

Facebook knows who you are, and that's worth more than you think - mattjaynes
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/04/facebook-knows-who-you-are-and-thats.html

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systems
I remember how most of my friend were on ICQ and suddenly they all moved to
MSN, I never understood why! ICQ had more feature + offline message. Very few
at the time used Yahoo's messenger program, even when it also had more
feature!

Now most of my friends use facebook, I don't use it as much, but thats mainly
because it's blocked by work. Hi5 and myspace never really made that big, at
least here in egypt. Hi5 was perceived as something nasty or dirty. Facebook
had respect

Anyway, my moral is, it's really non trivial to understand what makes a site
popular, and what make people switch.

To replace facebook one have to come with something that is very very very
attractive

~~~
anewaccountname
which is easier to remember: 483960572194022 or imadude7347?

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ardit33
I'd say Paul is biased on this one. His own startup revolves around people
keeping track on their friends, and their company's value is on knowing who
you are, and who you are connected to.

So, since is selling lemonade, he is telling you that lemonade is really good
and valuable.

~~~
mhb
Or you might conclude that he is confident enough that he is right about this
that he started a company in order to benefit from it.

~~~
ardit33
True. He really believes it (and he might be very right about it, i am not
discussing that point), but the essay would have been more powerful coming out
from somebody that doesn't directly benefit so much from it.

A not so great analogy; would be real estate agents telling you "it is always
a great time to buy a house", or "buying a house is a great investment" etc..

Clearly a conflict of interest. And, just because a real estate agent buys a
house himself, doesn't make him necessary right.

Anyways, I still think Facebook will do great, but 15 billions is a strech.
Maybe it would be sticky for a long time, but I still remember, when everybody
I knew, my age, was using ICQ in high-school, then AIM in college, (you
couldn't survive without it at campus), and then slowly people moved away from
it, and now I barely use it. Maybe, once people added everybody they know, and
the novelty wears off, facebook will slowly fade also. Who knows.

~~~
brlewis
Isn't it more like a homeowner saying that buying a house is a great
investment?

~~~
pchristensen
That would be if a FriendFeed user wrote this article. Paul is like the home
builder or developer. He has product that he needs to move and he's marketing.
(I'm sure he believes it too, but that is the effect of his writing. But it's
no different than pg writing about startups or Joel writing about issue
tracking)

~~~
brlewis
The benefit he's selling isn't one that friendfeed users get. Only the owners
of friendfeed as a company can monetize the social graph. I don't think
friendfeed is looking for acquisition, so I see the financial value of social
graphs as a benefit (or potential benefit) that he owns himself, not as one he
needs to sell.

------
richcollins
> I get a lot of messages on Facebook, but unlike email, I have yet to receive
> any spam. That's pretty remarkable.

That is pretty remarkable. My Facebook experience is defined mostly by spam.
Application spam, newsfeed spam ... etc

~~~
Elfan
And unlike email there is no way to automatically filter most of it.

~~~
sprig
There's a greasemonkey script called UnFuck Facebook, which does exactly that
- It hides all app things and auto ignores apps sent to you, hides all
Facebook ads and makes it look very clean in general.

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webwright
If Facebook could roll in degrees of separation, it'd be interesting.

What about adding an "is this person important to me" web service for email.
For example-- I get an unsolicited email via Gmail. Gmail looks at the sender,
pings Facebook's social graph to determine if I know the person or happen to
be a degree or two of separation away.

Voila-- a foil for spam and a tool to allow you the ability to sort email
based on social "proximity".

Of course, the social graph isn't new. Gmail has a pretty good read on the
Social graph. Not as much explicit relationships, but it could determine
relationship strength by frequency and size of correspondence.

Facebook has a good start, though I think they have a long road before they
have enough data (especially among older generations) to be useful.

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Goladus
Facebook is not going become the next Google. If they do get lucky, they may
be the next Microsoft, though.

If Facebook manages to crowd everyone within their walls because of the
hassles of spam and anonymity, Facebook will have an enormous amount of
control over protocols and standards.

Part of my negativity towards Facebook is because I think that will be a very
bad thing in the long run. I agree that it's possible, but I'm praying
something better comes along.

~~~
mariorz
I've said this before and I'll say it again. The whole "walled garden" meme
is, at best, uninformed. It has an open API (has had one for a long time), it
is an open platform (anyone can write apps, any language). What walls are you
referring to?

