Roger with his axe
Roger McNamee is a smart guy and a very successful investor as a co-founder of Elevation Partners. He made a breakfast presentation last month at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles that is well worth watching. I could probably get half a dozen columns out of this one speech, but the part I want to concentrate on here is McNamee’s claim that when it comes to social media, Facebook (in which he was an early investor) has already won. I’m not here to say Roger is wrong, just that I am not exactly sure what Facebook is winning.
The core of McNamee’s speech didn’t have to do so much with Facebook as with Microsoft, Apple, Google, and HTML5. His point was that Microsoft is going down and that is freeing-up money from a decaying enterprise software business that can go to support new businesses based on HTML5. Google won’t be the beneficiary of Microsoft’s fall, according to Roger, because they’ve lost, too: the mobile transition effectively eliminates Google’s tollbooth on the Internet because smart phone users hardly search at all. So Apple wins by providing all the devices and Facebook wins, I guess, by providing the most popular destination.
Again, I’m not saying he’s wrong, but what I took away from this speech was first an image of Microsoft as the Roman Colosseum being mined for marble after the barbarian invasion, and second a sense that while Facebook is certainly a huge social, cultural, and business phenomenon, I just don’t see it being around for very long.
Facebook is a huge success. You can’t argue with 750 million users and growing. And I don’t see Google+ making a big dent in that. What I see instead is more properly the fading of the entire social media category, the victim of an ever-shortening event horizon.
Each era of computing seems to run for about a decade of total dominance by a given platform. Mainframes (1960-1970), minicomputers (1970-1980), character-based PCs (1980-1990), graphical PCs (1990-2000), notebooks (2000-2010), smart phones and tablets (2010-2020?). We could look at this in different ways like how these devices are connected but I don’t think it would make a huge difference.
Now look at the dominant players in each succession – IBM (1960-1985), DEC (1965-1980), Microsoft (1987-2003), Google (2000-2010), Facebook (2007-?). That’s 25 years, 15 years, 15 years, 10 years, and how long will Facebook reign supreme? Not 15 years and I don’t think even 10. I give Facebook seven years or until 2014 to peak.
Does this feel wrong to you? Listen to your gut and I think you’ll agree with me even if we don’t exactly know why.
Roger may not care since he will have already made his Facebook fortune and then some. But I think this foreshortening is important because it makes Facebook the winner, yes, but the winner of what? Super-IPO of the decade? Yes. Dow-30 company of 2025? No.
My interest is in what follows Facebook, which I think must be its disintermediation by all of us reclaiming our personal data, possibly through our embracing the very HTML5 that Roger loves so much. The trend is clear from “the computer is the computer” through “the network is the computer” to what’s next, which I believe is “the data is the computer.”
You’ll notice I didn’t mention Apple. Black swan.
Definitely right that “the data is the computer.”
Or at least, that it will one day be the computer.
But it will be interesting to see if FB can buck the trends a bit from you’ve put forth here, Bob. Another way of looking at your timelines and companies of dominance is that with each successive “revolution”, the circle is brought closer to the individual, and the relationship *between* people shrinks. Has (or will) FB brought that circle as tight as it can be imagined? Probably not. But they’re definitely closer than anyone else has ever gotten. Will they find ways to tighten the interpersonal relationship potentials of the framework, or are they at their peak already?
Not sure. I’m one of the few who don’t have a FB account.
Its all about privacy and intellectual property. It is the one thing about the future that we know without a doubt. I think there are very few people in the world that ‘get it’. They are often too consumed with the idea of market dominance. Microsoft swept the world with ActiveX and the ability to run native code on connected computers. But they grossly sacrificed security and that dominance died a quick death as AcitveX in the browser and on the desktop was a viral petri dish of despair, frustration, and loss to productivity, property and privacy. Ironically, native code is back via the ‘trusted community’ App store. Only this time native code is properly signed, vetted and trusted.
Facebook is the new social media ActiveX. That cute FB share button that appears on CNN and Tech Crunch has alreadybeen exploited and “virtually clicked jacked” on dozens of sites. Waiting in prey to be automatically clicked the minute you visit a page, ready to post vitamins, Viagra, and porn right to your untrusted, unfiltered, FB Stream. Suckerburge himself stated that the “age of privacy has ended”, sorry Suck, its just getting started. Google+ on the other hand is the future App store of social networking. Why even Google itself is already notifying users that their machines are infected (http://consumerist.com/2011/07/google-warning-infected-users-about-malware.html).
Coupled with a respect for privacy and intellectual property, Apple and Google appear to “get it”. This is just one step away from adding micro transactions and viola! Cost effective de-brokering of every product, service, and information you can imagine in a safe, trusted, self policing singularity. Tired of junk mail? Tired of *sending* junk mail? Why not get paid to reveal your favorite toothpaste (heck, it’s cheaper to General Mills then sending you a free sample). If I had a penny for every useless coupon that went into the trash bin,… well you get the picture. My future child’s favorite cereal on the other hand is not up for negotiation but in today’s landscape there is no alternative. If FB *doesn’t fail*, cereal brand is the least of our worries.
I don’t have a FB account either.
Bob what did you mean by the Black Swan reference to Apple?
[I haven’t caught the flick and don’t know anything about the real bird 🙂 ]
I believe that Bob is referring to Naleb Taleb’s black swan theory, that there are high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations. As the extreme outlier, Apple would be the black swan in this case.
Think of the black sheep, but instead of being looked down upon is looked up to, hence it’s more like a swan. I suspect Bob is trying to acknowledge Apple in a favorable light while necessarily leaving it out of the numbers game.
My suspicion is that facebook is nothing but a better implementation of SMS on a cellphone; and that twitter is even better still. I haven’t had a cellphone since 1999, so I skipped out totally on SMS and facebook and twitter. My personal understanding of this technology is that it is similar to BBS (bulletin board system) technology from the 1980s, but much more convenient — yet still something I gave up on decades ago.
(The last time I used a modem was in 2002, and only because my ADSL ISP maintained a dialup line for use when the broadband service got interrupted.)
The reason I threw away the cellphone so many years ago was that I grew to hate being connected and distracted all the time. Maybe that’s something that happens to all of us as we age, or maybe a cloying effect from constant technology exposure. Plus I got tired of the outrageous monthly bills, that was another big factor to me.
What works for me is: home telephone; face-to-face contact; email via my permanent alumnus account; and anonymous forums such as this comment forum and other feedback forums. The main attraction to me is I am completely in control of my life, without being required to monitor facebook or a cellphone all the time.
He means that Steve Jobs/Apple is a wild card that managed to greatly influence the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, and 00’s.
5th on the google search results answers that question. 🙂
I assumed he was referring to the black swan fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability#Inductive_categorical_inference). That is, the swans I see are all white, therefore all swans are white.
I assumed Bob was implicitly falsifying another common argument: The popular smartphones and tablets today are made from Apple, therefore all popular smartphones and tablets will be made by Apple.
This social networking craze reminds me a little of the soap-opera craze which morphed into a reality-TV craze when people got bored… I really hope the social networking craze tones down considerably before it becomes so banal it’s not worth bothering with.
A friend of mine, who is an independent software developer, told me yesterday that he was quitting FB and returning to his self-hosted WordPress blog with only hints and links posted to Twitter etc.
His reason being that he feels (correctly in my own opinion) that he and his relationships have been commoditised. He and his family becoming a product. The social networking companies are gatekeepers to his widely distributed family and friends.
Having to use a social network “aggregator” to keep everything in view is a wrong turn in the ease of comms.
All probably simplistic and easily dismissed by the Big Noises. However I too no longer bother with my FB account. Twitter is handy, Blogger ok but uninspiring and I haven’t had an invite to Google+ – I’m not important enough!
I’m happy to be over at WordPress with no followers except those who really want to listen 😉
Wow, Facebook isn’t the only thing he’s wrong about. That guy comes across as severely misinformed. Odd, considering his background. Perhaps he’s just weaving a web of propaganda to support his own investment interests?
Who is “he” in this instance? Roger McNamee? Me? A commenter?
Roger McNamee. And I was referring to his misuse of the term “HTML5” when he’s really just talking about modern web development in general, the claim that HTML5 development is cheaper than Flash development, his misunderstanding of licensing costs for the H.264 codec, among other things.
Ryan. The W3C standard called HTML5 is a boring codification of the state of the art from the web circa 2008. Everybody else who uses the term “HTML5” is referring to all the new and interesting APIs that build on top of HTML5 (the W3C standard) such as WebGL, WebSockets, Web Workers, local storage, typed arrays, the File APIs, Canvas image data, Web Audio API, much faster Javascript engines, CSS3, WOFF, etc, etc, etc. Really, when people use the term “HTML5” they mean technologies for developing modern web applications.
