1. Your social games argument is really weak. People may play some social games with random people, but they mostly like, comment, have common friends, appear in photos together, go to weddings with real friends.
2. Your second argument is contradictory to your observation that Like buttons across the web are mainly cookie carriers.
And as far as lying is concerned, people don't just lie virtually with Like buttons and comments. They also lie by spending real dollars. Even if you know squat about F1 racing, buying that red Ferrari jacket is a pretty good social signal to send to your equally clueless peers.
I'd be really surprised if Facebook is not working on a mobile OS or browser. They will probably also make a big direct play in ecommerce (see Karma purchase).
Predicting failure for Facebook purely based on its desktop web app ads seems shortsighted and naive.
He wasn't actually predicting failure for Facebook. The last thing he wrote was "It's still valuable but it will take some time to figure out exactly how much it's worth". Don't be so quick to lash out at people because they're not sitting in front of you or because you didn't read the comment.
>"1. Your social games argument is really weak. People may play some social games with random people, but they mostly like, comment, have common friends, appear in photos together, go to weddings with real friends."
Go to any message board for a popular Facebook game; it will be filled with people saying "add me!". This is one of Facebook's dirty little secrets. These games have warped the network. They already had to reign the games in by cutting off viral channels. 1 BB registered users? I've seen people with 20 active accounts trying to "game" the games.
Again, this doesn't make FB worthless, just worth less.
1) Facebook might be able to distinguish real friends from social gaming faux friends, but advertisers aren't given that information today. They can target "friends of friends" of people who appear to have a particular target interest (for example), but that's going to have a lot of noise because of the social noise.
2) When people lie by spending real dollars, at least their spending real money. And they are actually saying something. Maybe it's not "I'm a race car driver", but "I'm interested in race cars". The trick is understanding what it is they are saying.
2. Your second argument is contradictory to your observation that Like buttons across the web are mainly cookie carriers.
And as far as lying is concerned, people don't just lie virtually with Like buttons and comments. They also lie by spending real dollars. Even if you know squat about F1 racing, buying that red Ferrari jacket is a pretty good social signal to send to your equally clueless peers.
I'd be really surprised if Facebook is not working on a mobile OS or browser. They will probably also make a big direct play in ecommerce (see Karma purchase).
Predicting failure for Facebook purely based on its desktop web app ads seems shortsighted and naive.