cursory blog post from CNet
once it launches.

~~~
jmcentire
Diaspora isn't the answer. It's reactionary. It tries to deal with privacy
concerns but is limited because it ignores the utility of Facebook.

If I meet someone, I can exchange a lot of information with them by merely
sharing my Facebook information. I can then "stalk" them and learn a lot about
them. If there are n independent servers (for security), I'm now limited. I
have to expose myself on a multitude of sites or convince others that my sys-
admin is the most trust-worthy in existence. The sys-admins need to make
money, though. Even the most altruistic sooner or later run out of funds,
right? You could argue that each of the n servers will be designed to share
information and the user interface is no different than Facebook today --
however, if that is the case, then a malicious individual can add a node to
the cluster and then scrape any and all data that comes by.

So, either it shares information freely so that anyone and everyone can
exploit it, or it requires a lot more involvement from the user. The avoidance
of which is exactly the reason people don't simply use: Flickr, MeetUp, evite,
LinkedIn, Google Calendars, Twitter, PlentyOfFish, OkCupid, et cetera.

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deweller
When the social web has a well defined and widely adopted standard, then
Facebook will become just another social site. In short, we need an accepted
standard like HTML or RSS for social updates.

I would like to use Buzz/Twitter/Identica/whatever to post one update. And
then all my social connections will be immediately notified of the update
regardless of what client or website they prefer to use.

~~~
mindcrime
Exactly. It still hasn't come completely to pass, but Om Malik made a good
point about social networks being "Just a feature."
[http://gigaom.com/2007/02/05/are-social-networks-just-a-
feat...](http://gigaom.com/2007/02/05/are-social-networks-just-a-feature/)

Eventually "social networking" like features will be ubiquitous and your
social graph will be federated across many different sites using standard
protocols. Facebook won't be anything special, but just another portal (view)
into your social network experience. Unless they try to remain a "walled
garden" in which case they'll be nothing, eventually.

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Aaronontheweb
If people start getting racked with real-world consequences because of things
they put on Facebook, like lost work opportunities, legal ramifications, harm
to their reputation, and so forth to a point where the average person (non-
techies) becomes concerned about privacy to the point of avoiding social
networks like Facebook entirely then Facebook's growth model is going to be in
jeopardy. As for what will replace Facebook in the event that this happens -
probably closed networks along the lines of LinkedIn.

I'd say it'll take a few years of things going the way they are now before the
public at large starts taking their privacy a little more seriously.

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lkozma
I had this idea of a real social event, say on campuses, etc. that would be
called "Quit Facebook Party". It would be a themed party where people delete
their accounts permanently, the process being projected on the wall for others
to see. With the social validation people would find it easier to get over
their addiction and stop wasting time on FB. Once it became "cool" to not be
on FB, it could spread just as fast as being on it did earlier.

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Zakuzaa
Topple or not, I am sure Google's version of facebook can make much more money
with comparitively much less users.

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base
a great API like twitter. facebook is still far from good for developers:
always changing their apis without notice, slow response times and limited
functionality (do they already have any type of search api that works across
all the website?)

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jbail
Yes, and they'll do it themselves with their hubris.