And while I can’t speak to the cost of web applications vs Flash applications, I’ve developed both large applications and currently develop large web applications. The cost of maintaining and supporting (and probably initial development of) a large web application is far lower than an equivalent native application.
In his book, Taleb says not all black swans are bad, and cited Google as an example.
He sees black swans as unexpected events no one predicted which change everything.
No FB account here either. Guess I’m just to busy with work (where I sit in front computers enough already thank you) and to many other real interests to bother. FB seems to be a ‘virtual reality’ wherein everyone is your ‘friend’ and all contacts screened by various categories. Is this reality?
Roger McNamee is living in a fantasy world where everyone is entitled to a new iPhone every year and a Electric sports car. Easy money and cheap credit has built a lazy America that has time to fool with silly social experiments like Facebook and it’s related Mafia Wars. Bad news for you McNamee, Facebook is a fad riding the back of a capitalist bubble.
ROTFL!
Ha . . . data is king. Take that OO !
“OO”? This didn’t help me either: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OO .
Should have said OOP – Object Oriented Programming, which said the world is only about behavior. Data shouldn’t be seen, it’s encapsulated in behavior.
The earliest computer prototypes always had the concepts of both data and code (behavior or instruction). Trying to banish one led to some strange contortions. OOP purists didn’t even like getter and setter methods, because they actually exposed data.
Now Bob says it’s all about data. Perhaps that’s ll it every was about.
Remember CDC (Control Data Corporation)? I always loved that name “Control Data” – had a nice ring to it.
Ill be happy when the day come that Zuckerberg is back to being a nobody and the adults can get on with it. Thanks for all the fish.
So… Why is FB big? You go there because it’s easiest way to find folks you lost track of and then stay in touch: one site, lots of pictures from old friends. Easiest site to use? I wouldn’t say so. Just has nice large search field. So, a few years from now, will it be easy to put up your contact info and then have a pointer to whatever content you want to show? That would kick FB and every other social media site in the teeth. It’s all about their user lists right now.
Once my Bigfoot Email addy for life went away I was really hoping something like USPO would step up and offer a basic email addy/contact info set up, that would just point to ‘your stuff’ on whatever server/service you used. Still waiting.
[…] while after I posted this, Cringely posted something about the projected decline and fall of Facebook. Google+ doesn’t figure into that in his picture. Facebook is a huge success. You can’t […]
I’ve been expecting the death of FB at about the same time, but for a much simpler reason. Do you think a kid who is 5 years old today will want to use her parents fad when she becomes a teenager?
I can already tell you, my kids say NO WAY. To them it is totally uncool and nowhere to be. Actually, they prefer youtube for social networking as do their friends
I don’t know Bob. I’m starting to get some (but not all) of my news from FB. I get media notices on FB. I’ve “liked” enough fan pages that I keep up to date on all the things of interest to me. The social aspect of it is wearing thin unless I want to share comments or items I think might interest some of my friends (so I save an email blast). I even posted a link to your flip side of cyber bullying article for all my friends who teach. To me it is becoming a search engine where I don’t have to search. Things I like just appear. If FB gets better at providing that service they may last a little longer than 10 years. Although I think part of your point is that they won’t be able to change themselves into something like that… or some other black swan.
When talking of dominant technologies that eventually faded away, don’t forget AOL. In my opinion, AOL’s history is the biggest predictor of what to expect for Facebook.
so his basic analysis is:
1. Microsoft is going down.
2. Enterprise software money moves to HTML5 (ie: “the cloud”).
3. Smart phone users hardly search, so goodbye Google’s
4. Apple wins by providing all the devices
5. Facebook wins, by providing the most popular destination
I don’t care to argue these points; he may be right, he may be wrong, but either way, OMG how obvious and self-serving is this analysis? It’s kind of sad, not an ounce of creative thinking, just repacking the conventional wisdom a longer narrative.
I don’t think HTML (5 or otherwise) is a true technology for the future, In my opinion Web in general is the equivalent of command-line on the desktop: a simple and quick introductory approach, soon to be superseded by something much more powerful.
Facebook will die due to its own success. Originally, Facebook was a way to track what your college friends were doing. Is there a party? Who’s going where on the weekend? Can someone give me a ride? What was that Chemistry assignment?
Now, if you post something on your wall, the item will disappear in a matter of minutes. Instead, you’ll see who got their rutabagas planted in Farmville or that Bob is now friends with Jill. So much information and most of it is useless drivel.
When Facebook starts to fall, it will fall very quickly. Much the way MySpace did. I already see people abandoning Facebook for Twitter.
I agree, the demise of Facebook is near. The only reason to use Facebook is because your friends are using Facebook, and the only reason they’re using Facebook is because it’s the most convenient way currently, to reach all of their friends. However, it suffers from the same problems as MySpace before it and Google+ after it, it’s a silo. MySpace lost because Facebook built a better mousetrap and Google thinks it just one-upped Facebook, however, it won’t matter in the long run because these silos are incompatible with one another. Google+ is basically DOA.
What will replace social network is more of a peer(s)-to-peer(s) communication model (think SMS minus the telco). There may be one or many centralized services in the cloud behind the scenes, but that won’t matter. It will enter via the one device that makes this possible, the always connected smart phone. It will be an application that allows you to communicate with one, some or all of your friends regardless of device but the key is that it will be an App or some API implemented directly by the smart phone OS and users won’t need to go to Facebook or Google, they’ll just interact on their devices. Its simplicity and lack of ties to a particular company will be what gives it ubiquity, unlike the current social strategies which rely on users joining the silo. You have a phone, you’ll be on the new platform, you won’t even have to think about it.
Miscalculation/Typo? IBM (1960-1985) is 25 years (not the 15 stated above).
Fixed, thanks!
Bob,
Get the point, but you need to correct your math:
Now look at the dominant players in each succession – IBM (1960-1985), DEC (1965-1980), Microsoft (1987-2003), Google (2000-2010), Facebook (2007-?). That’s 15 years, 15 years, 15 years, 10 years,
That should be:
Now look at the dominant players in each succession – IBM (1960-1985), DEC (1965-1980), Microsoft (1987-2003), Google (2000-2010), Facebook (2007-?). That’s 25 years, 20 years, 15 years, 10 years..
Cheers!
DEC (1965-1980) is 15 years.
So I can’t count either. Heh.
The “black swan” event will be the end of the Internet free-for-all as we’ve known it since the mid ’90s. Governments world-wide will lock it down and control content access. The means for this lock down will be IPv6, and the reasons given will be national security and public safety.
Many people I know are going dark — intentionally reducing their exposure to media and online technologies.
In about the 2022 Presidential election we’ll find out who was smart and never touched FB or so little as to make no future negative difference.
Future political candidates will only use Linkedin (how boring is that?) or the as yet to be imagined “Politics-in-book-face-irc-geocities-stumpspeech-gov” website for those who wish to avoid the pitfalls of hip social networking.
Facebook is in a decline the minute the IPO happens. That will just be all the investors cashing in, leaving those who still believe that it has some worth, holding the bag. From that point forward, all innovation will stop (sorta has already) and it will be a has been.
i love hating on facebook, and am glad that bob is a fbook skeptic too.
xo
ps – where you at Robert Young???
I’ve been saying for months now that Facebook is the CB radio of the 2000’s (and 2010’s). Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s, a LOT of people went and got CB radios so they could talk to truckers and others while driving. How many cars still have CB radios nowadays? Not very many…
Hey I still have a CB radio. There aren’t cell phone towers everywhere you know.
“the data is the computer”…I’m afraid I don’t get the point of that statement. It’s always been about the data regardless of the hardware used to create and access the data, ever since the first writing instrument was created.
“The Data is the Computer”
When I read that statement I think of my travels when I carried around a custom Linux installation on a usb stick. I could boot almost any computer making it my own. I’ve been meaning to reconsider doing this on a regular basis.
Linux opens up some interesting options that aren’t legal or even possible with other operating systems.
What’s your interpretation of the aforementioned statement?
Carry one of these around https://www.airstash.com/ and you can be free from the internet as well.
“Now look at the dominant players in each succession – IBM (1960-1985), DEC (1965-1980), Microsoft (1987-2003), Google (2000-2010), Facebook (2007-?). That’s 25 years, 15 years, 15 years, 10 years, and how long will Facebook reign supreme? Not 15 years and I don’t think even 10. I give Facebook seven years or until 2014 to peak.”
I have no idea what this is. You went from talking about hardware to…huh? Google dominated for 10 years? Dominated what?!
Some would say ‘search’, but in reality more like web advertising.
So Apple wins by providing all the devices and Facebook wins, I guess, by providing the most popular destination.
