
Facebook Is Not Really That Special - mqt
http://mattmaroon.com/?p=345
======
menloparkbum
He's wrong because for most people, their friends and their social life are
more important than the rest of the stuff on the internet. You can't google
your friend's birthday. You can look it up on Facebook. You can't google for
photos of what happened at the bar last saturday. You can look it up on
facebook. Oh, you didn't get that cute girl's number last night? She's a
friend's friend right? Sweet, she accepted the friend request. You can't do
that on google, and previously, if you forgot to get her number on the spot,
you were out of luck in real life, too. You can't google for "what should I do
friday night" but you can use facebook to find out what people you know might
be doing. If you are already anti social and simply sit at home in your boxer
shorts, then yes, Facebook makes no sense. But if you actually have friends
and do stuff with them, it is a very useful tool. I'm almost certain that 90%
of anyone that went to college in the USA in the past 5 years has 2 sites they
visit every day: facebook and google. There is no other way at the moment to
use the internet to do the things I mentioned above.

On the other hand, the applications can be overwhelmingly irritating. The news
feed is a blessing and a curse. I like to know when there are new photos of my
friends to check out, but I don't care about what Zombie they just became. And
regarding the app signup notifications in the feed: there are some things I'd
rather not know about my friends, and one of them is how much time they are
spending goofing off on Facebook...

Note to startup hackers: if you're on facebook and more than 50% of your news
feed is your CEO's random facebook activity, it might be time to look for a
new job (or start your own thing.)

~~~
volida
The serious question is if it can be replaced not if its currently popular.

there are already so many social networks, so facebook is not dominant where
as Google has penetrated globally due to its quality.

~~~
halo
Whether Facebook can be replaced is an interesting question.

I'm leaning towards "no". For any site to replace Facebook it would require
either many, many users to make the transition to another site or to outright
leave making the site less useful for its users, and I honestly don't see that
happening. Facebook is honestly nicely designed, has plenty of users and I
can't see any killer app or nicer equivalent of Facebook appearing to make
moving worthwhile.

The only thing that could replace Facebook is an unprecedented sharing of data
between many significant players allowing interoperability between sites much
like how E-Mail works. The existence of DataPortability may be a slow but sure
approach towards this goal but there's too many factors to consider
influencing whether this will ever actually happen. I certainly hope so in the
long run - one site having the amount of influence that Facebook potentially
can worries me.

Disclaimer: I don't actually use Facebook, and probably never will.

~~~
axod
People are _extremely_ fickle. A few years ago in the UK, _everyone_ was on
friendsreunited. Then they all moved to facebook/myspace. If there's a new
thing with some cool feature, they'll all move to that. Facebook is just the
current fad.

------
aston
I love how Matt Maroon's post titles always sound like he prepared for
blogging by swigging Haterade.

~~~
xlnt
What part of his post, specifically, do you disagree with?

(If what he said is true then it's pretty ridiculous to call it hate.)

~~~
allenbrunson
for starters, the title. "not really that special" is the sort of passive-
aggressive thing someone says that often leads to flamewars. the text of the
article continues in that same vein.

~~~
xlnt
do you understand that you haven't commented on whether his position is true?
you just passive-aggressively called him passive aggressive.

------
yters
In a purely technical sense, none of the web 2.0 phenomena is special. What
are blogs, social networks, and the like? Merely the web pages that we nerds
have been messing with since the dawn of the internet.

However, the real "technology" is how the popular perception of this tech has
been (purposefully?) changed so it is no longer "techie."

On the other hand, the fundamental problems of the internet are not inherently
technological anyways, but based on social dynamics and trust. That is why
things like facebook and myspace are important.

What I would like to see some genius do is figure out what the "purpose" of
the internet is. By this, I mean what is the compelling, concrete, and
feasible potential of the internet? Sounds like a facile question, but it
isn't. I don't mean something like "communicate faster, broadly, and more
efficiently" or "watch porn."

There is a deep, underlying motivation that compels us to interact and be
social, to avoid loneliness and the like, despite all the narcissistic toys we
surround ourselves with. Why, and what does the internet do for this
motivation?

~~~
xlnt
facebook makes no interesting steps forward in solving trust problems. i made
an account. people give facebook their email password and thus entire address
book (this amuses me when the topic is setting up reasonable trust system),
and thus i sometimes get friend requests from acquaintances. which i ignore.

all they came up with is letting you make one type of connection with other
people with an account. nothing to see here. the only thing that makes it
notable is the large amount of data put into it.

