Sometimes The Oniongets things exactly right.
I beleive we will have numerous social sharing sites that will ultimately have the ability to connect with eachother so that the choice of site is not so important. Much like AOL’s instant messaging app form years ago.
lol…They talked about some show called “Six Feet Under” and a band called “The Shins”.
There are two things that makes me unsure that Facebook will die off any time soon while reading this thread: One is the MySpace comparison; the only ones I knew who used MySpace were musicians trying to get their music available. Of course it was bigger than that, but personally I and most people I knew didn’t care for it at all; and most people didn’t notice it going down the drain. Facebook, on the other hand, has grown to something “everybody” use, and more like Microsoft Office than MySpace, if “everybody” uses it, it is very difficult to replace. Google+ might be the new cool thing some people use (like Star Office if you will), but whether it will actually replace Facebook is another thing (in the foreseeable future of course, as far as that goes in these days). The other thing is that Google hasn’t always been very successful outside of the search engine (google “google flops”) – while Gmail and Chrome is doing alright it is far from what “everybody” uses, and those two are among the most succesfull projects they’ve had as far as I know.
Who knows? I’m just not as sure as most of the above posters seem that Facebook due to some law of IT technology evolution is doomed to vanish under the weight of the Google competition; and this Facebook-Skype marriage might strengthen its position.
I don’t know and I don’t care much, just my thoughts on the issue.
Social networks have a scale problem.
They’re only useful if the important people in your life are also on them. Facebook’s scale gives it the advantage of already containing a lot of the people that you care to keep track of. I don’t think that advantage can be easily unseated.
Therefore, I think facebook is here for the long haul.
Google has shown that it can threaten companies who were previously thought to be unassailable. It may not dominate, but it can take marketshare where people thought there was no more share to be had.
Microsoft Office? Google Docs.
MapQuest? Google Maps.
iPhone and Blackberry? Android.
IE and Firefox? Chrome.
The losses it has incurred (Wave, Buzz, numerous other small projects) are the cost of pushing for regular, constant innovation. You win some, you lose some. Google’s losses have been relatively small while its wins have transformed the internet.
At the very least, I’m reasonably certain Facebook and Google+ will settle into being similarly-sized services that serve different demographics. The thing is, social networks don’t like to be split. You can’t be social if you’re here and your buddies are over there. Facebook may survive and Google+ may fade away, or Google+ may hit a critical point where its regular buildup of subscribers begins to shoot up rapidly as more and more people make the jump.
What heavy investment? Getting on Facebook required no investment in new technology, no learning curve, no software licensing fee. All I did was click on a website, sign up, and look for friends. A few of my friends have already bailed on Facebook because of privacy issues. If enough followed suit, or if I decided privacy concerns were big enough, I could walk away from it without a second glance.
I came to post the exact same sentiment.
Twitter is faster than Google at disseminating searchable news–oftentimes instantly as the news event is happening from someone actually there. If anything, anywhere, happens in the world, you can find out about it without waiting for an article or webpage to get published, crawled, and show up on Google’s search results. That was how I first found out about the earthquake in Japan; a friend of a friend tweeted that his bus was shaking.
Essentially, Twitter is a news desk with millions of on-site reporters.
If I had to bet, I’d say Twitter will outlive Facebook, Google+, and all the successors of their ilk.
I don’t know that it’ll become dated, per se… Maybe it’ll just be “it’s complicated”.
And I still don’t really get exactly what Twitter is. The only fundamental differences I can see between it and, say, a message board is its limitations.
But none of these products have made the competition “dated” (except for MapQuest, I guess, of which I’ve never heard), which was the question. IE and Office is still much much bigger than Google Docs and Chrome, for instance.
Facebook is losing it’s popularity right now (maybe not stat-wise)… Twitter is what it is right now and honestly it will die out too. Computers will eventual return to a game of solitaire, people will get sick of computers and posting their every move for their friends/strangers to know, people will want their privacy back. So there is no need to fear, one day you will see kids outside playing once again.
Technology gets old, even if nothing new has replaced it.
Take the computers away and watch how life slows down… Living only once, the slower the better. Something like that anyway, I don’t support what I wrote (i’d be a hypocrite ((i am))) but it’s just another way to view things.
Sure why not? Happened to AOL, happened to MySpace. And other sites are more popular in other countries already. Not sure what the next big thing will be. Maybe Google plus, maybe not. Diaspora was primed to be the next big thing, but it looks like it might never make it out of beta. I really wish there was some kind of app that could post to multiple sites at once.