~~~
Goladus
The core functionality of facebook involves personal profiles that people log
into. One must join facebook and volunteer personal information. This is the
entire basis of facebook's value, without that it's nothing.

In order to interact with these users, you must use Facebook's API, you must
use the protocols they decide to support, and you must interact with their
servers. It does not matter whether they are open or not, what matters is who
controls them.

In order to exploit users using Microsoft operating systems, you had to use
their API and you had to use the protocols they decide to support.

Google made it to the top and stayed there by being the best at what they did,
and figuring out a good way to make money off it. If Facebook wins it will be
because they've managed to get enough people hooked to their network and
unable to leave without consequences, much the same way people wouldn't switch
away from Windows in the 90s.

For the record, I don't think Facebook is going to become the next Microsoft.
That's just where they're headed if they manage to pull it off.

~~~
mariorz
I understand what the core functionality of Facebook involves, the fact that
you must join does not make it "closed" at least by any reasonable definition
that affects developers.

Also the amount of control Microsoft has over developers and users is not
comparable at all with a service like Facebook. You're talking about an OS
that comes pre-installed in the computers most people use, they generally
don't know how to keep it updated, much less remove it and install a different
one. Anyone can join a new web service.

Oh and btw part of the reason Google stays at the top (at least with regard to
revenues) _IS_ because they're at the top. Having an enormous inventory is a
big part of the ads business.

------
volida
a lot more people can replicate a social network feature set than a search
engine. That's why is harder to replace Google.

the moment any networking site begins charging for any of their service they
will lose 90% of users, and they know it and then the rest of the 10% will
abandon because there wont be any value for them to stick around.

~~~
ntoshev
Facebook is more like eBay than like Google in this respect. It is easy to
replicate the computer technology, but not the social aspect of the site.

Except that eBay has stopped innovating (in either the technical or the
human/social part of their technology), while Facebook is constantly trying
new things.

~~~
nostrademons
FaceBook's network effects are nowhere near as big as EBay's.

When I first started making friends online, we all got DeadJournals. It was
free, it didn't have invite codes like LiveJournal, it wasn't "too young" like
Xanga, and it wasn't "too old" like Blogger (I was a freshman in college at
the time, and most of my friends were high schoolers).

Then _one_ person in my group of friends got a LiveJournal, and with it, an
invite code. LiveJournal was seen as higher-status, and so over the next 5-6
weeks, we _all_ migrated over. Every week (that's how long you had to wait to
get an invite code), the person who just got their LJ code would announce
"I've got a code. First person to shout gets it" in an AIM chatroom, and one
more person would move over, until we were all on LiveJournal.

Then, when my friends graduated high school, there was a big split between
those who went to college and those who didn't. Those who didn't usually went
to MySpace, because their local friends were all there and they felt they had
less in common with those of us who were college-bound. Those who did would
post messages on their LJ that said "I'm on FaceBook as Jane Smith @
SomeCollege", and then everyone else would comment with "OMG I HAZ FACEBOOK!
Friended you! [And if they're polite, they'd say what their real name was, so
the person didn't get lots of friend requests that they had no idea about.]"

Similarly, when LJ did something stupid and pissed off all of fandom at once,
there was a mass exodus of people for GreatestJournal. Everyone would post
"I'm now at username@greatestjournal.com", their friends would leave too, and
they'd all friend each other on the new site.

Analysts are right that nobody ever leaves a social network site while all
their friends are there. Instead, they leave as groups. It's very much like
the tipping point where somebody grabs their coat at a party and then everyone
gets up to leave.

EBay is very different, because if you're finding a seller for a rare item,
you have no other means of communication other than EBay. EBay holds a
monopoly on your means of finding the person you're looking for. FaceBook
deals with real social relationships, and real social relationships always
have backchannels. If you're FaceBook friends, you probably have regular buddy
chats over instant-messaging, or you see each other at school, or you go out
for lunch. If something better comes along, you can say "Oh, I found this cool
social networking site, let's all go check it out."

