Facebook versus the Web
10-09-2007, 09:47 PM
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Facebook versus the Web
Interesting post on TechCrunch comparing Facebook to AOL. Here is an excerpt:
[SPOILER="my response (long)"]# David Litsky
October 9th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
The “web community” is focused on the details, while Zuckerberg, Gates, and others are focusing on the 40,000 foot panoramic. Creating a web site is easy, all you need is someone that can use a coding widget, and a good support staff to do your design, build your database, and come up with the business plan. Facebook is similar to AOL in that it is a walled garden, but that is what the general consumer wants. They want a one-stop shop where they can send e-mail, catch up on news, chat with friends, and act like a kid again. Facebook has a strong infrastructure and provides their customers with exactly what they need.
On the web, all of your data is indexed, filtered, shifted, aggregated, packaged, and devilvered to mass marketers 2.0. Google takes a 40% cut so it is in their best interest to shove advertising at you wherever you go — your mailbox (email), your television (YouTube), and your newspaper (websites like TC). The current “web” which is chock full of in-your-face advertising is not what was envisioned by visionaries like Christopher Locke and David Weinberger when they wrote the cluetrain manifesto. What they envisioned were web forums, which have easily replaced RIP graphics and multipart newsgroup threads.
Take vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com/), the top web forum software around. It made it there by being simple, rugged, and fully customizable not by looking pretty and acting flashy. Forums are a one stop shop where you can start open threaded conversations, send private messages, track who is talking to you, play games, and read news on your favorite subjects. These communities were pioneers in the wild frontier of the web. In the beginning, many of these forums were open allowing people to post anonymous comments under fictitious names similar to newsgroups. The problem was that they were vulnerable to spammers and inflammatory posters. To start the filtering process, many forums began to require a username and password to access the site. Users could still be anonymous, but it gave the operator of the site a ring of control, to make sure that things didn’t get out of hand. In addition, content held within their walled gardens is often barricaded from the tentacles of Google’s advertising spiders.
What makes the forum world so special is that you become a real family that cares about each other, even if they show it in a very different way. You are surrounded by siblings — with a traditional male to female ratio of 200:1, that aren’t afraid to call you out on your BS, make fun of you for it, and never move on. The problem is that these communities work too well and users like interacting with people too much. As the web became populated in the web 1.0 era and through the cycle that has brought us to the end of web 2.0 era, bandwidth started to become more scarce. Much like the end of cheap oil in the 70s, the cost to operate these communities in the mid 00s substantially increased. The larger communities hung around with context ads, banner ads, donations, and other ways to defer the costs. Sadly, many of the smaller communities that had 20-200 members folded and they became nomads of the vBulletin circuit.
Enter Facebook which is special because it acts as a big, open, vBulletin forum. Their goal with the social graph is to reconnect with true internet friends and bring our offline friends into the simple web that made us early adopters. On Facebook, you can control how little or how much of your private information is displayed to other members — while remaining invisible to outsiders. This provides a safe location for you to discuss your next business idea with Jenny from high school who is now a banker, Mike from college who works as a software engineer, and Bill from the bar who wants to write you a big check. Why Facebook will succeed is that they are providing this service for free — including the bandwidth bill, in return for modest advertising.
Sidebar about bandwidth — has the web community forgotten that Facebook doubled their user base in less than six months, and only had one hiccup? What Facebook did is grew organically creating headroom for an exponential amount of new users, per user that they were adding. For example by planning for 100 people per user that they added in the beginning, with 5 million members they could easily scale to 500 million.
Facebook is trying to build a better web where its users bring the ideas and labor, and they provide the infrastructure to help you succeed. Take the fbFunds debate that has been on the minds of Uber Bloggers like Jason Calacanis. People like Jason want the web to remain open so that he and other like-minded businessmen can poach your ideas and build them out faster than you with his venture capital. The fbFund is not looking for the next widget builder, but the visionary that needs access to widget builders so that they can revolutionize the platform. What Facebook has done is bring old school (think Plato’s Republic) business to the web.
Business will not be replaced by an open web, but hire Vogon contractors to clear the path.
[/SPOILER]
Cliff Notes: I don't agree and think that Facebook is the next version of the web forum -- with free bandwidth...
Anyone dare to weigh in?
