The social networks are like TV shows. They have a limited run. This is because it's entertainment, rather than tech.
Hollywood knows how this works, and they do not incorporate or IPO each individual TV show: instead they incorporate studios, that produce many different shows. Facebook is forced into this model too by reality, thus they bought Instagram, and tried to buy Snapchat. Those shows will also have a limited lifetime. Facebook will fail, because they do not recognize that they are in the entertainment business and they will cling to their one single show.
Someone needs to create a non-gaming software studio, that is tooled to make or to buy Instagrams for less than $1bn, knowing that they constantly need to retire the old shows and come up with the new ones.
You haven't provided any evidence that social networks in fact behave like TV shows.
The fact that one effect of social networks is to entertain people, and the fact that TV shows also have the effect of entertaining people, does not imply social networks are therefore bound to the rules/generalizations of TV shows.
That's pretty lame, argonaut. OP made an interesting analogy which I haven't seen before. He is setting the stage for further discussion. It's not like he ended his post with "QED."
Why is my point lame? The funny thing is that I responded precisely because I thought the OP's analogy was lame. I think it's only slightly removed from the usual "X social network is a fad" comment. Saying "Facebook will fail [because of the above]" is closer to QED than it is to setting the stage for further discussion.
This is not a trial or Wikipedia, one doesn't have to display evidence to share thoughts.
Please retort, provide counter-arguments or share your point.
The fact that one effect of social networks is to entertain people, and the fact that TV shows also have the effect of entertaining people, does not imply social networks are therefore bound to the rules/generalizations of TV shows.
You are arguing over the logic of an analogy, but what about sharing your point of view?
The OP made a statement but didn't provide any reasons as to why the statement is true. If you want to get technical about it, it's not my burden to retort something unsubstantiated.
I didn't assert that he or she didn't make an argument. I'm just saying the argument has no evidence or logical reasoning for it. Otherwise it's just speculation.
It seems like you're implying entertainment : limited run :: tech : not limited run. But that can't be right, because plenty of bits of tech have had limited runs, and there are bits of entertainment that are centuries old and still going. So could you clarify what you meant in your first paragraph?
I think that it would be more correct to say the social networks that have failed have not had the kind of classical design that could make them long-term parts of society, unlike, say, Shakespeare. But then, that is a fairly trivial observation too. Of course social networks that have failed have lacked the qualities that could make them not fail.
some tech has short run; and some entertainment has long runs (like ER TV show), but these are exceptions to the rule. Your search engine, Google has enjoyed a 14 year run, and is going strong. Windows OS has enjoyed a nearly 30 years run so far.
Kardashians on the other hand, enjoyed only a couple of years of popularity. This is what I mean.
Facebook has to evolve from being entertainment, to being technology. For example, look at Steam. It's a platform for distributing games. It's not going away any time soon. They work to improve the platform. They're going to open the platform up, so everyone can publish games. They're not simply a website that tries to sell you games.
Facebook needs to do the same if they want to survive. They need to stop being a social networking site, and be a social networking platform, that others build from. Facebook the site, should be one site of many using that platform. I should be able to develop a social networking site built from the Facebook platform, to compete with the Facebook site. Then when my site gets old, or the Facebook site gets old, new sites emerge, and build off the data from the existing platform. This way, it lives on. However, this will never happen, and Facebook will die.
That's an interesting analogy. However, I don't think that Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc are as easy to replicate as a TV show. Empirically, social products are exceptionally difficult to 'manufacture' and are usually the result of side projects and early stage startups.
Big hit TV shows are extraordinarily rare. Most fail; most fail quickly.
You can just about list on one hand every decade, the number of shows that last more than five years and bring in big ratings (audience / users). Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Roseanne, Mash, etc.
Hit TV shows are extraordinarily difficult to 'manufacture.' Out of thousands proposed and scripted by writers, one or two per year are hits if you're lucky. Out of those, a few survive five or seven years.
And that's all true even with the huge built-in audiences that companies such as NBC, ABC, CBS have that show up every night waiting to watch content. There aren't 100,000 other apps to compete with, just a few major deliverers of TV shows / networks; and the failure rate is still that high.
How do you think of Reddit in that framework? Reddit itself is explicitly a tool for creating, basically, community sites. How closely does it fit with your vision of a tool for crafting social networks? When do you predict it will fail?
> Sure, reddit has a community aspect, but it's really just a side dish compared to the content (links).
Maybe if you stick to the default subreddits that are composed entirely of memes.
The main reason that I use Reddit is for the discussion; I highly, highly doubt that you're going to find /r/askscience-calibre conversations on Facebook.
