
Ask HN: Do you think we'll see any Twitter/Facebook real-competitor? - henriquea
Honest question here. Do you think we&#x27;re going to see any new product that will possible replace Twitter&#x2F;Facebook&#x2F;LinkedIn in the near future?<p>Which companies should we follow closely?
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jballanc
When AOL first entered the market, you could only send E-Mail to other AOL
users. Eventually, faced with the potential of users leaving their platform
for more interoperable (if less full-featured) alternatives, AOL relented and
made their email system a proper, standards-based utility.

Now, granted that scenario is not a great example as email existed as a
standard long before AOL came into existence, but I do think that as the
number of users on Facebook/Twitter reach their inevitable peak, those
companies, too, will be faced with the need to open the gates on their walled
garden.

It's interesting that, thus far, both companies have delayed such a situation
from arising by buying-out the other platforms people have been moving too
(Instagram, Vine, etc.) and incorporating them ever-more-tightly with the
parent platform. At some point, though, I think (hope?) this strategy will
prove untenable and open interoperability will once again rule the web.

Call it crazy speculation, but I could foresee a resurgence of RSS/Atom
eventually doing to Facebook/Twitter what SMTP/POP/IMAP did to AOL. If you
think about it, the only thing that RSS/Atom was ever missing from becoming
what Facebook/Twitter are today is a central aggregation point in the cloud. A
smart startup that pulls a user's Facebook/Twitter feeds and mixes in any
other RSS/Atom, as well as allowing users to post back to
Facebook/Twitter/Atom could potentially spell the death of proprietary
timelines.

~~~
ebbv
AOL is definitely the best comparison. AOL had a 10 year run of dominance much
like Facebook has had.

But we're already in a world where kids today see Facebook as something for
their parents. And I know more and more people who (like myself) deleted their
Facebook account years ago and don't miss it.

Facebook is headed toward irrelevance. It will probably always hang on like
AOL and Yahoo still do. But it won't be the center of the online universe like
it has been for so long. We're already on the down side of that hill.

~~~
brentm
> Facebook is headed toward irrelevance.

If you only consider relevant company to be one that is creating a new and
disrupt technology as their core product then sure they will have to fight
daily not to become irrelevant. However, if you consider relevance to mean
something that impacts the daily lives of many people, within the last 30 days
they had their first 1B active user day. It's just very hard to displace that
many people and so many of them have their lives (and memories) on Facebook in
terms of the photos and connections. I am not extremely active on Facebook but
having an account just seems like that otherwise missing world directory mixed
with a personal life timeline which only increases in value as the years pass.

~~~
brentm
And one other thing -- Maybe less younger people will sign up as time goes on
(I don't disagree with the kids not wanting to be where their parents are
theory of why FB will fall apart) but FB has shown the right instincts in
acquiring (or attempting to acquire) the next social product of the moment or
where the "kids are" so to speak. Everyone thought Instagram @ $1B was near
insanity at the time and now it looks like the deal of the century in terms of
what their estimated private valuation would be today ($37B+ in March [0]).

[0] [http://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-
valuation-2015-3](http://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-valuation-2015-3)

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jeletonskelly
I think you already see that younger generations don't prefer (or simply don't
at all) using those social apps. Instead they use several social apps for
specific things: snapchat for pics/text, whatsapp for text, vine for video,
tinder/grinder for dating, instagram for social and pics, and more that I'm
probably just not aware of because I'm 30. I think you're less likely to see a
replacement and more likely to see them become places for "old people."

~~~
spoiledtechie
I use the book of faces specifically for keeping in touch with family from a
distance. I think it will be the same for kids when they grow up. They move
away and they will join facebook.

~~~
crazypyro
Facebook is still used heavily by younger people, especially in their 20's and
late teens. I see Twitter falling a lot harder in popularity than Facebook. At
the end of the day, "everyone" has a facebook. Most of my friends don't have a
twitter and only use it when linked to it from Reddit or some other site.

Twitter does seem to be gaining in the international recognition, probably
still residual effect stemming from the media attention gained by the Arab
Spring and other social news events that unfolded on Twitter.