If iCloud can push my photos to my friends devices, and push their comments back to my devices, they will solve the sharing feature among friends which is the basis of social networks. Of course, new software on the device must be created to manage the data stream. But you always retain a copy of everything you post and what others post about your photos, videos, etc. If iCloud can do this, there is really no reason to go to Facebook as a destination. You are your own destination.
As an ex-computer programmer, platitudes like ‘the data is the computer’ mean nothing to me. Data and logic are intimately entwined.
This person, Phong Le, has hit the nail square on the head.
With slight mods to the iCloud philosophy, people will indeed be their own destination. It will be interesting to see how the prime movers – businesses (marketeers) who use social networking to push their advertising – will react to this.
[…] Fadebook “What I see instead is more properly the fading of the entire social media category, the victi… […]
How many FBers are now inactive? I got roped into Facebook as an adjunct to my HS XXth reunion. Fun to reconnect with old, old friends. Now, my only FBing is if my niece posts something about her new baby. Otherwise, PAH!
RE Nigel: “This social networking craze reminds me a little of the…” …CB craze of the 70’s or USENET in the 80’s (there, I’ve dated myself). Sound and fury signifying shallowness. I’d rather phone somebody I really care about or at least email them in a missive longer than 140 characters – oh, that’s Twitter – another questionable use of time…
Bob X., 2014 sounds optimistic: 25-15-10-7(overlap w/ Google)- I think maybe 5 years — just in time for the Mayans.
Google is betting that Apple will be paranoid enough to take out Facebook, because it is the only cool enough brand that will keep the brainless quiet as they watch the equivalent of a seal clubbing party. The rise of FB represents the decline of the average caliber of web users. We gotta admit there simply aren’t that many smart people around, but access keeps expanding all the time. Result = FB. Unfortunately FB is not only abbreviation for Facebook, but also FratBoy. Every time tech dumbed down, from the time of the mainframe thru the present tablet/smartphone, it has taken superior intelligence to accomplish the dumbing down. FB is the first idiotisation product that has succeeded with crappy worthless technology. FB has trivialised intellectual effort, in a way nothing has since the wild success of contract bridge in Culbertson’s time, forced some chess grandmasters to take up bridge (and in the process getting bored after they found it took so little to kick card sharps you know where.
Gasbags like McNamee encourage this dumbing down, behaving like financiers.
Bob,
You coward!
So Apple is a Black Swan. Accepted.
However, what’s your prediction of its reign? I know Apple holds such a small but special place in your heart, I know you don’t want to even guess as to its decline.
Come on, Bob, you need to let it go. The best therapy is to predict the demise of your long lost love.
BTW, no mystery at Maiden. I was there last week. About 20-25% full. Mostly HP but the boys in IT are mad as hell the purchasing guys have pitted IBM versus HP to get the prices down. The reason for the empty feeling? No one’s buying into the cloud, Baby.
Facebook will peak and decline like everything else, but who says it has to die? The world’s number one email service is still Hotmail. Does anyone think Hotmail is cool, superior, or fun? No. It simply benefits from entrenchment: the masses don’t want the trouble of changing email addresses.
Windows, too. How many times have we predicted the death of Windows? It’s not cool, superior, or user-friendly. But it has dominance (market share), ubiquity (synonymous with computing for most users) and entrenchment (pain in the ass for individuals and companies to switch.)
Facebook also enjoys dominance, ubiquity, and entrenchment. Google search has dominance and ubiquity but no entrenchment (if it vanishes we just switch to Bing in five seconds) which is why Google has to make an expensive play with G+ to make sure the social layer of the internet is not walled off. They can’t kill FB but as long as they get 100M users or so they can protect their cash cow of Adwords.
Apple also has a certain kind of dominance, ubiquity, and entrenchment, but it all relies on an innovative product cycle and maybe Steve Jobs being alive. Black swan indeed.
This might be the most worthwhile comment I’ve read yet. And yet, no response? I’ll start. Thank you for bringing up what will most likely be the biggest factor in social media growth/change: entrenchment. Never underestimate entrenchment. Nevermind the 750 million users, how much content is on FB? And how many people are really willing to switch their years of accumulated content from FB to say, Google+? Users will always be willing/excited to create new content on whatever new site, but how often do they take their old content with them? I think FB has proven their worth as a main hub, and as the original social media game changer, I think we need not underestimate their game plan for the next 10 years. I agree that if FB were to stay in a constant state, it would become irrelevant. But tell me why does everyone expect this? I’ll trust Mark Zuckerberg’s understand of social media over any of these 40+ “experts” that don’t even have a Facebook. (ps, by not having a Facebook, you do not prove your superiority, but rather a stubbornness that suggests you actually oppose change and growth, and an ignorance that proves you really have no influential place in the digital and social media world)
and to clarify, when I say “you,” I am (of course) not speaking to you specifically, but rather to the general population of this comment feed.
Thanks Liz. I think the Dominance/Ubiquity/Entrenchment test is a good shorthand to measure the security of any company, brand, product, or service.
Apple, Google, and MS are the only tech companies in or near the top ten list of traded companies by market cap. FB could well enter that list, even if outliers like me decide to deactivate our accounts, as I have.
the pattern recognition reminds me of “Independence Day” are we winding down to some type of digital singularity? does the datasphere become self aware? is the next Zuckerberg – Max Headroom Jr.?
No silly, it’s SkyNet.
If you think about it, Facebook is most useful as a replacement for that annoying website called Classmates.com. My 20th high school reunion is next month and it’s being organized on Facebook. After that, I plan to cancel my Facebook account. Generally speaking, the positives don’t outweigh the potential negatives.
Bob: the Apple black swan reference.. are you saying they are about to be hit by some awful unpredictable bad news?
Can you really “cancel” that Facebook account?
It might be removed from public view, but I doubt that the data disappears from the servers.
My first experience connecting “online” was doing a direct dial modem-to-modem chat, followed by BBSes. As a private person by nature, I’ve always been careful about managing my online “persona.”
I may have little control over what the professional data mining companies dig up from public records, but I’m certainly not going to add to that voluntarily, whether through Myspace, Facebook, or whatever follows them.
Succeeding generations have no such qualms or reservations about sharing, and Facebook, Google, etc. have built very successful businesses on making their users the products and benefiting from them. Like you, I think the ratio favors these companies more than it does the users, but I realize it’s a minority view.
Looking at the era and the dominant players is nice, but it would have been nicer to additionally relate this with the people involved, whose presence pretty much matches the successful era of the companies involved. Then again, you have already covered many of these people in your show(s); Watson (Sr. and more so Jr.), Kildall, Gates/Allen + Ballmer, Brin/Page + Schmidt, the guy depicted in the social network movie. It seems that when the founding people leave, the company or companies go nowhere.
One can apparently only maintain speed for about 15 years, except for the guy who’s company you left out.
Bob –
This is the second or third cryptic comment about Apple recently. When are you going to convey your Apple vision?
When I come up with a vision of Apple’s future is my glib response. I’m working on it. This is a big topic, attempting to relate Apple’s goals, the intended and unintended effects of Apple, all to a post-Jobs future. When I think I have it figured out you’ll be the second to know.
Cool. Thanks!
[…] and services building on Google+ that keep Google in the social web game. But there are those who think that Facebook has already won this […]
I think longevity is a thing of the past. Years ago companies like Microsoft and IBM were holding all of the cards. That is not true anymore. Everyone has access to everything. The secrets once held by big, poweful companies are out of the bag and anyone can create the next cool thing from anywhere.
Cringely at least check some damn facts!
80% of iphone users use search..same percentages on android..
so basically you whole spiel unravels..all because you did not validate or verify some facts..or in other words Google has stated that they pay for their android engineers with mobile ads served by mobile search..were they lying sir?
It’s all about information overload. There’s only so much a human mind can consume and pay attention to. The signal to noise level on FB is decreasing – rapidly. Part of this is due to FB’s need to monetize the service. Part is due to more and more friends posting crap. User-tools to increase the signal must decrease return$ for FB as well as mute friends. The next revolution will be personal AI agents that can handle the info overload. Think of a service that can centralize the stuff that matters on a single profile page. You AI agent can act on your behalf, logging into websites (like FB) and finding the stuff that matters.
Thank you for not mentioning Apple. I’ve always had a loathing for them and to imagine that you don’t see them as a viable player in the future gives me hope. 🙂
Mobile users don’t search? A ridiculous statement that is completely disproven by looking at any report or data. Given that mobile platforms will likely outnumber desktop and laptop platforms by a wide margin, it is an even more ridiculous comment to say that Google won’t have a play there.
