Back in 2003, I would've found it absolutely inconceivable to not chat with my HS classmates on AIM. For me, even bigger than MySpace dying was AIM dying. It still kind of blows my mind. AIM was the way you got social cachet back then. Everyone was on AIM. Young people were on AIM.
I am completely convinced that FB will go the way of the dodo in the next decade, and it will take Snapchat and Instagram with it.
I remember moving to FB when my mom joined MySpace... I've since straight up quit social media, but I know folks that moved on to IG/Snap so they could broadcast content they didn't want certain social groups to see via FB. Of course now those social groups are joining the newer mediums.
Maybe social media platforms are inherently cyclical? At least under the "maximum growth" mindset:
* Innovators develop new platforms because they're unhappy with the old
* Early adopters like the new platform's features or community
* If it's good enough, the early majority slowly follows as knowledge disseminates
* New features and narratives are developed to attract the late majority and laggards
* The presence of those people, and tactics used to attract them, disenfranchise the early adopters
* Unhappiness rises until a new digital eden is discovered. Then the cycle repeats
Gave up on /. around the time cmdrtaco got married. Gave up on digg sometime before the downfall. Have stuck with HN (was fairly early here). Reddit on and off.
That makes me feel even more weird about going Slashdot, HN, sometimes-Reddit-but-mostly-HN.
but I'm a bit weird with account creation. A service generally has to really prove its worth before I bother to create an account. I spent a couple years on HN before before bothering with an account and commenting, and it took way longer after that until I finally found some Reddit communities that made me want to create an account (and even now, I comment sparingly), even though I looked at it occassionally.
My social media experience started with the program I wrote myself, in 1975 for a 300-user timeshare system. That's the last time I was even close to the forefront. Didn't pay any attention to Myspace until it was obvious there was no need to. I've completely avoided Facebook because I've never trusted them.
I've never heard of Digg, but I still read Slashdot (though it has certainly gone downhill since the 90s), Reddit (at least certain subreddits like r/boardgames), and HN daily.
This will date me but at one time Digg had a section that ranked how influential of a user you were on their platform. There was a superstar who used the alias "MrBabyMan" that ruled the roost.
I was in the top 100 users back in those days. I loved their platform. It's a shame what they did with it. It is my opinion that Reddit has gotten away with a terrible UI compared to what Digg once had.
The strange thing is, I've been using the WWW since 1995 (and the Internet since the late 80s). I don't know how I missed Digg, but it's not because I'm a newbie ;-)
I skipped Digg; it seemed always seemed irrelevant to me (EDIT: that's just my personal perception -obviously I was wrong).
My personal journey was:
BBS -> Usenet -> Slashdot -> phpbb/vb forums -> Ars -> Reddit -> HN
I haven't had any problems with Reddit as far as technical information goes, but I mostly go there for non-tech subs (eg AskHistorians).
I absolutely get what you mean about it being nasty though -it took me years and years to break down and finally make an account because of the nastiness.
You need to skip the main/popular parts of Reddit and choose your subreddits carefully. I personally spend a lot of time in r/boardgames which is an amazing community.
I prefer proggit to HN these days. This place is mostly political commentary. The rules around engagement - while outwardly all about having a good conversation - just make this whole place feel passive aggressive and limp-wristed.
A lot of the trolls and flaming on proggit is funny. HN feels too much like that episode of South Park where Kyle moves to San Francisco and everyone is huffing their own farts.
True. On HN i mostly don't even bother to write my own opinion if it's not in line with the mainstream. It will just get downvoted to death instead of sparking a discussion...
Agree. Apparently it's ok to downvote people you disagree with, rather than crap arguments. I've mostly lost interest. Too bad too, it was really great for a while.
This is basically what a heavily curated set of reddit subscriptions are. I know others do the same with Twitter except I find that doesn't work for me because you're following people rather than on-topic communities and nobody sticks to the topics you're following them for in the first place. Personally, I kept getting stuck with a feed full of useless virtue signaling with some of what I wanted to see peppered in every now and then.
Personally I think that's why a site like reddit has more staying power than a site like Twitter. Twitter has too much of your identity invested in it while reddit has a place for nearly everyone.
I agree with the Twitter comment but can't stand Reddit. It's a site that promotes trolls and actively punishes people for being civil. Add to that completely tone deaf policies from the owners and I just cannot support that site. The mods there are also terrible cretins that rule over their fiefdoms with whatever bias they feel wont to.
Most people whom have expressed this sentiment to me have generally not been exposed to much more than the defaults.
Reddit with defaults or r/all is a horrible experience. It is what you make of it though, and if you don't make anything of it then it is obviously not for you. The advice I always give to someone trying reddit is to 1. make an account 2. unsubscribe from all of the defaults and 3. search it for whatever interests you. Pretty much everyone can find something for them, and moderation is going to be variable which I think is actually a net positive. A well moderated sub is a gem, such as AskHistorians, but not every sub needs to be moderated to the same extent as AskHistorians to remain useful or relevant either.
I'm not saying that I've never had a positive experience on Reddit. I'm saying that I violently disagree with how they've handled themselves and their trolling. It's saying Well Fargo Bank has some amazing tellers if you can look past their horrendous policies meant to fleece people who bank there. FWIW HN is literally the only social networking site I still find valuable so I completely respect that your experience and value derived from Reddit may be different than mine.
Yep, that's why I am promoting custom filters. There are so many folks on Twitter who post awesome content but I have to unsubscribe so I don't get inundated with their politics.
