
The Greatest Challenge to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is Unbundling - ttunguz
http://tomtunguz.com/unbundling-of-social-networks
======
NoodleIncident
A social networking site is only valuable to a user once it reaches a critical
mass of connections.

Maintaining these connections across multiple accounts is a huge pain. None of
the existing social networks have any incentive to make this process easier,
whether by providing an export tool or conforming to an open "friends list"
standard.

Specialized Craigslist clones can exist because no one wants to sell apartment
space to the same people they buy used furniture from. Friends are friends,
though; if you want to share videos with them, there's a good chance you want
to see what the tweet, too.

~~~
rubinelli
Specialized networks have two paths. One is offer value even if you are the
only user. Instagram and Pinterest do this. The other is making sure people
join in groups, which is close to what Yammer does.

(There is the dark path of spamming your users' contacts from another network,
but we know where it leads.)

~~~
ttunguz
Yes, right on. Great point.

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jonathanjaeger
I think this thesis can hold true in many verticals and is overall a solid
argument. For example, a user might be okay with paying for premium features
on a site like Vimeo, Behance, Elance, etc. when they wouldn't pay for similar
features on a generic social network like Facebook or Twitter. You're paying
for these premium features because the service provided is much more targeted
(and provides more value for your time) or the community is more engaged in
your media or conversation (and provides a richer experience).

~~~
ttunguz
Yes, agreed. Whenever there is a general platform of large scale, an
opportunity exists to unbundle and take the most valuable contributors
elsewhere.

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danmaz74
This is a general law of marketing: You can't be the best at everything, and
the more you dilute yourself the more other laser-focused competitors will cut
slices from your pie.

Tangentially, Google could have played upon this with plus, if they had made
into the social foundation for others to create verticals to rival with
Facebook. Too bad they didn't go this way.

~~~
tcskeptic
This sounds interesting, but I'm not sure what it means. Could you explain
what Google should have done more fully?

~~~
ryanhuff
I suspect what the commenter meant is that Google could have created an open
social platform for others to build upon, resulting in a plethora of specific
social implementations targeting many different verticals.

Instead, what we have today is G+ as a glue that provides a social foundation
for all of their products, although I hope that G+ will open up soon to allow
others to build upon it.

~~~
danmaz74
Your suspect was right :) I remember many discussions about this when G+ was
in its infancy. Obviously for Google the best thing would have been for G+ to
become facebook - but that was, and is, impossible. So, the second best thing
would have been (imho) to beat FB at the openness game, attracting first the
developers, and then their users. Alas, they chose a different path.

------
wslh
The natural problem that arises is how to handle many social networks at the
same time? I can think of many different specialized social networks to cover
my interests but if I don't have a few or a single "console" they will be
impossible to handle. Sometimes I need to post to LinkedIn and Twitter,
sometimes to Google Plus depending on the audience.

I've written some articles about how I see this future integrations but being
self critical I think it is impossible without full APIs. I also wrote
recently an article using similar concepts for challenging Google
[http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-
challeng...](http://blog.databigbang.com/letters-from-the-future-challenging-
googles-search-engine/)

~~~
thwarted
I don't mind going to different sites to do different things, rather than
having everything handled under one umbrella. Mainly because, for example, I
find flickr to be a better photo sharing and management experience than some
other site that has photo handling tacked on as a secondary feature.

Admittedly, twitter's interface isn't the best for what it is (and they keep
shutting down tools/sites/apps that might end up with a better interface found
via experimentation), and there have been (some successful) attempts at a tool
that abstracts away the social network and technical part of different sites
and lets you interact with more of them at once.

Oddly, it seems other people sometimes _do_ mind going to other sites. Family
wanted to know why I didn't post photos to facebook so they could see them. I
had been posting links to other sites where I had uploaded them for public
viewing and apparently even clicking on a link to go see them was too much
cognitive load.

However, what I do mind is the walled garden nature of the different sites
that keep me from easily and effectively aggregating all my actions across the
internet into a single place: both for my own purposes and as a jumping off
point for other people to explore.However, twitter keeps shutting down easy
access to my data (I can't tell if the v1 api call for favorites via RSS is
still enabled, it seems to periodically work; last I checked, there doesn't
appear to be a new way, without oauth, to get a feed of favorites). Facebook
has an "export" function, but it seems to be all or nothing and single shot,
and integrating. Flickr generally has good external integration via simple
RSS, but I think that's because Flickr "gets it": they are a photo sharing
site and they are not focused on keeping people on the site. That's most
likely due to their monetization model.

Unfortunately, services that did this, like friendfeed and memolane, are dead
or dying. It's really hard to create and maintain one, especially one that is
more unified interface than just data aggregation, when the landscape for
sharing and integration keeps changing out from under you as sites try to lock
users in. The focus on creating an all-in-one do-everything experience rather
than something that compliments the features of other sites contributes to
this, I think.

~~~
wslh
> I don't mind going to different sites to do different things, rather than
> having everything handled under one umbrella.

In my perspective things change when you are using services for business
rather than personal consumption. There are SO MANY sites that can capture
your interest or where you want to just duplicate that blog post or copy your
tweet to other sites, and are impossible to manage because we all have 24
hours days.

In some way it is the same problem that arises in the long tail: probably
there is a product that a million people want to consume but is unknown.
Probably there are hundreds but we humans can't focus and handle periodically
so many items. I think the problem is not the lack of resources but tools that
help you to pick many of them with a simple interface.

------
Hitchhiker
[http://cdixon.org/2012/11/23/some-problems-are-so-hard-
they-...](http://cdixon.org/2012/11/23/some-problems-are-so-hard-they-need-to-
be-solved-piece-by-piece/) seems to to have the graphic as well ;-)

~~~
danielharan
And Chris Dixon had the decency to give credit where it's due.

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gz5
Seems this also means these horizontal giants should focus on adding value to
these verticals - helping to develop and grow these ecosystems - focus on
evolving their horizontal platform attributes?

~~~
ttunguz
Yes, the problem is it's hard to scale that while keeping focus on the core.

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zacharyvoase
Is it a challenge, though? These 'focused' competitors in many cases might not
actually take market share from their more general rivals. It doesn't need to
be a zero-sum thing.

~~~
ttunguz
It's a long term challenge I think. If the most valuable people on the network
find value elsewhere....

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sek
I think the biggest problem it creates for the big ones is lack of focus.

By trying to be everything at the same time, they become cluttered and
complicated.

~~~
technoslut
The goal is acquiring information and, in this regard, Google is one company
that has extended themselves into many areas but seem to keep their focus
pretty well. They may be an outlier though.

As for this article, I'm reminded of a similar story with a different point of
view posted on Medium: <https://medium.com/understandings-
epiphanies/aae8d5f880cc>

I do question question the long term value of social networks that operate
under what has become the traditional advertising model as teens move towards
apps that are more privacy conscious.

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beachstartup
right, except craig never had $Billions to buy out all their competitors as
soon as they emerge as a threat.

~~~
ttunguz
yes, balance sheet is really important. CL was never that interested in
building a balance sheet by increasing revenues, going public, etc.

