
Facebook's killer app is here. No, it's Not places. - luxative
http://blog.eyesandfeet.com/2010/08/facebooks-killer-app-is-here-no-its-not.html
======
edanm
Personally, I think Facebook's killer app is that it fixed email.

For a huge population, email never worked very well, mostly since they had to
find out someone else's email to talk to them. Facebook fixes this completely
for any personal email use - all your real-life friends are friends on
Facebook.

I'm guessing a huge percentage of personal mail has moved from email to
Facebook messages - does anyone have any data about this by any chance?

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Hmm, facebook mail is absolutely horrid. It's a combination of spam messages
and just contact that I will never read. I have 1000+ unread messages.

I actually read a fb message in my normal email box and if it's something
actually valuable, ill then respond on FB.

~~~
mambodog
Facebook didn't fix email with its Facebook 'mail', it did it with wall posts,
comment conversations, and events.

~~~
mdh
This.

My experience with non-geeky friends is that they check facebook for messages
and interact with friend/family through comments and wall-posts. Some of them
get email notifications for these things but they use them as a prompt to go
to facebook.com to view and respond. Email is the medium but not the message.

------
johns
This is just the latest revision of AOL Keywords. How did that work out for
them?

~~~
iamelgringo
20 years after they were a startup, they made $400M in profit on revenue of
$3.2B last year. I'm not saying those are sexy numnbers, but they're not
exactly shabby, either.

~~~
johns
They don't control the web though. So it's significant, but not as dire as the
article implies it will be.

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rfugger
I personally don't see the appeal of Facebook pages. The only function I can
see of "liking" any of these pages is to give Facebook more information so
they can try to sell you more stuff.

~~~
sz
The appeal to businesses is clear.

The appeal to users could be social ("What brands do I associate myself
with?") or promotion-related ("Become our 1,000,000th fan and get this free
thing!", "Facebook-exclusive discount!"). Also I don't think Facebook lets you
put in bio information (favorite movies, etc.) anymore without it linking to a
page.

~~~
patrickk
Facebook's increasing focus on business customers will be at the detriment of
regular users, who will be demoted to the rank of mere 'consumers'. It's a
subtle - but important - distinction.

Facebook's decision-making will increasingly be driven by thinking like "how
can we monetize all this wealth of consumer data" or "how can we introduce
tiered fanpage packages to business customers as a revenue stream" rather than
focusing on what makes a great user experience.

Currently, knowing that my friend has achieved another 'badge' in Mafia Wars
adds zero value to my life. It only gets worse as Facebook focuses more and
more on business brands. What do I care if my friend 'likes' Apple or Nike?
How does that improve my relationship with that person? People I am _really_
friends with in real life don't care what brands I like, or what isotonic
sports drink I drink. The like me because of _me_. Much as businesses would
like to think that people define their lives by the products they buy (this is
like the opening scenes in 'Fight Club' where Edward Norton's character tries
to pick out stuff from an Ikea catalogue that defines himself) that's not a
basis for a relationship. And Facebook used to be all about relationships. Now
I look at my Live Stream...and it's got all this random flotsam floating
downstream. I care about none of it.

The reason I love HN, incidentally, is because it's the polar opposite of
MySpace and what Facebook is gradually becoming. Real people, that I share a
lot in common with, expressing their real opinions, no auto-generated crap,
and zero bling.

You see comments like "What could cause FB to die?" here on HN. They're so big
at this stage, with the power of network effects and lock-in, that external
competition is no threat to them realistically. The only way they will die is
if they continue exactly the way they are now, making people's experience
ever-more spam choked, till people realize "hey this experience is actually
quite shit, even if I do have 500 online friends" and start looking for
alternatives. We're not quite there yet though.

~~~
luxative
I didn't fully get your point earlier, but it's clearer now. You raise valid
points. By the way, two points that may interest you: (1) I personally filter
my facebook stream to weed out all the "spammy auto-updates" you've mentioned
- so it feels a lot more 'human' to me. I get exactly what you mean (mafia
wars is a pet peeve) (2) The whole thing about the Dunbar
number-<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number>

~~~
patrickk
_(1) I personally filter my facebook stream to weed out all the "spammy auto-
updates..."_

Forcing users to 'prune' their status updates is in fact a symptom of
something broken in the user experience. I check into Facebook every now and
again, and I shouldn't to have to act like a gardener who has ignored his back
yard for a month. A lot of status updates are incredibly frivolous too -
Facebook's culture is not suited to my taste I guess. Virtually all of my
(Facebook) friends are not hacker types and will post "I'm bored" or "feeling
tired" or something equally awe-inspiring. Granted, this is something that
Facebook would have never solved as they are trying to appeal to the
mainstream, not early adopters. I love the fact that by logging onto HN I
often learn something new, and quickly learn to a) write well and b) only talk
about stuff you are knowledgeable about. Anything else and you will get caught
out pretty quickly.

