[Ryanmf]

The rest of the world lives inside Facebook.

For now.

To me, there's exactly one compelling thing about Facebook: It illustrated that normal humans will join and use a social network.

Beyond that, I don't see any reason why their adoption patterns will differ from those we've already seen with other humans on other "social" web properties (Hi Livejournal/Facethejury/Friendster et al!). Which is to say, the enthusiastic folks eventually get those who joined begrudgingly involved, everyone has fun for a while, then everyone gets bored and moves on.

It's not as if nerds who have SRS PRIVACY CONCERNZ and talk about things like data portability are the only people growing weary of Facebook. An approximate majority of the musicians/DJs/artists I know in real life and on the internet say they hate Facebook but maintain an account for promotional purposes. But they all seem to have really warmed up to Twitter. (Specifically, most in the music crowd seem to have adopted a combination of Twitter and Soundcloud as their primary internet residencies, filling the void where MySpace once resided.)

To assume that Facebook will remain the social network of note just because they're Facebook, or just because they got there first (sort of) seems naïve.

The network effect will be the primary driver of where we all—geeks and normies alike—end up next. Facebook doesn't really have any control over that. And we've seen that the network effect can linger even after the product has effectively failed (Hi MySpace!), so having the network now may not be a reliable indicator that they'll keep it, even in the very near term.

And that leaves the product. Which is fine, I guess. Not that bad, not that great. But when Google announces their first real crack at a genuine social network and it has features no one's even talked about yet, and it's cooked directly into their mobile platform running on about 180 Mm devices worldwide [1][2], Facebook's "awesome" reply, "We've got video chat now," falls flat. To me at least.

[1] http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1622614 [2] Android/Google+ and some of the new iOS 5 features along with Apple's Twitter partnership have me semi-convinced that we're moving towards the transparent social network, where membership has much more to do with which smartphone you buy than anything else. I predict that in a competition with Google and Apple/Twitter, Microsoft/Facebook will turn out to be also-rans. Also, poor RIM.

[rokhayakebe]

Livejournal/Facethejury/Friendster

These never reached the audience Facebook has today. 750M users and growing, FB won social networking. Game over.

It's not as if nerds who have SRS PRIVACY CONCERNZ and talk about things like data portability are the only people growing weary of Facebook.

I guarantee you this is a very tiny portion. I live with someone who spends lots of time on FB ("Oh, look at this pictures from XYZ"). They don't even know there is a discussion going around privacy.

To assume that Facebook will remain the social network of note just because they're Facebook, or just because they got there first (sort of) seems naïve.

It will just as Microsoft has dominated the OS space. Another desktop OS is not going to kill MSFT, but maybe mobile will. Same for FB, it will take a different experience to get people to stop spending as much time on the site. Something like Instagram or With with a few added features/mechanisms.

[Ryanmf]

I don't have the time this afternoon to find hard stats on this, but if you were to plot active userbase over total internet users worldwide for, lets say, AIM & Livejournal c.2004, Friendster c.2006, MySpace c.2008, and Facebook and Twitter currently, I suspect Facebook would appear much less the unstoppable force/immovable object you're making it out to be.

I'm acquainted with hundreds of people like your roommate, and I'm aware that normal people don't give a shit about our geeky critiques of Facebook. What I was trying to communicate is that they likely won't bail on Facebook for those reasons, but they might because there are too many annoying people on Fb, or they don't want to get Faceskyped by their mom, or something that's more interesting or lower friction comes along, or other people move for a variety of reasons and they just follow.

FB won social networking. Game over.

I hate to put it this way, but what are you doing on HN? Seriously. I thought we'd all read The Innovator's Dillema. Nobody wins anything for long, the game's never over. That's sort of the point of capitalism.

[rokhayakebe]

I hate to put it this way, but what are you doing on HN? Seriously.

I apologize if I offended you, Ryan. All I am asking for is for an example of one company that had reach the sort of mass FB has (coupled with a total dominance in its vertical)and ended up loosing to a competitor. Enlighten me.

[wonnage]

Yahoo

[rokhayakebe]

Yahoo was a portal that was made "irrelevant" by Google. Google was not in the portal business. This is what happens when a company comes in and changes user behavior. In other words Google did not build a better portal, they build something that made portals irrelevant over time.

[matwood]

FB won social networking. Game over.

Youngsters today and the lack of history being taught in schools. History is full of winners, who after a period of time became losers (or at least not the same level of winning).