I think a better timeline comaprison would be The rise and fall of AOL > Yahoo! > Hotmail > MySpace
Facebook will gradually fade away just like its “social networking” predecessors.
My theory is that the current social network fades away soon after three things occur:
1. Corporations exploit it (from advertisements to spam)
2. Malware exploits it.
3. Grandma and grandpa start using it.
Very intriguing post, Bob. As you said, Facebook has won the early race in social media. But, as we all know, the only guarantee is change … and that is often spurred by innovation (whether through technology or other disciplines). This doesn’t mandate that FB will lose, since they can change internally and re-focus when the time comes.
History does repeat itself and leaders fall in time … and sometime re-emerge stronger (look at IBM and Apple). However, with so many resources available today, entrepreneurial people (especially bright young kids) will transform what we have today and create things we didn’t even imagine yet.
The mobile industry was once symbolized by the briefcase phone carried by Oscar Goldman in “The Six Million Dollar Man” TV series. Today, there’s a device in nearly every hand or pocket … and it’s the connection point of choice and capability for emerging nations.
Alan Kay said: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” That will never stop. Thank goodness.
Best,
@IanGertler
I’ve been on fb since early 2008. I don’t recall when it happened exactly, but perhaps some time around late 2009 I noticed a drop in the number of my friends posting even though I was gradually adding more friends. People were briefly enamoured with fb, but then most didn’t bother to keep using it regularly. I now have roughly 120 fb friends (I’m very selective) and would guess that only 1/4 post regularly. At least 1/4 never log on. What I’m trying to say is that IMHO fb peaked long ago, regardless of how many new users they’re adding.
I and many in my circle of friends hate fb (the company) and hope Google+ will replace fb. It’s too early to tell if enough people will join Google+ and start posting there instead of fb (or crossposting during the transition.)
Why do I use fb if I hate the company? For me it’s a very useful means of communication as unique and useful as e-mail, phone, SMS, snail-mail, etc. Fb has allowed me to be much more in touch with many of my friends than I could have without fb, so I’m convinced social networking (the tool) has a lot going for it.
With the hippie hair and carrying a guitar, of course he’s anti-Microsoft. So predictable it’s stupid.
[…] via I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology. […]
He who controls the data controls the world.
It used to be gold, oil, water, food, etc. but now it’s information. Now, you have to ask yourself, who controls the data? Facebook encompasses a deep but narrow slice of that data – the social graph, the connections between people. And as humans are, obviously, intensely social beasts, this human network map may be the most important slice of information ever constructed. Can Facebook leverage it in this fashion? Not that I’ve seen so far.
Google is the king of data in the grand sense. Buried within their data centers is undoubtedly the most extensive connection map dreamed of to date. But, it’s buried. Buried deep within the noise. If G+ can somehow layer an intelligent and intuitive interpretation facade upon this mountain of data, such that it exposes the inherit knowledge stored within, well then, the big G will truly reign supreme.
I’m betting on the team of Google + IBM to build the world’s first publicly available knowledge engine: anyone Circle IBM’s “Watson” yet?
That’s kind of funny, because of my smart phone I’m constantly google stuff. It drive my fiancee crazy when I do it at a nicer restaurant.
Me too – the SECOND that anyone says, “Oh, now, who was that?” or “Where is that?” or ANYTHING like that – Boom! Smart Phone, Google, Answer.
I third (thrice?) that.
I really like the google voice search feature of my android phone. It just needs to go to the next step which is reading the responses back to me in some logical fashion and then you have the next generation of voice interactive devices that are portable to boot!
Yes, but you are probably not seeing (and definitely not clicking on) ads, which is how Google makes money. And even if you are using your smart phone to check Facebook, you are not seeing the ads. That has to change if Facebook is to stay even viable. Smart phones are not just the new computing platform. They are radically changing the way we engage online. And the old business models will get disrupted.
Smart phones don’t get my bid’ness until they (somehow) get decent keyboards. I type much more quickly than you can talk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZdSNSphnZU
i can talk to my smartphone where ever i am faster then you can go home and type.
I’m consantly searching things from my smartphone. Hear a term I’m not familiar with? Google. Need quick familiarization with a topic wkikipedia. I search more from my phone than I ever did from my PC. It’s right there & I don’t have to remember to look it up when I get home.
So many want Facebook to be over just as so many want Microsoft to be over.
I don’t think that everyone wants Microsoft to be over. Instead I believe the majority really want Microsoft to stand today for what it stood for when it was being operated out of a garage.
Personally, I love Microsoft. That being said, I’m ready for Microsoft to become important to me again.
@Jason Howard
So what did it stand for when it was a garage business?
As a general comment. Personally, I think you may have a point here. The question is, who is really benefiting from the whole social tutu thing –
the individual
the average-joe company
the social media/ marketing company
the corporation
what is the social web being used for to apply the attribute “social” – social games, personalised marketing, etc.
The only thing, I would care about, If Facebook would go away, would be how to export and import (in some other place) all my important contacts.
Microsoft never operated from a garage. A bank building, but never a garage.
MS: a shopping mall. in particular, back end of a dead sandwich shop in a shopping mall, where some guy with boxes of small parts thought he owned the world and everybody had to take his direction.
that was MITS of the Altair, and everybody else didn’t take long to say, “Screw you, buddy, thanks for the bus diagram, now we’re going to use it for our stuff that is a third the cost and is actually tested before we start selling it. And stay out of our face, The Community owns this now.”
Microsoft learned a lot in that back shop. Some of which is going to kill them.
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The notion that smart phone users hardly search at all is really flawed.
You should have a look at Diaspora; http://eicker.at/DiasporaSummary
“Again, I’m not saying he’s wrong,”
Well Cringely, if you wont, I will say he’s equal parts wrong. FB is an entry technology in the socialization of interaction on the Internet. It set a relatively moderate standard for social networking on the Web when there was zero competition. The overnight adoption of G+ demonstrates there is A LOT of folks looking beyond FB and not only that but are numbers that are almost certainly sucking in active non-users of FB, such as myself.
Why did that happen? Because say what you will about the Google product the one thing it obviously is … is an evolution. It will also not stop there! FB has inertia but it also shows there are higher places to achieve in the social sphere and they are not going to be the default provider or mastermind.
FB has been put on notice and I applaud Googles fortitude in developing a product like this in the face of such a Goliath and they will have my support until the next iteration occurs. Touche G+ and good luck!
I don’t disagree.
But what I do find funny is: that being a DOW-30 company is a measure of success. Btw. nobody knows, if there is a DOW by 2025 either. So there is that.
You give FB til 2014 to peak? I say 2011.
FB peaked in May 2010. That month they added over 8 million users. In June 2010 they added only 250,00 and have been bleeding users since.
FB has never succeeded in penetrating any market to anything more than 50%. Good penetration, but it shows their limit. At 50% penetration, they start losing users. They have only been able to keep their numbers up by entering new, highly populated markets.
The unfortunate things for FaceBroke (a.k.a. FaceBook), is that as they entered more markets they also increased the number of people they have been offending and stomping on. The tipping point we are waiting for with FB is how many people they have to make angry over privacy before their service implodes.
[…] writes here in The Decline and Fall of Facebook My interest is in what follows Facebook, which I think must be its disintermediation by all of us […]
One of the things that Facebook doesn’t deal with, but Google+ is a lot closer to, is that many of us have multiple identities as written about by SysAdmin
http://sysadmin1138.net/mt/blog/2011/07/identity-social-legal-and-work.shtml
I certainly keep my different roles to different systems, that is why I have several email addresses just to keep said message traffic separated. For that same reason, I am on both Linked-in and Facebook, but with very different connections on each. One is professional, the other is personal, and very few are connected on both.
If I was FaceBook, I’d get that IPO ready stat or the Winklevoss Brothers will never make a dime!
The smart kids I know who embraced AOL, Friendster, Tribe and MySpace are ready to leave FaceBook in droves and the next venue is Google+ for now and a few years from now, most likely something else. People like to flock to their friends.
I know it’s hugely popular and I greatly respect how they created an empire out of nothing, but FaceBook is a mess. It’s really hard to use if you’re trying to use it to promote a band or a project. It’s better than MySpace, but they all stink. There is no way to easily duplicate an existing calendar and move it to FB through a technology like RSS. You really have to manually enter in each event and it’s not even easy to do. If you run an FB page for a venue, there’s no easy way for a band to add you in as an event and get the event added to the existing FB venue calendar. That means there’s no easy way to tie into people following the band or the venue. There’s no easy way to use a common log-in email to manage multiple pages and projects. You need multiple emails and user accounts. It’s a pain to program to FB because you have to learn an entirely different set of FBML rules that are poorly documented.
