The idea is not new ("Facebook is the new AOL") - it's been said many times here. BUT, I did find one slide to be really interesting: "Imagine if before you searched, Google asked you this..."
Or, everyone leaves facebook for a more "true" social experience. How about social networks created dynamically based on your location with the people around you? You know, real life social interactions. (Color, for example?)
Left are parents (and grandparents) who update their statuses and post on walls because they're comfortable with facebook and don't really understand that "other" stuff...
And in 5 years time, it's very possible that Facebook, like AOL, will be dominated by old people, the stubborn, and the relatively computer illiterate, as others have moved on to greener pastures.
Facebook's dominance is not set in stone. People may not be able to live without Facebook, but there's no reason they can't transition, such as how people quickly transitioned away from MySpace.
You start by having two accounts. The more interesting, cutting edge, friends are on the new network. Your high school friends, family, and tertiary relationships are on the old network. You check them both equally at first, but slowly you find yourself on the new network more often. Then, at some point, you stop updating the old one, save for the occasional "I don't use this anymore, I'm on X now." updates. Others follow suit, until at some point, the trickle becomes a flood. Next thing you know, the old network is a ghost town. Nobody cares about it anymore, and people only reference it as a relic from a distant past.
There is nothing Facebook has done to prevent this. And this will keep happening until social networking is eventually decentralized.
That's interesting, actually. I think Facebook Connect might be the start of preventing that from happening.
Say, for instance, they chose to become more platform-oriented, providing the data/services of facebook to developers. Suddenly, developers could build on top of an fb-platform allowing users to update from one central location. They could provide specific services (wall or no wall) and extend services (which would be specific to that site...)
"Have a facebook connect account? Sign in today to expand your profile page on the-latest-greatest.xyz!"
All your friends are still "friends" and communication is still possible, regardless of where on the web your social networking "home" resides.
As someone who did not join live journal, friendster, orkut, myspace, etc, I too think Facebook is likely a fad.
However, these days even I am tempted to get a Facebook and/or twitter sock puppet account, if only because more and more of social interaction is moving to them. More and more of the "Hey we'll bet at X around Y" chatter is exclusively on Facebook.
And I am old enough to remember when only anti-social geeks made appointments on-line instead of IRL!
I don't recall myspace or anything ever reaching the scope and popularity Facebook has. And I am starting to wonder if Facebook is in fact NOT a fad?
The problem/challenge with that scenario is that you quite likely will want to sort by multiple, intersecting categories at some point.
You've sorted to friends and relatives. Now, suppose you want to send a message about Sci-Fiction. You'd like automatically send to friends who are Sci-Fi fans and relatives who are Sci-Fi fans.
What's the interface which can do this? What's the interface that can make this easy?
I'm working on something akin to Google-instant for this purpose.
Anyone remember Googlezon ? That EPIC2014 project which was talking about how the world was going to be taken over by a merger of Google and Amazon. When I joined Google in 2006 there was joke about putting into the new hire orientation that you didn't need to forward the video to the misc list :-)
That didn't mention Facebook at all, most people thought MySpace was going to dominate social. Anyway, ...
People who had been around computers and networking have known since their first (or maybe second) class on data structures that structured data was computation. The last node in an LRU list is, because of the structure, computed to be the oldest node in the list. One of the really cool things about Python was list comprehensions is "foo" in bar?
So its sort of a yawn when we see that you can infer a traffic jam by the smart phones sending in position data periodically, or that the movie 'companion' suggestions from Amazon are all from genres you've previously purchased. But its just dawning on a lot of folks.
This blogger thinks Facebook is AOL because they have grown rapidly and have a valuation they don't understand and a number of page views that made their AdSense ID salivate. They equate AOL's walled garden to a castle. They draw a parallel between Facebook's other properties and the kind of walled garden that AOL once supported.
And yet they miss evidence that Facebook isn't a service that people use, it is people instantiating themselves in what is most like a network directory service. Humans as nodes in a n-tree of relationships and desires (likes) and even dislikes.
Peter Warden's original "who your friends are hack" illustrated so clearly, you don't have to 'guess' you can know truths by looking at the data structure that is Facebook. This is not something AOL even imagined.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] threadLeft are parents (and grandparents) who update their statuses and post on walls because they're comfortable with facebook and don't really understand that "other" stuff...
Facebook's dominance is not set in stone. People may not be able to live without Facebook, but there's no reason they can't transition, such as how people quickly transitioned away from MySpace.
You start by having two accounts. The more interesting, cutting edge, friends are on the new network. Your high school friends, family, and tertiary relationships are on the old network. You check them both equally at first, but slowly you find yourself on the new network more often. Then, at some point, you stop updating the old one, save for the occasional "I don't use this anymore, I'm on X now." updates. Others follow suit, until at some point, the trickle becomes a flood. Next thing you know, the old network is a ghost town. Nobody cares about it anymore, and people only reference it as a relic from a distant past.
There is nothing Facebook has done to prevent this. And this will keep happening until social networking is eventually decentralized.
Say, for instance, they chose to become more platform-oriented, providing the data/services of facebook to developers. Suddenly, developers could build on top of an fb-platform allowing users to update from one central location. They could provide specific services (wall or no wall) and extend services (which would be specific to that site...)
"Have a facebook connect account? Sign in today to expand your profile page on the-latest-greatest.xyz!"
All your friends are still "friends" and communication is still possible, regardless of where on the web your social networking "home" resides.
As someone who did not join live journal, friendster, orkut, myspace, etc, I too think Facebook is likely a fad.
However, these days even I am tempted to get a Facebook and/or twitter sock puppet account, if only because more and more of social interaction is moving to them. More and more of the "Hey we'll bet at X around Y" chatter is exclusively on Facebook.
And I am old enough to remember when only anti-social geeks made appointments on-line instead of IRL!
I don't recall myspace or anything ever reaching the scope and popularity Facebook has. And I am starting to wonder if Facebook is in fact NOT a fad?
You've sorted to friends and relatives. Now, suppose you want to send a message about Sci-Fiction. You'd like automatically send to friends who are Sci-Fi fans and relatives who are Sci-Fi fans.
What's the interface which can do this? What's the interface that can make this easy?
I'm working on something akin to Google-instant for this purpose.
That didn't mention Facebook at all, most people thought MySpace was going to dominate social. Anyway, ...
People who had been around computers and networking have known since their first (or maybe second) class on data structures that structured data was computation. The last node in an LRU list is, because of the structure, computed to be the oldest node in the list. One of the really cool things about Python was list comprehensions is "foo" in bar?
So its sort of a yawn when we see that you can infer a traffic jam by the smart phones sending in position data periodically, or that the movie 'companion' suggestions from Amazon are all from genres you've previously purchased. But its just dawning on a lot of folks.
This blogger thinks Facebook is AOL because they have grown rapidly and have a valuation they don't understand and a number of page views that made their AdSense ID salivate. They equate AOL's walled garden to a castle. They draw a parallel between Facebook's other properties and the kind of walled garden that AOL once supported.
And yet they miss evidence that Facebook isn't a service that people use, it is people instantiating themselves in what is most like a network directory service. Humans as nodes in a n-tree of relationships and desires (likes) and even dislikes.
Peter Warden's original "who your friends are hack" illustrated so clearly, you don't have to 'guess' you can know truths by looking at the data structure that is Facebook. This is not something AOL even imagined.