Most regular people I know enjoy Facebook, and are accustomed to how it works.
I'm curious about where you see the demand?
I enjoy Facebook. I just see opportunity for something next-generation. Also, I disagree with the notion that Facebook will be fine forever as the dominant player in social networking. They are better off with more competition. Gates and Jobs are quoted saying that Microsoft and Apple's existence helped each other become better companies [1] [2], and helped get more useful computers into people's homes and businesses faster.
Gmail offers an export feature of its emails and contacts in formats that are importable by other tools.
Facebook could do this for your friends list. They don't because they've never had competition that provides such a feature.
When internet explorer became free for everyone, Netscape was forced to become free for everyone.
> I'm curious about where you see the demand?
Demand doesn't make or break a new product. There wasn't demand for cars or iPods before they came out.
That's the best I can explain it. If you don't agree that's fine.
I liked your examples of cars or iPods. I agree that as specific solutions there was not demand before the existed, however there was clearly demand for personal transportation and portable music players.
What is the equivalent for portability?
I think that makes my point further. There is demand for social networks
I'll concede that portability may or may not be the next big thing for social networks. Let's speak more generally.
People want better social networks. They want to connect with friends more easily. To be honest, my Facebook feed is improving bit by bit, but it's still not as good or interesting as it could be. My perception is that Facebook is 100% focused on improving the feed, but without competition, we'll never have anyone thinking outside the Facebook box. Mark has the final say on certain strategies, and I think his vision is great, but his company would be even greater if there were another Mark.
Jobs and Gates fed off each other. Their efforts to market computers to the world helped each other's businesses grow faster than they would've grown alone. By borrowing each other's ideas, we got better products. And their employees were constantly on their toes. Google and Facebook are amazing companies and provide more services to their employees today than Apple and MS in the 90s.
However, the same energy isn't there to improve their core products. Google could be much better at machine translation across all languages, which is part of search, for example. In the future, I think they will be. Without another real competitor, they're free to work on whatever side projects please their employees. The core products miss out on advancements that may otherwise arrive sooner.
All of this is fine and I think tech will thrive regardless. The reason I write all that is I believe in churning up ideas from the bottom that might not otherwise find support. I don't think I'm the only one with this idea.
Perhaps this is just a recent revelation for me, and talking about it helps form my thoughts. And maybe I'm wrong about FB. I don't use Snapchat or Instagram etc. My sense is that FB is far ahead.
I sometimes like to think of it as not so much a benefit of competition as a risk for monopoly holders.
For sure. It is also a risk for state-favored companies that hold monopolies inside authoritarian regimes. Their growth will probably be limited to their own country. Without local competition, it may be difficult to make the leap to global competitiveness. This is very theoretical as I have no experience. But I think you can draw some parallels to the way politicians cut their teeth. They begin at the local level and work their way up.
Yeah. This doesn't seem so bad to me. Search has improved tremendously over the years. Things are easier to find. Google is making more content discoverable.
Advertising is arguably the biggest revenue generator for internet tools. Everyone can use things that are free, and companies want to reach everyone. So long as Google is the most frequently visited site in the world, they remain in control of the biggest revenue stream.
One could argue Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat etc. are making up ground by giving people access to more readers than the likes of Blogger or WordPress. These isolated worlds feel a little like AOL's heydays to me. There ought to be an easy way to publish somewhere, then take your content and network and move to another service if you want. At the moment, it's possible but not easy.
I think anyone who makes such an open social network, with easily exportable contacts and content, would find a lot of success. But it's a really hard problem to solve and I understand why this doesn't exist yet.