~~~
yters
Yes, I think facebook started out right, but now the pressure to profit is
causing them to make stupid decisions.

The key is to allow the kind of control people have in real relationships.
From what I understand, it isn't possible to terminate facebook friendships,
and that eliminates the basis of accountability needed for a good trust
relationship.

------
pg
_I knew Google was, in a way, similar to Yahoo (which everyone had been using
up until then) but took one very critical step further. It was clearly a
paradigm shift, the difference between a propeller and a jet engine._

Wasn't Yahoo using Google to generate search results when you first saw
Google?

~~~
mattmaroon
I don't think so. I'm not clear on the timeline exactly, but weren't they open
to the public for some time before Yahoo licensed their technology?. I know I
must have found out about Google in 99 or early 2000, because I was living by
Akron U at the time. When did they partner with Yahoo?

Also if I remember correctly, when you searched on Yahoo for, say, poker, you
saw whatever was in their directory first, and then any further results were
from whoever their provider was (I want to say it was Inktomi before Google).
Am I wrong about that?

~~~
fallentimes
Matt,

You're right. Inktomi powered their search results before Google.

Source: <http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2162831>

------
alex_c
One counter-example: would you dismiss Flickr, and the entire photo hosting
industry, as not that special, or unimportant?

Facebook likes to brag that they host more photos in the US than Flickr and
the other competitors COMBINED (I'm trying to find a linkable source for this
- maybe someone has more luck?). That seems pretty special to me, especially
since all those photos can be found in a strong social context, unlike on most
other hosts.

I also wouldn't dismiss "a convenient way for you and a friend to decide which
bar to go to tonight" as unimportant. For the majority of people it's more
important than "the biggest advance in information distribution since the
printing press". Sad, but true.

It feels weird defending Facebook, since I resisted signing up for it, I'm not
a constant user, and yes, there IS a lot of hype. But I don't think it can be
dismissed as easily as "I don't get it".

------
ed
It took nearly 1000 words to say this is all a gut feeling?

Can you dismiss their 65 _billion_ page views a month? The fact that half of
their users return daily? Can you explain why it's not valuable to
_essentially own_ most interpersonal relationships on the web?

~~~
xlnt
pokemon is popular too. that doesn't make it important in the sense matt
means.

~~~
ed
But it's not just popular. Almost any undergraduate in the US will tell you
that facebook is already an essential social resource. That isn't trivial nor
is it easy to dismiss.

~~~
xlnt
how is "anyone will tell you it's awesome" different than "popular"? if they
know something that makes it fundamentally important you could relate what
that thing is, rather than just implying there is one.

------
alfredp
For some reason, I am reminded of this article: Social Software: Stuff that
gets you laid
[http://many.corante.com/archives/2005/02/16/social_software_...](http://many.corante.com/archives/2005/02/16/social_software_stuff_that_gets_you_laid.php)

------
blader
I'd parody this with 'Email Is Not Really That Special', but I'm too busy
building a profitable company on Facebook.

~~~
mattmaroon
Email was clearly a paradigm shift, but I wasn't there during its inception.
It was well established by the time I got wise.

~~~
jacobolus
_“paradigm shift”_

You should look that up (i.e. read Kuhn’s _Structure of Scientific
Revolutions_ ), because it does not mean what you think it means. (Except when
used as a bullshit buzzword by “enterprise” software executives)

~~~
jmzachary
You're not forward-thinking out-of-the-box. These best-of-breed phrases are
multi-disciplinary across vertical and horizontal markets.

------
mrtron
A lot of backlash coming from here, but I absolutely agree with this post.

~~~
jmzachary
I agree with it, too. I don't see the big deal with myspace or facebook, in a
big picture kind of way. Now that people are on it and have built out some
social graphs, they're asking "now what?" and there is no good answer. What is
the big itch that facebook scratches?

~~~
sgibat
The demand for the fast, free flow of information about your friends' and
acquaintances' lives and events, not only to tell you about who and what you
already know, but about who and what you'd like to know; And it works.

------
h34t
Was the pet rock Special and Important?

Well, for whom? For its creator it was obviously both. For a few happy
customers it was at least special. For society at large, who gives a shit?

I think this would be a much clearer discussion if we defined "Special" and
"Important" properly (and realized that they mean very different things to
different people).

