I ultimately would like to create a facebook alternative. I understand that a lot of people also share my desire. My question is, should I go for it, or look for a MUCH smaller niche?
You have to come at them obliquely. If you set out to build a better social networking site for everybody you'll fail, because they have more resources and more expertise.
Instead, try to figure out a niche that they're failing at - either an activity or a population of users - and that can be expanded into a full social networking site as it grows. Twitter's attempting to do this with status messages, Zynga with casual games. There've got to be a bunch of other sub-activities that people do on FaceBook that aren't well supported...tie into one of those, then gradually expand your usage base until you're better than FaceBook at everything.
IMHO Facebook make a colossal mistake when they opened up the service to the entire world.
Now that they've let the genie out of the bottle, there's no going back. With 500 million users, every feature they add is a monstrous engineering challenge and every change they make is an impossible political challenge, guaranteed to piss off a major portion of it's users.
How do you market to 500 million people? How do you govern a sytem with that many users in any meaningful way.. you can't. There's nothing you can offer that many people except for lowest common denominator stuff like advertising.
The biggest challenge in business is finding a market you can clearly define, that can be reached easily. Had Facebook stayed "closed" and only available to college students, that's exactly what they would have had.
Imagine the possibilities.. Facebook would have been a right of passage for freshman students.. you go to college, you get a facebook account. College students and their families are some of the richest people on the planet.. just imagine what you could have offered them?
If a college social network is the primary product.. what are the related products, information, services and media? Dating, food, moving, insurance, travel (spring break!), textbooks, banking, car rentals, housing, used goods, career counseling, job searching, recruiting, training, social events, clubs.. the list is endless.
But with a market of everyone.. which products do you offer? When you picture "everyone" do you have an image of a person in your head? Of course not.. but "college student".. ahh you know immediately what to offer them.
Imagine how many companies would beg to offer their services and products on a college-only facebook network?
That's how you compete.. find a specific niche you can clearly define and build deep relationships with your customers.
Ermm, you can still easily target college students because they add their colleges to their Facebook network. Users tag their interests, music they listen to, books they read.
From a business stand point, I really can't see how you could say facebook made a colossal mistake by opening to the world. It made them rich and one of the most powerful websites on the Internet.
they also provided a better product than the alternatives at the time. Now that facebook is out there, you can't release a facebook clone and not get laughed at. You have to innovate.
They're related concepts, but I'd say that they won by building a superior product for a niche.
I first got on FaceBook in the fall of 04, when they were still "elite colleges only", and first checked out MySpace around that time too (I did end up creating a MySpace profile, but abandoned it after like half a dozen visits). MySpace was better as a general social-networking site. It had all sorts of features that FaceBook didn't - you could put pictures and videos and music on your profile, it had messaging (FaceBook only had the Wall when it launched, which was everyone-to-everyone messaging and lost the thread of conversation), and it had all these features for bands and other local entertainment.
FaceBook was better at one, specific use case: you meet someone at a party, you want to remember their contact details so you can hang out with them again, you track them down on FaceBook. And it was a lot better than MySpace at this: your profiles were private to within the school so they wouldn't be exposed to the whole Internet, and you could easily search within schools, and you could find their contact info & interests at a glance without having to wade through all the crud people put on their profiles. And that one use case turned out to be very useful for very many college students.
Niche social networks are dead. People are fatigued by the idea of a social network. The word itself makes me pretty much want to puke. Social is the web now; its a fluid idea. What do you want your product to do? to achieve? How is this going to make my life easier, better, more fun? Even if it is all about my profile and moments - how is it better?
Remember when a lot of people used to think that the blue "e" icon is the internet, and "Microsoft" is "Word"?
Probably now many Facebook users think Facebook is the internet. Good luck!
What I mean is: they don't use Facebook because they think Facebook is so great, they use it because their friends use it (like email - it is just a way to send each other messages). They probably never questioned why they use it. Therefore it would likely be hard to make them switch to something else.
If you were Mark Zuckerberg asking HN "Compete with MySpace?" a few years ago, you'd likely get the same advice you'll get now: they're way out in front of you and you'll have a much better shot at success if you pick a different niche.
The Bad News: You'll almost certainly fail if you try to take on Facebook.
The Good News: If you succeed, you'll almost certainly be a billionaire.
If you wanted to do this, I'd recommend reading up on what the Diaspora guys are doing and beat them at their game rather than attacking Facebook head-on.
This is an incredibly hard and most likely frustrating thing to do. Social networks require momentum to work. In other words, I won't join your social network unless most of my friends are there. Facebook was able to gain traction on MySpace because it started with a niche (colleges), LinkedIn also has a niche (business). Perhaps you can start with some sort of niche (furries?) and if the user experience is good, that community may extend it to their friends.
I want a social place but not to share pics with my family and friends. I want to share knowledge and expertise. I want to ask questions, get answers, share code, show off my projects, learn from the experts, chat with colleagues, network and socialize.
Start with a facebook clon for hackers, then, like reddit, expand to all possible interests. Let people create their groups of interest and then grow, grow like weed.
Start with a facebook clon for hackers, then, like reddit, expand to all possible interests. Let people create their groups of interest and then grow, grow like weed.
People like (and find it convenient) to split into tribes they identify with. Look at Usenet, Reddit, Facebook, IRC, etc. What if you took this niche-based grouping and applied it to a social network?