If people promoting events find it’s easier to share information on a different platform than FaceBook, the flock will move quickly to another site. Especially if that site has a nod to privacy tools or better virus controls. I should not be able to click on a movie and suddenly send viruses everywhere. You can do that in FB.
That is such a narrow-sighted comment. If people can find another place to promote better, they will leave? That may apply to Twitter or MySpace audience where it’s all about self-expression and self-promotion, but Facebook is more like a contact list.
Why would people leave for somewhere else where they can be “promoted to”?
I think I have said too much.
People left Friendster because you couldn’t really do anything with it.
People went to Tribe in a small way because it allowed them interaction.
It was replaced by MySpace which allowed better interaction. MySpace grew slowly, but it grew because people moved from Friendster and left messages on their wall saying they moved to MySpace. At MySpace you could post movies, you could have a calendar to promote things. It was better than the previous tools at promotion. You could leave comments. It was perfect for bands, celebrities and anyone trying to promote something. Plus other bands and celebrities were showing up because other bands were there.
FaceBook did all of that and did it better. The problem is that with the advent of Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, it becomes hard to promote yourself in three different arenas, plus the promotion of an outside Web site or more. FaceBook was able to reconfigure itself so that you could easily promote things on Twitter and Facebook. It’s event calendar was far better than the existing calendar on MySpace.
Facebook might have 700 million subscribers, but there not all equal. Certain subscribers like bands, celebrities or promoters might find better tools in another Web site. If those people start to migrate to a place which makes it easier to promote themselves, the fans will follow. If enough decide to move to a new platform, the move becomes a tidal wave. Especially when ego kicks in. If one band can have a 100 followers, someone will shoot for 1,000 or 10,000. The bands and celebrities become the promotional tool just through ego.
Since it’s easier than ever to alert your friends you moved to another service like Google+, it means the migration could happen even faster from Facebook to Google+ than it did from MySpace to Facebook.
Google is putting the brakes on businesses moving to Google+, to improve tools for users first, then switch the focus to businesses. I assume this means they are creating easy-to-use tools to help people program something once they move. With tools such as google.com, gmail.com, adsense and adwords as properties they own, they could easily promote themselves to millions and work a way so that celebrities and bands might make money on having a presence on Google+. If the promotional tools like Google Calendars are easy-to-use, it makes it even easier for people to use Google+ as a promotional platform since many users are already using Google Calendars to promote themselves. You can use it to do things like update your Facebook upcoming events.
That’s my expanded narrow point of view.
As both a band promoter, and concert producer, I think we go where the fans are, and not the other way around. There are already a number “better” event databases, but they don’t have the audience that Facebook does. So unless a new platform is head and shoulders better than Facebook, they’re pretty safe. All that said, I don’t think Facebook is primarily about promoting entertainment. It’s about little bite sized social interactions with friends and aquaintences. And selling ads, I suppose.
I’m not sure what value Facebook provides, and of that value, how important is it.
To be honest, I’m not comfortable with it, and I am surprised so many people are. The first thing people do when they gain resources is purchase privacy. House, Land, Car. etc… Facebook, as I understand it, is the opposite. I guard my privacy fairly closely. So, I don’t see its value.
The Mainframe, the mini, the pc, the laptop, the cellphone… I see the value in each one. (By the way, DEC was going well past 1980 for business systems). They each project immense power into new areas.
The mainframe provided value to large organizations, the mini to medium sized, the pc to small and individuals, the laptop and cellphone gave mobility to individuals. Microsoft was able to provide some value, google does too, but I don’t get the value Facebook gives me, unless I value a lack of privacy. I just don’t get it. I’m also 50, so maybe that’s part of it. I prefer to communicate by email, text or phone. So, unless Facebook provides value, and I mean economic value to users, I don’t see its driving force.
These days we need people to gain more spending power. Maybe Facebook could provide that by creating bulletin boards of where to purchase a gallon of milk in your neighborhood for the least amount of money and so on. Maybe that’s happening… I just don’t see it
I quite agree that Facebook is going to continue that trend – 5-7 years reign tops; though I don’t think Google’s reign (which you quote as 10 years) is quite over; rather, it has continuously morphed as they move along – originally in Search, then anything surrounding search, then Mobile, and now Social.
That said, I don’t think Social Media is really going to go away – just change into what it really ought to be – which Facebook it is not; and Google+ is not either.
I’m quite an avid Sci-Fi reader as I’m sure many who read this are. Almost all recent Sci-Fi includes some kind of social technology – similar to Facebook/email/blog/etc all combined into one, most all are completely decentralized, with some various central authenticating services.
So, think of the future of Social Media as each person carrying their own Facebook/MySpace/Blogger/Email Server/WebServer/VOIP/etc around perhaps linked to some computer kept at home, with full network access around the globe (Celluar/Wifi/etc), and something like Digital Signature Keys (e.g. Verisign or (more likely) a replacement thereof) providing an authenticating source for people to verify each other with.
So you’re phone call will becomes: Access Credentials for Friend X; Initiate Voip session; send personal credentials; wait for Friend X to receive, validate, and confirm receipt of the call (or deny it); start the Voip call (if approved).
Or from Friend X’s perspective – receive a request for a Voip call from some person Y with a given set of credentials; verify that they are valid; accept the call.
In both cases a 3-way secure communications link can be setup between the two individuals. AT&T/Verizon/Vonage/Skype/MovieStar/etc are only useful in as far as they provide the communications medium for everything to communicate and none of them will control anything other than infrastructure.
That is ultimately where this is all going. Of course, the established players (AT&T, Verizon, Microsoft, Comcast, etc.) will all fight it tooth and nail as they lose control over what they’ve been able to dominate, but lose control they will. Other players may stick around – and Apple and Google certainly fit the bill for the kind of companies that will transition right through it and last. (AT&T, Verizon, etc. will likely too; though companies that depend on dominance like Microsoft will certainly not survive.)
How long with this all take? Well, a lot will probably shape up in the next 10 years as far as things moving closer and closer to the above. What will be interesting is if cellular/wifi technology gets replaced by something more pervasive that can’t be so easily controlled – things that turn the radio-bands into pure whitespace where everyone can communicate with proper built-in negotiations for use of the bands.
I’m going to miss some services, here, but the premise is social networking (what was once called community) will *never* go away. There was The WELL (Founded in 1985, and still exists as a paid membership), AOL, Friendster, MySpace, etc. This has nothing to do with a cycle. This has everything to do with a human need to interact. Some comments here speak to the discomfort of using FaceBook; clearly millions don’t have that same issue. Additionally, many more people would use something like this regularly if there were more – and *very* clear – options to manage one’s ability to make things public. Oh, and to be unequivocally assured that the data you submit is yours in its entirety – period. FB has already lost their way and have pissed and scared off millions. This is a business problem, not some kind of broad tech cycle. I also think the examples used do not take into account *why* we use certain things. Some of those cycles are based on hardware manufacturing issues and related technologies. A tablet is a computer, just a different form. That’s the only relevant perspective.
while you are right from a human need perspective (need to communicate, etc.). the question is –
are social networks (or what is labeled as such) really delivering on that basic need?
(virtual) social networks are used frequently to provide a projection of oneself, i.e. a (positively) distorted image. many people just “like to hear/see/watch/listen to themselves” – derive status not from money/goods but from virtual entities such as the size of their social network.
Now, I suppose the connotation of “decline of facebook” is not from providing on that human need but being able to attract (investor, new user) attention, i.e. essentially deliver a product. I suppose that, whenever something is regarded as simple commodity, its perceived value declines and hence its actual price decreases as well.
I wonder if most people really do find that online form of interaction very fulfilling? To me, it seems like people, especially young people today, might really just be living more sheltered lives because of the online social media–sheltered inside a room, behind a computer screen–and especially sheltered compared to kids in the past, who lived in times when there was more of a real sense of community. The question then is, do these social media sites, and the internet in general, really serve the purpose of providing fulfilling social interaction, or do they merely provide a substitute which often actually subtracts from a real sense of in-person community?
God I hate blog comments. People get irate at the first paragraph of the entire article and fly down to the comment box and peck away at their keyboards, spittle flying from their lips and blam hit Submit Comment and leave without reading much more.
So. I don’t think you are wrong. 2014, 2015, around then. What’s more interesting is what you started to say before veering back to Facebook. “What I see instead is more properly the fading of the entire social media category, the victim of an ever-shortening event horizon.” Fading of the category but not the functionality or activity. There but no longer named. Google and +1 is trying to do that but a bit too blatantly for it to work.
Blam! Submit Comment.
So I understand that Bob predicts the demise of the category but the reason “victim of an ever-shortening event horizon”, doesn’t add anything. It just says to me that the category will die because it will become a victim of death.
