mattmaroon.com - Latest Comments in Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Hasan Luongo — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:43:07 -0000

@Gubatron - wondering how valid you are finding my comments after every major social network now has a developer platform for 3rd party apps, and Apple opened its app store. There is no doubt that 3rd party networks are directly influenced by fb's platform.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Hasan Luongo — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:39:49 -0000

Matt, just wanted to pass along some of the latest stats on facebook growth.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2...

always good to check in a few months after the media fervor has died down and revisit the numbers.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Vincent Nicolai — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:43:41 -0000

hey, pretty interesting.

i added the post to http://www.tectrnd.com

cheers

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

mattmaroon — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:12:04 -0000

I mean, the first paragraph anyway.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

mattmaroon — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:12:04 -0000

Isn't that Loopt?

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Gubatron — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:40:56 -0000

The only way I see facebook being a real social networking breakthrough, is if it makes it to everyone's phones in such a way that you get to a bar, run a peer to peer search among all the phones available in the bar, and you find 3 or 4 candidate people to do what you want with them. Now that would revolutionize the way people meet, know each other or get laid.

Imagine not having to waste energy with a girl on a bar to which you'll never have the slightest chance of getting laid, while all that time there was a girl that you may have liked and she would've totally taken you back to her place.

You'd walk into bars, and there would be a lot more people hooking up with their best matches. That would be the next sex revolution, straight from your phone. Then you'd have another one of thos "aha" moments.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Gubatron — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:36:27 -0000

@Hasan
"as for overall utility fb's platform is the major innovation on the web in the last 5 years"

You gotta be kidding me...

Where do you leave stuff like semantic web, virtualization, distributed virtual machines, p2p video (joost), p2p telephony (skype), new advances on HCI, google earth, google maps.

that's real innovation, not a social networking site that lets others pollude it so that they can generate more pageviews.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Gubatron — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:29:51 -0000

Cannot agree with you more. Also, if you try to advertise inside facebook, you'd think they would really target your ads pretty well... the reality as it is now (Apr 2008), their ad system sucks, they only target your ad on the person's interest, and basic info, you'd think they'd do smarter things... the results, very low clickthrough rates, and given the hype, the bidding is way too expensive. Putting banners in google adwords is way more cost effective and has a much broader audience.

Facebook being called a "Social Operating system", is such a ridiculous hype phrase, to me, it's nothing but a social networking site that allowed people to create their own plugins to their CMS, how the hell can that be called an operating system.

Now, if you consider the initiatives of google, releasing distributed technology of their caliber, such as BigTable, Google File System, and maybe in the future MapReduce, now that's something that could live to the hype of a "Web Operating System", or a "WebService Operating System"

Facebook just has great backing behind it, lots of pageviews, but it's nothing but a time waster, you get nothing out of it, except getting back with old friends, and there's many sites that could do all of that.

We need money invested in things that have real value to human kind, finding new energy sources, finding a way to use CO2 in a beneficial way, colonizing the moon, thinking of the big picture as a species.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Dave Ambrose — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 22:16:26 -0000

Hey Matt,

I really enjoyed this, especially after the Fortune profile came out about COO Sandberg. Interesting dichotomy of viewpoints.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

mattmaroon — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:29:01 -0000

That is a brilliant use of the web, but has nothing to do with the big social media sites in general.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Guest — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:00:48 -0000

I couldn't agree more. After marketing in the Social Media industry for two years now I can honestly say that there really isn't that much to it. Don't get me wrong, its cool but they are just "feature heavey" message boards.

The reason social networking continues to be the buzz of the day is that adults are just picking up on what "kids" started doing 5 years ago.

For every 45 year old that opens an account on Facebook with a smile on their face, preparing to throw buzz-words around at the water-cooler the next day....... there is also a 20-something that is abadoning their MySpace or plain exhausted with Facebook.

Facebook came out my first year of college and it was like...... "yeah cool" and then we would slowly log-in less and less often to the point that noone really cared.

Little did we know that when the 30 was to get interested 5 years later it was going to be the most exhaustive, over-exaggerated frenzy I have ever beared witness to.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Ranjit Mathoda — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 13:00:49 -0000

You may not find Facebook particularly useful, but social network software can be very powerful for a political campaign. My.barackobama.com has been used very successfully by the Obama campaign, and potentially a future President could use Internet tools to efficiently reach and organize their supporters to bring pressure on Congress while in office, as I describe in my essay The coming Digital Presidency: http://mathoda.com/archives...

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

chopps — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 09:13:09 -0000

I don't see the Silicon Valley hype around Facebook that you mention, however, I do see that facebook itself is pure hype.
I agree with your argument that they are not the next Google, but who is saying that they are?

Consider..

Every single digital marketing agency in the world and all of their employess are pushing facebook and my space and whatever to all and sundry in the hope to be able to elevate some silly marketing campaign, that they are charging their clients millions for, to the masses.

You'd be hard pushed to find a marketing strategy presentation deck that doesn't include social networks , viral marketing and a facebook / digg marketing strategy.

I think you are missing the point semantically with the use of the word social. Social is not the purpose of these apps, and a paradigm shift in social interaction is not what they promise.

What they do promise is a network of net users collective attentions, which happens to be worth a lot of money.

And by the way the nested replies on your blog are just not doing it for me :)

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

George P Burdell — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 05:23:14 -0000

I was never a finance major, but can you explain how the following:
7 Bil revenue
4 Bil profit
2 Bil cash on hand
750 mil debt
qualifies Yahoo! as "scrambling to avoid bankruptcy"?

Also, you completed misunderstand the term "social search". It takes all of about five minutes to do a little reading and find out what the term refers to, but apparently you were too busy trying to see how many times you could use the word paradigm to do a little research.