~~~
ntoshev
You have a point. I have less personal experience with social sites, but it
seems to me that the more information about your relationships you build, the
harder it becomes to leave. Think of leaving Facebook as losing your phone and
the contacts you have on it. It's up to Facebook to make it like this, but the
potential is there.

------
yan
Sounds like Paul is continuing to underline what Zuckerberg has been saying,
stressing the importance of the "social graph."

It's amusing to see people involved in industry X continue to blog about how
industry X is worth more than people give it credit for.

~~~
nostrademons
FaceBook's only a small part of the average person's social graph, though.

If you look at my FaceBook Wall or SuperPoke or Scrabulous list, it's mostly
friends from high school or violin. They predominate because I have no other
means of getting in touch with them. The people I hang out with most in person
are all Amherst alums in the area; they almost never appear on my FaceBook,
because I can talk to them in person. If I do write something to them online,
it's through PlanWorld, which is an Amherst-only social network hosted on an
Amherst student organization's computers.

There's another group of friends I have: folks from my Harry Potter fandom
days. I'm FaceBook-friends with nearly all of them, but there's little
activity between us. Instead, I talk to them over AIM. Why put up with the
latency of the FaceBook wall when you can communicate instantly?

Then there are former coworkers from work that I stay in touch with. Most of
these people don't even _have_ FaceBook accounts, though a couple do. I use
e-mail and LinkedIn to keep in touch with them, or I send them an IM and setup
a time to get together for lunch.

I think a lot of people that make a big deal about the social graph are
Boomers and Gen-Xers that are keen observers of today's "always connected"
culture, but aren't really participants. They know that social networking is a
huge part of young people's lives, but have no idea just how pervasive it is
or how many options people have. The average American teenager now "talks"
through phone, text-messaging, FaceBook, MySpace, LiveJournal, e-mail, AIM,
and a half-dozen special interest sites. There've been conversations I've had
that were half-verbal and half-AIM, carried on through a mix of typing and
talking with the other participant sitting 6 feet away. The FaceBook social
graph is pretty inaccurate when you consider all the options for back-channel
communications.

------
Prrometheus
>What else is highly profitable on the internet? Search.

Actually, what is profitable is traffic, not search. Google gets paid by
website proprietors to send traffic their way. They do not get paid by users
for their search product.

~~~
mrtron
Actually, after being in the industry, I would have to disagree.

Google makes so much money because of the high volume of traffic combined with
the targeting they can do as a result search queries, knowing users and all
that. I actually click gmail links occasionally because they relate to the
email thread I am in. Discussing a camping trip the actual campsite I wanted
to go showed up as a link! That combo of high traffic and highly targeted (and
therefor high conversions) is what creates the value.

------
yters
If Facebook + Loopt develops critical mass, it'll be a thing to behold.

~~~
yters
Seriously, why doesn't everyone believe this? I've googled HN and the web, and
I'm not seeing a lot of people pointing out the F+L duo. The user base is
minimal for the Loopt Facebook app. As far as I can tell, I'm not making an
obvious statement.

I don't get it. These two technologies together answer The question of the
internet.

~~~
mdemare
Explain it to us!

~~~
nazgulnarsil
i think he means that missing link of directly tying the internet back into
real life.

despite what people like us think, the internet is still just entertaining
emails coming out of a confusing box for most people.

~~~
yters
Glad I'm not the only one who gets it!

Though, it isn't just connecting the internet to real life, which still sounds
mundane. The real Big Deal is the network effects you get from the feedback
loop between the two. If you've read Guns, Germs, and Steel the two together
in a social context create an autocatalytic environment, which is essential to
every form of progress in GGS.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
I actually think that the question of the internet is a different one.

I think the barrier between the internet and real life is the signal to noise
ratio. we have tons of great examples, this site being one of them.

when someone comes up with an efficient and easy way of personalizing exactly
what information you get and what is blocked without the fear of missing
something important, they will become a huge company.

------
edw519
Good arguments with an interesting look at a potential future. Now what about
the hundreds of millions of good citizens who don't spam or commit fraud but
don't want to put their personal info on a social site like facebook? How do
they fit into this picture?

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weezus
And that's exactly why I don't trust them.

I'm _very_ wary of what _any_ entity with that much personal information might
do with it.

------
lst
(Damn!! And I'm not even registered!)