M$ gone? Don’t bet on it but you can be sure HTML5 is not some sort of amazing technology or the future is not that bright.
The next step is AI on a personal scale and IBM looks like they will do just fine. I love how many people get lucky and think they got it dialed in.
Quote: M$ gone? Don’t bet on it but you can be sure HTML5 is not some sort of amazing technology or the future is not that bright.
Actually, it’s more a matter of escalation curves now than anything else – escalation of how fast people move from Laptops to mobile (smart phones and tablets). Part of that escalation curve will be determined by how fast manufacturers pick up on doing things like the Motorola Atrix – though a Bluetooth/near-field communications (not necessarily Near-Field the company) would work better but its a good start in the right direction.
The problem for Microsoft is two-fold: (i) they have never been able to do mobile well; namely b/c they never wanted to sacrifice their desktop business so they always sabotaged mobile in some manner or made it too much like the desktop. (ii) the company is extremely dependent on the sales of Windows (desktop+server) and Office – so much so that if either one loses significant sales that the company will be on a short path to bankruptcy since almost nothing else makes much money if it turns a profit at all (most portions of the company don’t even turn a profit).
So, if Microsoft can’t fix the first portion there and actually make some headway in the mobile markets – which WP7 is not – then it’s merely a matter of time before the company goes under.
Of course, they are now trying to extort the markets via software patents, especially Android, which may buy them some time – but only until they manage to get themselves investigated under RICO.
It is interesting to note IBM, DEC, Microsoft, and Apple all make (made) money by selling PRODUCTS and SERVICES. What they sold had real value and benefit to their customers.
Facebook and Google make most of their money through the sale of advertising. They will make money as long as people visit their websites. Facebook provides its users entertainment. Google provides its users navigational help with the Internet. Google offers people something they NEED, Facebook does not. When there is something better to entertain us, Facebook will be in trouble.
It is always helpful to consider how the youth feel about things. Kids don’t like email because of the SPAM. They really liked instant messaging but AIM made it too easy for chats and chat rooms to be intruded. When something better came along, the kids dumped AIM. That better thing was Facebook.
Lets be honest Facebook has had a number privacy issues. They are doing things to increase their value to advertisers that people may not like. If they go too far the kids may not like it. When something better emerges, Facebook could be in trouble.
If Facebook wants to survive for the long term they need to find ways to give its users more valued services and do a lot more to protect people’s privacy.
Facebook is one of the places some employers check before hiring someone. It is not uncommon for college seniors to be advised to delete their Facebook accounts before applying for jobs. Facebook’s future will not be easy if their users have problems like this. Think about it.
[…] Shared I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology. […]
I have a facebook page but I find that I can’t really use it. Because I HATE the ads! They are ugly. Facebook does not have a clean look. It runs counter to what the consumer is coming to expect.
Let’s face it, Zuckerberg was a decent engineer, he had good ideas, executed proficiently, and is now well on the way to monitizing. He’s only just begun the process of building the infrastructure required to continue to build software and with access to 750m and lots of capital, you’d be nuts to think that Facebook is peaking now. Facebook is big enough and has enough momentum and adult supervision to last a long time.
[…] Facebook fall in 2014? Robert X. Cringely believes it will. And the longtime technology industry watcher provides a surprisingly rational explanation […]
Thanks for sharing this link and your thoughts. I appreciate the caffeine buzzed ideas that Roger puts forward. One thing I enjoy observing is that the pace of change in everything that relies on technology seems to be speeding up. It is an amazing time to be alive and watching the shifts and changes. What other industry completely redefines itself every decade?
This is really great commentary and I love the provocation.
Looking forward to coming back to this post in the future…
…and I don’t think we will have to wait until 2014
FB is reluctant to go IPO because they know the declared 750 million is less than 20% active (maybe less).
FB is following an AOL timeline
(Remember when everything had to have an “AOL Keyword”).
I bet next year, on this same date, we will read this and be amazed by how prescient your post is….
Bravo.
I agree completely.
What Facebook, twitter, & myspace did was open the world to easy blogging. I work with an outfit that is doing the same only for highly specialized, tight target markets – making blog sites that they can CONTROL – that’s the key.
You can’t control what gets posted on facebook, etc. That’s the achillies heel in my opinion.
“The mobile transition effectively eliminates Google’s tollbooth on the Internet because smart phone users hardly search at all.” > Sorry Lumberg, your statement about the non-existence of mobile search is painfully false. Here’s your proof in three different flavors: technology industry (http://bit.ly/od2IBN), agency industry (http://bit.ly/rgGyZ5), research industry (http://bit.ly/qZqAGF, see page 23 of the white paper).
Again, long time reader. I think this is such an interesting topic. Where does Twitter fit in? I joined Twitter in May, and have only been on Facebook 3 times since. I prefer the data flow and the amount of “real” information.
Twitter is certainly a community, certainly provides a way to connect and while I wouldn’t ever Friend SI’s Peter King, I certainly enjoy following him and interacting with him and his followers.
So, does Twitter replace FB, or is it just different?
Again, long time reader. I think this is such an interesting topic. Where does Twitter fit in? I joined Twitter in May, and have only been on Facebook 3 times since. I prefer the data flow and the amount of “real” information.
Twitter is certainly a community, certainly provides a way to connect and while I wouldn’t never Friend SI’s Peter King, I certainly enjoy following him and interacting with him and his followers.
So, does Twitter replace FB, or is it just different?
SSN is next. (N is for network).
“You’ll notice I didn’t mention Apple. Black swan.”
Claim chowder noted.
This may sound strange to most, but I think Facebook is essentially a platform more than anything else. There’s great value in that, but there is just as much value over time in what gets built upon it. My analogy is to think of Facebook as the equivalent of a cable connection circa 1983. It was cool that you got more channels, but most of them got really boring fast. It took the ideas of 24 hour news, sports and music (CNN, ESPN and MTV) to make cable broadly beneficial and usher in a completely new way of utilizing your television. This time it will be games, politics and … (Zynga, Votocracy and …).
Pedantic correction
“an image of Microsoft as the Roman Colosseum being mined for marble”
The Colosseum (better known to the Romans as the Amphitheatrum Caesaris or Flavian amphitheatre) didn’t have that much marble. It was built of travertine stone. The only marble was in facings and didn’t need mining at all.
This might make your analogy inadvertently more correct …
PS If we are comparing Microsoft to the Colosseum, might I mention that one entered and left by passages called ‘vomitoria’?
[…] X. Cringely touched on the implications of this in an article about Facebook where he says this: The trend is clear from “the computer is the computer” through “the network is the […]
Cringley – speaking of Google Plus, is this you:
https://plus.google.com/116536660610832140604/posts
Or some imposter?
Bob, I can’t agree more. I find my facebook addiction increasingly boring. I am there everyday, but for less and less time. The facebook equation is no longer about users, but eyeball hours. I haven’t seen stats, but I suspect I am not alone in my reduced interaction.
I too wonder what will engage me next, and seriously doubt it will be from any company that is currently a household name. I do know what I what like to see next, and that is a real “social search,” although there is very little “Search” involved. The best sources are my friends (or specifically groups of friends). I want to know what sites / apps they are using, in an aggregate top ranked sort way (with sufficient rules to maintain anonymity).
Security / anonymity concerns aside, I basically do not want to waste a second searching. I want to see what is trending with my college friends (as a proxy for people of a similar age group and education). Likewise, I want to see what is important to my work colleagues (I trust their evaluation of what is important more than random bloggers or news outlets). I want to see what my local friends are interested in (is there a deal or event in the area?). All this to say, the best search filter is the people I know, not an overall internet search.
This is kind of where Apple was headed with Ping, but with a wider net, well better integrated, functioning, etc. Note to Apple if you are listening – I want this in the AppStore too. I hate all search, google, bing, sharepoint, and appstore to name a few.
Speaking for myslef, Google already is social search. Why should I limit myslef to advice from my “friends” when I can search for people all over the world who have had the same problem I’m having and who may have found a solution. My Facebook and so-called real life friends are useless when it comes to most of the technical problems I need help with. That’s probably because they either avoid technology or don’t have the interest or inclination or time to work on the same issues I do.
[…] https://www.cringely.com/2011/07/the-decline-and-fall-of-facebook/ My interest is in what follows Facebook, which I think must be its disintermediation by all of us reclaiming our personal data, possibly through our embracing the very HTML5 that Roger loves so much. The trend is clear from âthe computer is the computerâ through âthe network is the computerâ to whatâs next, which I believe is âthe data is the computer.â […]
[…] I, Cringely » The Decline and Fall of Facebook […]
Neil’s First Law of the Internet:
It’s earlier than you think. (and still accelerating)
People are still inventing how they want to use this webnet thing. So far, the biggest successes have been constrained enough to be easy, while unforced enough to be adaptable. Google+ has clearly looked at facebook and twitter and c., and is trying to be capable of all of it and more.
