

I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet - enki
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/facebook/

======
gfodor
This is one more step toward the inevitable "major event" occuring in the mid
2010's regarding online privacy.

Sooner or later, we're going to trend backwards away from all this. Just like
it's hip to be environmentally conscious now, it will be hip to be privacy
conscious when the generation growing up giving away all their personal
information grows to realize this ultimately can lead to an unhealthy world.
This sense of enlightenment, that our natural impulses in the short term can
have undesired consequences in the long, is the foundation of movements that
define generations. Usually the thing that kicks it all off, though, is a
major event that brings these long term consequences to the surface. I
certainly hope for this one, it doesn't cost any lives.

~~~
troystribling
I dangers of online privacy have been in the news for the past 5 to 6 years
since myspace et al. initially became popular. Since then more people have put
more information about themselves online because they believe there is an
advantage in doing so. Unless some 'major event' leading to the deaths of
thousands of people occurs, which is very unlikely, I do not see the trend
diminishing. In fact, I predict that within a decade if your job history and
some social information about you is not readily available on the web your
professional opportunities will be constrained and people will view you with
suspicion.

~~~
Xichekolas
> _... because they believe there is an advantage in doing so_

That is one possible explanation, but I think it is really simpler than that:
People like to talk about themselves, and they like to find out what other
people are doing and talk about that too.

~~~
troystribling
benefit is probably a better term than advantage. Then your case would be
included.

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tjpick
I just don't get quotes like (I see in the sidebar) "we are making a web where
the default is social".

No shit Sherlock. The web has always been social and about sharing
information. There's the <a> tag, one might say linking to your friends page
is encouraged, and the "default" is no authentication. Meanwhile I,
apparently, can't even read the facebook developer docs without signing up.
Yeah, real social.

------
sunchild
Here's my counter-prediction: 5 years from now, both Facebook and Techcrunch
will be as relevant as MySpace is today.

~~~
nl
Why?

At least Techcrunch provided some reasoning.

Your prediction is worded in a way that makes it hard to argue with, because
"relevant" is so subjective. I know a lot of artists find MySpace VERY
relevant.

However, to attempt a rebuttal, taking the Facebook case:

If Facebook is to become less relevant than it is now I would argue it's
growth would have to stop, or at least slow down. According to the linked
article it is currently accelerating, and usage of Facebook APIs OUTSIDE of
Facebook is increasing enormously.

Growth like that doesn't just stop, unless there is some external factor.

So far, Facebook have proven themselves to be reasonable technically skilled,
so I'll rule out technical problems.

It's possible some kind of legal issue could slow them (privacy lawsuits or
something?). However, lawsuits take such a long time to play out that it would
probably be at least 2-3 years before any negative verdict against Facebook
would make them change what they are doing, and even then it won't shut down
the site. If Facebook have 2-3 years more sustained growth it would be
unprecedented for them to shrink from half-a-billion users to something less
relevant than MySpace in another 2 years.

Another good counter-argument is the likely-hood of an IPO in the next 5
years. Apparently, Facebook had $700 million in revenue last year, and should
do $1.1 billion this year ([http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/03/02/facebook-
made-up-to...](http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/03/02/facebook-made-up-
to-700-million-in-2009-on-track-towards-1-1-billion-in-2010/)). If they IPO'ed
now, with a P/E ratio of 20 (Google & Apple = ~24, Microsoft = ~ 17), then
they'd be a $20 billion company. That buys a lot of relevance.

EDIT: Note that is a revenue figure, not an earning (as pointed out below), so
the numbers are wrong. I'll leave it here, though, because the point is more
important than the numbers - if (when) Facebook IPO's they will raise a LOT of
money.

~~~
sunchild
What is the basis for the "P" in your "P/E" calculus?

~~~
nl
The shareprice, based on a fixed P/E. If their earnings are $1 billion, and
their P/E is 20 (similar to Google), then their cap is $20 billion. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P/E_ratio>

(Note the error I made above regarding their earnings, though)

~~~
sunchild
So you assume comparable P/E to other much larger and more established
companies, in order to arrive at a fanciful market cap number, in order to
prove...something. No wonder these bubbles keep bursting.

~~~
nl
Not at all.

Bigger, more established companies generally have (much) lower P/E ratios that
new companies (eg, Google had a P/E ratio of 118 at their float price, and had
a lot of criticism for pricing too low. See
[http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2007/tc200...](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2007/tc20070816_425764_page_2.htm)).

I'd be very interested in what you think a non-fanciful market cap number is -
and how you arrive at it!

