Every time a social startup becomes too successful, it creates the need for more social startups. E.g. there would have been no reason for snapchat to exist if not as a reaction against the success of Facebook. It seems unlikely that social will ever reach a steady state, and so I doubt we'll have have a ten year period without a new 100B+ social startup.

Social is an evergreen human need, but the exact flavor that resonates with the zeitgeist at any given time will likely change faster than any given company can adapt.

Snapchat benefits from survivor bias, and until its financials are out in the open, we won't know whether it's a legitimate cash-flowing operation or yet another project sustained by large liquidity injections until the music stops.

There are a number of dynamics at play.

One is the Yogi Berra / Evaporative Cooling effect. "Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded", or the more precise construction given at Bumblebee Labs. High-value members leave, the network is dominated by lower-value providers. As the Tilly-Odlyzko refutation of Metcalf's Law notes, not all contributors are equal. Network value doesn't rise with n^2, but n * log(n). I'd add on top of that a network cost function which is effectively constant per member, so we end up with V = n * log(n) - kn, where k is some constant cost. At the point where k > log(n), additional members lose* you value. This happens through spammers, griefers, trolls, scammers, idiots, and other forms of annoyance.

(A corollary: to grow your network, you've got to minimise that per-user cost -- it matters more than value ultimately.)

http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-...

There's accumulated technical debt. Existing systems have an ever-growing component of klugey old software that's got to be maintained. Possibly even and Amdahl's Law (or Baumaul's Law) component where that comes to dominate constraints -- it's so baked in you cannot easily extricate it, and all the easily extricated stuff's been eliminated.

There's the falling costs of information technology. About an order of magnitude every ten years. Facebook cost about 1/10 what Google did for equivalent hardware functionality, Facebook's competition will cost about 1/10 what it did, and 1/100th what Google did. Much of that is eaten up through the Jevons Paradox -- making a thing cheaper creates an induced demand for more use. But there still seems to be a tendency for computing hardware to be ever-more democratised. The current challenges aren't in system capabilities, but in interfaces, and the compromises those present. It's the keyboard and screen size I need now, and the device I'm using now (a tablet and highly defective Logitech Bluetooth keyboard) is almost _all_ keyboard and screen. The latest generation of Apple laptops are essentially an iPhone slipped inside a keyboard/display case, with all the empty space filled with flat, form-filling batteries.

The larger challenges are relevance, the social graph, the interest graph, truth, and quality content. Filling a datastream with crap 24/7/365 is easy. Filling it with genuinely relevant information, and avoiding abuse, harder.

I disagree, I think VR is going to be the next big thing but it will take a few generations of HW and SW to get there. VR mixed with real time video of your surrounding (augmented reality) is a new environment for brand new applications but it needs to reach the state where it is hidden in your average looking glasses to be really mainstream.

I would say, based solely on this statement, that VR is not the next big thing according to your own narrative (as the next big thing will likely be within one to two hardware generations).

These all had significant excitement and commercial success. The Brewster stereoscope was introduced to great fanfare at the Victorian Exhibition of 1850. It eventually sold 250,000 units. The ViewMaster has sold millions of viewers and 1.5 billion reels. (In WWII, the US military even bought 100k viewers for training.) All of these products are now marginal or extinct. Novelty aside, none of them is much better than the 2D alternative.

I'm not saying VR will never work. But I am saying that anybody inclined to make a big financial bet on VR should think very hard about this history. Generations of smart entrepreneurs and their customers have mistaken 3D's cool factor for lasting utility. In the end, everybody has gotten bored, shrugged, and gone back to 2D. This is true even when, as with 3D movies, the hassle is as small as putting on a pair of glasses, something millions of people otherwise do daily.

You might want to check out this thread to get some idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12046398

People also thought stereoscopic photos were the "new medium going forward", so linking to somebody amazed about a novel experience doesn't change my mind. It's another example of exactly how I think people shouldn't make this decision.

What will make the difference for me is not yet another person being amazed, but people using VR gear on a daily basis for something after the novelty wears off. At this point I have asked an awful lot of VR partisans for examples of that sort of usage, but so far nobody has offered anything substantial.

I hope one day it will get there, but until it does, I personally wouldn't bet much on it.

not to have a lack of vision, but nobody is promoting a better solution right now

Wait for the first e-ink cheap as paper. That and solar cells cheap as paper. Then things will get interesting.

Why? Display cost isn't a big deal any more. Display size is getting insane. I was in Costco yesterday. 70-inch TVs for $1500. TV sets are now outgrowing standard houses.

Solar cells already cost less than their installation cost as a retrofit on houses.

Not, "there's my workstation and the giant LCD monitor is no longer a status symbol" but more like "well of course the wall next to my bed is a star trek style all-walls-are-misterhouse interface to everything"

Not, "there's my solar panels which cost more than the roof they're sitting on although they are quite profitable" but more like "well of course every surface exposed to the sun charges a battery or sells electricity to the local power co-op".

Think of the weird stuff that'll happen culturally. Campaigns to save the topsoil because people who want $$$ more than they want grass lawns will kill their lawn by shading it with cells. Endless arguments on HN about if you're better off selling solar power to buy hot pockets or using the sunlight directly to grow lettuce. All battery powered rechargeable devices will charge when sitting in the sun, so you'll have interesting social patterns about not stepping on or running over people's devices. When sunlight equals money you'll have people chopping down their neighbors trees illegally on a regular basis. They'll be a short term "vegas" effect where every surface of the world will have to be covered with gaudy advertisements. People will wear clothes that are computer display fabric and download new patterns more often than they wash, probably. And they'll be viruses that eat your electricity until you pay them off, throw spam on your epaper, and upload nude texture packs to your ecloth clothing (although, who knows, maybe people will intentionally like that?)