Anything hobby specific generally has decent enough modding but the value of those depends on the quality of the community specific to the hobby, so for example I subscribe to a few Nintendo-related and Game-related subs. AskHistorians is generally always good. Changemyview is generally enjoyable but each thread can be hit or miss depending on the OP. I like listentothis for finding music, OldMaps, MapPorn and InfrastructurePorn are nice to look at. Neutralnews was pretty decent when I last looked at it but I don't use reddit for news anymore, and DepthHub is one of the few general purpose subs that generally always has something interesting.
As a rule, the more general purpose the sub is, the lower the quality of the community, especially if it has lax moderation. I'm not someone that is into gifs or "memes" so you'll have to ask someone else about those. I don't use reddit or any one site for news because I don't need that in my life, I have other channels for anything that actually matters. Programming subs are usually pretty good resources for whatever tool, language or technology they're promoting that you use or are interested in, but I steer clear from the pointless debates.
I would say search a few of your hobbies, whatever they are, there's probably a decent model train collecting sub but I wouldn't know, and if you want to use it professionally, search it for whatever tools you use. There's self-development subs like getdisciplined and most subs have others you can look for in the sidebar if you really want to dig down the rabbit hole, but go in prepared to unsubscribe from all of the defaults and build up your own personal collection of subscriptions from there.
> Maybe social media platforms are inherently cyclical?
I think so, because a huge part of social interaction is either being a trend-setter or following trends. Either one of those requires constant change.
Looking at my Facebook feed it’s mostly companies, “personalities”, a few groups and a handful of people over 50. Everyone else is using Facebook mainly for messenger and event planning. Everything else that Facebook were used for (pictures, status updates) is being handled by Instagram and Snapchat.
I think what killed AIM, MSN, etc. was SMS. You had to meet your friends in person at school or be home in front of a computer to talk to your friends. With SMS you can talk to them anytime, anywhere. Then smartphones came out and apps like WhatsApp, FB Messenger and LINE took over.
The United States got SMS a lot later in the piece than other countries, didn't they? From my experience the opposite of what you said appeared to be true - what started to kill SMS here was services like MSN messenger and eventually facebook etc afterwards
Not only that, but SMS was extremely expensive in the US. If you didn't have a text plan, they cost $0.20-$0.30 a message, and unlimited plans were in the neighborhood of $30 a month. Texting didn't really take off in the US until the prices started coming down, and that didn't start happening until Google and Apple launched their own messaging apps.
MSN was helped by the integration into the most used email at the time, hotmail. It was still pretty good, you could play mind sweeper on it with your friends, most of my international friends used it. they had a pretty good market penetration in China too.
Then MSFT was like, OK we bought skype. EVERYONE WILL USE SKYPE.
For me what killed MSN Messenger was Microsoft. I would have not had a need to ever use FB Messenger were it not for the merge of Skype and Messenger. Both Skype and Messenger were good back then by themselves, but the result of the merge wasn't so convincing for me. I literally only use Skype to talk with my parents - noone else even uses it anymore...
I think MSN for me died when I finished middle school. Everybody kinda lost contact (going to different schools / apprenticeships) and we stopped writing.
Then new people I met (online and offline) were all using Skype. This was just right before Smartphones came out.
Then offline people slowly started joining Whatsapp or Facebook groups.
Online people stayed on Skype until Telegram took over a few years ago.
I don't think MySpace vs Facebook is really a real comparison. Facebook has reached a level of ubiquity that MySpace could never have dreamed of.
That little white F in a blue square is a global symbol and it won't be undone in a few bouts of bad PR.
I think we, the tech literate, forget just how other people interact with tech. I need only to look at my parents interacting with Facebook to see how they're still so addicted to it (my aunt still is addicted to candy crush ffs).
Don't forget all the social lock in Facebook has on you: a decade's worth of photos and all the friends you picked up along the way.
Sure, people are unplugging, but I personally think they've got critical mass.
Myspace also reached a level of ubiquity that prior social media (think Six Degrees, ICQ, Friendster, AIM, etc.) could only dream of.
Its downfall also illustrates how little it mattered that they were then hosting their users' digital life. A new generation rose using a new social medium, and this lack of new users eventually sucked the life out of it.
That, incidentally, is probably why Facebook paid so much for WhatsApp.
You're entitled to your opinion. But I don't think you're even comparing apples to apples here. Facebook claims 2.2 billion monthly active users. Sure, that is a flattering and inflated number, but at face value that is about 28% of the world's population.
That is "the world's most recognized word is Coke/Apple" levels of mindshare. That simply doesn't go away overnight. People no longer drink 24 bottles of Coke a day[0] but Coke is still everywhere and ubiquitous.
Hence my assertion that Facebook has critical mass: the history of MySpace isn't a useful analogy for trying to stipulate what might happen to Facebook. After a certain size/ubiquity they can sidestep user exodus, if only through sheer acquisition of the replacement.
Perhaps a concession is that Facebook the product may be gone in a decade. I'll be very surprised if Facebook, Inc. is gone.
Also, kids don't like social networks where their parents hang out. This more than anything else will kill Facebook -- it'll be what old people do.
Of course, Facebook could acquire (and Messenger and Whatsapp and Instagram are powerful moats) but the core social network functionality is weaker than it appears.
I suspect that was very geographical, over here (Norway) young people were on MSN Messenger. It was practically universal for anybody who wasn't an old fart.
In Poland, we had a network called Gadu-Gadu. Everyone was there until Facebook happened. Virtually no AIM, ICQ nor MSN usage here.
There was a brief period of most of the people being reachable via Jabber too thanks to Gmail and Android, but Hangouts mostly screwed that up, both in terms of Jabber interoperability and their own native usage.
Also Canadian, I can easily recall the ICQ number I haven't used in 15 years but I couldn't tell you my student number from University despite all the times I wrote it. Coincidently that was when Facebook was exclusive to students and even then far more popular with us than MySpace. I'm not sure how this 2007 article could have missed it.