My point is that when they float, they will raise a lot of money. It might be
$5 billion, it might be $20 billion, it might be $50 billion. In any case,
they are going to be sitting on a big reserve of cash.

Your point was that they will be irrelevant in 5 years. My argument is that -
ignoring other factors - any company in the tech sector sitting on a few
billion dollars in cash is far from irrelevant.

~~~
sunchild
"I'd be very interested in what you think a non-fanciful market cap number is
- and how you arrive at it!"

Market cap is defined as "a measurement of size of a business enterprise
(corporation) equal to the share price times the number of shares outstanding
of a public company".

My point all along is that you are engaging in wild, unfounded speculation
about a non-public company, using wholly inappropriate metrics.

------
jrockway
I don't really get Facebook. What is it? I left it alone for a few years, when
it was basically a profile and a list of friends. Now when I log in, I don't
know what to do. I don't know any of the people who are trying to friend me,
and I don't see any way to _do_ anything.

Contrast this with Google, where I can find information, get maps, check my
calendar, listen to my voicemail, and chat with my friends.

I am not sure which one will "win", but I know which one is actually useful
for me right now.

~~~
j_baker
I thought I was the only one who found facebook totally user-unfriendly.

~~~
ismarc
I've determined that Facebook is designed to have something to hold your
attention for 45 seconds to 3 minutes on each page before something else shiny
jumps out for you to click on it. It's a brilliant interface when you're
dealing with people killing time. It's a horrible interface for anyone who
actually wants to get something done.

------
apsurd
Compare the headline with the author's eventual written statement:

 _"In my opinion, Facebook still has a ways to go towards improving its actual
site if it’s really going to be the long-term center of the web."_

Sign me up for some techcrunch bannagee please.

------
hyperbovine
I can live without facebook (in fact, I have never used it.) I could never
live without the Google, and I can never envision a time when this will not be
true.

What am I missing here?

~~~
whatusername
For my circle of non-tech friends.. Facebook has replaced email and IM. That's
pretty big.

~~~
nl
And photosharing. And gossip magazines.

And sharing location ("I'm having beer at the pub. Come and join me")

Oh, and they use it for little things like product recommendations ("I need a
new washing machine. what do people like?")

And then there's the whole "how do I fix my computer/car/whatever". Lots of
people don't Google for it - they just ask on Facebook and wait for the
original poster to Google it and reply to them

But yeah.. apart from these things it's pretty useless really.

~~~
sunchild
Oddly enough, all of the things that you mentioned are useless to me.

~~~
BrandonM
Oddly enough, all of the things that he mentioned are crucial to 90%[1] of
people aged 18-25[2].

[1] a slightly-educated guess

[2] and many others as well, obviously

~~~
sunchild
[1] Wishful thinking? [2] Fickle user group.

------
unignorant
My thought is that sensationalist headlines are nothing new.

More seriously, I know enough people who disdain/distrust Facebook that this
seems ridiculous to me. Then again, maybe I know the wrong people.

~~~
runevault
I am the sort of person you are talking about (distrusts FB) and I do what I
can to make others realize how evil they are. Case in point, somehow many
people either missed the whole Beacon debacle entirely or have put it out of
their minds until reminded. I will never understand how anyone can give ANY
personal data (who friends are and so forth) to a company who has proven so...
ruthless in using that data for personal gain without consideration of their
user base.

------
doron
Its the relationship stupid.

Everybody is a friend, no colleagues, much less family, or people you admire.
eliminating privacy and reducing relationships to simplistic formulas to be
sold to marketers.

Fact is, all my relationships are complicated, not just one. including my
relationship with facebook, one i'm not particularly attached to either.

------
gnaritas
I think someone's lost touch with reality. Facebook hasn't seized anything and
couldn't scare Google if their lives depended on it.

