
What do you think is Facebook's long-term strategy? - kirse
I'm still trying to understand what is preventing Facebook from becoming just another social fad, especially after reading the whole article on the Google exodus to Facebook. Right now it's still just a glorified social network slowly trending towards Myspaceism with all the AppCrap (as I call it).<p>"We want to make Facebook into something of an operating system so you can run full applications..." (Zuckerberg). Ok that's great, but the majority of Facebook apps are FAR from what a traditional OS offers.<p>As a successful app developer (550k users) myself, the bin of roughly 9,000+ growing apps has made it pretty damn hard to unite any major Facebook usergroup behind a single app.  It's the same problem as trying to find a single, unified, interest-group among the millions that exist (hint: you can't). If only 2 of your 200 friends have added the app, it's pretty much worthless from a SocialOS standpoint, no matter how awesome it is. Obviously "social apps"-"social"="plain old app", and there are very few Web apps that can compete with plain old desktop apps right now.<p>Facebook has executed the social network component amazingly well, but their vision as a SocialOS by web developers has not been much more than a hack-job with 99% of apps falling into the "Value-Added: None" category. They would do better to buy up the good applications by developers and make them permanent components to Facebook.<p>Don't even get me started on the SocialAds network either, that has absolutely ZERO benefit to the end-user other than another way to brag about what you've bought to your friends.<p>Right now the biggest thing Facebook has for it is the appeal of FB as the cool new thing to do (over Myspace) and the fact that many of us still use it as a glorified contacts directory (College student speaking here who's been on FB since v1).<p>So in summary, we have a great Social Network + Poorly executed socialOS + Privacy-Invading Ad Network. Right now users are only benefitting from the first one, and I see no reason why they won't just move on to the next great(er) social network. After all, that's exactly what's happening as people get rid of Myspace for Facebook.
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icky
1\. Get users (done)

2\. Get investment money (done)

3\. Lure developers on to their platform as sharecroppers (done)

4\. Get more investment money (done)

5\. Starve existing (and possible) social networks of users through network
effects and platform lock-in (done)

6\. Get more investment money (done?)

7\. Hold out long enough to get at least a partial exit for founders. (working
on it)

8\. Implode

~~~
indie01
>>5\. Starve existing (and possible) social networks of users through network
effects and platform lock-in (done)

This is what Microsoft did. Maybe not necessarily with "social networks," but
in principle. The fact that this little iteration of 'lock-in' is both
preceded and followed by a "getting investment money" cycle would be a cause
of alarm to me if I were a potential facebook investor or employee. Scratch
the "investment" word and you're left with just "getting money." Welcome to
the real world.

Lock-in is not a sustainable means of long-term growth, revenue, or profit.
Obfuscating code behind a bunch of platform-specific run-around gibberish and
license lawsuit nonsense doesn't benefit users and gives developers major
headaches. Lawyers do seem to like it, though, since they always are "getting
money".

As history has shown, superior, non-obfuscated, legal, free! open-source code
will inevitably appear on the outside of any lock-in. Lock-in creates
something known in management as "groupthink" and it's almost never (ouch,
sorry for the pun) "group_wise_". Groupthink causes those on the inside to
value that which is on the inside > the market is able to value it. There's a
reason disclosure is required in the world of securities: it's called "insider
trading."

So for long-term strategy, I'd say facebook flubbed _bigtime_ by being greedy.
Being greedy ala-Microsoft and "not accepting anything less than a billion" or
. . . whatever the tipping point was that caused them to jump in the stew with
Microsoft specifically . . . that was really just not smart. Trying to be too
many things to too many people?

The Internet was built for niche markets. I'm hopeful on the _open_ source
niche. :)

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cratuki
1\. Get lots of users

2\. ???

3\. Profit!

I'm wondering how dangerous the police state aspects of it are. The fact that
I've willingly told somebody "who all my friends are".

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JohnN
Well....

1\. Facebook does has a great Social Network and the chances of people moving
elsewhere is unlikely because they have developed a critical mass. Millions of
people are already invested in Facebook. Fads are easy to change. Its not easy
to opt out of Facebook because your friends drag you back. I cannot go and
join another network because none of my friends are there.

2\. You say the social OS is poorly executed but you have to remember its
early days and I am eager to see how the integration of Parakey will change
Facebook. You are right when you say there is a lot of app crap, however
slowly but surely I expect better more useful apps to be developed as Facebook
become more professional. Its a fun social network at the moment but I've seen
my friends profiles change significantly since joining megacorp. Their
profiles are now like resumes.

3\. The Privacy-Invading Ad Network pisses me off. But because of number 1
(above) I think its one of those things that will be accepted as a fait-
accompli. Us guys and girls in the tech community may start a fuss, but
Facebook now has millions of members. We can be ignored and if the majority of
people don't care, I doubt Facebook will change things.

Conclusion - Its too early to tell were Facebook is going (they probably don't
even know). Somethings about it may piss us off, but the tech community's
influence in Facebook will wan.