I'm old enough to have lived thru long distance voice communication going from "too expensive for regular folks per minute" to too cheap to meter. I can see something coming for at least low power electricity and computer display tech.

Also, imagine putting high-dpi full-colour displays on all your walls and ceilings, so that one can change wallpaper at the flick of a button, or place ‘paintings’ wherever one wants.

Backlit LCDs would lead to uncomfortable living; rooms would be warm, there would barely be any shade in the room, and power costs (even if solar cells are cheap as paper) would probably be high.

e-ink wins on the power usage front, and is reflective, rather than backlit.

No. Not going to happen. The wall, the plain white-ish surface, has been a thing for thousands of years. I own a nearly infinite number of nails, glues and other fasteners to affix thing to my white walls yet change the appearance of my walls ... well basically never. It would be moderately cool to see a wall capable of HD television, but the physics of ever doing, in comparison to a dedicated device, will never be practical. There will always be a place for paint.

I for one would love having every inch of my interior walls e-ink, changeable on a whim, and would likely pay $1 to download a new wallpaper/design on a regular basis.

People will pay extra for wallpaper that doesn't move.

(Whether or not you think that counts as 'relevant' is another thing.)

Edit: The problem with 3D movies/TV is that there's always that one person who gets headaches or eye strain from them, and so you can't use the 3D function. Then by the time you're finally watching something on your own, you just watch the 2D version by habit.

If the desire for a 3D TV experience can be overcome by casual viewing habits, then that's a sign to me that the value delivered is quite low.

That certainly matches my experience. I found 3D movies a pleasant novelty, but after a couple times it wasn't something I would pay extra for. That's in sharp contrast with, say, color. Or theater-quality sound, which I went out of the way to get for my home setup and make sure is properly working whenever I watch something I care about.

I think this sums it up nicely. I'll sometimes pay the couple of dollars extra if I'm already seeing an action film at the cinema, because I think it does add some value, but it's in no way indispensable.

Of course things like automatic subways, industrial robots and vision processing already exists and are probably more of an evolving hing than the next big thing.

How about ad-supported, one-or-two-person operations with good traffic? Is advertising still a viable revenue model for something like that?

You are correct. AR (augmented reality) is the future, and it's going to be huge. Look at microsoft's hololens, and use your imagination as to what magic leap is cooking up. Once the hardware is there, it'll be like the second coming of the iphone.

I think interior design will change a lot in the next ten years.

The latest megainvestment cycle was largely inspired by facebook (and enabled by zero interest rates).

It's interesting what happens to Facebook. The founders all cashed out. But the main product is dead. Will Instagram/WhatsApp maintain its market cap, or will it implode? Will it buy Snapchat and continue to buying anything new that is fashionable? I am actually curious about the opinions here.

Facebook has more users than ever before. It continues to add users at a health pace.

Moreover, the people who quit Facebook actually tend to be older, not younger.

If you want to continue to asset the eminent collapse of Facebook, please bring data.

[0] http://www.statista.com/statistics/408971/number-of-us-faceb...

Here are some other hearsay links:

http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/27/facebooks-active-users-are...

"Facebook’s definition of an active user is now so broad that you can do very little on the site and still be counted within its figures. Secondly, and just as importantly, GlobalWebIndex’s data shows that, while Facebook’s active user numbers are undergoing consistent declines, its member and visitor numbers are either holding steady or increasing. Clearly, we have a large group of Facebookers who are checking the site but not actually contributing to it"

Or even:

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=facebook&cmpt=q&tz=E...

(note the countries below the chart). Contrast this with

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F0nbtf_n

The VentureBeat article is obviously anecdotal and relying on poor data.

Doom and gloom all you want, but the only real numbers we have (from Facebook) directly contradict your view. If you're trying to force the data to fit your hypothesis, it's usually a sign that your hypothesis is wrong.

Snapchat is starting from a base of 0. So of course it has increased as people have even found out about it. They didn't have any desktop users to transition to mobile.

You're being totally irrational.

Companies like Paypal are begging to be disrupted, we've all seen the problems of Too Big to Fail banks and the havoc they've unleashed. Globally remittances charge a fortune in fees, just to name another area that seems ripe for disruption by cryptocurrencies. Even big banks are expermenting with private blockchains for asset transfer and verification.

Smart contracts are in a phase somewhat similar to the dotcom 1999-2000 boom/bust, some great ideas and some awful missteps like the DAO disaster recently. Even Bitcoin had it's Mt Gox moment, which didn't kill Bitcoin. Eventually the diamonds in the rough will become apparent.

Disclosure: ethereum investor/miner

It seems to have a magical ability to turn doubters into enthusiasts.

Absolutely not. I feel like I have a pair of very low resolution monitors strapped to my face. The whole rig needs to be an order of magnitude lighter and and order of magnitude higher resolution before it actually approaches "virtual reality". It's pretty impossible with the current generation of devices to forget that the device is there, which I see as a key requirement of credible virtual reality.

The few people who liked it but had to stop, had issues with nausea.

I think we are maybe a generation or two away from a vr explosion.