OTOH, subreddits like IAMA, AskScience and ELI5 are fairly significant parts of reddit. In fact, most of the top items in /all are memes that refer back to things that happen within Reddit, so I'm not sure the links to external websites are nearly as important as the community these days.
I worked for one of those "non-gaming software studio" and I am doubtful that this approach is the right one.
My experience is unfortunately anecdotal, but I'd say the energy you have in an early stage startup that is focused on building a good product is difficult to replicate, and without this, I believe competing against the Instagrams and the Facebooks is no easy task.
In its emergent form, yes. They need to start branding it: Medium [brought to you by Obvious]. More importantly, the key is to reduce the cost of purchasing or coding the next Instagram, as the commenter above noted.
Rather than rescuing your data, start publishing to your own platform and syndicating content out to whichever silos become popular.
This is the idea behind 'Indie Web' [1] and even though it is harder at first it is the simplest long-term solution. Domain names are cheap, hosting is cheap, and publishing isn't very difficult.
'Rescue' might be the wrong word here. A simple transfer, or updated 'address' form would seem more likely. Like when you want to delete a WP blog, it gives you several options for your content/blog (though most imply not owning it anymore).
I suppose this highlights the problem with a third-party owned and run system - you don't own your data! You are at the mercy of the third party for data that you put there and believe are owed.
Being for grandparents makes Facebook stable - at least in markets like the US with greying demographics. Heck, the people who were on it when it was student-oriented invite-only and hook-up driven are pushing 30 these days.
And that means they''re headed into life phases where they buy high profit goods and services like stroller systems and financial services. And old folks like grandpa? Well he's buying pharmaceuticals and taking cruises.
>I’m a business man and a family man. I love collecting chairs and getting drunk on the weekends. I want to introduce all of these aspects to my network...Combining your identities, creates a synergy and depth to your online persona.
Isn't this what Google+ has been trying to do from the start?
All this talk of "products" seems to miss the root problem with these social networks - they aren't networks. They are centralized databases that are designed that way not for the benefit of the users but as means of simplifying the profit model. Because they all share that same inherent design, they will all share the same fate.
The next generation in social networks will be something that is actually a network, until then all that's really going on is "rearranging deckchairs on the titanic."
A see a huge problem with the shared profit thing, with virtual worthless points like Likes you already have all sorts of retardness from people dying to pull a hit stunt to profile for a dead baby mummy, can you imagine if the users were paid for the attention their posts get? "A thousand likes or this kitty goes in the microwave". I think the nice new place to be would be one where you are not the product, doesn't matter if you are being paid or not, or if you are paying or not.
Anyone else feel that no one knows this "next-generation social network" better than, well, the next generation? I'm talking about today's young teens and little kids. Facebook took off during our time because we were the cool demographic back then. It was everything we wanted and needed that MySpace and Friendster failed to give. I think it's difficult for us to comprehend what the next-gen social network will be because we think differently. We didn't exactly grow up with touch-screen devices and mobile internet, for one.
I agree with this. I'm not sure that the next-big-thing is even imaginable yet. I don't think it will be just a product or service like Facebook. I think it will involve a complete paradigm shift, and perhaps some tech that we haven't yet envisioned.
This article makes some interesting points and, perhaps, the next generation will incorporate some of these ideas. But, it feels like a modest iteration over the current state of affairs. And, much like the current landscape (FB, Vine, Instagram, SnapChat, etc), the article feels fragmented. It consists of a lot of related ideas, but there's no real cohesion or unifying theme.
Is it a coincidence that most of the partners (YC in particular) aren't teens (or in that potential demographic)? If you're good enough, you can spot a hot/interesting product. You raise a very valid point, however, and that's part of the reason why the internet is so rad -- it's ever-evolving.
I think the obvious answer here is there won't be a next-gen social network that is Facebook. Instead there will be several social networks that are laser focused on being the best for X.
Ala Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Vine, Pinterest, Path, OKCupid, Github, etc...
The new social network should share profits with users who create the content. In fact, it shall only take a small commission, and offer the option to convert the commission to a fixed monthly sum in exchange for the technology services it provides.
An interesting idea, but won't that encourage spam?
Yeah, variations of this have been tried repeatedly and failed. Refer.ly is one of the most recent that comes to mind.
The whole point of social networks is to be social with people you enjoy. As soon as you provide financial incentive, then things get skewed.
Maybe there's a model or variation under which this could work. But, simply allowing people to monetize interactions, the stuff they share, etc. will pervert the incentive and devalue the platform.
As soon as you provide financial incentive, then things get skewed.
I would go so far as to say that what is required is something that discourages financial gain. Money perverts social relationships. Long before the internet people were saying things like "never lend money to a friend because you won't be friends any more." The green card lawyers were among the first to abuse the net for financial gain and that model of spam has gone on to be an enormous drag on the utility of the net.