I remember my ICQ number (1998-2002ish), my compuserve id (1996-1998), and my first house phone number (1984-1993), and two school friend's hosue numbers (1993-2000), and the Live and Kicking number (081 811 8181, which dates it to 1990-1995). I can also tell you, just about, my mobile phone number (2006-now) and wife's (2003-now). I can also tell you both my passport numbers and expiry dates. Couldn't tell you my home phone number, let alone anybody else's.
You remember numbers you use a lot, I have no idea why I remember by ICQ number though.
> Ah the good ol' days, when contacts were only saved locally.
Ah, that explains why when I recently logged into ICQ for the first time in 15+ years, I apparently had no contacts. I thought they must have just wiped some old protocol at some point.
The cohort of young people that used AIM/MSN/Y! (depending on your region) aged up into Facebook Chat [1]. Facebook captured the 'chat with people you know in real life' usecase, gradually leaving distance-only or interest-specific friends on the old chat networks. This greatly contributed to their decline.
> The cohort of young people that used AIM/MSN/Y! (depending on your region) aged up into Facebook Chat [1].
Speak for yourself, most of my social group is split between iMessage and WhatsApp.
Even so, what Facebook has that MySpace didn't is enough money to buy up its competitors to stay relevant (e.g. WhatsApp). So this might be what will happen, even if Facebook itself fades in relevance.
(Bear in mind that even if Facebook Messenger grew in popularity as AIM declined, so too did the number of people online increase, and the number of people with smartphones -- saying that one increased while the other decreased is not sufficient.)
> Even so, what Facebook has that MySpace didn't is enough money to buy up its competitors to stay relevant
Echoing that, I'd add that FB/Zuckerberg knows when to do one of the following with an upcoming competitor
a) snatch it up
b) throw company's resources at duplicating it
Good point, it was pretty interesting that Facebook was allowed to buy WhatsApp. That just seemed like slow monopoly building in live action to me. Regulators just can't keep up
While it's anecdotal I was heavy on AIM and never got into Facebook chat. It's actually a bummer for me, I loved chatting and the chat apps all kinda died off.
While I use a lot of FB Chat, I feel like the thing I use most like old AIM is Steam's chat. I chat randomly with a lot of people, some of which I don't know in real life.
It's crazy how much more complex it feels like communication has become. Back then basically all of your RL friends were either on AIM or not online at all. If you were a more tech/internet savvy person you probably also had ICQ for many of the people you met online and you might hang out in a couple of IRC channels. Today even if you aren't a digital social butterfly you probably have half a dozen different messaging/chat apps.
and it didnt even matter what network others were on, you just installed adium/pidgin/etc which could connect to all of the networks and abstract it away. today everything is completely walled off
I find it interesting you think the fall of Facebook-like platforms will affect Snapchat. As far as I'm aware Snapchat is popular for the same reason WhatsApp is - you send your updates to people you choose too, not some huge acquaintance-list or group of 'followers'.
Although it may have the same fate, AIM suffers from being computer only when it was in its prime. (maybe always) Anywhere I go I can socialize on whatsapp, or snapchat or whatever app.
I think you're touching on something here. Around the launch of the iPhone (and rise of Androids) many companies that got on the mobile-first bandwagon survived, and those that assumed web-only to be the best way really quickly died.
I don't think it was purely Facebook that killed MySpace and AIM, it's that they didn't get on phones quickly enough.
What made Whatsapp popular is that it worked just like SMS. Users are identified by phone numbers, so you can use your existing contact list.
However unlike SMS it didn't cost eye-watering amounts of money to use. Whatsapp never became popular in the USA because most people on pay-monthly contracts received large SMS allowances.
In the rest of the world, networks felt threatened by SMS -- if texts were too cheap then people would stop making phone calls! So it was universally crippled with ridiculous limits and fees. Even in 2018 it costs me a lot of money to send an SMS, and I don't know anybody under the age of 35 who uses it.
Why would anyone use AIM when our primary device is a cellphone these days? iMessage, What’s App, and other apps provide more functionality that is right at my finger tips at all times.
AIM and AOL were popular when we didn’t have texts or even cellphones. It wasn’t so common to give kids cellphones early in those days.
AIM was available as an app on iOS App Store's launch day on July 11, 2008. But push notifications for the iOS Platform didn't arrive until June 2009, so it was cumbersome -- daresay awful: messages only arrived when it was in the foreground [1].
Within a few months of push notifications first being available, WhatsApp was released for iOS, in November 2009.
This! I used FB for about a month and it reminded me of going to a Frat party in college where it was loud and very hard to communicate directly with people.
Chat apps are more like a visit at the coffee shop.
And after AIM my friends migrated to Gchat. The real mystery to me is why Google let Gchat wither on the vine. For many years it was my primary way of chatting with friends. (Now it's iMessage.)
Google Talk appearing inside Gmail, and Facebook opening up to more than just .edu addresses both happened in 2006. Keep in mind, Gmail was still invite-only until 2007.
In 2008 Facebook introduced Facebook Chat, and ever since then Google has acted [1] to try to challenge Facebook for social networking -- and this caused Google's communication offerings to alternatingly be neglected or leveraged for that cause [2]. Google didn't win.
Facebook exploded in the desktop web era. For today's kids desktops are for work, not socialising except when playing games online using Skype or Discord.
My girls are 13 and 14 and just created Facebook pages purely for updates on activities for a club. Everything else is in WhatsApp, WeChat (for Chinese relatives), Instagram, etc. Lightweight special purpose apps linked to tight groups of friends. The last generation wanted a one-stop solution to their social media needs. The new generation see that as some unwieldy monolithic platform for mums and dads.
