
Ask HN: What will be Facebook's weakness? - dchs
http://twitter.com/yegg/status/24471492383
======
jaymstr
Location. I thought they'd be perfect for it, but I think their implementation
shows that they just don't quite get it. It doesn't matter to me that someone
was at Wawa 15 hours ago.

~~~
natrius
My hunch is that they've just scratched the surface of their plans. If not, I
am similarly disappointed.

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patio11
What are Zynga's weaknesses? Every one of them hits Facebook, because of the
huge proportion of revenue FB gets from Zynga (and businesses which are Zynga-
with-worse-execution).

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thenduks
How about 'Reliability'. Their API is constantly changing in what seems like
random ways, and after updates there are always a couple weeks where
everything is incredibly flaky.

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pinksoda
It has intermittent latency too. The new "like" button doesn't work right on
FireFox either.

~~~
MisterWebz
Off-topic: Are you the guy who made the IAMA on Reddit about your successful
website? I was just wondering how you're doing and if you're still working on
startups? :)

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jaikoo
Probably a small gap, just big enough to fly a fighter space ship through. At
least that's what I find...

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GBKS
Erosion of trust due to lack of user control is the only real issue I see
outside of guesses like "people will get tired of it".

The way Facebook connects data and people is very clever. There is lot going
on behind the scenes that you never see as a user. One of the results is that
you just don't know who will see what. This results in a lack of perceived
control.

Here's an example. At a friends wedding, I got introduced to a friend of a
friend that I hadn't met before. She knew all about my child and has lots of
pictures of him. How? My wife sends picture on her cell phone to her sister.
She, in turn, uploads those to Facebook and tags them with my name. That opens
up those pictures to her complete circle of friends. One of her friends
comments on a picture, and another group of people gets exposed. The result is
that I can only assume that hundreds or thousands of random people know
everything about my child.

The result is also that Facebook is building up a profile of me without my
knowledge or participation.

That's why I prefer Twitter. They don't try to outsmart me. I know who will
see what. It's obvious that everything is public.

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royrod
Being a mile wide and an inch deep in too many functional areas.

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dstein
Facebook's "Open Graph" is in reality a "closed" Semantic Web implementation.
It is named so to precisely obscure this fact. Logically, Facebook's downfall
will be an open Semantic Web.

~~~
stingraycharles
That can only be a downfall if the FB "Open Graph" becomes the key to
Facebook's long-term success, - it isn't, yet.

~~~
mseebach
If the connections isn't the key, what is?

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waxman
Contextual Sharing (and the new social network that figures it out) _will_
kill Facebook.

I'm convinced that contextual sharing is the next evolution of social
networks, and I don't think FB is in a position to pivot towards it.

Contextual sharing is the idea that in real life you have multiple, often
separate social circles (work pals, college roommates, siblings, friends,
grandparents, frat brothers, etc.), and that social networking 1.0 (i.e.
facebook/twitter) doesn't account for this very well. You really want to share
stuff only with specific groups, but this is hard to do on existing sites.

This leads to all sorts of real pain points, many of which are becoming
unbearable for some users: i.e. you don't want your boss seeing photos of you
drinking, or you don't want your grandmother to see that racy link you just
posted, so you suspend your FB account.

Even though Facebook has a crude groups feature, this doesn't come close to
addressing the fundamentally flawed orientation of the network: one, big pot
of 100 to 1000 casual acquaintances, as opposed to dozens of partitioned ~2 to
10-person real social circles.

This idea has been exploding, recently:

\- Google Me (Google's soon-to-be-released last shot at social) is almost
certainly going to be based around this concept of contextual sharing (as
Google UX engineer @padday's recent slide show indicated)

\- Diaspora (the OSS project from NYU students that raised $200k this spring)
announced on their blog that contextual sharing is their #1 interface priority

\- Frid.ge (YC '10) is built around this idea

\- College Only (funded by Peter Thiel) is a solution to the problem just for
one context (college friends)

\- Groupme.com (betaworks) is an SMS-only approach

And ALL of this projects came to life within the past 3 to 6 months!

Next-generation social networks will mirror our offline social experience more
closely by shifting the focus from a giant network of "friends" to private,
micro-networks that mimic real friend groups.

I think this change is significant enough that Facebook will be unable to
pivot without alienating their huge user base.

Also, one of Facebook's main competitive advantages has been the fact that it
is a network good with high switching costs (e.g. in order for a new site to
be as good as facebook, you need to convince all of your 800 friends to sign
up for the new site too).

If the future of social networking really is contextual sharing, though, this
barrier becomes much lower (if it continues to exist at all), because if you
really just want to share with your 'real' friends, then convincing these
small groups whom you know really well (your best buds, or your roommates, or
your sibilings, or whatever) to try out a new site is actually pretty trivial.

Thoughts?

Full-disclosure: I'm thinking of building a contextual sharing tool of my own,
because I think it's so damn exciting. Would love your feedback.

~~~
natrius
My sub-optimal solution to this problem has been to use Facebook for personal
stuff and Twitter for professional stuff. The problem you mention about your
boss seeing drinking photos or your grandma seeing racy links is easy to avoid
with Facebook today, but maybe not for users who don't know about the
functionality. Put your boss in a friends list that can't access your photos.
Click the lock button when you're posting the link and exclude your family
members friends list.

My problem is that I want almost everything to be visible to everyone, but I
don't want to _publish_ everything to everyone's news feeds and pollute them.
Everyone has hobbies, interests or professions they enjoy talking about, but
they don't want to burden all of their friends with those posts. If you can
fix that without making me drag all of my friends to another social network,
I'll use your tool in a heartbeat. I don't think it's possible for anyone but
Facebook to meet those restrictions, since only they could change the way
posting on Facebook works.