If there's a 10% commission to earn spam would be the least of their problems. No one would buy anything expensive any longer without making sure their spouse or a friend recommends it to them.
Between my Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, iMessage, SMS, and phone, and whatever else I'm forgetting... I'm all socialed out. Do I, or for that matter anyone else, really need another way to communicate with social circles?
Do I personally want another one? Well not me, but other people might.
Does anyone need another one? I highly highly doubt it.
The next paradigm shift in social networks is the distribution of the social graph. Ten years ago, this would seem unacceptable because of privacy issues. Today, we know people have learned to embrace the fact that once you publish it, it's public, so they do not care about privacy online.
A truly open social graph, distributed so it isn't controlled by a single entity, is a game changer. It lowers the barriers to vertical oriented social networks, which wouldn't have the barrier of reconstructing every user's social graph.
The trick is the transition. It's like we are stuck in a local maximum. Once we move to distributed social graphs we are obviously better, but I can't imagine how this transition would occur, other than Facebook itself having an amazingly long term vision and going all in with this vision. There's a lot to be gained from being the industry leader for 50 years instead of monopolist for 10...
I rather view the internet as a party where everyone is invited. The social networks are the loud attention seekers yelling "look at how cool we are". People are wow'd and sucked in. The problem is, it's a keg party and the only way they've been able to monetize is to sell ads at their party. Once the ads go up, the venue is no longer cool and the party moves to a new venue.
Of course, there are other types of parties and my prediction is that quality is going to trump quantity in future networks. Who wants a keg party that sells advertising when the quality of the people I meet at a cocktail party could lead to new opportunities without advertising?
The next wave will build on social and actually generate real value. Therefore, it'll have a new name and it won't be Social 2.0 It'll be something entirely new that addresses that value.
This article surprisingly misses the fact that I want to communicate with my grandparents. Sure, I don't want them in the same circle as my friends, but communication there is important too.
There are many social networks who aren't tailored to the older generation, so there's a bit of a problem there: My mom has no interest in Twitter. That's why I like attempts like togethera.com, I think there are plenty of alternatives for "the social network we think we want", but not enough for the ones we actually would find useful. "Faster horse", etc.
>This article surprisingly misses the fact that I want to communicate with my grandparents. Sure, I don't want them in the same circle as my friends, but communication there is important too.
Which is beside the point he makes.
You can always communicate with your grantparents on FB.
Plus, on the scheme he presents, you can just make a personal profile for communication with your extended family and grandparents.
As long as you can target your content to the various different types of people in your life, why does it matter if they are all in one place? You don't stop using your phone because your parents have a phone too. What Facebook needs is a good, reliable way to keep your conversations with your friends away from your conversations with your parents. Who wants to have to go to a bunch of different places to talk to the people you need to talk to?
The problem is Facebook seems to want to do exactly the opposite: open up your life to as many people as possible. It's also shown that it wants to monetize your social connections i.e. beacon and endorsed ads. If Facebook was a service like a phone, then I'd have no issue with it, but it has shown that it wants to play a bigger and more opinionated part of people's lives.
We are building a platform network around this idea. we believe that a social network is defined by the places were you are regularly (sport club, work, bar). Our plattform lets you communicate with the people at those places even if you are at a rock concert.
Isn't closed to your social circle? OP wants something that helps you expand to other social circles. Arrive to a new city none of your friends are in, and have an app tell you what is around you based on your interests and posts.
Yeah, true. OP expresses his concern over Facebook's ad revenue system, the clutter it creates and how it spoils his entire Social Network experience. Path, on the other hand gives a user a rich and a personal experience. I guess that's the trade-off there. For getting recommendations based on location and interests, I use Circle(discovercircle.com). Works fine for me. :-)
You just described the social network I'm working on now, and like a couple of other posters have mentioned, our entire userbase is teens and college aged people at the moment.
Nothing new - it sounds like the german schuelerVZ (facebook for pupils).
I always wonder what happens to a user base of such a website once it gets older and crosses the magic line - in this example, if maximum of the user distribution gets older than 30.
Hollywood knows how this works, and they do not incorporate or IPO each individual TV show: instead they incorporate studios, that produce many different shows. Facebook is forced into this model too by reality, thus they bought Instagram, and tried to buy Snapchat. Those shows will also have a limited lifetime. Facebook will fail, because they do not recognize that they are in the entertainment business and they will cling to their one single show.
Someone needs to create a non-gaming software studio, that is tooled to make or to buy Instagrams for less than $1bn, knowing that they constantly need to retire the old shows and come up with the new ones.