Re:What will kill Facebook?
by malandrew on Wednesday December 15, 2010 @07:19PM
(#2010527)
To drive the point further. This is a vertical that has a LOT of unexplored potential.
The truth is that people spend most of their time in verticals.
Statistics focus on the aggregate amount of time the average American spends on Facebook, 7 hours per month.
But the truth is that what is most interesting is the 20-40 hours a month someone spends on the verticals that matter most to them.
For us it's nerd/tech stuff, so we hang out here for hours on end. The number of hours I spend on here blows the amount of time I spend on Facebook away. The same goes for Quora.
For companies that make money from advertising, the highest click-through-rates come from the most engaged audiences and highly targeted advertising.
The truth is that no one has perfected many verticals. StackOverflow is one of the the best examples of startups that have done an excellent job in a vertical, but there is still much more potential there too.
Regarding search verticals, the search algorithms for code are going to look really really different when compared to those for natural language that Google is after.
Imagine a code search engine where I can save preferences for the languages I want to search in. This engine then indexes lots of different places like Github, Gitorious, Freshmeat, SourceForge, etc.
If you are part of the community that cares about code, you all of a sudden stop going to Google as the default for all code searches. Of course, Google could then become a portal to your search, but at that point the the barriers to entry for other companies to aggregate vertical search engines becomes much lower and Google's dominance is no longer guaranteed.
The truth is that people spend most of their time in verticals.
Statistics focus on the aggregate amount of time the average American spends on Facebook, 7 hours per month.
But the truth is that what is most interesting is the 20-40 hours a month someone spends on the verticals that matter most to them.
For us it's nerd/tech stuff, so we hang out here for hours on end. The number of hours I spend on here blows the amount of time I spend on Facebook away. The same goes for Quora.
For companies that make money from advertising, the highest click-through-rates come from the most engaged audiences and highly targeted advertising.
The truth is that no one has perfected many verticals. StackOverflow is one of the the best examples of startups that have done an excellent job in a vertical, but there is still much more potential there too.
Regarding search verticals, the search algorithms for code are going to look really really different when compared to those for natural language that Google is after.
Imagine a code search engine where I can save preferences for the languages I want to search in. This engine then indexes lots of different places like Github, Gitorious, Freshmeat, SourceForge, etc.
If you are part of the community that cares about code, you all of a sudden stop going to Google as the default for all code searches. Of course, Google could then become a portal to your search, but at that point the the barriers to entry for other companies to aggregate vertical search engines becomes much lower and Google's dominance is no longer guaranteed.