~~~
saberduck
Twitter is for me unique that it is used a lot by opensource developers and
more broadly IT envagelists/figures. It's a goto resource for news related to
frameworks, dev conferences,... LinkedIn aspires also in this area, but it's
not relevant yet.

~~~
dublinben
I find it highly ironic and counterproductive that so many "open source"
developers and users live on a proprietary platform like Twitter. Free
alternatives exist, but they need the critical mass that a community like that
could bring.

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onion2k
For a company to replace Facebook (or even scale to a point where they're a
legitimate competitor) they would have to turn down offers from
Facebook/MSFT/Apple/etc to buy them. If Facebook buys then they just stop
being a competitor and become part of Facebook. If anyone else buys then
they're unlikely to want to go up against Facebook consider Facebook's
marketing power. That alone makes it highly unlikely.

There is one the notable exception though - a startup that got enough traction
to worry Facebook and then sold to _Google_ might actually come out on top.
Google actively wants to compete with Facebook. The problem for such a startup
would be Google's track record in social, so they'd need to resist Google's
desire to assimilate them too much. That would (probably) be quite hard.

~~~
ConfuciusSay
If you're growing like crazy, it's not that hard to turn down offers. Indeed
that's what Facebook itself did, so there's your model.

~~~
onion2k
Facebook turned down Yahoo's $1bn offer because Mark Zuckerberg realised that
Yahoo didn't really understand social, and that they were making an offer
because 'social is the hottest thing right now'. It's entirely understandable
that a founder wouldn't want to sell their business to someone who wouldn't
know what to do with it.

A Facebook competitor faced with an offer from Facebook would not have that
problem. It's very likely that the competitor and Facebook would be _very_
well aligned strategically. Selling would mean the competitor would get to
where they want to go. Very few founders would say capable of saying no.

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netcan
"Replace" is a loaded term in the sense that it implies these are categories
dominated by one player. I think the reality of these kinds of services is
that they overlap each other to various degrees rather than replace. People
can use facebook, twitter, linkedin, HN, etc. etc. simultaneously.

So if you mean will other services in that general fuzzy category become
popular, the answer is 100% yes. It's happening all the time. Whatsapp,
snapshot, whatnot. These pop up all the time and many get traction.

If you mean will Twitter & Facebook loose popularity, that's harder to answer.
But, I think it's reasonably likely. They're basically mediums for online
culture and online cult evolves fast. It also depends on your horizon. If the
question is "will a large portion of humans check Facebook daily in 100
years?" that seems pretty unlikely.

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junto
I think (hope) that eventually these centralised monoliths will be taken over
by distributed versions.

The Internet Of Things IoT will be a precursor to any device being a node in a
massive mesh net. That means that I can run my own private, secure personal
social node on my cell phone, or even on my toaster.

The front end app will literally just be a front. The backend processing can
be done on any number of nano-cloud processing instances run by companies like
Amazon or Microsoft.

Storage similarly will be outsourced, but all data will be protected at rest
using strong encryption.

~~~
henriquea
Really like the idea about our own distributed/private-cloud version but I
struggle to see ordinary users using it.

~~~
losvedir
Same. I'm very excited about sandstorm.io, though. A lot of very smart people
behind it, and the idea of being able to install "SaaS" apps onto your
personal server at the click of a button from an app store, but where you own
the data and can move from Linode to AWS to a home server, etc, is very cool.

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Beltiras
Yes, that is inevitable. Growth is slowing down for FB and the platform has
grown to the size where it can't pivot hard. Any new player in the marketplace
simply has to reject FBs success and present a wholly different way of
interacting, free of the all-inclusive strategy employed by FB.

One thing we are seeing a bit and may see more of is microplatforms. They will
focus on specific interactions instead of the generic type FB goes for
(thinking bangwithfriends (some would even say Tinder _is_ this type of SN),
sector-specific Linkedin, regional social networks).

FB will be around for a long long while thou. It was a twist of genius
implementing federated logins, in effect becoming your passport to the
internet.

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Smirnoff
I foresee Google being replaced by something else. As a search engine Google
has been stagnant for a while.

I still cannot black- or whitelist websites that I want or don't want to show
up in my results. Really, I want to control what I see!!!

When another search engine gives me the flexibility to control my results,
I'll jump ship. But currently even with annoying results that I don't want to
ever see again, google's results are still better than anything else.[1]

[1]- Although yandex is definitely better for search results in Russian.

~~~
rdancer
That's what browser extensions are for. Google has had blacklisting for a
spell (last year?), and whitelisting, but IMO it failed to pass the 80/20
threshold.