Having said that, if there is a place of a monolithic platform like that maybe facebook is it. They can probably still stay relevant and useful, they're just not the be-all and end-all of social media they appeared to be. I hope.
Instagram seems like it would be the most resilient. It's so low level, with few gimmicks, you just share a piece of media. Humans will want to share with each other until the end of time. Snap and fb have interesting features but it's less clear whether they will always remain popular.
What are some shifts that can take Instagram down? The main one I can think of is decentralizion and owning/controlling your own data, but that would hit almost everything.
Do you think the shift away from these sites will be structural/technological (again, like if the world generally moves towards a different business model than data collection), or do you think these sites will be hit for specific reasons?
> Do you think the shift away from these sites will be structural/technological (again, like if the world generally moves towards a different business model than data collection), or do you think these sites will be hit for specific reasons?
No. I think it will be completely cultural. In other word, exactly what happened with MySpace, AIM, etc. Young people will want something new, different, novel. The underlying technology and functionality will, in all likelihood, be exactly the same.
- Dark UX patterns (withholding notifications to encourage addiction)
- Unpredictable sorting behaviour (if I have a post with better engagement than another post in the Top Posts for a given area, why doesn't my post beat theirs?)
- Unpredictable behaviour generally. My posts get only 20% the engagement they did 18 months ago.
I'm wondering if the following scenario could push Whatsapp out of its leading position. Imagine a platform (Android or iOS) to develop an API for a "message center" where all information from email, chat, system messages come together. This message center will then become the main place for users to read their messages. At this point, the user doesn't really care which app the messages came from, and Whatsapp has lost grip on its leading position.
Honestly, if iMessage were to ever come to Android, it might have the best shot. No one understands google's offerings anymore, whereas Apple has already a strong presence.
Young people were on AIM st one point, but it seemed like the generation before was on ICQ and the generation after was on MSN messenger. Then the generation after that was probably on Skype, then hangouts/FB messenger after that? And now Snapchat?
I was a weirdo making stuff before I researched if it already existed back in 2004.
I made a site for musicians to post music, sell or distribute it merch, control previews, analytics, yadayada all on an calpop p4 server when my then gf told me about Myspace.
I moved on to other things when she showed me FB and I learned I couldn't sign up without a .edu, they lost me there.
I registered in 2006 for a blind date, uploaded a pic of a salad bowl, never spelled my name correctly or used my real dob (I'm a melinnial and knew in 94 compartmentalize my online behavior) and doubled with an ethos crafted around consistency, I've done alright for my generation.
The content stays the same, but the medium changes. Most content is either written word, voice (like radio) or video (television -> youtube). The medium that content lives in will always change.
I think positioning a product that would allow you to move your content between the different mediums (i.e. myspace to facebook to ??? or blogger -> wordpress -> Medium) would be huge. Something like IFTTT but on steroids.
Take a look at the W3 recommendation "ActivityPub" [1] which is a shred protocol for communicating not only across different servers of a social network but also across different social networks. I think using an interoperable protocol is better than having to move your content to another walled garden every few years.
NJ USA used AIM. I still never found anything better than the search feature they used to have. I would search for "female", "North jersey", and I think even age.... then send a message to everyone that popped up.
If I remember correctly you had to allow yourself to be searched for like that, essentially it functioned as a really cool way to search for people interested in talking and for the most part it worked. There was this really awesome young lady I met on there once and to this day I consider it a loss that we lost touch. She was big into Python programming and I learned a lot from her.
I remember having to reload my Nokia brick phone with like 100 text messages. That was painful and just filled in the gaps until I could get back to AIM on a PC.
If Facebook goes away, MySpace is nowhere near an adequate analogy. Facebook has 2.2 billion monthly active users. In other words, there are more active monthly Facebook users in the world than:
* Roman Catholics (1.2 billion)
* People living in China (1.4 billion)
* Total speakers of English, the most widely-spoken language in the world (1.4 billion)
* Muslims (1.8 billion)
* Viewers of the 2014 FIFA World Cup final (1 billion)
* iPhones ever manufactured (1.2 billion; also, the top two most-used apps are Facebook and Facebook Messenger)
* Windows users (1.4 billion)
* Inhabitants of the European Union (508 million)
* Cats (600 million)
* Firearms (875 million)
* Africans (1 billion)
Now, obviously whether or not you use Facebook isn't as important to your identity or as hard to change as your religion or where you live, but it's also not something that's just going to suddenly disappear without some sort of replacement, or else if it does, it will be the first time in human history that two billion people all decided at once to give up on something.
That 75m might not look so bad if you compare it to the total number of internet users at the time. But it's still probably an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook.
Probably half of that are fake profiles, profiles made by people for commercial purposes or bots. If you make fake account and you will start wandering in the endless facebook steppes, you will notice that many of them are one post account that advertise or play games. The best ones are those with pictures of known or lesser known models to collect friends and sell such an account for dollars later. I have reported several hundred of such profiles, of which maybe 1/20 have been blocked rest is fine because moderators can't see difference between real life person and photo from google images in 20 accounts in a row...
2.2 billion isn't the total number of accounts, it's the number of "monthly active users"--and Facebook would probably be in much hotter water than they are now if they cooked the books on that number.
This don't change my comment still many of them are fakes. I know people who have 5-6 accounts active at one time playing different games with 500+ friends on it. Many of those "friends" also are fakes, some even with the same profile picture of "real person" with fake data but I have nothing against FB, every medium is abused.
