
History Repeats - Facebook is the new AOL - klous
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/facebook/history-repeats-facebook-is-the-new-aol/
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michaelchisari
And in 5 years time, it's very possible that Facebook, like AOL, will be
dominated by old people, the stubborn, and the relatively computer illiterate,
as others have moved on to greener pastures.

Facebook's dominance is not set in stone. People may not be able to live
without Facebook, but there's no reason they can't transition, such as how
people quickly transitioned away from MySpace.

You start by having two accounts. The more interesting, cutting edge, friends
are on the new network. Your high school friends, family, and tertiary
relationships are on the old network. You check them both equally at first,
but slowly you find yourself on the new network more often. Then, at some
point, you stop updating the old one, save for the occasional "I don't use
this anymore, I'm on X now." updates. Others follow suit, until at some point,
the trickle becomes a flood. Next thing you know, the old network is a ghost
town. Nobody cares about it anymore, and people only reference it as a relic
from a distant past.

There is nothing Facebook has done to prevent this. And this will keep
happening until social networking is eventually decentralized.

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j79
That's interesting, actually. I think Facebook Connect might be the start of
preventing that from happening.

Say, for instance, they chose to become more platform-oriented, providing the
data/services of facebook to developers. Suddenly, developers could build on
top of an fb-platform allowing users to update from one central location. They
could provide specific services (wall or no wall) and extend services (which
would be specific to that site...)

"Have a facebook connect account? Sign in today to expand your profile page on
the-latest-greatest.xyz!"

All your friends are still "friends" and communication is still possible,
regardless of where on the web your social networking "home" resides.

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yarone
The idea is not new ("Facebook is the new AOL") - it's been said many times
here. BUT, I did find one slide to be really interesting: "Imagine if before
you searched, Google asked you this..."

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ChuckMcM
Anyone remember Googlezon ? That EPIC2014 project which was talking about how
the world was going to be taken over by a merger of Google and Amazon. When I
joined Google in 2006 there was joke about putting into the new hire
orientation that you didn't need to forward the video to the misc list :-)

That didn't mention Facebook at all, most people thought MySpace was going to
dominate social. Anyway, ...

People who had been around computers and networking have known since their
first (or maybe second) class on data structures that structured data _was_
computation. The last node in an LRU list _is_ , because of the structure,
computed to be the oldest node in the list. One of the really cool things
about Python was list comprehensions is "foo" in bar?

So its sort of a yawn when we see that you can infer a traffic jam by the
smart phones sending in position data periodically, or that the movie
'companion' suggestions from Amazon are all from genres you've previously
purchased. But its just dawning on a lot of folks.

This blogger thinks Facebook is AOL because they have grown rapidly and have a
valuation they don't understand and a number of page views that made their
AdSense ID salivate. They equate AOL's walled garden to a castle. They draw a
parallel between Facebook's other properties and the kind of walled garden
that AOL once supported.

And yet they miss evidence that Facebook isn't a service that people use, it
is people instantiating themselves in what is most like a network directory
service. Humans as nodes in a n-tree of relationships and desires (likes) and
even dislikes.

Peter Warden's original "who your friends are hack" illustrated so clearly,
you don't have to 'guess' you can _know_ truths by looking at the data
structure that is Facebook. This is not something AOL even imagined.

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dguaraglia
Just for reference, here is John C. Dvorak's 2010 article of pretty much the
same title: <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372729,00.asp>

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gojomo
So we'll know this cycle has peaked when Facebook buys Time-Warner.

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j79
Or, everyone leaves facebook for a more "true" social experience. How about
social networks created dynamically based on your location with the people
around you? You know, real life social interactions. (Color, for example?)

Left are parents (and grandparents) who update their statuses and post on
walls because they're comfortable with facebook and don't really understand
that "other" stuff...