 _(2) The whole thing about the Dunbar number_

This had occurred to me also when writing the original comment, but I didn't
mention it as I don't see a decline as inevitable as an online community grows
in size - I believe HN is proof of that. By deliberately appealing only to a
narrow segment of the internet population through a strict, human-enforced
culture (see HN guidelines), and allowing users to only maintain very loose
ties if any with each other (contact info in your HN profile for example),
it's possible to have meaningful, no-spam interaction on an online community.
Pg mentioned recently that HN now gets something like 60k uniques per day.
I've been on HN for quite a while and I think the quality of article and
comments has been consistent over time. I think the Paul Buchheit philosophy
of building something that a small number of people _love_ , and that most
people would hate (HN), rather than something that tries to appeal to everyone
(Facebook) comes into play here. See my below comment on the 'tribes' concept
for a possible solution to this problem in a social networking context. I
believe it would work as it models how people organise themselves into groups
in real life.

------
loup-vaillant
Scary. That's centralization to a degree I hardly imagine. I hope this will
fail.

~~~
sz
I don't think this is really centralization. Just another avenue for
advertising. For example, even if (less mainstream) bands generally use a
Myspace URL as their web presence, Myspace doesn't necessarily control the
music industry.

I find the Facebook-controlled universal login much more unsettling,
personally.

------
jonknee
MySpace band pages were the rage a few years ago. Times change. The MySpace
pages at least provided value for both sides--you could hear the music and the
bands could let you know about shows. Most business pages I've seen on
Facebook are one sided in that the fan gets nothing out of it other than
letting all their friends know what corporation they are a "fan" of.

~~~
masterj
It really depends on the business. There are a couple of local businesses here
that I follow: a liquor store, a crepe cart, a coffee shop, etc. They all
regularly post with specials, events, new dishes/type of coffee/beer, etc.
YMMV, but knowing that I can pick up grilled fig, honey and goat cheese crepes
on the way to work tomorrow is pretty cool in my book.

Though I imagine most pages are not quite so well utilized. These are all
small, local businesses.

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dlsspy
I've been noticing this trend as well. I commented to a friend recently,
“Remember when there was more than one web page?”

~~~
chunkyslink
Yea me too. As someone who doesn't have a Facebook account I notice it a lot.

I have actually started removing sites from my favourites list that are
peppered with Facebook widgets. I just don't visit them anymore. There is
still plenty of choice out there but stuff is slowly morphing into Facebook.

~~~
alttab
I've seen plenty of commercials with: facebook.com/myproduct as their URL.
Crazy shit.

------
chrisbaglieri
When combined with Places, Pages becomes a significantly more compelling
platform. For business owners it becomes a more vibrant and useful set of
data. For consumers, it becomes more real time and as a result more social.
For developers, it becomes a more interesting data set to build upon. This
excerpt from GigaOM ([http://gigaom.com/2010/08/20/facebook-places-the-real-
target...](http://gigaom.com/2010/08/20/facebook-places-the-real-target-is-
yelp/)) was telling:

 _We’re hearing that Facebook is pouring resources into pitching the Places
feature as a tool for local businesses in dozens of markets, by approaching
individual store-owners and business people and selling them on the idea of
setting up a Places page for their location. According to Facebook’s
description of the new feature, anyone can create a page for a place, but
businesses can claim their page — by responding to a phone call from a
Facebook representative, or by uploading some kind of official documentation
that proves they have the right to that location._

------
kasunh
All true only if organizational default url becomes their fb fan page and that
is not likely to happen

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DougBTX
Facebook, the most visited site in the US, has only just now found it's killer
app?

~~~
nanairo
Did you read the article? The whole point is that they had already found it
(or so claims the author). It's the author that just now realised.

------
heinel
Old news. Though if fan pages really took off with places like suggested then
time is really running out for Google Me. Unless there's some super cool
feature that really blows Facebook out of the water, but it is hard to imagine
how anything could be.

------
InACloud
FACT CHECK: 500 million users is over 25% of the world's online population.

Actually, the last time I checked
<http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html> shows the world population at
6.8billion. So 500 million would only be 7% of the worlds population.
Impressive, but nowhere near 25%.

~~~
dagw
Not everybody in the world is online, and thus not part of the worlds _online_
population.