There are a lot of people on HN/YC who are trying to hack together a
successful internet company. For them, I don't think Matt's definitions of
Special or Important are all that useful, because they ignore a lot of viable
business ideas -- ideas that fill a niche which is inane by itself, but
economically important to a few focused souls. If you make your living
building Widget X, then no matter how trivial that widget is to its users
lives, it is _everything_ to the people who devote their lives/company to
producing it.

The better our economy evolves to allow niche ideas to make money, the harder
time we're going to have figuring out how to define "Important". It is
increasingly possible to earn a living doing something that's entirely trivial
from a "big picture" point of view... but as soon as you're earning a living
from it, it's become important (to you).

------
randomhack
Facebook is not really that special.

1) Facebook, unlike Google is not a technological advance. It means that
copying Facebook is easier.

2) People can also jump ship en-masse from one social network to another
within a few years. Many people migrated from Myspace to Facebook. Its not
limited to social networking sites. I was amazed when almost everyone of my
friends migrated from Yahoo Messenger to Google Talk within about a month. I
had about 30-35 regularly online friends at Yahoo and suddenly almost all of
them migrated to Google Talk. This was when GTalk didnt even have emoticons.
Of course Yahoo Messenger is still ahead of Google Talk in terms of users but
this was just an example to show that even if a previous communication medium
has all your friends, that does not mean you are locked in. It may so happen
that suddenly everyone just simply without explanation migrate to another
platform. This process is not very rational and completely unpredictable.

3) Also consider the fact Facebook does not seem popular in countries like
India and China. Within some years these countries will be far bigger in terms
of number of users compared to the US.

------
aneesh
"Facebook is pretty good at what it does. But what it does just isn’t
important."

Maybe not important to him (or me, for that matter), but there are definitely
people out there to whom it's important. But facebook needs to find a good way
to monetize all those page views before the hype wears off.

~~~
xlnt
he agreed it was convenient for them, but said it's not important in some
directly world-changing sense. you haven't contradicted this.

~~~
sgibat
it _is_ world changing for them. it completely restructures their social lives
and the opportunities available to them for both serious and non-serious
social interaction. facebook has had a larger impact on many people's lives
than google. do you think most people really care about somewhat better search
results and somewhat better webmail over having access to four times (pulled
that number out of my ass, but you can bet that it's a multiplier) as many
social events and people as they did before?

------
ssharp
Facebook & MySpace have managed to get people on the internet who wouldn't
normally be on it. If you sampled random college students, I wouldn't be
surprised at all if most of them care very little (or not at all) about blogs.
However, most of them probably use Facebook or MySpace. It's hard to get the
perspective when we're some encompassed in what we do. Personally, I rarely
sign onto Facebook but am reading blogs daily. I know very well that I'm the
exception.

I don't think Facebook is worth $15 billion but I wouldn't trivialize it too
much - it's becoming the de facto online personal communications tool.