~~~
waxman
I feel you.

I think the "drinking photos" example is illustrative because it's extreme,
but I think the real, widespread pain points --- I know the ones I have, at
least --- are more along the lines you mentioned.

Sure, you can put up certain walls relatively easy (i.e. only these friends
can see my pictures).

But I think you hit on the essence of contextual sharing, which is that
privacy aside, you simply want to share different things with different
people.

I want to share the Paul Graham essay with only my start-up friends, I want to
share the new NoSQL db github link with only my hacker friends, I want to talk
smack about fantasy football with only those people, I want to post my family
vacation pictures to only my family, etc.

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davi
Previous good discussion on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603374>

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zalzally
What about Search/Discovery? Sure, Facebook's Open Graph is being cultivated
by all of us as we like and share stuff, but currently, there's no way to
search through my feeds, what I've liked, what my friends have liked, the most
popular liked items, and any slicing/dicing of that data. I'm sure they're
working on it, but it seems like a major gap right now.

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percept
The life cycle of any large company: they'll grow too large to innovate, and
ambitious folks will leave for greener pastures.

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yurylifshits
I think the answer is "Business/Enterprise"

Facebook is a brilliant consumer web company, but they never looked at
enterprise market. Enterprise market is bigger (but less sexy) than consumer
market. So it is possible to build a new technology powerhouse from enterprise
revenue and eventually beat Facebook for the next generation of talent.

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raarky
Fashion... It could be uncool, people could just become bored with it or
something better comes up.

Look at what happened to myspace

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mdasen
It could be a number of things.

Right now, there's a danger that people start thinking of Facebook as the
company that's good for status updates and photos. That might prove to be a
long term facet of our lives, but it could also prove to be fleeting. Another
example of this could be users thinking of Google as that search company and
ignoring the company's attempts at other products. There's lots of ways to
take social software, but there's a potential that people will popularly think
of Facebook as the status message and friend-tagged photo company.

Facebook's barrier to entry (its closed social graph) is both its strongest
asset and its greatest weakness. A barrier to entry like this means that most
of your competition is gone. You can get used to having very limited, if any,
competition because if someone's 20% or 50% better than you are, the barrier
to entry slaps them down and maybe you even buy them and incorporate them into
you on the cheap. But then someone comes along who is a genius and changes
things and shoots the moon. A bit of a comparison here could be Microsoft.
Apple was weak for a long time. The Win32 API was a huge barrier to entry.
Then a lot of forces conspired to really break Microsoft. The rise of the
platform-independent web (with Google, Apple, Mozilla, open-source, and
others), Apple's resurgence (where they took Microsoft by surprise on
handhelds and might have even sent Windows Mobile to the annals of history),
and just the changing landscape. I mean, I remember a time when I thought my
Mac would always feel like an also-ran platform unless Microsoft was forced to
open up the Win32 API. Nowadays, I don't think any of us Mac users feel like
we're on an also-ran platform (at least not in the way it felt years ago).

People's tastes might change. Right now, people want a connected, low-privacy
social graph. In 10 years, we might feel different. People's preferences
change.

Facebook might become generationally limited. A lot of us got on Facebook in
college. I remember when you could list your courses and find people in your
classes. Some non-Facebook company might hit critical mass in a different
generation of users who might see Facebook as lame because their parents are
on it.

Those are a few that came to my mind. I'm not saying that Facebook can't rise
to the challenges. They've shown themselves to be quite an adept company.
However, it's hard to predict the future and social networking is something
that everyone seems to be gunning for. Others are trying to out-maneuver
Facebook and users can be fickle.

~~~
natrius
> _Facebook's barrier to entry (its closed social graph)..._

Huh? <http://graph.facebook.com>

~~~
mdasen
The data is squarely under Facebook's control. They are allowing other people
to buy into their platform in the way Microsoft allowed third parties to
develop for Windows. Microsoft gave developers the ability to make programs
that ran on Windows with the Win32 APIs. They didn't open things up so that
developers could write their own Windows-compatible operating system and
compete with them.

It's still closed in a way that they hope manages and minimizes the
competition. "Don't build your own social graph. Use our's which we'll give
you a little access to." It is very closed in that you can't friend people
across services and it all has to be Facebook mediated. It's a strategy to
maintain their control over the barrier to entry and extend their barrier to
many applications developed by third parties.

Being open means that you're on the same footing as everyone else.

~~~
natrius
Windows is a bad analogy. There's no data involved. Facebook's data is open.
It isn't federated like XMPP, which seems to be what you're requesting.
Federation would be a handicap for a product that changes as much and as
quickly as Facebook has over the years. Instant messaging is simple in
comparison.

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swatermasysk
Time. Eventually, someone will bring something to market which will reset all
of the rules. Like those who came before Facebook, they will ignore it because
they are "Facebook".

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smallegan
Privacy

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kgo
To quote Yogi Berra (or was it Niels Bohr):

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

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tyohn
Over popularity...

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pwpwp
Centralization

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danilocampos
Having > 500 million users.

That's a lot of different kinds of people to make happy. That's a huge ship to
turn around. That's a huge amount of surface area to be spread over.

Having to serve the lowest common denominator for that many users in a
community oriented platform is going to leave a lot of needs unserved, or
served poorly. It leaves plenty of holes for a disruptive company with nothing
to lose to show up and do something interesting.

The converse strength they can leverage, though, is also their huge numbers:
users, engineering staff, sales people, technology partners. If they realize
the power of a disruptive idea just early enough, they have the resources and
culture necessary to build and scale it in what may as well be an instant
fashion, since they can drop it on millions of users at once.

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earle
CONTEXT