IBM isn’t gone. It’s still pretty big, even. But it hasn’t ruled for a long time now, and cannot impose FUD. M$ isn’t gone either. It’s still pretty big, even, but its two cash cows own saturated markets, and Redmond can’t make headlines with every murmur, and never will again.
Meanwhile, MySpace lost 94% of its market cap in the last six years. It’s not a question of can it happen to facebook, but when, and what innovation will blindside them and make them irrelevant to further progress.
[…] Robert Cringely […]
If you want to know what follows, just read “Stand on Zanzibar” by John Brunner where television and a proto-internet meld together to give viewers an interactive experience of “the happening world” events. That interactive TV/social nexus that Microsoft’s Kinect seems to be striving toward which will thrust a person into the real/virtual game/news/war/whatever experience that they desire.
[…] may be the most hated social media company and some people such as Robert Cringely may believe its dominance may soon be over but Facebook ain’t going […]
I Just love the prediction..let’s wait and watch what will happen in future for FB..
[…] predicción matemática de Cringely recurre a una matemática simple, pero al parecer lógica respecto a los tiempos de hegemonía de […]
[…] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology Facebook is a huge success. You can’t argue with 750 million users and growing. And I don’t see Google+ making a big dent in that. What I see instead is more properly the fading of the entire social media category, the victim of an ever-shortening event horizon. (tags: facebook socialmedia google) […]
[…] tradotto da The Decline and Fall of Facebook, di Robert X. Cringely. {lang: 'it'}Post correlati:Perché ho lasciato Google e ora lavoro in […]
I don’t know. The success of tech in it’s current incarnation depends on if they can convince everyone on the planet that the internet (Facebook) is not only their brain but their parent, instructor, guardian, and of course only home. Doubt thats going to happen with the exception of a few tribes here and there that are still convinced tech is the answer to everything. And of course those for whom the web is their only chance at anything resembling a social life or have way to much time on their hands. Another thing is kids growing up around their geeky parents will rebel since they don’t want to become their parents to soon in life. Should be interesting. Tech is still one of the most over hyped industrys around which is another thing to consider and put into the equation also. Actually it’s boring as hell if your really honest with yourself and look at it with clear eyes. It’s still 1994 in minds of the current crop of geeks running the show out there in the Valley.
[…] Roger McNamee is a smart guy and a very successful investor as a co-founder of Elevation Partners. He made a breakfast presentation last month at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles that is well worth watching. I could probably get half a dozen columns out of this one speech, but the part I want to concentrate on here is McNamee’s claim that when it comes to social media, Facebook (in which he was an early investor) has already won. I’m not here to say Roger is wrong, just that I am not exactly sure what Facebook is winning. Read more […]
Facebook are planning to be the platform that handles online profiles and communication. Basically they will control tomorrow’s equivalent of email and more.
So anyone wanting to create an application that is in anyway social or multi-user etc will probably have to support Facebook and integrate their APIs.
With that level of power I think they’ll be able to monitize it without much trouble and they could literally have their fingers in every pie. Look at the revenue they get from Zynga alone. Zynga games might be currently on the Facebook platform but there’s no reason they have to be but to get access to Facebook’s users they will still have to go through Facebook’s APIs, here’s where they could charge the business a “tax”.
That’s what they’ve won, access to practically every person on the planet and almost no way for them to be caught.
Oh but I disagree with what the guy said, I think in a few years it will be Android that will be floundering not Microsoft which I think is really hitting it’s stride now.
Microsoft vs Apple : Round 2
Bob:
I have followed your column for years, and your take on things has always stimulated my thinking, and illuminated and enhanced my understanding of how technology has impacted us.
Here is my reaction to your observation that the periods of change are becoming shorter.
Is this not Moore’s Law?
As for the media, (the internet, and the devices we use to connect)
it may help to think of Marshall McLuhan’s “Laws”. (McLuhan’s tetrad)
1.What does the medium enhance?
2.What does the medium make obsolete?
3.What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4.What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?
If we restate the first as “What need does the medium meet for the person using it?”, it would appear that some people use their ‘obsolescent’ landlines to make telephone calls to interconnect with other people who they feel a need for connection to, and feel a sense of comfort in calling. Conversely, the same people on your speedial list on your cellphone are not the same people on the speedial list of the person you are calling.
As we evolve as humans, small groups of brainy nerds get together, and create
“things” that we think of as ‘magical’ because they fill a need to get one need met quickly, so that we may use our time pursuing other needs.
Caveman: Huh! Lighter good! Make fire quick! No waste time with sticks!
Cellphone Man: Show me that process again, please, where you take stuff, mix it in a pile, and start a fire. I sure could have used that the other day, when I was hiking in that big wilderness area. Rubbing two sticks together, was it?”
What’s the next techno trend?
I have no idea either, but the clues are there.
[…] maybe not tomorrow but inevitably at some stage. There is a really good, if somewhat technical, article here by one of my heroes, Bob […]
[…] […]
[…] Google keyboard shortcuts. But Roger McNamee says, “Google is done.” Bob Cringely predicts “the fading of the entire social media […]
[…] Google keyboard shortcuts. But Roger McNamee says, “Google is done.” Bob Cringely predicts “the fading of the entire social media […]
[…] suspect that Facebook is soon to fall but Facebook still has plenty of time to make changes and adjust to their […]
I’m stuck on the 2010-2020 smart phones and tablets point…
What on earth could be next?!
If we knew, we’d already be trying to make it.
Implants!
[…] Google keyboard shortcuts. But Roger McNamee says, “Google is done.” Bob Cringely predicts “the fading of the entire social media […]
Am I the only one who’s been looking forward to this since the beginning of facebook? With all the other sites (namely Google+), who needs facebook? The games which used to be free aren’t, the profiles that used to be real aren’t, and the false sense of security they used to have simply isn’t there.
Roger is a very righteous dude,
“Walmart, Amazon deliver iPad apps bypassing Apple”,
https://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/11/BU8O1KLPPD.DTL&type=printable
nikeheels-shop.com
It’s my opinion that tech companies fail because they become a “diseconomy of scale.”
Imagine enlarging a chicken to the size of a T-Rex; soon the chicken collapses under it’s own weight.
Facebook has 750-million users – how can they be fluid within that “tower of babel?”
essentially their poor argument can be used just as well to say that any tech company will die. you could use that by extention and correlation logic to say apple will die or google will die and that twitter will die ect ect. those dying companies were all purely machine companies and fb is not. tech is an enourmous space and analogies between why they died and why fb will die needed far better analysis for this article to be vaguely taken seriously. the article was i guess written for the headline.
I like the idea that improved firmware can help because I’ve always felt the supplied software in my Router is pretty poor.
I’m guessing movies might have less of a need
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So, explain to me why Google’s reign of dominance ended in 2010? That would be convenient to establish the pattern you’re trying to achieve in diminishing time spans, but it’s far from a given.
BobX isn’tsaying it ended, he is saying it peaked.
IBM didn’t die off, it plateaued.
Microsoft didn’t die off, it saturated the market, and is now slowly shrinking in importance, even while total sales still slowly increase.
Google didn’t pop like a bubble, they just stopped doubling in income and reach every time you turned around.
Facebook will be facing the same kind of thing. But, Facebook is more of a social thing, or even a fad. They can disappear much more easily that IBM or DEC (which did die, or rather was absorbed by Compaq then HP and now may come back from the dead.)
I think that Bob’s point here is that the fantastic growth days may be behind them, and if they aren’t careful, they could miss the opportunity to thrive, or even survive.
Are you sure it’s a facebook era right now ?
Cause $$ wise they make shit compared to what Apple makes in a year.
You’ should rather call it an Apple era, dont you think ?
With the death of Jobs, Apple will sink in relevance since they cant buy or wont buy anything that they can ‘innovate’ and claim as their own and make cool. Without him they are not cool. Thus the ass kicking they took at Christmas. Regardless of fan boy sentiments, i see more PC than Mac at my Starbucks and in schools. And i am now seeing android powered phones far more than iPhones.
Apple is a patent company and law firm with some developers and typesetters thrown in. Their relevance will fall off the map by the end of the year and Googles’ relevance will climb. Facebook is already making the moves to follow the crowd to mobile. If they can stick the landing this year they will be fine. Google+, i am not sure where that is going to go. I am monetizing Facebook and if i can do it, anyone can. Facebook is here to stay for quite sometime. It wont die, neither will Apple. Their relevance is a whole different question beyond my limited knowledge.
