

Ask HN: Compete with Facebook? - mkice

I ultimately would like to create a facebook alternative.  I understand that a lot of people also share my desire.  My question is, should I go for it, or look for a MUCH smaller niche?
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nostrademons
You have to come at them obliquely. If you set out to build a better social
networking site for _everybody_ you'll fail, because they have more resources
and more expertise.

Instead, try to figure out a niche that they're failing at - either an
activity or a population of users - and that can be expanded into a full
social networking site as it grows. Twitter's attempting to do this with
status messages, Zynga with casual games. There've got to be a bunch of other
sub-activities that people do on FaceBook that aren't well supported...tie
into one of those, then gradually expand your usage base until you're better
than FaceBook at everything.

~~~
cheald
> _for everbody_

This is key. It's arguable that Facebook is successful because it was
exclusive to a smaller niche (college students) when it was starting out.

~~~
Gibbon
IMHO Facebook make a colossal mistake when they opened up the service to the
entire world.

Now that they've let the genie out of the bottle, there's no going back. With
500 million users, every feature they add is a monstrous engineering challenge
and every change they make is an impossible political challenge, guaranteed to
piss off a major portion of it's users.

How do you market to 500 million people? How do you govern a sytem with that
many users in any meaningful way.. you can't. There's nothing you can offer
that many people except for lowest common denominator stuff like advertising.

The biggest challenge in business is finding a market you can clearly define,
that can be reached easily. Had Facebook stayed "closed" and only available to
college students, that's exactly what they would have had.

Imagine the possibilities.. Facebook would have been a right of passage for
freshman students.. you go to college, you get a facebook account. College
students and their families are some of the richest people on the planet..
just imagine what you could have offered them?

If a college social network is the primary product.. what are the related
products, information, services and media? Dating, food, moving, insurance,
travel (spring break!), textbooks, banking, car rentals, housing, used goods,
career counseling, job searching, recruiting, training, social events, clubs..
the list is endless.

But with a market of everyone.. which products do you offer? When you picture
"everyone" do you have an image of a person in your head? Of course not.. but
"college student".. ahh you know immediately what to offer them.

Imagine how many companies would beg to offer their services and products on a
college-only facebook network?

That's how you compete.. find a specific niche you can clearly define and
build deep relationships with your customers.

~~~
coryl
Ermm, you can still easily target college students because they add their
colleges to their Facebook network. Users tag their interests, music they
listen to, books they read.

From a business stand point, I really can't see how you could say facebook
made a colossal mistake by opening to the world. It made them rich and one of
the most powerful websites on the Internet.

------
matthewer
Niche social networks are dead. People are fatigued by the idea of a social
network. The word itself makes me pretty much want to puke. Social is the web
now; its a fluid idea. What do you want your product to do? to achieve? How is
this going to make my life easier, better, more fun? Even if it is all about
my profile and moments - how is it better?

~~~
djacobs
My guess:

1\. by giving us back control.

2\. by giving us data portability.

------
Tichy
Remember when a lot of people used to think that the blue "e" icon is the
internet, and "Microsoft" is "Word"?

Probably now many Facebook users think Facebook is the internet. Good luck!

What I mean is: they don't use Facebook because they think Facebook is so
great, they use it because their friends use it (like email - it is just a way
to send each other messages). They probably never questioned why they use it.
Therefore it would likely be hard to make them switch to something else.

------
troygoode
If you were Mark Zuckerberg asking HN "Compete with MySpace?" a few years ago,
you'd likely get the same advice you'll get now: they're way out in front of
you and you'll have a much better shot at success if you pick a different
niche.

 _The Bad News:_ You'll almost certainly fail if you try to take on Facebook.

 _The Good News:_ If you succeed, you'll almost certainly be a billionaire.