~~~
derwiki
I think that's the attitude that has lead to the demise of more than one great
company.

~~~
jrockway
OTOH, Google tried to be social by default (Buzz) and suffered massive
backlash. So maybe that's not what people want after all.

------
justinph
This is all very neat. But I'm not going to make my site's functionality
dependent on Facebook any more than I'll make it dependent on Yahoo,
Microsoft, or Google. There needs to be a way to abstract all this stuff so
that if Facebook goes belly up tomorrow, I can still have the social features
on my site. I'm pretty sure facebook doesn't want developers thinking about
that, though.

------
samd
_In my opinion, Facebook still has a ways to go towards improving its actual
site if it’s really going to be the long-term center of the web. (As in, the
place you go to rather than Google.com.)_

So they are saying that Facebook wants to become like Digg and Reddit? I just
don't see that happening. Maybe if you're a power user who collects friends
and has hundreds of people posting stuff you can do that, but it takes a large
community to find all those interesting links. And the larger your community
becomes the less personal it is and the more it becomes saturated with
irrelevant stuff. So it seems that Facebook can be either a great place to
find interesting stuff online or a personal place for you and your friends,
but not both.

------
arihant
Well, Facebook just released a feature it thought will make life better for
it's users, and it probably will. Nowhere did Facebook mention that one can't
create something similar with their own social network.

Facebook is trying to do something really innovative here. That's solid
entrepreneurship, which is why it's receiving such violent opposition, as
usual. They are trying to jump to the next curve, and that's great. If other
networks jump in, this could change the very basics of how we experience web,
with or without Facebook. I think Facebook is just first company to start
this, just like some company started 'e-mail'; that company didn't own the
world's communication.

What I really want to see here is, how much are people willing to use their
'real' identities outside of facebook window. Because most of legit users on
Facebook use their real names (I think), and there must be a reason that
whenever somebody uses an id to comment on websites, it looks like
'pinkgur92twilight_meow'.

------
greenlblue
This is just creepy. Facebook is a profit motivated company and I don't
understand why people keep feeding it data and not just any data but relevant,
extremely profitable data for free! Google knows a bunch of stuff too but for
some reason this seems way more creepy.

~~~
trobertson
This is creepy because Facebook is making "private" information available to
other private companies, who can do nearly whatever they want with it. Also,
anybody can write a crawler to find the private information of thousands of
people with little to no hassle. Google, on the other hand, keeps your data
locked up for use in its advertising programs. Google doesn't hand your data
over to other companies.

------
mercury
i still dont use facebook that much.

~~~
jamesjyu
Then you will soon be in the minority of internet users. In a few years,
Facebook has the potential to basically BE the web for most people.

~~~
sh1mmer
That worked so well for AOL when they were the "internet".

~~~
whatusername
Except that facebook has a population already greater than "America". And AOL
cost money to use - facebook is free.

It doesn't stop you using other services/sites/etc -- you just don't need or
want to.

~~~
sunchild
"facebook has a population"

Every time I hear this meme repeated, I get the (depressing) image of roughly
400,000,000 stub accounts that were created to check out FB, and promptly
abandoned to gather dust.

~~~
dsil
The numbers they release are "monthly active users", ie people who logged in
within the last 30 days, not stub accounts.

~~~
arihant
I don't think so. Facebook only had 132M unique visitors in March, compared to
400M users they are believed to have. To say that 400M were active last 30
days, Facebook need to workaround the pigeonhole principle.

------
brandon272
I would love to see more data behind their users, as in how many of their
nearly 500 million users have even used the service? Added to their profiles?
Created a friends list? Verified their e-mail address?

I have friends who have, combined, created hundreds of dummy facebook accounts
that they do not use because while they do not have dedicated facebook
accounts, they often want to see someone's profile or friend's list. So they
hit "Sign Up", put in a fake e-mail address, fake first name, fake last name
and register. Facebook makes this quite easy because they don't even require,
last I checked, that you verify your e-mail address before you start using the
site features.

~~~
drawkbox
Facebook goes off of monthly active users. If you had logged in and done and
action once this month. Same for monthly active users within games, if the
user logs in, accesses the game that counts.

It is pretty clear how deep the social links are that Facebook is truly that
big. All your friends from elementary to college, all your relatives, nearly
everyone is on there. Your mom is probably on there. That tells that the
numbers are real.

------
modsearch
Does anyone know if we are supposed to rewrite our old FB Connect code using
this new stuff? Seems much cleaner anyway

~~~
tokenadult
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283226>

------
alexro
The main point goes like this: I can't be friends with all smart people. Thus,
HN and other 'neutral' sites gonna stay.

------
aresant
I wish they would have IPO'd before this, bet we'd see a nice bump in
valuation over the next few months.

------
gojomo
Facebook to Google: "Thanks for keeping the web warm for us, but we'll take it
now."

------
vtail
I have a proposal for HN: replace those triangles with 'Facebook recommend'
buttons :)

~~~
izak30
Please don't actually consider this. From most of the other comments, many of
us don't use facebook

------
yanw
Your internet identity in owned by Facebook, I don't like that, what if I
wanted to delete my account, I'd lose my identity, my friend connections and
all the stuff gathers on my FB profile, I don't think this should be the case
and I don't think it's sustainable.