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cptskippy
I don't think there will be a direct competitor, I think we're going to start
seeing the decline of the social network.

People are realizing that the benefits of social media are curses in disguise.
Instead of a stream of interesting dialog between friends, they have a raging
river polluted with the rantings of every person they ever met or any company
they ever liked. It's hard to have meaningful interactions with people when
that girl you met one night at a friend's party, your crazy uncle, and
Starbucks are all screaming in your face.

Just as people are getting sick of Social Networking, businesses are starting
to realize that the promise of the Social Network as a way to connect with
customers isn't happening.

Case in point, I was shopping online the other day for an office chair and was
prompted to take a survey (I'm a sucker for surveys). The survey went
something like this...

Will you be sharing anything on our site with social media? No. Have you ever
shared anything on our site with social media? No. Have you ever shared
anything on any of our competitor's sites with social media? No. Have you ever
shared anything from an online store on social media? No. Do you find any
value in social media buttons on online stores? No. When you are shopping
online, do you utilize social media? No.

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arethuza
Wouldn't a open standard for social networks be preferable to simply yet
another centralized system - an SMTP for social networks?

~~~
Beltiras
You would need a big player with long-term vision to enable such a system.
Google really can't do it, they have lost credibility in the space. We could
see a surprising backbone for it like a massive cloud hoster (Thinking
Cloudflare, Amazon, Rackspace).

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brador
Twitter yes, Facebook no.

Mark is smart enough to buy his competition before it bites.

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rajacombinator
I think the consensus is that Twitterr is already dying, fast. They lack
direction and a way to engage with new users. Facebook won't go down as long
as Zuckerberg cares. Beating their core product is pretty impossible, and he's
made smart acquisitions of products that young people are favoring over the
core product. Now they're taking over in video ...

LinkedIn is clearly the worst of these three. Please let an ethical competitor
kill them ...

~~~
siquick
Whats the issue with Linkedin?

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impostervt
Everything ends. Given how fast these companies rise up, I expect they'll be
replaced just as quickly. For instance: myspace.

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xlm1717
I would doubt that we see one in the near future. The one that had the biggest
potential, Instagram, was quickly bought out by Facebook. A competitor not
only has to overcome the huge userbase, thereby convincing everyone _and_
their mothers to switch, a competitor also has to resist the urge to cash in
and risk not making it.

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DougN7
I can't imagine what it would be, but less than 10 years ago a colleague was
lamenting that Microsoft was invincible and would never have any competition.
Google looks that way now. But no company maintains their lead forever.

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gii2
The next wave of social networks will most likely be decentralized. At the
moment the concept is not yet clear, so no company to follow yet.

~~~
tmaly
I mentioned in another comment the idea of a blockchain based system.

~~~
gii2
At the moment the Bitcoin blockchain is 40+ GB, meaning everyone involved in
the network should have it locally. This is not possible for mobile devices.

Relying on blockchain technology is needed only when everyone should trust on
something, but once you have the peer to peer connection this is no longer
needed.

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therealmarv
Already there: WhatsApp, Instagram, Tumblr to name the biggest ones. For
example Instagram has more active users than Twitter!

~~~
henriquea
Well Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook :)

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alexro
Not before we get a chip inside. Then it will connect us to "the matrix".

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raverbashing
There won't be a direct replacement, rather some other network will grow while
one of them gets 'legacy' status (and will be eventually shut down)

FB (the company) is hedging their bets by acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp and
not relying only on Facebook (the platform)

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anujdeshpande
Reddit is making a lot of policy changes to bring in more users.

~~~
abalos
They might end up with more users, but I've noticed that the content on Reddit
is consistently declining in quality. Kind of worrying to me. Smaller
subreddits might be enough to save the site though.

~~~
irl_zebra
I'm very annoyed that anytime I see an insightful, top-level comment on
Reddit, there is just a string of meaningless puns starting a comment or two
below it. So essentially I just browse, read the top-level comment, read the
child comments until I see the first pun, then move immediately to the next
top-level comment down. It really just became a race to the bottom.

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lenzai
With no doubt: wechat

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HiYaBarbie
Twitter at least helps people from different countries follow global current
events, but do we even _want_ a competitor for Facebook?

~~~
henriquea
That's true! Twitter is used a lot in the news industry. Hmm, good question I
use it to share news with my family and friend since I live abroad.

