Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?

Re:Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsof... by timdellinger on Thursday April 22, 2010 @11:54AM (#1285425)

I suppose Mark Cuban thinks Facebook is going to turn into a 1991 AOL: a one-stop shop for all things internet, a lens through which you experience everything. This is the same Mark Cuban who said that Twitter will replace Google for searching... I think he's a little out of touch with how people use these services.

Facebook is attempting to expand in scope because they're ambitious, but at the end of the day, they're just a social networking site. As a matter of fact, they're really just a template for people who don't want to go to the trouble of designing their own webpage. Which is a great service, but that's all it is. Oh, and it's easy to link to other people's web pages.

Facebook and social networking are exciting today the same way EBay was in 2000: the medium is the message. You went to EBay because it was novel and fun. Soon enough, Facebook will have reached it's potential the way EBay has.

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Re:Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsof... by roc on Thursday April 22, 2010 @12:48PM (#1285602)

> I suppose Mark Cuban thinks Facebook is going to turn into a 1991 AOL: a one-stop shop for all things internet, a lens through which you experience everything.

For everyone I know that actually uses Facebook [1], this is essentially true. FB users don't do things on the net. They do things on FB. Excursions to sites/services outside of Facebook are the exception.

I've been calling it "AOL all-over-again" for a few years now. (I'm behind the curve, I'm sure; I don't do social networks).

[1] Subtracting out those who use it for professional reasons.

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Re:Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsof... by SanjayU on Thursday April 22, 2010 @12:56PM (#1285631)

Gotta agree on this one.

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Re:Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsof... by ekanes on Thursday April 22, 2010 @12:08PM (#1285474)

They're pretty different actually. eBay is a website that stopped evolving, whereas Facebook is a platform that's evolving at a decent pace without signs of slowing down.

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Re:Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsof... by jamesjyu on Thursday April 22, 2010 @01:08PM (#1285673)

The difference between Facebook and eBay is the overwhelming success of the FB platform. Yesterday, Mark said that it only took a fraction of the time to get to 100MM connect users than it did for normal FB users. They are betting big again on the platform by basically giving publishers even more power with social plugins and the graph api.

You are trivializing FB by saying it's just a templating engine for people who don't want to design their own webpage. FB is much more than that, and they will be even more interesting if they prove their graph api idea.

In this way, FB is more like a Google than an eBay.

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