I wonder what will be the future of these Social Networking Sites. In every 3 months new website is launched with new features.
Google is still struggling to make its place among these Social Networking Sites.
Perhaps the reason for the decreasing years of dominance is related to the increasing impact of software innovation over hardware advances for most consumer products.
[…] http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/the-decline-and-fall-of-facebook […]
Alex Good Job I agree as I know a company that had use a deal through walmart and ibm to pickup walmart laptops dirt cheap if they traded in there desktop computer So I don’t think IBm toppe doff I think they are staying off the Radar
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[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology[…]…
I believe Facebooks stranglehold is fading all the time.
I think Twitter will overtake them all. Personally I do not think Google+ will have any impact at all apart from a social bookmarking tool.
The Mobil Stampede represents an expansion of the market,– not a shift. Mobil endpoints though are mainly content consumers; not contributors. As the Old Sages says: a rising tide lifts all boats and so it will be with this. Content contributors will continue to prefer the heavy duty equipment that facilitates their work: an office, phone, snack room, co-workers, and a couple quad-core dual monitor work horses hooked up on fiber cable.
There is change in the wind and that is for privacy and security. Customers are already cognizant of the hazards of excessive privilege and the resulting abuse of customer data and equipment. Companies which do not move decisively to make this right will find themselves on the wrong side of the law in addition to the wrong side of customer goodwill.
[…] The Decline And Fall Of Facebook […]
I don’t think for a second that privacy and security will drive any appreciable amount of people in any meaningful way, especially with something entrenched like Facebook. The only reason people fake a tiny amount of concern over it is because of FB’s policy to ask permission first.
I agree with the premise of this article, though. As technology improves, we won’t need a central hub to do any kind of “social networking”. We’ll be able to host pictures and stream images directly from our own equipment, without any need for special expertise or an intermediary.
Companies like Facebook that get in the way by insisting that you use their sites to communicate, post pictures, etc… which seem so easy and seamless now will begin to seem like an artificial hurdle to jump over without a meaningful advantage.
Platforms that constrain what you can do by locking you in to a vendor’s preferred method of doing things will slowly wither and die as the slow but (relatively) steady march of progress brings legally unencumbered alternatives to bear.
The reason Flash died out was only partially technical. If Flash had been, from the beginning, an open standard, it would be far better integrated with everything else as more people, wishing to take advantage of it’s strengths, improved on it. Instead, we got a highly self-contained ball of slow-loading and buggy crap that continually caused crashes and never integrated all that well with the rest of the system and imposed largely unnecessary constraints.
It’ll be slow and painful, but Flash will die. Facebook is as Flash was five years ago. Asking people to subscribe to its way of doing things. And it has and will work because it was accessible and quick and easy, and everyone else was doing it. But eventually there’s going to be a feature, a paradigm, a way of doing things that it won’t be able to support. Then another, and another. And people won’t be doing absolutely everything on it. Companies will start having to maintain a presence both on and off of it, and people will realize that those things you could do on Facebook, you could do elsewhere. And the foundations of sand will begin to crumble away.
Sorry this has been a very long and very stream-of-consciousness rant. I wasn’t expecting to have this much to say on this topic before but whatever. It’s done. Submit!
I will say, though, that one good thing FB has done (is doing) for the web is bring metadata to it. OG tags are really nice; they let you specify things about a site for machines to interpret. It may be very good for future searches (e.g. you could subscribe to a feed of what local restaurants are offering without any need for an intermediary aggregator. The result you get will be based it’s own identifying characteristics and on others’ preferences, and those businesses will not have had to pay any marketing agency or publishing company for the privilege of showing up in such a definitive guide.)
I am sorry, I dont quiet follow the logic here.
How did you get to facebook will fail and post fail analysis from Facebook is hugely successful with 750mill+ users ?
The era analogy makes sense in a ex post facto analysis. I am sure you can put Apple in there somewhere along with Lotus, Adobe and others.
Does this feel wrong to you? Listen to your gut and I think you’ll agree with me even if we don’t exactly know why.
>> I usually listen to my head. Gut usually gives me wrong answers all the time.
Is this the core of your argument ?
Or am I missing something here ?
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[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology[…]…
Fantastic post. Great perspective. I find your data interesting and spot on, in fact, my blogs reflect the same attitude. I’m looking forward to reading more posts!
Thanks,
Joseph
tend to be more intuitive than men….
unfortunately, most women don’t use this power for betterment of their relationships.most women tend to direct their intuitions in wrong directions like fueling suspicions. this only creates a roadblock in the healthy development of their relationship…
Agree the basic theme.
There could be several reasons for fading away of this pure play social media ( that is social media for the sigular purpose of being social). When web 1.0 happened (getting information access over the net ), Yahoo was the pioneer and goto destination for all the users expereincing the net. But once the platform got standardized, users started going to more purposeful sites (Amazon, Ebay …) than going to Yahoo just for getting some news.. etc.
I think the same thing is going to happen to facebook. You can already feel the tiredness of being on it for all the time even though it is addictive — just as internet itself was in early 90s. It is matter of time – perhaps 3-5 years – before the novalty of social connection online fades and the users will start moving the sites that serve more purpose using the same user inter connectivity.
My gut instinct said Facebook was wrong from day one and I never signed up. I prefer my social life to take place “for real” as it were. I don’t have 212 friends and I don’t want 212 friends, thankyouverymuch.
I skipped Facebook, but signed up for Twitter, which I believe has the potential to be a tremendously more powerful medium, with purpose, as you put it so well. The usefulness of Twitter during the Eygptian crises last year convinced me that “social” networking of the Twitter variety was a good thing.
facebook can embody and implement the semantic web for real. every device, every car, every tv, can stand as a facebook endpoint on the open graph. zuck implies as much, and as such, this is just the very beginning.
You kind of seem to imply that Facebook will decline and fall like the other previously dominant companies. The thing is out of you 4 previously dominant companies 3 are still around are among or nearly among the top 5 biggest technology companies there are.
Vivekananda…
[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology[…]…
This article presents very fascinating insights on technology trends along with resulting human behavior and preferences and finally an impact of all this on service providers. I feel the big thing already happening is ubiquity of data availability and access. We are all aware of cloud and its impact, though its being offered largely to enterprise it has started for public at large through services such as iCloud. Like someone has mentioned earlier in their posting it should not matter how and what one posts as long as one is not tied into a specific medium such as FB. I am wondering how cool would it be to have your own data on cloud and be able to do postings across social sites as and when you like and be able to view in your preferred manner. I am not that great a fan of FB look and feel which is too cluttered for me.
–Deccan Rock
You miss one critical point. Social media is the first of the above decade long trends built on a foundation that will not change – human narcissism. Whether FB remains #1 is debatable, but as each generation becomes increasingly “me centric”, social media will become more important, not less.
…”but as each generation becomes increasingly “me centric”….
I think generational attitudes are actually cyclic rather than trends that we could extrapolate in a straight line. There is some research that lead to the hypothesis that there are four distinct types of generations (like seasons in a year) that follow a 80-100 years cycle, with all people born within the same 20-25 year period belonging to the same “generation”.
This means there is one “me-me-me” generation every century (those born between 62 and 82) and of course there is a corresponding antagonist generation coming afterwards that will strengthen civic life at the expense of individualism. This means that social media will evolve away from the indiscriminate online profile hosting towards fulfilling a more specific communication purpose and audience e.g. Twitter
You can read about the underlying research in the book “The 4th Turning”
Deleteded my FB and do not miss it at all. Good riddance! They should have named it Frackbook instead
Frakbook
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[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive » The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology[…]…
I know that interest on student loans can be claimed. But what about personal bank loans, bank loans for cars and the like? I get documents stating the interest paid that say it can be used for income tax purposes. My guess for the car loan at least, that if I owned a business and the car was a company car, in that case I could claim it..
[…] his blog, Rober X. Cringely speculates that, “My interest is in what follows Facebook, which I think must […]
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[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive The Decline and Fall of Facebook – I, Cringely – Cringely on technology[…]…
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[…]I, Cringely » Blog Archive The Decline and Fall of Facebook – Cringely on technology[…]…
no matter what justin bieber writes on…
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In contrast with the processing time at embassies,
applying a visa on arrival is much faster. We cruise up
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evolvement went beyond the borders of Spain and the third office opened in Lisbon.
[…] — Facebook transforms itself (or tries to) with a outrageous acquisition. I wrote prolonged ago that we’d never see Facebook in a Dow 30 Industrials. The association is awash in users and […]
So when he announced he was cutting the lot off in aid of Cancer Research UK, friends, family and work colleagues flocked to his fundraising webpage to pledge their support.