Separated
at birth?
Facebook now claims more than 500 million members. Facebook is too big. Already we’re seeing Facebook defections by, well, me. And others, there are other people than me who are put-off by the simple fact that this social network is becoming as ubiquitous as bad breath in dogs.
LinkedIn, at only 80 million members, is already having success with its branding as the working professional’s Facebook. Well the real Facebook can’t allow that, can they?
So expect this year a Facebook fork with the social network offering premium services to get back all those high earners over at LinkedIn. We may see several Facebook channels in fact. How else can Zuckerberg appeal to those of us who, like Groucho Marx, “refuse to join any club that would have me as a member?”
“There’s no forking Facebook,” Zuckerberg will say. But he’ll be wrong.
LinkedIn is getting both interesting and tedious with it’s groups. Initially the groups are useful focused business “bulletin boards” but with success comes spam and a loss of focus as the group owners try to get more and more people to join.
Facebook might try to address the professional user (individuals and businesses) and if they do it will be interesting to watch them experiment, change, and tick off users! 🙂
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/04/five-reasons-why-im-not-buying-facebook/
Google failed once at social networking (Orkut), so did Apple (Ping) . Both learn from mistakes and start anew, stealing Facebook’s audience.
What, exactly, is the utility of social networking, anyway? An economy which used to use its brains to go to the moon, cure cancer, build bridges, and generally make things which are useful to most of us now uses its brains to corrupt its financial system and make gossip software.
Why does Bob even care what happens to Facebook?
Not to be an out and out curmudgeon, but we still build bridges (some very nice ones, in fact), The “cure” for cancer marches forward, depending on which cancer you’re talking about and what you mean by a cure, and with the partial of the decoding of the protiens carried on the outside of cancer cells which aid in it’s getting blood supply and tissue growth (site?), we are marching forward indeed (I know, my punctuation is horrible), the moon has become too expensive with no real payoff in sight, and useful things get made all the time….. Most, if not all, of these things have gotten privatized because the only thing that marks our government more than its greed, is its inability to keep up with the technology that surrounds it and its constituants.
Sites like Facebook are distractions to a populace that doesn’t want to look at its surroundings, like television was to the 50’s and the games and gladiators were to the ancient romans. None of which is cheery.
You’d be amazed at the stupid things I care about.
Oops! I got into the mead again!
You crack me up Robert.
To answer your original question though, Facebook is great for keeping up with the goings on of people you would normally have to expend an effort to do so. Military buddies, childhood friends. People you might consider throughout the year, but wouldn’t necessarily make an effort to contact frequently.
In that capacity it’s fairly nice. What sucks about it is constantly having to wade through the jibber jabber of those same individuals.
I think Bob cares about it because it represents the potential for personal exposure. Monetizing that shouldn’t be too difficult given he is published.
Facebook’s size will be its own enemy. Monetizing that 500 million (times 2) eyeballs will be hard and fickle. No one likes to stare at billboards on their screens, however fancy. That 50 billion valuation is based on that 500 million captive audience’s willingness to click on those ads.
To paraphrase Yogi Berra, “when you see a fork in the road, take it!”
There is an extremely high noise to signal ratio online and no one is certain if it is progressing, has progressed or how it will end. Second Life was a bold experiment but has basically failed.
I think 2011 will be the year of Twitter. I recently reconnected with a former Korean student in Bali. We don’t need computers and smartphones are shrinking the world and enabling banking in developing countries. Twitpics, Twitvideos etc… will rule the net and the PC will hopefully die the death it deserves.
There are some apps which refuse to die like Word or Excel but taking and passing another computer class in Access, Word and Excel made me realize that most people are moving towards their smartphones…
There’s an app for that!
Is Facebook entirely irrelevant? Well, we elected North America’s first mayor based on a Facebook and viral campaign, here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada…
Don’t worry Bob, Americans, you’ll eventually catch up to us!
To paraphrase Yogi again: “Nobody uses Facebook anymore. It’s too crowded!”
I would expect (prefer?)more integration between Facebook and LinkedIn; the smart play would be a combination.
I like Linked in to keep my business contacts, and I don’t think their groups are worth the time and effort. For that matter, many of the Facebook groups aren’t worth the time and effort. I used to like classmates.com for getting back in touch with old school chums, but since you can’t really do anything on that sight without forking over $30/year, Facebook has largely supplanted that, and I have gotten in contact with way more of my classmates there. In fact, I even got married to an old flame after we got back in touch on Facebook just a year and a half ago.
All three of these sites have a great little niche, but each is exploiting the revenue opportunities in a different way.
Facebook is completely free, except for the ads. LinkedIn is mostly free and works well, but they offer a Professional membership, so you can contact more people. Classmates is virtually unusable in the free model.
It’s little wonder why Facebook is the darling of the financial markets. They have attracted everybody and their brother (well, not MY brother) because it costs nothing. And then they get sucked into the games, and click on a few ads, and join groups and generally provide marketing fodder.
I like LinkedIn the way it is, but admittedly, I’m probably not generating much revenue for them. They run the risk of ruining my experience if they try to go too ‘Facebooky’. However, if they can mature their groups into something usable, say for instance, tech discussion groups or hosting blogs like Cringe’s, it might not be so bad.