It's just interesting that not a single research was done on this topic that I know about. :)
Game limits, not wanting to share private account with some random folks used in games or for commercial purposes aka selling account later on and I can tell that this business is booming! :)
Person has a public karma of 59, using an IP to a direct VPS that allows bitcoin for payment. It has multiple business names in the DNS and points to a naked .ogg file. Yeah I wouldn't click on that either.
I've heard that you count as a monthly active user if you sign into something else using your FB account. If true that would inflate the number quite a bit
Advertisers in any medium probably have to accept that some people aren't paying any attention to the ad. High-viewership events cost more to advertise on, but a significant portion of the audience is going to wander off at any given commercial break.
"Facebook" is more like a suite than a single service. For example, I use Facebook almost every day, but I never look at my newsfeed, and virtually never post to it. I basically only log in for 2 specific private groups that use it for scheduling.
It would be easy to replace, if that group of friends/colleagues decided to use something else for collaboration. We don't need to replace all 100 services they offer. We need only a couple.
I suspect that's how Facebook is going to end. We're not all going to stop going to "facebook.com" overnight. Someone will steal away chat (Twitter?), someone will steal away photos (Flickr?), someone will steal away events, and so on, until it's been picked clean.
If you assume 1 MOD account means one person 30% of the world's population uses Facebook. At one point 23% of the world's population belonged to the British empire [0]. Facebook falling would be similar to the British empire decline.
That's because the World Cup because it ended, not because we all decided that we didn't want to watch soccer any longer. That analogy would work if we all quit Facebook because Facebook shut off its servers. It doesn't work for people voluntarily quitting Facebook.
Mmm... 2.2B MAU. When you think about how they counted them, probably they used HyperLogLog. In usual configuration, it has a 0.7 - 1% error. Basically a medium-sized country...
Or the number of users that any startup founder will die for...
It is impressive what Facebook managed to build, but, although the number is staggering, the relative amount of people that switched from horses to cars or to electricity for illumination from candles and burning oil is even bigger... People do not voluntarily stop using something, but the force of innovation is huge. Very few Fortune 500 companies even existed 100 years ago, and the pace of disruption is accelerating...
we usually overestimate short term trends and under estimate long term trends.
Who would have thought Apple would be the most valuable company when the iPhone came out. Nokia was the king back then. Kids nowadays don’t even know what Nokia is.
Will it actually be "the first time in human history that two billion people all decided at once to give up on something"? How many users of leaded gasoline were there? I guess that wasn't "all at once", though.
MySpace didn't suddenly disappear, it fizzled out over a long time. Also, the relevant metric isn't the total number of users -- this is a massive parallellisable process -- it's the average network-effect lock-in per user. For one thing, networks are fairly segmented around geographies. And that's what makes the MySpace analogy relevant: people thought it would never go away because it had very strong network effects, everybody you care about is on it.
Facebooks demise doesn't require the coordinated action of two billion people. Network effects work the other way as well: when people do leave, they make the experience a little worse for all their contacts, lowering the bar for them to leave as well.
Sure, the number of users probably extends the long tail of the demise, indeed I expect Facebook to hang around as at least a low-engagement contact book/messenger platform for a long time. Their demise will look more like Yahoo than MySpace, but the MySpace story does tell us that network effects aren't magical spells that can never be broken, and network effects are Facebooks most important moat.
I'm curious about how many people were on the internet at Myspace's peak though.
Seems a lot of the online world is on Facebook now, but technology does make it very easy to switch platforms at a moment's notice when the new thing comes out. As you've stated, it's MUCH harder to change a core part of one's identity.
Facebook's metric probably counts me as a user because once or twice a month I watch a video that happens to be on Facebook. Be careful about taking that number too seriously.
you also have to consider how many people actual connected to the internet back then... most connected with a desktop computer. nowadays, everyone with a phone has the internet in their hand.
This is a perfect summation of how people feel about Google and Amazon, or Sears in the 1920s and Kodak in the 1960s. And it's a perfect reminder that monopolies are much more fleeting than people realize.
I have a sneaking suspicion that with every dissolved monopoly future monopolies get stronger. They must religiously case study all prior cases and strengthen the right areas.
I don't think that's true. We speak of AppAmaGooBook now (i.e. an oligopoly of 4 major players), while in the 1990s it was "Wintel" (2 players, one a hardware monopoly and one a software monopoly) and in the 60s it was "IBM and the 7 dwarfs" (i.e. IBM was the only relevant computer company). IBM controlled 70 percent of the whole computer market, around what Google controls of the Search market now, which is a small subfield of computation. And these all pale in comparison to 19th century monopolies, like Standard Oil (90% of U.S. refining capacity in 1880) or American Tobacco (100% of the tobacco market in 1900).
I think the reason they seem bigger is because the economy is bigger, and so in dollar and output terms they are bigger. But that also means there are more niches and greater complexity, and it becomes harder to sustain a monopoly against multiple competitive threats over time. While the playbook of monopoly managers has expanded since 1900, the number of adversaries they face has expanded faster.
Ironically it took me a moment to realize that Book was Facebook :-)
This is a great comment to put things in perspective. It’s easy to forget that Google has only had “dominance” for about a decade. They have diversified quite a lot though (autonomous vehicles, the mobile market etc). And Apple literally have enough cash stockpiled to takeover countries if they choose to wage war. It’s all pretty fleeting though.
The difficult comparison here is that we have never seen any company monopolize so much of media as we have facebook and google do world wide. The only comparable example I see is possibly disney, and I wouldn't be surprised to see facebook and google succeeding far into the future due to well targeted acquisitions.
Additionally, it's important to remember that all of the largest american oil companies today are descendants of standard oil, and I imagine such could very well be likely if any of these other big monopolies were broken up today when it comes to the internet.
