[patrickk]

Thanks. I'm genuinely curious what people think of this, so I reposted it there.

I think the early-adopter types - like you, me and the typical HN user see real value when it prevents itself, and Facebook ain't it. Mainstream users will hop onto Facebook because their friends are there, not necessarily because it's the best social network out there, whereas early adopters will jump onto Facebook in it's early days because

a) it's cool

b) it's useful - for users - not businesses

c) it's not MySpace.

They will continue to stick around as long as these are still true. Whether a) is still true is debatable, b) is fading and c) is becoming more of a reality by the day.

[luxative]

Patrickk, some thoughts on your points:

a) Yes, it's not 'as cool' as before. But, thanks to the 'friends of friends' effect ypu've mentioned, it has achieved remarkable numbers while it 'was cool' - and at this time, that's all that matters.

b) I think businesses are starting to see value in facebook. Facebook Places (with the automatic creation of a facebook page too) will only catalyze this.

And...with a single destination site seeing 500mn+ users, we're in unchartered territory - history won't help us here.

[patrickk]

On a) - cool is very subjective, so perhaps there's no point in even mentioning it. It depends on the person you ask.

On point b) - Facebook is focusing on making it's services more useful to business, at the detriment of it's core users. Facebook became popular in Harvard because you could scope out that cute undergrad you spotted around campus. The people in your network were tied to your friends and classmates in the real world. The more Facebook grows, the more it devalues it's definition of 'friend' (Facebook's definition of friend that is. Having 300 Mafia Wars friends might make me spend more time on Facebook for a while - increasing Facebook's stickiness, hence it's value to brand advertisers, but it doesn't mean I'll ever have a meaningful interaction with the members of my "Mafia").

Do I want to get notifications every time a 'friend' of mine 'likes' Xbox Live? No. That's not a real interaction - it's just spam. Do I want a notification every time a friend of mine logs into their account in a Starbucks (this is how I'd imagine their location-based feature working)? No. Of course I don't. I want my social network to only give me message that aren't auto-generated, i.e. those that are real messages from real people. Like HN comments.

I think Facebook has forgotten about what made it popular in the first place, and now because of it's size and self-sustaining growth, will implement features that are useless to it's core user base. There will be no telltale indicators (at least externally) of this growing dissatisfaction because any attrition of it's user base will be compensated by new, incoming users. And of course many people who don't like the service will hang around because they don't want to be out of the loop.

What I envision as the ideal would be social networks to emulate email and SMS. I can send a Gmail email to my Hotmail based friend. If I don't like Gmail, I can switch email providers and take my contacts with me. Social networks should organise in 'tribes'. You associate with whatever tribe you feel describes you best. Tribes can interact with each other. If I don't like my tribe (perhaps because it's becoming MySpace-like) I can move easily to another. There could be a tribe that appeals to HN type users, and another for 12 year old girls, and another for retirees. Each have their own identity and values. What I'm describing is an open protocol for social networks, which forces "tribes" (individual networks) to compete on how good they are, rather than how many of your friends are on that particular network. This will keep them honest as they can't depend on user lock-in. In an ideal world, Diaspora and Facebook would be on an open protocol and users could switch easily and painlessly.

[GBKS]

I actually think Facebook has a decent grip of this spam problem. Your news feed doesn't show you all the events that happen, only a limited set. They figure out which people you interact with more, which updates get more attention, etc and only show you the ones that they think matters to you.

Their goal is to capture as much data as possible (updates, likes, places, pages) and to find the connections between things. With enough data and number crunching, they can figure out if you're interested in xbox or Mafia Wars updates or now and adjust accordingly.