[wpietri]

Very interesting. A few years back, I was fascinated to see how much Facebook had become the native medium for the whippersnappers. Some of our interns thought of email like I thought of fax machines.

But even if Facebook is prone to stumble, I'd encourage entrepreneurs not to try to be the "next Facebook". As I wrote elsewhere [1]: "Honestly, there probably won't be a 'next Facebook', for the same reason there hasn't been a next Amazon, next Oracle, next Google, or next Apple. There hasn't even been a next Yahoo, because the secret to success for many startups wasn't being another Yahoo, it was being different. Something you should think hard on: Zuckerberg didn't set out to make the next Facebook, or the next anything. He was just making something fun for himself and his fellow Harvard students. It was only when he saw how powerful his creation was that his ambitions increased."

This seems especially relevant to me now that I'm seeing ads around San Francisco for two new social networks that are lamely trying to be the next Facebook.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Entrepreneurship/Is-it-foolish-to-go-t...

[chasing]

Wasn't Facebook the "next Friendster?" I feel like it was actually a relative latecomer to the social networking party of the early '00s. Not to diss FB or their achievement, but it certainly felt like an evolution rather than a revolution upon launch. Only once they built up steam did it really begin to become an entirely new sort of beast.

Same with Google, no? I feel like they entered a crowded market of search engines and came out on top, but certainly weren't the first of their kind.

[dragontamer]

Some of us have longer memories than others.

* Facebook was the "Next MySpace"

* MySpace was the "Next Xanga"

* Xanga was the "Next Homestead"

* Homestead was the "Next Geocities"

[jseliger]

Wasn't Facebook the "next Friendster?" I feel like it was actually a relative latecomer to the social networking party of the early '00s.

A lot of industries also have early periods of extreme tumult, then greater stability as firms consolidated and success becomes more obvious and definable. Think about cars: it's become a commonplace that Detroit was the Silicon Valley of its day, but eventually a few car makers became dominant. When, say, GM first emerged, it might have seemed to observers that another rival would rise to take out GM—which didn't really happen until decades later.

Facebook may be the first of the "mature" social networks that isn't almost immediately superseded by something dramatically better. The fact that it now has so much lock-in inertia indicates that it may be with us for much longer than its day-to-day critics believe.

[dworin]

I'd argue that Facebook is actually the next AOL (a tool for managing your connections, communicating, and viewing curated content in a walled garden). Teenagers in the late 90s/early 00s lived on AOL in the same way that they later lived on Facebook. But you don't become the next anything by trying to be it, you try to become something different, and it's only in hindsight that they look the same.

It's also true that the company that looks indomitable today is seen as an anachronism tomorrow. At one point there were lawsuits against AOL to open up the instant messenger network because it was seen as an anti-competitive monopoly. Now nobody seems to care.

[coldtea]

Well, Facebook could be seen as the next AOL, or Friendster, or MySpace.

And Google could be seen as the next Altavista, Lycos, Excite, etc.

Android itself could be seen as a copy of iOS (released a year after the iPhone redesigned to match it) , and it has eaten into its' market (and into the general untapped smartphone market).

So I wouldn't say he haven't seen that "next" stuff happening.

Doesn't have to be 100% the same to be next -- just to cater to the same market and needs.