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by akardell
6830 days ago
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This is the second time I've read something recently that Facebook will never be MySpace because MySpace has more users. I disagree. One of the articles I read made it's point by showing a graph that showed Facebook is clearly catching up. It's a few months old, but Andreesen had a really good post on why the platform will always win: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html |
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"The web, after all, vanquished proprietary online services like America Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve -- the so-called "walled gardens" -- in large part because the web is a platform and the walled gardens were not."
Umm, no. Broadband vanquished them. They allowed unfettered internet access long before they began their downward spirals. I had AOL in high school, when they were approaching their zenith, and never used any of the walled features, just internet and IM.
When you phrase platform the way he does, it sounds superior. When, in reality, you have people piling layer on top of layer until what remains is something so complex and unreliable that few people can understand or tolerate it, you end up with something nobody wants.
And honestly, anything is a platform once somebody turns it into one. Myspace most definitely is. People make good livings just making layouts for it. Photobucket got rich off of it. Lots of indie bands sold concert tickets and CDs thanks to it. Dane Cook owes it his entire career.
So in the platform race, Facebook is losing. They're a more restrictive platform built onto a smaller one.