------
bdr
It was a good post, but the phrase "smelling their own dog shit" was a pretty
awkward change of tone and contradicts "Facebook is pretty good at what it
does". It kind of came out of nowhere at the end.

~~~
mattmaroon
You know, you're right. Long story as to how that got there, but it should
have gotten edited out with what preceded it. I'll fix that.

------
jacobolus
This rant is uninsightful and frankly pointless: it boils down to “I don’t
find Facebook very useful for me, therefore there’s nothing to it,” with added
bitter invective.

Matt should go read some of danah boyd’s sociology papers about social
networking sites, if he wants to be convinced that there’s more than just a
“nifty utility” there. She does a much better job exploring their significance
than random unsubstantiated comments in this rather inane discussion.

------
Mistone
I totally disagree - fb build something people want simple as that. you may
not like it / get it, but their growth and engagement metrics are simply off
the charts, they have deep, deep talent and plenty of growth paths left. im
surprised your not considering doing a fantasy sports app on fb - its a
winning space.

as for overall utility fb's platform is the major innovation on the web in the
last 5 years and its still very young (less than a year). Additionally photo,
mobile, media sharing, and virtual goods apps are both technically powerful
and very easy to use.

they are aggregating the primary social activities on the web and a wrapping
them together in one box that people are familiar with.

there is a lot of hype in the valley, yes or course, but dismissing fb as a
fad is a bit shortsighted. with the level of traction they have achieved to
date and the opportunities ahead fb is in a very good spot.

------
gojomo
Way late to the thread, but anyway -- here's why Facebook is special for me:

I had at least a little 'aha' when first encountering buddy-list instant
messaging; and again when it added a bit of activity awareness (like twitters
or Facebook statuses).

Another little 'aha' was when seeing the convenience of Friendster for both
self-publishing to friends and expanding one's social vision.

Another little 'aha' was encountering easy group-forming via the net, via
anything from eGroups to the super-easy affiliation groups of early
Orkut/Tribe (when Friendster fumbled affiliations).

Yet another was the benefit of online event invites/planning/followup, as
through Evite and Meetup and Upcoming.

And another was the fun of casual or cooperative games with friends and
strangers, as through IGZ/Excite Games/Yahoo Games/etc.

The special thing about Facebook is that it has a reasonable chance of
subsuming all those, and more, based around the shared and reasonably
defensible core, the 'social graph'.

That same graph offers a good hope of dealing with the 'trust' problem that's
attacking the utility of the net on every front -- email spam, web spam,
anonymous harassment, phishing, malware trickery, vandalism, payment/sales
fraud, impersonation, libel. People are justifiably retreating to circles of
trust, and a well-groomed, jealously defended, authentic 'social graph' is a
plausible antidote to all those problems.

For example, email was a giant 'aha' when it was young and strong -- but it's
dying under the weight of abuse and generational change. Social graph
messaging has already replaced email for some people, maybe a whole generation
of net users, and social graph messaging might topple (or save!) email in the
near future.

Of course Facebook isn't the first social network, but it's mostly been doing
the right things to be the 'last', the one that you never need to leave
because it overlooked a new opportunity or forgot to defend its core trust
value.

------
run4yourlives
>Sometimes I think Silicon Valley believes its own hype just a bit too much.

Understatement of the 21st century right there.

------
jbrun
Facebook is special in the sense that it is not going away. Ever since we
climbed down from trees (and even before then) we have been obsessed with
social hierarchy, staying on top, in touch and in control. Facebook is just
another way to interact with our fellow humans.

It may not have the profound, society shaking, impacts that Google has, but it
does cater to a fundamental human desire - societal interaction. And, as such,
it is special and not going away.

------
lbrdn
Google made information as easy to come by as air. Fb made it easier to know
who your girlfriend is thinking about cheating on you with. In the scheme, fb
will be a great scrapbook for historians to peruse but Google will have
changed the way we learn.

------
ntoshev
More fluff from Matt Maroon. This is starting to irritate me. Matt is probably
a nice guy, but does this article contain any insight for anyone?

If not, why exactly is it the top story?

~~~
rms
It makes for decent discussion.

~~~
ntoshev
It makes for some discussion, but it doesn't start at a particularly high
point. I have read much more interesting articles about social networks on
this very site, stuff written by Marc Andreesen and Paul Buchheit.

For example, the potential of social networks as consumer distribution model
or as magnifying social capital is completely ignored here.

------
Spyckie
Google is the 'ahha' tool for introverts. Facebook is the 'ahha' tool for
extroverts.

------
mwerty
Did you buy into the google IPO? I ask because its not clear how special you
thought Google was. It's easy to remember stuff this way and not count all the
failures you also had a good feeling about.

~~~
xlnt
you should try reading his post before criticizing him.

he literally said he couldn't foresee GOOG in particular getting so big, just
that _type of thing_ in general.

~~~
mattmaroon
Exactly. His argument is fallacious. I never would have guessed GOOG in
particular would get to where it is today.

~~~
mwerty
Investments are not as likely to be subject to
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias>

Unlike human memory, investments keep track of false positives which is why I
suggested that as _one possibility_. But, there might be other ways to avoid
forgetting.

~~~
mattmaroon
I thought GOOG might be overvalued at the time. You'd laugh if I told you what
I was buying around then.

I did much better after 2004, but that year was my first attempt at any
serious trading, and it didn't go so well.

------
bosshog
You could replace "Facebook" with Hacker News in your argument.

It's not the technology, but the community.

~~~
fallentimes
No one is calling Hackers News a paradigm shift.

------
Mistone
im so ready to switch from google

------
schammy
Totally agree. FB is a complete waste of time and I wish TechCrunch would stop
writing about it 50 times per day.

------
xlnt
someone thought facebook was special?

~~~
bosshog
It is, but not because of the technology.

[http://www.horsepigcow.com/2008/02/23/social-capital-and-
the...](http://www.horsepigcow.com/2008/02/23/social-capital-and-the-
influence-of-social-networks/)

