Tourist Girl: And, your beer tastes like piss.
Short Bartender: We know.
Tavo: 'Cause we piss in it!
Short Bartender: That's not all!
Desperado, Movie
I did not write much in the past about Facebook. So let's discuss Facebook.
An opinion.
I really dislike Facebook's approach to do things. I do not like their privacy policy. I do not like their webpage design. I do not like their "let's enable face recognition without telling our customers". Is it a coincidence that Microsoft invested a lot of money? I do not like social networks in general. But of course I have a Facebook account to stay in touch with friends in the US. And of course I have an opinion.
Recent developments at Facebook
- Facebook browser [0]. Don't think it works. The idea of social browser is out there for some time now. But people are just not interested
- Face recognition. Well I hate it. I really hate it. It might be one of the reasons why I quit Facebook. It is for sure the reason why I will never upload anything to Facebook. [-1]
- App market for HTML5 (Spartan). Good idea. But I will not use it. Because it's Facebook. And Facebook to me is just a simple Contacts DB.
The market of social networks.
The really interesting question in this whole Social Networks context is: How will the market behave? Will there be a-winner-takes-it-all? Or will there be many social networks besides each other?
If you take Google (not a social network) it seems that there is a winner takes it all philosophy. Even despide switching from Google to Bing to Ask is supersimple (ask.com is even shorter). Google has "something" that forces people to stay.
But nearly anywhere else there are many competitors in a market. That's what a market is after all.
Nils [1] recently told me that Google Trends shows that searches for Facebook stagnate. And he is damn right. Even with all the turmoil in Arab countries the popularity of Facebook did not skyrocket any more. Google Trends is a quite indirect tool to measure something, but it gives you an idea.
Wow.
Is it possible to break Facebooks dominance?
The nice thing is that even Google (a search website company) goes into the direction of a social network. I am not sure if it is a good idea for Google to advance in this direction, but the competition in the market seems to work. MySpace went down, Soundcloud came up [2]. Linkedin is getting stronger (check out Google Trends), Xing is getting trouble. Google becomes more social [3]. And even assholes can survive (Netlog).
To be sure: Facebook's niveau is damn high. Facebook is a money making machine one way or the other. But I now tend to think that it is possible to make money and even break Facebook's dominance in social networks. You have to do it right. Be different. Be something else. I am sure it is possible if you got the right attitude.
What is a social network after all? A big website connecting people? Yes. It is nothing too special. And there is an awful lot that Facebook is doing wrong. (Shit. And there is a lot of stuff Facebook does right, but this post is a really bad rant :D ).
[-2] http://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/06/16/facebooks-project-spartan-to-be-html5-app-store-for-ios/
[-1] http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15144128,00.html
[0] http://www.allfacebook.com/rockmelt-facebook-browser-2010-11
[1] http://www.nilsjuenemann.de/
[2] http://ars-machina.raphaelbauer.com/2011/03/why-myspace-closed.html
[3] http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=165228