Re:What will kill Facebook?
by michaelchisari on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @02:11PM
(#2009361)
Distributed social networking will "kill" Facebook. Except that it won't kill it, but will make it less relevant.
The same thing will happen to Facebook as happened to AOL. It will exist for years to come, but it will be forced to open it's walls, and play nice with an open standard. Younger users will leave for more niche communities which interconnect, and older users will stay with what they're used to.
In other words, in 5 years, Facebook will be for old people. As well as other people who prefer familiarity.
The history of the internet is a history of decentralization winning over walled gardens. There are too many projects pushing for decentralized protocols and solutions. Appleseed, GNU Social, OneSocialWeb, etc. I think the last time I checked the spreadsheet, there was over 50 such projects. Some of us are pretty close to providing a viable alternative, too.
But most importantly, we're not going to give up. No matter how much people may think of Facebook as infallible, we're never going to throw up our arms and say "oh well, I guess we can't win". We're going to keep pushing and refining our solutions and building momentum until we win.
The Next Big Social Network tm may even run our software on the back end, and people will move to a distributed system without even realizing it.
The same thing will happen to Facebook as happened to AOL. It will exist for years to come, but it will be forced to open it's walls, and play nice with an open standard. Younger users will leave for more niche communities which interconnect, and older users will stay with what they're used to.
In other words, in 5 years, Facebook will be for old people. As well as other people who prefer familiarity.
The history of the internet is a history of decentralization winning over walled gardens. There are too many projects pushing for decentralized protocols and solutions. Appleseed, GNU Social, OneSocialWeb, etc. I think the last time I checked the spreadsheet, there was over 50 such projects. Some of us are pretty close to providing a viable alternative, too.
But most importantly, we're not going to give up. No matter how much people may think of Facebook as infallible, we're never going to throw up our arms and say "oh well, I guess we can't win". We're going to keep pushing and refining our solutions and building momentum until we win.
The Next Big Social Network tm may even run our software on the back end, and people will move to a distributed system without even realizing it.