If you wanted to do this, I'd recommend reading up on what the Diaspora guys
are doing and beat them at their game rather than attacking Facebook head-on.

~~~
earle
Bad advice.

If your goal is money, just spend your money on powerball tickets since your
chances are much, much greater.

If you do what you love because you're passionate about it, and you're
exceptionally talented at what you're doing, rich is a natural byproduct.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
You can be both passionate and exceptionally talented, and utterly broke,
quite easily.

------
ry0ohki
This is an incredibly hard and most likely frustrating thing to do. Social
networks require momentum to work. In other words, I won't join your social
network unless most of my friends are there. Facebook was able to gain
traction on MySpace because it started with a niche (colleges), LinkedIn also
has a niche (business). Perhaps you can start with some sort of niche
(furries?) and if the user experience is good, that community may extend it to
their friends.

------
Kilimanjaro
I want a social place but not to share pics with my family and friends. I want
to share knowledge and expertise. I want to ask questions, get answers, share
code, show off my projects, learn from the experts, chat with colleagues,
network and socialize.

Start with a facebook clon for hackers, then, like reddit, expand to all
possible interests. Let people create their groups of interest and then grow,
grow like weed.

~~~
jgg
_Start with a facebook clon for hackers, then, like reddit, expand to all
possible interests. Let people create their groups of interest and then grow,
grow like weed._

People like (and find it convenient) to split into tribes they identify with.
Look at Usenet, Reddit, Facebook, IRC, etc. What if you took this niche-based
grouping and applied it to a social network?

Imagine, for example, that I sign up with your site and join the "Lisp
Hackers" group. I can private message other Lispers, I can pop open a chat
window and talk live without having to open an IRC client, post code on our
public discussion forum, view the profiles of the people in my group, look at
their pictures, etc. The important thing would be to emphasize community-based
subsites with a full suite of features for the members.

Facebook now works (to my understanding; I don't have an account) on the
principle of "friending" everyone, and discovering some new people in "Groups"
or "Fan Pages", which provide primitive utilities for talking with one
another; at the end of the day, to get the full list of features, you have to
add everyone to your giant "list o' friends." What would happen if you started
with the idea of strict grouping instead?

~~~
whatusername
Did you just describe Ning? I think I created a login once -- and i'm pretty
sure that's exactly what it did.

------
possibilistic
@mkice: Please email me (echelon@gmail.com). I've got a massive engineering
project that I've been working on for some years, and I definitely need help
on it due to my busy education schedule. It's along the same lines of
Diaspora, but a much broader scope: give all data a decentralized, ontological
API and a node-based exchange platform.

I've taken some ideas from the Semantic Web community, but scaled them down so
they're practical. I use a subset of RDF that maps cleanly to an SQL/ORM.
Models are generative based on the ontologies you define. Types are
hierarchical "Resources" that are uniquely identified (and sometimes
dereferenceable) by URI and can be exchanged from the original source or via a
p2p mechanism.

If this or any similar platform gains traction, Facebook is history. Blogs are
history. Reddit, etc. -- it can all be emulated (and improved) on this
platform and everyone can write code for it. No more data silos.

Personally, I'm not so interested in the social networking aspect, but social
network tools can be built upon this. I'm more interested in creating a tool
to route interesting information to and from relevant parties. I want an
optimal web reading experience, and not even hacker news can provide this.
(ie. I want to algorithmically find peers with similar skills/interests and
fetch their highly-ranked stories/comments, data mine, personal interest
profiling, etc. Can't do that without success/adoption of the platform
though.)

~~~
mkice
Hey, I sent you an email..

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michael_dorfman
The question I'd be asking myself is, what do you have besides the desire? Do
you have some other advantages (contacts, technology, funding) that makes this
even slightly plausible?

If all you have is the desire, you might as well take on General Motors.

~~~
aspiringsensei
Well...I'm already in a better capital position than them ;)

------
nnash
Personally I don't feel the need for a facebook alternative, and I'm sure that
a majority of people feel the same way. Otherwise there wouldn't be 500
million facebook users. I'm happy with using facebook to connect with all my
acquaintances, twitter to interact on the micro level and tumblr to blog. Here
is a question you have to think about; "What can you possibly offer that would
change my mind?"

I think everyone at some point wants to create the next big thing in social
networking, but honestly, it just isn't a realistic expectation. Look how much
Google has failed to compete, even with MySpace, in the social arena.Do you
think you can you do better than Google?