Imagine, for example, that I sign up with your site and join the "Lisp Hackers" group. I can private message other Lispers, I can pop open a chat window and talk live without having to open an IRC client, post code on our public discussion forum, view the profiles of the people in my group, look at their pictures, etc. The important thing would be to emphasize community-based subsites with a full suite of features for the members.
Facebook now works (to my understanding; I don't have an account) on the principle of "friending" everyone, and discovering some new people in "Groups" or "Fan Pages", which provide primitive utilities for talking with one another; at the end of the day, to get the full list of features, you have to add everyone to your giant "list o' friends." What would happen if you started with the idea of strict grouping instead?
@mkice: Please email me (echelon@gmail.com). I've got a massive engineering project that I've been working on for some years, and I definitely need help on it due to my busy education schedule. It's along the same lines of Diaspora, but a much broader scope: give all data a decentralized, ontological API and a node-based exchange platform.
I've taken some ideas from the Semantic Web community, but scaled them down so they're practical. I use a subset of RDF that maps cleanly to an SQL/ORM. Models are generative based on the ontologies you define. Types are hierarchical "Resources" that are uniquely identified (and sometimes dereferenceable) by URI and can be exchanged from the original source or via a p2p mechanism.
If this or any similar platform gains traction, Facebook is history. Blogs are history. Reddit, etc. -- it can all be emulated (and improved) on this platform and everyone can write code for it. No more data silos.
Personally, I'm not so interested in the social networking aspect, but social network tools can be built upon this. I'm more interested in creating a tool to route interesting information to and from relevant parties. I want an optimal web reading experience, and not even hacker news can provide this. (ie. I want to algorithmically find peers with similar skills/interests and fetch their highly-ranked stories/comments, data mine, personal interest profiling, etc. Can't do that without success/adoption of the platform though.)
The question I'd be asking myself is, what do you have besides the desire? Do you have some other advantages (contacts, technology, funding) that makes this even slightly plausible?
If all you have is the desire, you might as well take on General Motors.
Personally I don't feel the need for a facebook alternative, and I'm sure that a majority of people feel the same way. Otherwise there wouldn't be 500 million facebook users. I'm happy with using facebook to connect with all my acquaintances, twitter to interact on the micro level and tumblr to blog. Here is a question you have to think about; "What can you possibly offer that would change my mind?"
I think everyone at some point wants to create the next big thing in social networking, but honestly, it just isn't a realistic expectation. Look how much Google has failed to compete, even with MySpace, in the social arena.Do you think you can you do better than Google?
II agree with everything you said, and still... I think there's a place for more social networks, if we redefine "social network" a little.
What there are are tons of communities, any of which a given user may or may not be a member of... and as long as people prefer to show a different face when interacting with a given community, or keep their interactions with the members of a given community separate - whether as a convenience, or for privacy reasons, whatever, there will be room for "social networks" around interests, geographic areas, etc.
So, yeah, a "social network" for Doctor Who fans, a "social network" for Mazda RX-8 enthusiasts, etc. This space is mostly filled by "forums" now, which don't necessarily have (or need, and this point is probably key) the same suite of features as a "full fledged social network."
But if there was a way to take advantage of all these discrete communities of interests, yet still give a user convenient access to their entire social-graph at all times, and a void "profile fatigue" and "password fatigue" then one could probably accomplish something.
Whether or not what Diaspora are building, or one of the other varied "decentralized social network" projects, remains to be seen. And how the hell you monetize it if you could build it also remains to be seen. But there point in all this rambling was really just to say that there are needs for "networking" that Facebook isn't filling at least not alone. Now the combination of Facebook, Gallifreybase.com and rx8forum.com may fill the needs of the hypothetical Doctor Who watching, RX-8 driving, social-networker. So would one really want to compete with Facebook or with rx8forum.com and gallifreybase.com?
It isn't just forums that are filling the gap it is sites like Ning, and Wordpress plugins like buddypress that are allowing people to develop their own "social networks" as well. Which has me thinking that it is probably better to create a service that allows individuals to design and develop their own communities that cater to whatever interest they may have.
If you goal is to make money, then ignore this comment.
If your goal is to make something better than facebook, you want to ask yourself, why you want to reinvent the wheel? Unless you have some great idea. Don't.
Check out Diaspora, maybe it's better for you to work on that when it comes out. They have some good ideas. You can also look around other open source SNS.
Facebook is not about features anymore. It is about the fact that they have 500M users. When you want to compete with Facebook, you have to grab 30% from the 500M to your side to call it a competition. You have to convince them that you have a better service and that they won't miss the people that are still on Facebook.
P.S. 1% of Facebook users care about privacy. The rest are not aware.
Agreed. The network effect is their advantage. Features are for tech blogs to write about, real people care that their buddies from 30 years ago are online now.
You should go for it if you can offer a compelling feature that facebook lacks. (I mean really really compelling).
I think the advice about going at it obliquely is only necessary if you're creating a straight up clone, this targeting a niche thing is only about marketing, but if you can offer something better, I think you'll find many early adopters.
Figure out why people use Facebook, and then do a better job at it than Facebook is.
Presumptions: Facebook does not actually understand its own audience and why people use the site. Also, I presume you will figure out what "better" really means for your audience and not just over-engineer something.
Instead, try to figure out a niche that they're failing at - either an activity or a population of users - and that can be expanded into a full social networking site as it grows. Twitter's attempting to do this with status messages, Zynga with casual games. There've got to be a bunch of other sub-activities that people do on FaceBook that aren't well supported...tie into one of those, then gradually expand your usage base until you're better than FaceBook at everything.