Comments on: Facebook: the next Google?

By: Fabrice Grinda: Musings of an Entrepreneur » Looking back at 2007, looking forward to 2008

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:52:58 +0000

[...] Facebook: the next Google? [...]

By: Federico

Federico — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:01:56 +0000

Fabrice
I think that the whole facebook team (p.thiel, vcs, zuckerberg,etc) have the vision of facebook as a complete website that includes social networking, search engine, classifieds, and many other things. Everything combined.
Maybe they want to become the Microsoft of the Internet or something similar.
Social Networking could be only the start of something really big…

By: Advertising on Facebook and MySpace: the “Grinda Hypothesis” | Musings of an Entrepreneur

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 22:23:00 +0000

[...] a recent post, Facebook: the next Google?, I expressed skepticism on the value of Facebook given the nature of advertising [...]

By: Franck Poisson

Franck Poisson — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 11:47:01 +0000

What a pity we did not met at the CTIA, I was there for 2 weeks. any chance to come over Paris soon ?

By: Sean Tierney

Sean Tierney — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 23:57:00 +0000

Fabrice, just getting caught up on my blog reading and noticed you were in SF recently. I’m going to be up there from Nov 9th-Dec 9th. If you’re around we should grab coffee.

As far as your assessment of Facebook – i noticed you posted this before they announced OpenSocial. How has that announcement altered your take? I agree FB has the best user experience right now for any social network. They could potentially buy one of the OpenSocial participants like Hi5 and essentially get inside recon by proxy to make an informed decision about participation since it sounds like they’re being intentionally left out of the loop on some stuff. My gut is that if the OpenSocial initiative truly delivers we should expect to see the same trajectory that took place with IM clients – there used to be pockets of friends on each but eventually products like Trillian and Adium became the IM interface that allowed you to forget which service you were using and communicate with your friends regardless of which they use. The social networking fabric will become irrelevant at some point and the interesting real estate will be the dashboard that unifies things and gives you one place to manage your digital identity and connections across your blog / sn’s / forums / lists/ etc. more here-> http://www.scrollinondubs.com/2007/11/04/opensocial-facebook-orbitz-swa/

sean

By: Marie

Marie — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 03:39:47 +0000

I could not agree more with David. Facebook is over hyped.

But what “scares” me the most is how “open” is this plateform and how many widgets and api (along with people looking forward to “feed” from facebook data under the name of “HYPE & AJAX fake cooliness…”

People don’t often realize how much information is fed on Facebook by third parties (there is so much layers of preferences and settings of who can acess what and on Facebook) that it’s a bit tricky for some users to understand the reality of what they think is their “secured privacy”. The next thing you know you are listed on Rapleaf, Zoominfos etc. but there is more to it.

However I believe that what classmates.com never achieved, Facebook did : finding long lost schools friends.

I think of Facebook as an Adult Pannini Stickers Book.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1010/p09s01-coop.htm

By: Fred

Fred — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:11:32 +0000

I’d like to add the tangential thought that google ads can be viewed as annoyances also. I get the impression from some users that most of the clickage has precious little value at best and at worst is out and out fraud. They’ve all shut down their usage of AdWords. My supposition is that google ad rates for AdWords at some point will fall due to this. However it might be tough to separate from the obvious dilution thats likely to occur due to the simple demand function google has created for websites. Really…after all I get what I want as a result of the google searches. Their page rating system does a pretty good job. The relevancy of the AdWords ads are in the vast majority of cases less than the search results. Ergo optimize your search result positioning. Sound familiar?

By: David

David — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 01:31:50 +0000

I think Facebook is massively overhyped. I’m sure that I am like many others who only signed because they received an invitation from someone, and then discovered that they needed to become a member to see what the invitation was about. I wonder how many of their new users hang around for very long.

Having read your post I spent some more time looking at what Facebook has to offer … and are still unimpressed. The interface is not attractive and I found most of the postings in the groups I checked out to be useless. And as for seeing what my friends are doing via the news feed – I don’t really need to know that XXX is now a friend of XXX or how someone is feeling today.

Give me LinkedIn for business social networking any day, and I’ll stay in touch with my friends through email, phone and catching up.

Like Microsoft before and Google today, Facebook will have its moment in the sun and then people will move onto the next thing. It may retain a certain audience and make money, but it just won’t be sexy anymore.

By: Cem Sertoglu

Cem Sertoglu — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:28:19 +0000

I am a huge fan of facebook but i think their achilles heel may be what i am seeing in Turkey right now. facebok has grown in turkey like no site’s ever grown – it is now the 3rd hightest traffic site in the country. however, it lacks one of its most critical traits that has made it what it is: networks. everyone in turkey is pretty much a member of the same huge “turkey” network. this may have an impact on the trust factor that has distinguished fb from the other SNs.

By: Minter

Minter — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:15:26 +0000

One of the interesting angles for Facebook to take would be to merge with a Netvibes-type platform. I see FB becoming the new way to communicate, providing a host of different ways to communicate… ultimately replacing hotmail/gmail for example. And if it could aggregate other sites, then it could be the one place/portal you go for everything…

To Khanan: apparently at the CMA Digital Marketing Conference, Mark Murphy, VP Media Sales of Facebook, made some interesting comments:

The company is looking to find a work around to allow it to administer the applications, not the person…

He also said that FB adherents expect FB to remain free because it is surrounded by advertising.

FB is averaging 350,000 new users every day; it just crossed 50 million.