The point is that when declaring "this time it's different", you have to explain away all the many, many things that are exactly the same, and not just point out the one thing that's a little different.
The Facebook/CA scandal broke in traditional media, and traditional media hasn't exactly been downplaying the possibility of Facebook-powered "fake news" influencing of elections, either. I think that tells you everything you need to know about the purported monopolisation of the media by Facebook.
that's what Frank Herbert theorized with CHOAM Company in Dune. Eventually one company managed everything from food stuffs to military kit to intergalactic space engine fuel. I think they even set the contracts for the pilot's guild, and do orbital surveillance, so it's not just goods but services.
Seems realistic to me, when capitalism stops working as envisaged by its own founder, because the mechanism of the state gets bought out by the capitalists, and isn't enforcing anti-trust laws or competition.
The other examples weren't really monopolies. AT&T was a monopoly, but there were other camera and film manufactures even in the Kodak days. Just because they're the biggest doesn't make them a monopoly.
Google is probably the closest to a modern day monopoly in many (but not all) markets. The competitors like DDG, Bing and Yahoo make up such a small percentage of the market share that Google has become the de-facto standard for search, unless you're in places like China and Russia.
I'm using the term loosely too, because technically a Monopoly is when only a single supplier exists on the market. Typically monopolies start out as government agencies (AT&T, Telstra, TelecomNZ .. telecos are great examples of this btw) but the rest are really relative monopolies. There are other suppliers, but they pale in market percentage (Microsoft was declared a monopoly by many EU courts even when people were still using macos).
Natural monopolies are like that. Artificial ones are either Govenrment enterprises or Government enforced taking what was initially natural one and making it into law, and tend to overstay their welcome because of that.
Monopolies are good as long as they can be gone in the flip of a hat if people decide so.
Social platforms are much "easier" to rebuild and actually gain market share with (because they're to a large extent self-contained, you "just" need the users).
No company is really competing with Google on search. There's DuckDuckGo and all that, which is a nice idea, but their results are just nowhere near as good as Google's in most cases.
"There's DuckDuckGo and all that, which is a nice idea, but their results are just nowhere near as good as Google's in most cases."
I don't agree with that assessment. Occasionally I'll need to stick a !g at the front of my search, but usually DDG does a good enough job with the results (and when it fails, Google usually fails, too).
I've found I needed to adjust how I search slightly, after switching to DDG. Mostly for local results, because they don't know where I am! Which is a feature as far as I'm concerned.
your evaluation is different than the GP’s. your DDG results are usually “good enough” so you don’t check google until they aren’t.
since i’ve gone back to using google as primary i’ve found the results are better.
anyway you are both speaking anecdotally but arguing as if you speak for the general case. at the risk of making the same mistake, i bet that in the general case google is better.
I didn't intend to imply that I'm speaking for the general case, especially for something as inherently individual as the relevance of search results :) From my perspective, and in my experience, DDG is indeed usually good enough; it presents the information I seek, and when it doesn't, Google usually doesn't, either. That's entirely dependent on my search habits, and will likely be a very different experience for someone else with one's own very different search habits.
Either way, seems like betting on a general case is a shaky proposition given the difficulty of defining a "general" case for a search engine.
Recently I have switched all my browsers to DDG and found myself almost never having to fallback to Google. It became pretty good, sometimes even better due to Google trying too hard to interpret what I meant.
Sometimes the synonym searching doesn't make a lot of sense -- you can search for "mens socks" and it'll give you "womens socks," with "womens" highlighted. You can fix this with quoting terms, but how many people know to do that?
I'm not so sure that FB's place will be so fleeting. I think they will lose their place at the same rate that Microsoft lost theirs. They will still be around in 15 years later, just not quite as relevant.
Microsoft is coming back in a big way though. Sure, it may not have the dominance it used to have but they've learned from the problems of the Ballmer era. Satya Nadella seems to be a huge proponent of meeting customers where they are and it's paying off in a huge way.
If Facebook learns to listen to their customers the way Microsoft has (as opposed to trying to tell them what they want) then they could recover. But with Facebook, users are starting to have large issues with its core business model, and to listen to customers and adopt the changes they want, it would cost them too much and would eventually disappear as so many others have before them.
Really? They still have corporate desktops and cheap skanky laptops (for some reason), but azure is not a challange to AWS, they aren't in the media business, the home market is being chipped away, where are they doing better now then they were 12 months ago?
Since 12 months ago profits have doubled, shares are up 19%, revenue is up 13%, cloud revenue is up 11%, cash reserves are up, oh, and PC-related revenue is down a whopping 2%.
Actually the latest quarter shows cloud revenue up 98% (I assume year-on-year), so Azure is doing pretty well.
FB is different because they buy competitors. Between WhatsApp and Instagram they've managed to insulate themselves against game changing competitors. So even if traditional FB dies Facebook the company will live on.
-Microsoft's old motto. This is exactly how they previously did business and still do, frankly.
Facebook's core business functions purely on user data though and that's how they use the rest of their businesses to make money. If traditional Facebook dies their other businesses won't be far behind without significant change that doesn't disrupt revenue.
"Fleeting" - in that another more permanent and more powerful monopoly supersedes them, such as Wordstar, then Wordperfect, then Word. Eventually the roulette ball comes to rest, particularly if the laws that countervail market power aren't enforced.
The roulette ball is still moving. Word is getting hammered by lightweight, online, mobile-available, collaboration-first tools, such as Google Docs and Quip.
Facebook was started in, what, 2004? It went mainstream on most college campuses in 2005. By 2006, MySpace was a place for the non-college educated; the older generation never used it, the college-aged users had switched (if they ever used it at all), and the younger generation either weren't on either, or were on MySpace but aspired to be on Facebook by the time they got to college.
