

Matt Maroon: The Anti-Social Graph - joshstaiger
http://mattmaroon.com/?p=356

======
aston
There're only two questions that are important for trying to put a price on
Facebook:

    
    
      1) How much are Facebook users worth to advertisers (brand and/or CPC) on average and in aggregate?
    
      2) How much is the data Facebook has (the social graph, demographic information) worth to third parties?
    

Matt's answer to both, based on his recent two articles, is "right now, not
much relative to the internet heavyweights." That actually isn't controversial
at all.

There's a lot of optimism about Facebook's future, however, that allows people
to argue against Matt based on the "just wait until you see what they come up
with" line of reasoning.

I'd be interested in hearing from both sides about this _future_ Facebook. As
in, what facts, specifically, might change about the world that would make
Facebook worth $15 billion, and how likely is it that those changes will come
about?

~~~
fleaflicker
Facebook's users aren't valuable to advertisers because they're "fragmented"
(i.e., no common interests).

That's why the only ads you see on MySpace and Facebook are for dating sites
and T-shirts.

The bigger money is in selling very specific advertising (for example, selling
HD-TVs to fantasy football fanatics).

~~~
anewaccountname
I just searched, and there are 15,321 groups with "fantasy football" in the
title on Facebook.

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jgrahamc
I think he makes a good point about the apps. There are literally thousands of
apps and when I was involved in Facebook app development I saw _nothing_ that
used the social graph for anything interesting.

I actually started a social news system inside Facebook (called Wildfire), the
idea was that stories would only get voted up if people passed them from
friend to friend. It went nowhere, perhaps that was my fault.

Has anyone seen a really cool Facebook application?

~~~
yters
I haven't but I've had two ideas I thought were fairly interesting.

1\. Tomagochi app where your creature's features are representative of your
friends friends. I.e. people with fewer friends will contribute more unique
and interesting features to the creature and people with many friends
contribute more material for making bigger creatures. This would motivate
people to seek both ends of the spectrum.

2\. Trusted distributed computing. People would bid for users' cpu time, and
users choose who they want. Bids can either be money or promise of payout from
the job's results.

------
blader

       "That’s true, but it’s even more fashionable (at least in tech circles) to say that Facebook is the next Google, or that Facebook is building the social graph which is worth a lot for some unknown reason and they’ll monetize it later."
    

I submit the comments on this very thread, and this previous thread
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=160408>) as countering data points. It's
extremely fashionable to call Facebook a spammy, me-too, useless, overhyped
social network that has jumped the shark.

At least in tech circles.

~~~
mattmaroon
That was my point. Both are very fashionable because they're the only two
extreme opinions on a very talked about topic.

I'm sure there are plenty of people with opinions in the middle, but moderates
never speak out much.

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SwellJoe
I'm always hesitant to bet against anything Buchheit says. But, I really don't
get the appeal of Facebook (this is probably why I do systems management apps
instead of social network thingies).

I do know, however, that many large companies have historically paid very
large amounts of money to know as much about people as Facebook got people to
volunteer to give them. There probably is significant value in this
information. It's stupid to think that the #2 social network is worth 30 times
the #1 social network, but it'd also be dumb to wholly discount the value of
all of that data.

~~~
angstrom
Maybe, but for all the hype over Facebook I find it ironic that Amazon
probably has more valuable information via Wedding/Baby shower wishlist
registeries than all of the social graph in Facebook is worth.

~~~
SwellJoe
No one is arguing that Amazon isn't worth a very large fortune, and that a big
part of their value is in the data that they have about customers and the
reviews that customers have written for them for free. But that doesn't really
alter Facebook's value (there have always been multiple sources of data about
consumers...and yet it is still valuable data).

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brlewis
Matt, here's an example of money in the social graph: What movies have your
friends and their friends put in their netflix queue? Friends of friends might
have interests similar to yours, and you might end up renting a movie you
might not otherwise have rented.

Friend-of-friend recommendations have a tremendous commercial potential,
whether Facebook or FriendFeed have realized them or not. My example above is
actually from FriendFeed:

[http://friendfeed.com/search?q=&service=netflix](http://friendfeed.com/search?q=&service=netflix)

Beware of using "If P then the Facebook guys aren't imaginative" as proof of
not P. Also, don't use examples of the usefulness of the anti-social graph to
negate the usefulness of the social graph.

~~~
mattmaroon
But does this beat Netflix's recommendation service that uses data from all
Netflix customers? I'd love to see someone explore that. I've read a lot on
the Netflix prize and it leads me to guess it wouldn't, but I would love to
find out if I'm incorrect.