Originally Posted by Erick Schonfeld - TechCrunch
One of the knocks against Facebook is that it is a somewhat closed, proprietary platform. Here’s how the argument goes: The ultimate technology platform, in contrast, is the Web itself. It is open and ultimately will triumph over all other platforms, including Facebook. Any innovations that take hold in closed environments are quickly replicated on the open Web. At some point network effects take over, and the utility of those innovations on the Web supercede those on the original platform.
October 9th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
The “web community” is focused on the details, while Zuckerberg, Gates, and others are focusing on the 40,000 foot panoramic. Creating a web site is easy, all you need is someone that can use a coding widget, and a good support staff to do your design, build your database, and come up with the business plan. Facebook is similar to AOL in that it is a walled garden, but that is what the general consumer wants. They want a one-stop shop where they can send e-mail, catch up on news, chat with friends, and act like a kid again. Facebook has a strong infrastructure and provides their customers with exactly what they need.
On the web, all of your data is indexed, filtered, shifted, aggregated, packaged, and devilvered to mass marketers 2.0. Google takes a 40% cut so it is in their best interest to shove advertising at you wherever you go — your mailbox (email), your television (YouTube), and your newspaper (websites like TC). The current “web” which is chock full of in-your-face advertising is not what was envisioned by visionaries like Christopher Locke and David Weinberger when they wrote the cluetrain manifesto. What they envisioned were web forums, which have easily replaced RIP graphics and multipart newsgroup threads.
Take vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com/), the top web forum software around. It made it there by being simple, rugged, and fully customizable not by looking pretty and acting flashy. Forums are a one stop shop where you can start open threaded conversations, send private messages, track who is talking to you, play games, and read news on your favorite subjects. These communities were pioneers in the wild frontier of the web. In the beginning, many of these forums were open allowing people to post anonymous comments under fictitious names similar to newsgroups. The problem was that they were vulnerable to spammers and inflammatory posters. To start the filtering process, many forums began to require a username and password to access the site. Users could still be anonymous, but it gave the operator of the site a ring of control, to make sure that things didn’t get out of hand. In addition, content held within their walled gardens is often barricaded from the tentacles of Google’s advertising spiders.
What makes the forum world so special is that you become a real family that cares about each other, even if they show it in a very different way. You are surrounded by siblings — with a traditional male to female ratio of 200:1, that aren’t afraid to call you out on your BS, make fun of you for it, and never move on. The problem is that these communities work too well and users like interacting with people too much. As the web became populated in the web 1.0 era and through the cycle that has brought us to the end of web 2.0 era, bandwidth started to become more scarce. Much like the end of cheap oil in the 70s, the cost to operate these communities in the mid 00s substantially increased. The larger communities hung around with context ads, banner ads, donations, and other ways to defer the costs. Sadly, many of the smaller communities that had 20-200 members folded and they became nomads of the vBulletin circuit.
Enter Facebook which is special because it acts as a big, open, vBulletin forum. Their goal with the social graph is to reconnect with true internet friends and bring our offline friends into the simple web that made us early adopters. On Facebook, you can control how little or how much of your private information is displayed to other members — while remaining invisible to outsiders. This provides a safe location for you to discuss your next business idea with Jenny from high school who is now a banker, Mike from college who works as a software engineer, and Bill from the bar who wants to write you a big check. Why Facebook will succeed is that they are providing this service for free — including the bandwidth bill, in return for modest advertising.
Sidebar about bandwidth — has the web community forgotten that Facebook doubled their user base in less than six months, and only had one hiccup? What Facebook did is grew organically creating headroom for an exponential amount of new users, per user that they were adding. For example by planning for 100 people per user that they added in the beginning, with 5 million members they could easily scale to 500 million.
Facebook is trying to build a better web where its users bring the ideas and labor, and they provide the infrastructure to help you succeed. Take the fbFunds debate that has been on the minds of Uber Bloggers like Jason Calacanis. People like Jason want the web to remain open so that he and other like-minded businessmen can poach your ideas and build them out faster than you with his venture capital. The fbFund is not looking for the next widget builder, but the visionary that needs access to widget builders so that they can revolutionize the platform. What Facebook has done is bring old school (think Plato’s Republic) business to the web.
Business will not be replaced by an open web, but hire Vogon contractors to clear the path.
[/SPOILER]
Cliff Notes: I don't agree and think that Facebook is the next version of the web forum -- with free bandwidth...
Anyone dare to weigh in?