There were legions of people who couldn't handle how downright ugly and terrible MySpace pages were, and simply never used it, even when it was the only option.
The idea that MySpace had a "monopoly" on anything, 2 years after Facebook went mainstream, is absurd. It never had anything like the market penetration FB has, even among those online and interested in social media, let alone the overall user numbers that FB has.
I was slow to join Facebook and I signed up in late 2006, several months before this article was written. The author here was just out of touch.
In September 2006 Facebook opened to everybody. At the end of the year, Facebook had 12 million active users, roughly doubling their number from 2005. By April 2007 they had 20 million users. By the end of the year they had 50 million. The author wrote this piece right in the middle of Facebook's meteoric growth and they didn't even notice.
The press had the same blindness over AOL Time Warner. To 13-year-old me, that merger sounded like a dinosaur from the Cretaceous combining with a dinosaur from the Jurassic, but for some reason all the papers thought AOL was the business of the future. They had no sense for what was cool.
It’s quite typically Guardian in that it manages to combine preachy, pseudo-scholarly, smug and wrong. But it’s way down the scale on hypocritical outrage to be a global maxima.
Can you explain stereotypes of the Guardian? The article is pretty over the top, but as an American I am not intimately familiar with them like, say, the Journal.
The Guardian is generally a mildly left-ish, middle-class-ish kind of paper. I would say in the UK it tends to conjure up an image of a well-meaning, slightly naïve, hand-wringing sort of readership, though of course it’s base is likely wider than that.
What particularly makes it stand out is it has quite an open comments policy; it quite often publishes fairly ludicrous points of view from a variety of commentators. I’d say on the whole that’s quite a good thing, though it does tend to result in some absolutely preposterous headlines from time to time.
Somewhat ironically given today’s political climate there was a minor scandal in the mid 90s when a prominent Guardian journalist was found to have accepted money from the KGB [1]
To a Telegraph reader the Guardian looks very left wing (in british political terms) but it’s probably only about as left as Tony Blair, which is to say that it’s basically centerist.
Although usually mild-left, they sometimes publish articles which are pretty crazy-left.
Here's an example[1]: You have a university professor citing research saying that the 'acting white' phenomenon exists in integrated schools, plus her own black students tell her they suffered from the 'acting white' stigma. Yet she somehow concludes that belief in the phenomenon is not just wrong but 'intellectually dishonest'.
> You have a university professor citing research saying that the 'acting white' phenomenon exists in integrated schools
...in the course of arguing that it's image as a feature of all-black communities is false. (Integrated is very different from all-black.)
> plus her own black students tell her they suffered from the 'acting white' stigma.
What sdoes is relate that the “bullying essay” is a well-known archetype of freshman comp essay, and the common subtype of that type of essay she sees is one conforming to a particular form of the “acting white” narrative.
Freshman comp essays from people who don't have stories they want to share reflecting the author inserting themselves into narratives from the common folklore of their community instead of actual personal experience is a rather well-known phenomenon.
> It's also sometimes referred to as The Grauniad, as it has traditionally had the worst reputation of a UK newspaper for copy-editing.
This was mostly undeserved. Print newspapers have several printings each day, mostly with the same content. The early editions are less polished than the later ones. Because the Guardian was printed in Manchester, while the other major national papers were based in London, readers in the south would get the early mistake-ridden printing.
The Guardian is rather unique in British newspapers in that it is owned by a trust. The rest of the British press is pretty right wing and is usually pushing the line of it's owners pretty strongly. Brexit for example was disproportionately supported in the press. The Guardian often seems left-ish in comparison, but it would have been hard to imagine another paper publish the Snowden papers. They have been publishing stories about the links between CA/Facebook/Brexit/Trump for over a year.
I used to subscribe to The Times (owned by Murdoch) but canceled after it's complete failure to challenge The Snoopers Charter[0]
"Brexit for example was disproportionately supported in the press"
Not according to the most comprehensive research [0]. This is a Remain meme.
" eight endorsed Leave: the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Sunday Express, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Times, and the Spectator. Eight supported Remain: The Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the FT, the Independent, the Mail on Sunday, the Mirror, and the New Statesman. Buzzfeed, HuffPo UK, Vice UK, and the Star (Daily and Sunday) did not formally endorse
either side, though the editorial perspective of the first three lent towards Remain, while the Star strongly favoured Leave."
Facebook != Palo Alto. The real estate in Palo Alto is propped up by far more than just Facebook. Mainly by massive amounts of venture capital flowing into startups.
At 2B users, it's hard to imagine doing a faceplant as fast as MySpace did. But I can definitely see a situation where it is hollowed out in the short term, meaning that 'high value' demographics flee to some other service. If it's bad enough, it could drop their advertising revenue enough to hobble them and precipitate a slow decline.
The "face-planting" could be regional. It's possible North American and European users might drop off swiftly while FB continues to grow in other parts of the world.
This reads like a comedy now, the flow of logic faultless, reminding us how fleeting these technologies are along with the anxieties we have about them taking over the world.
I wonder if an open source platform and protocol for messaging and contacts would have the potential to confront all the Facebooks, Whatsapps, etc
I am not talking about broadcasting / sharing. Just messaging and contacts (a listing where you can publish your latest contact data).
So many people say that they would leave FB but they have no other means to contact many of their friends on their list. So is there anyone who can offer a solution for just this?
Email is a protocol that works very good. So is sms. Platform and provider independend. - Something as successful as email with a listing of people and auto-updating contacts list (details only shown to someone that I allow).