~~~
brk
Couldn't your Point #1 also be said of MySpace before?

The problem for Facebook is that the cost for the users of switching to a
newer social network site is practically zero. A little bit of time to create
your profile, but no real significant costs.

If 3 of your most significant friends from FB emailed you about a new, free,
social site, would you ignore their emails, or would you go check it out and
maybe join them? If you joined them, how many people would YOU attempt to drag
over?

~~~
JohnN
You make a fair point....

but Myspace never had the effect of Facebook because the social aspects are
limited. The tie-in is not as string as Facebook and how many of us actually
had a myspace page we updated regularly when Myspace was big? The privacy
aspect of Facebook has prob been the main difference between the two companies

~~~
Goladus
Social aspects aren't especially more limited in Myspace. You have friend
lists, bulletins, status feeds, and profile comments-- all of the most popular
features of Facebook. You don't have "MySpace Apps" but people add stuff like
quizzes to their pages and send questionnaire bulletins all the time.

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nkohari
There still has yet to be an application that takes advantage of the real
value of the Facebook platform. Current applications are all about virility
and simple fun. While there's nothing wrong with that, the social information
about Facebook's users could be utilized for so much more.

Facebook has a chance to be the "source of truth" for the social graph. When
you sign up for a new service that has a social aspect, the service could use
the Facebook API to learn if your friends are also on the service. For
example, what if when you signed up with Twitter, it figured out if any of
your friends were already on the site? The future of the Facebook "app" is
really a concept that could stand on its own, but instead leverages Facebook
so its users don't have to re-create their social graph.

Of course, that means that sites that are "Facebook-driven" would require
people to create accounts on Facebook -- at least to take advantage of the
social aspects of the site. Depending on the site, that may matter a lot or
not that much.

In terms of monetization, I think that Facebook still has yet to reveal their
full advertising strategy... the new Pages system and SocialAds are pointless,
because they add no real value to the consumer. It's all just glorified spam.
They really missed the mark big time, because just because I bought a new
digital camera doesn't mean I give a rat's ass about friending Sony.

However, if they could leverage the demographic and interest-based information
in a user's profile, and use it to drive very good targeted ads, they could
have something special.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
So your premise is that there is a race to own all of my friendships, and
FaceBook can be the source of truth for that?

I understand the premise, but I'm not drinking the coolaid. I have all kinds
of friends -- personal friends, professional friends, friends from school,
friends from work. I don't want to be mixing those guys up inside of one big
FaceBook bag-o-social-goodness.

Right now my FaceBook friends are people who contacted me on FaceBook and
wanted to link up. That's fine. But I don't go looking for others, and these
same folks will be using some other app five years from now and they'll be
inviting me to join it. I know, because I've been through several generations
of this: classmates.com, MySpace, ICQ, AIM, GMail, etc. Everybody wants to
make viral apps, which means everybody is constantly infecting each other and
soon there's a new prominent infection going round. Won't be long until
somebody out-FaceBooks FaceBook.

~~~
nkohari
I agree that the Facebook site itself is nothing special, but the data that
they control is. The next class of people graduating from college will have
had Facebook throughout their entire tenure. It's likely that Facebook will
try to evolve to follow them into their professional lives.

I also agree about having different kinds of friends. However, it would be
pretty simple to categorize friends as colleagues, acquaintances, etc. It
might insult people in the beginning, but if it was part of the system, it
would become second-nature.

Apps that are viral for the sake of virility are a waste of time. They might
be fun for awhile, and they might make their creators a little bit of cash,
but Vampires and Werewolves will never have a sustainable business model.
However, software that leverages the information in Facebook and the virility
of the news feed will gain a leg-up on the competition.

~~~
apathy
Virility != virulence.

Virility is manliness. Virulence is the quality of being viral.

I was wondering what the hell made an app 'manly' for a bit there.

------
marketer
1) Keep it pervasive across all generations - every kid who enters high school
or college gets a facebook account

2) Make sure facebook remains a necessary tool for social interaction

3) Cultivate the app platform, and make sure there is incentive to develop
applications