Lastly, how exactly was google maps a game changing product?

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Brett — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 04:39:25 -0000

'mapping the social graph'? I don't think so. FaceBook is simply providing tools for an insanely large amount of people to waste insanely large amounts of time on virtually useless activities. Hooking up with an old school-mate, sending someone a virtual fish, etc isn't providing a map to anything. I'm not even sure if FaceBook is developing any useful social interaction paradigms, or processes - I haven't heard of any.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Phil — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:09:47 -0000

its about advertising. and advertising depends on data about users. with google, advertisers know what a user wants to find (i.e., the user entered keywords on google.com monetized by bids or the user visited a site with certain content monetized by adwords). with facebook, advertisers know who the user is (e.g., male, 23 y/o, from nyc, went to college, likes XYZ music), and what the users' friends like/bought. the combination of google data (what someone wants) + facebook (someone's past attributes and behavior and their friends past behaviors) is incredibly valuable to advertisers.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Phil — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:06:07 -0000

its about advertising. and advertising depends on data about users. with google, advertisers know what a user wants to find (i.e., the user entered keywords on google.com or the user visited a site with adwords). with facebook, advertisers know who the user is (e.g., male, 23 y/o, from boston, went to college, likes XYZ music,), and what the users' friends like/bought. the combination of google data (what someone wants) + (someone's past attributes and behavior and their friends past) is incredibly valuable to advertisers

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Kalid — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:22:48 -0000

Great post. Loved this quote:

"I see a nifty little utility that, at its best, makes it easier for me to keep in contact with people I know and like, but don’t really care about enough to just hang out with, IM, or call."

The people I really keep in touch with is over email, IM and the phone (or, heavens forbid, hanging out in person). Facebook is an interesting diversion, but I have trouble seeing myself using it in 5-10 years (unlike Google, which I consider a basic utility).

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

n8k99 — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 23:34:01 -0000

so that you can know when someone replies to your comment

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Tim J — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 22:22:43 -0000

Great post. Facebook reminds me of the Seinfeld "The Show about Nothing" episode. It was a very meta take with the show talking about the show itself. I personally couldn't find what to *do* once I got into FB. I have tons of "friends", of course, 90% of them I don't know, some I have *no clue* at all how they found me. Makes for great "social" networking, I suppose.

To be fair to FB, LinkedIn is only marginally less useless. Lots of sales guys trying to "network".

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

the*point*man — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:17:19 -0000

BOTTOM LINE:
Facebook appeals to people with alot of time on their hands. Who has time to update photos, read trivial things, etc? People in college, stay-at-home mothers, unemployed folks looking for jobs, people not staffed on projects - these are the people who use Facebook on a constant basis. I have NO time for that type of time-wasting. Getting and sending pokes? What a complete waste of time. Email is the ultimate personal Facebook and will be for the future. If you have no time - YOU WANT PUSH, not PULL.

Someone made the following statement to me: "Well, Facebook is better than Linkedin!"

I totally disagree. I love the fact that Linkedin takes NO TIME. People send invites, I accept and now I have a contact list that stays updated with any effort on my part. I only accept PEOPLE I actually know. Not random people who like my picture or something else that is irrelevant. This is valuable - not all the time - but when I want to find someone with a certain skillset or I'm looking for a job. Then the information is there - waiting for me to use it.

Once the younger generations starts seeing how valuable time is (due to opportunity costs of other activities) - Facebook loses its value entirely. Not to mention the fact that the people that have alot of time on their hands also happen to have little or no money. That is why FREE (from a DOLLAR perspective) appeals to this audience - they have plenty of TIME to spend and that's all that is paid. For those of us who are time-strapped, time is MONEY...giving time to something as trivial as Facebook is EXPENSIVE.

This has several implications - first of all, the audience will not be clicking on much, unless it's just time the advertisers are asking for. My blog serves a much smaller niche - time-strapped travelers. My historical click-through rate is about 2.32%. Compare this to Facebook's CTR of 0.04% <== how do you make money off of this? Someone may say - get 100 million of user which Facebook will have soon. But, there is one-more factor to consider - that's the earnings per CPM - I bet you this will be very low for Facebook users.

Facebook targets the lowest common denominator with regards to dollar income - if you're spending alot of time on Facebook, you can get there is opportunity costs for not spending that time elsewhere (like working and making money).

Something to think about.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Jonathan — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:42:55 -0000

Facebook is special in the sense that it is not going away. Ever since we climbed down from trees (and even before then) we have been obsessed with social hierarchy, staying on top, in touch and in control. Facebook is just another way to interact with our fellow humans.

It may not have the profound, society shaking impacts that Google has, but it does cater to a fundamental human desire - societal interaction. And, as such, it is special and not going away.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Jim — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:22:33 -0000

keep drinking the kool aid brother. I think most people they sign on to FB that arent a college kid or a TechCrunchie like the service until they connect to everyone possible and look over all their photos etc. Then their activity dies off dramatically (mine did). Also Facebook Apps are worthless and plain silly in my opinion.

Its also interesting to see that many of people that work at my company that recently graduated college greatly slow their FB activity the further they get from school. Once you arent looking to hook up or party every night the service becomes less functional.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

Peter Cooper — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:15:16 -0000

Socializing is all about real world interaction.

Easy to say when you're of our generation, but this is increasingly not true. Amongst the locked-up-till-they're-16 modern generation of youngsters, online interaction is incredibly popular outside of school. Indeed, I'd go as far to say digital forms of interaction make up the majority of child-to-child social interactions, certainly in the UK.

Re: Facebook Is Not Really That Special

mattmaroon — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:49:03 -0000

Let me guess, you're in college or a recent grad.