There are a few projects that try and address this. The issue for 99% of the population is that you need to run it yourself (read run a server) or know someone who does.
You could go the p2p route (I'm thinking Torrents + magnet links kind of decentralised) so you just run a client and connect to the network.
Of course this then leads to the problem that users would have to backup their data (which they don't) and be online to participate with no real capacity for offline comms. Which leads back to needing to running a server of some kind.
Do monopolies of this scale are ever overthrown? MS in desktop OS, Intel in desktop and server chips. IBM is still a monopoly in mainframe market(not sure). It's just that new powerful industry in terms of mobile, internet services, social media have come up.
American Tobacco, Bell, Standard Oil and too some extent MSFT are all gone because of govt. actions.
FB has already successfully maneuvered industry change to mobile. It bought in its way into mobile apps and communication platforms. So FB won't be replaced by mastodon or Signal, but by an industry level shift which FB misses and can't buy in.
Does Diaspora still exist? (Answer is "yes")
Does anyone use it? Asking because I have no idea, but the idea looks cool.
[http://DiasporaFoundation.org]
It's funny, I used to use MySpace to bookmark bands I liked or may like. Now I use FB for the mainly same thing, as well as keeping up on other interests like skating and surfing. Oh, how cyclical the world is...
Was this article supposed to be a joke at the time it was written? Facebook had been open to the public for a year at that point and it was clear that Myspace didn't even have a monopoly left to lose.
Diaspora has been around for a while; I remember joining about 6-7 years ago, but it suffered from the problem all new social networking sites suffer from -- nobody I knew or wanted to follow was there, so I abandoned it.
I've since come to the conclusion that I'm not really a social networking type of person.
If you don't like the UI there is Pleroma ( https://pleroma.social/ ) which is compatible with the Fediverse so you can interact with Mastodon instances.
I don't think we'll see another breakout until someone comes up with a new killer use case. "Basically Twitter but with no users" and "Basically Facebook but with no users" is not a compelling proposition.
It was never even a consideration. Social network are still a relatively new phenomenon for the world and few people thought seriously about their implications. In retrospect, more of use should have thought about how our data is bing used. Hopefully we can learn from our mistakes.
"With aboutface.com you can easily set up a directory for your organization in your own private location right on this Web site. If you prefer, we also offer a traditional, Windows-based product, AboutFace/Windows version 3.9, which you can use on your LAN.
aboutface.com is a Web-based service that functions as a directory for your organization. aboutface.com maintains photographs and biographies of your employees and takes the place of your old-fashioned printed phone lists, address lists, facebooks, etc. aboutface.com is available for low monthly rates and resides in a secure, private location on our servers.
We are the premier producer of electronic facebooks (online "names and faces" directories) for the business and academic communities."
I remember signing up in 2005 because I was taking German for my future trip to the World Cup (pointless as 95%+ will reply in English (edit), unlike those darn French!).
As it grew in size and popularity, the limited nature of it really made those that couldn't get in jealous. I remember all the kids screaming about the feed when it went live, how they'd leave. Then once it opened to everyone, they'd leave then.
WhatsApp seems to be the new kid's playground, so facebook buying it was a smart move.
There will be another. Hell, maybe I'll make it :-)
Dropped out of my (still better IMO) Telegram style program after worrying about N$A fallout.
The per university rollout of Facebook was genius. Actually keeping people from signing up until there is critical mass is, I suspect, crucial for building a social network.
There's nothing to discourage me from coming back quite like the feeling of signing up and finding out I'm the only one I know.
Commonality isn't always a roadblock to trademarking.
Windows and Apple are two other examples. It definitely restricts the scope of the mark, but websites were new in all industries, just like software was when Microsoft and Apple got their TMs.
Depends on your criteria for common, but it was certainly not unique. We had them at the non-Harvard university I attended and IIRC, it was colloquially called the "freshman face book".
They may not have much network effect, but I am quite confident that a lot of people buy the same manufacturer's car (or, hell, even the latest model of the same vehicle) every time they are in the market for a new car. Like, there are people who just buy a new Camry every four or five years.
If a $MAKE hasn't given you any problems, then you may well go back to it. If I were to buy a small car I'd buy a nissan micra -- I've owned two and both were really good.
However if $MAKE has given you problems, then you're likely to avoid it.
Of course there is a limit, but I feel like many shoppers do not seriously compare very many cars and sometimes brand loyalty trumps even the most negative experiences.
Either way, it means that Ford's position is pretty secure for a while.
many years ago, i had bet a friend that facebook would begin to decline in 2016. seems like i might have been off by two years. shucks
my bet was predicated on (1) people realizing the insidiousness of facebook, (2) the cool kids moving on to other platforms, and (3) mobile communications being omnipresent and eclipsing facebook (solid but not earth-shatteringly original reasons).
i'd attribute the demises of friendster and myspace primarily to #2 (with underlying product and marketing issues exacerbating it). but more than that was required to topple the massive network effects moat that facebook built. notice that it wasn't another social network (e.g., snapchat) that will have overtaken it but rather a confluence of other issues striking in concert (some self-inflicted).
Well, their widespread acceptability seems to be declining, as indicated by all these articles and quittings lately. Presumably widespread quitting of users would only come after, not before, some high profile upsets and mistakes.
And # of Advertisers and Revenue are proportional to how people think they're doing, not how they're actually doing, and would presumably only decline after a mass exodus.
i didn't make a strong claim that they are declining right now, but sentiment really seems to have taken a dive in the past few weeks, which could be a leading indicator of a decline.
(and your linked article is 9 months old talking about even older data so is not really relevant to the current state of affairs.)
I am completely convinced that FB will go the way of the dodo in the next decade, and it will take Snapchat and Instagram with it.