Classmates I’m afraid is toast, because I just don’t see that they get it. Likewise, I’m a bit incredulous that Ancestry.com has held on as long as it has. I think their base would explode if they lowered their rates and brought in some ad revenue.
Each of these sites has a valid niche, but some simply cued on how to exploit it and make money from it better than the others.
Each will try to adopt, or co-opt, features of the other, in hopes of expanding their market. Each will probably fail in that goal, in one respect or another.
In the pursuit of marketshare, you run the risk of blurring your original market focus, what made you unique in the first place.
There is little to nothing that Facebook can do to compete with LinkedIn. Facebook is about social network, while LinkedIn is not simply about professional social networking, but also about finding jobs and putting out your resume. Their services are focused solely around that task – charging recruiters and hiring managers, etc. to be able to get information about the people in the network.
Facebook may try to do something similar, but will utterly fail if they do. The two networks are just so completely different that the behaviors and cultures differ too. People are extremely careful about what they put on LinkedIn; while they are typically careless about what they put on Facebook.
The defaults in how information is shared reflect this greatly as well. Facebook by default lets anyone see most anything; while you have to explicitly join a person’s contacts to see much of anything about anyone on LinkedIn. Again, it goes to their business model – it’s in Facebook’s interest to allow everything out; while it is in LInkedIn’s interest to keep it all locked up.
Facebook may fork over privacy issues and how the company runs the system. But it certainly won’t be to compete with LinkedIn.
Even if the can’t do it, that doesn’t mean Facebook won’t feel it needs to try. As the market leader they have to respond to competition if only to make it more expensive for competitors. Remember that worked for Reagan versus the USSR.
Is prediction #6 that Qualcomm will buy Atheros? Doh, too late!
Do you think we’ll see Facebook’s growth wane, or even see its size recede in 2011?
Unfortunately, I think the answer is no. But I’d like to see something like Diaspora take over Facebook. Personally, I just don’t trust Facebook. However, it seems that those 500 million users aren’t as picky as me when it comes to transparency, privacy, and content ownership.
Consider that all of these “innovations” over the last decade or so have been just fads, expensive from a macro view, but little more than hula-hoops. You have to ask the basic question: what *need* is fulfilled by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or … Generally the answer is: time wasting for those with too much on their hands. Send them out to the fields to pull weeds.
The hula-hoop, invented over 50 years ago, is still alive and well (https://www.wham-o.com) and is a popular entertainment and exercise accessory (https://www.hooping.org), so it’s not a fad. Based on your logic, why play golf, why play cards, why go fishing, why play a board game, or why watch a movie? They are all basically a waste of time. But, the reality is that most people enjoy the diversion of having a little entertainment or fun in their life, and as a result leisure activities contribute to our economy. As the old saying goes, “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”
This talk of forking facebook is interesting. You can fork Facebook yourself right now, all it takes is a browser extension, called FB Purity, it lets you modify how the Facebook page is presented to you, by filtering out all the junk messages and interface elements that you dont wish to see. Its fully customisable so it will fulfill most peoples needs. Its available for all mainstream browser (except IE)
You can try it out here: https://www.fbpurity.com
Fork facebook today! 🙂
Why is facebook even interesting? It’s just a lame personal web page combined with chat. Chat is boring and always will be.
Same with twitter. Chatting with nobody about nothing. More boring than paint drying.
“Why is facebook even interesting?”
I’m sorry but this is like asking “why is the phone even interesting? who wants to talk to other people?”
I appreciate that you don’t see the point in Facebook. I don’t see the point either. The difference between us, however, is that I am AWARE that you and I are not representative human beings.
For hundreds of thousands of years, people’s prime concern has been gossip and interaction with those around them. To simply dismiss tools that modify how this is done is astonishingly ignorant. It’s like dismissing electricity, or cars, as minor fads that will disappear in a few years leaving no traces on society.
Have you any influence, Bob, that might stop the onward march of “it’s” as the illiterate’s possessive pronoun? Is it SO hard to grasp that “it’s” means “it is”, and that “its” is in a group with his, hers, ours, yours, theirs? (In fact, we’re now getting sentences written where the two are actually reversed….)
From here on I will make that my life’s work, thanks.
Well…OK…BUT all the pundits have been saying Google was too big these past several years, and IT keeps growing.
Most, if not all, of these things have gotten privatized because the only thing that marks our government more than its greed, is its inability to keep up with the technology that surrounds it and its constituants.
Most, if not all, of these things have gotten privatized because the only thing that marks our government more than its greed, is its inability to keep up with the technology that surrounds it and its constituants.
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Cringely, when you go back and review these predictions next year, this is one you will have blown. Reading the comments reminds me that all of your fans like me are old (I have been following you since your print days) and we have no clue about what we are talking about.
Facebook is now a “right of passage.” Ask ANY elementary school kid and they can tell you what Facebook is more than any other technology. You are not officially “cool” in school until you get an account.
My kids now have iPhones and Facebook accounts and they couldn’t be happier.