~~~
mindcrime
II agree with everything you said, and still... I think there's a place for
more social networks, if we redefine "social network" a little.

What there are are tons of communities, any of which a given user may or may
not be a member of... and as long as people prefer to show a different face
when interacting with a given community, or keep their interactions with the
members of a given community separate - whether as a convenience, or for
privacy reasons, whatever, there will be room for "social networks" around
interests, geographic areas, etc.

So, yeah, a "social network" for Doctor Who fans, a "social network" for Mazda
RX-8 enthusiasts, etc. This space is mostly filled by "forums" now, which
don't necessarily have (or need, and this point is probably key) the same
suite of features as a "full fledged social network."

But if there was a way to take advantage of all these discrete communities of
interests, yet still give a user convenient access to their entire social-
graph at all times, and a void "profile fatigue" and "password fatigue" then
one could probably accomplish something.

Whether or not what Diaspora are building, or one of the other varied
"decentralized social network" projects, remains to be seen. And how the hell
you monetize it if you could build it also remains to be seen. But there point
in all this rambling was really just to say that there are needs for
"networking" that Facebook isn't filling at least not alone. Now the
combination of Facebook, Gallifreybase.com and rx8forum.com may fill the needs
of the hypothetical Doctor Who watching, RX-8 driving, social-networker. So
would one really want to compete with Facebook or with rx8forum.com and
gallifreybase.com?

~~~
nnash
It isn't just forums that are filling the gap it is sites like Ning, and
Wordpress plugins like buddypress that are allowing people to develop their
own "social networks" as well. Which has me thinking that it is probably
better to create a service that allows individuals to design and develop their
own communities that cater to whatever interest they may have.

------
lwhi
You need to cater to a real need if you want to be successful.

Why do you feel the world needs an alternative?

What problem would your product solve (that facebook isn't already solving)?

------
niallsmart
Go for it. Just make sure and use Facebook Connect for auth.

~~~
nnash
Is this a joke? Wouldn't it make more sense to use Open ID or a custom build
solution for user authentication/registration?

~~~
mindcrime
OpenID Connect? <http://openidconnect.com/>

~~~
nnash
that is what I was referring to yes.

------
Mgccl
Why do you want to make a new social network?

If you goal is to make money, then ignore this comment.

If your goal is to make something better than facebook, you want to ask
yourself, why you want to reinvent the wheel? Unless you have some great idea.
Don't.

Check out Diaspora, maybe it's better for you to work on that when it comes
out. They have some good ideas. You can also look around other open source
SNS.

------
kqueue
Facebook is not about features anymore. It is about the fact that they have
500M users. When you want to compete with Facebook, you have to grab 30% from
the 500M to your side to call it a competition. You have to convince them that
you have a better service and that they won't miss the people that are still
on Facebook.

P.S. 1% of Facebook users care about privacy. The rest are not aware.

~~~
waterside81
Agreed. The network effect is their advantage. Features are for tech blogs to
write about, real people care that their buddies from 30 years ago are online
now.

------
dotcoma
The answer is within you.

But without a great idea, excellent execution, a lot of technical talent and a
pile of money, I'd choose the much smaller niche.

------
revorad
Make a girls-only social network.

------
Charuru
You should go for it if you can offer a compelling feature that facebook
lacks. (I mean really really compelling).

I think the advice about going at it obliquely is only necessary if you're
creating a straight up clone, this targeting a niche thing is only about
marketing, but if you can offer something better, I think you'll find many
early adopters.

------
sabat
Figure out why people use Facebook, and then do a better job at it than
Facebook is.

Presumptions: Facebook does not actually understand its own audience and why
people use the site. Also, I presume you will figure out what "better" really
means for your audience and not just over-engineer something.