~~~
wanorris
It wouldn't necessarily even have to beat it -- you could use synergy.

For example: here are movies a bunch of your friends are watching, and here's
how much we estimate you'll like each one. Or, to flip it around, out of all
the movies we think you'll like, here are the ones that have the strongest
buzz amongst people you know.

Anything that gets people excited about watching movies is good for Netflix,
and should be something they can monetize.

You could do the same thing with YouTube videos, or with a music service.
Instead of having people send you a bunch of annoying "Hey check this out"
messages (by whatever messaging medium), you could look at a widget that shows
the current favorites amongst your friends. Sure, a Netflix-style rating
service may be more accurate, but a lot of people want to know what their
friends recommend.

~~~
mattmaroon
Doesn't Netflix already do this? I think you can already friend everyone there
and see what they watched, how they rated it, what they put in their queue.
Why would they pay Facebook for that?

Pretty sure YouTube and some music services have some of this sort of
functionality too. Every site does these days.

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bosshog
More classic MM haterade fuelled ranting. keep swigging. (with credit to
aston)

But I like the article a lot. Facebook now feels like the warm up to something
greater. (and probably smaller)

The identity thing is no longer an advantage for them since they opened up
beyond schools and coroporates. It is socially engineered toward real
identities, but that's all.

~~~
yters
That's the problem with getting greedy. They had a great thing going when the
community was more closed, in fact that was their selling point for me.
Opening up like this seems very short sighted, but I guess that's what you get
with the flipper ethic.

------
jkkramer
New Onion headline? "Area man constantly bringing up how overhyped Facebook
is"

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axod
Good point about spam. Facebook turns your friends into spammers, which isn't
helpful.

~~~
pfedor
I don't really use Facebook so I may not really appreciate the problem, but I
don't think you can call messages from people you actually know and sent
specifically to you "spam", for any reasonable definition of spam.

------
utnick
Question to Matt: How much do you think your yc startup draftmix is worth?

How much would it be worth if it came preinstalled on every facebook users
profile... with social aspects built in... and with the name brand of facebook
behind it?

Facebook is worth a ton of money because people under 30 with money visit it
several times a day... and its not like other sites like cnn or espn.com or
whatever because there friends are on it and there is an emotional attachment
to it.

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meat-eater
facebook has become a useless spam machine. Doesn't work for me anymore.

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aswanson
I have to agree with Matt on a lot of points here. As soon as I heard the
phrase social graph, my BS buzzphrase filter peaked.

Never been on facebook and I wouldn't say they are worthless, but $15 bill
valuation for a second place player doesn't make sense to me. Then again, a
lot of other things don't either.

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rokhayakebe
MM is doing the wrong startup. He should be writing more and I bet he will
have a decent size audience. Although i think he mostly likes to be on the
opposite side just for the hell of it, i still like to read his post and sure
knows how to defend his views by backing them with data. MM is sure making or
writing "something people want": controversy.

~~~
mattmaroon
Thanks, I've been told that a lot lately. I kinda like keeping it as a hobby
though. Not sure it would be as fun full time. I already took one hobby and
made a living from it and it ruined that.

I don't set out to play devil's advocate. I just don't find it interesting to
write about the things that I agree with everyone else on. I won't bother with
an article on how the music industry should give up DRM, for example, because
it wouldn't be anything thought provoking to anybody anymore. Hell, even the
record companies seem to have figured that out by now.

And I don't have much perspective on programming. I couldn't write anything of
use on the merits of RDBMSes vs. SimpleDB (though I appreciate some of the
articles from people who can). But I feel like I have a pretty good
perspective on people and how they use the internet.

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cstejerean
I couldn't agree more. Glad to see someone make the point clearly though, I
wouldn't have wasted as much time on the topic.

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rms
This is pretty misanthropic. I enjoy using Facebook.

~~~
SwellJoe
Matt didn't say you shouldn't enjoy using Facebook. He said that it's not
worth 15 billion dollars, and that many of the things people suggest will make
it worth 15 billion dollars are hogwash.

