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Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?

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Re: Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?

#21

Post by tokenadult »

coreyrecvlohe wrote: post #3

Though I'm not ready to call facebook a fad, or undercut it's significance, I will go out on a limb here and say the way the website works was pretty novel for a while, but it's lacking in innovation. The ability to check your friends status? Ok, pretty cool. Connect with old HS and college friends? Ok, that's sort of cool too. But more and more I find myself withdrawing from actually participating in the micro of th…

As I have related in another HN thread, I actually enjoy the friend-mash-up aspect of Facebook. I am more than twice as old as the median HN participation age (I'm pretty sure), and I have lived in more than one country, so I have friends from various eras of my life and various places. Now on Facebook I post a lot of links (some of which I learn about here on HN, with a hat tip in gratitude) and friends comment about those links, with all sorts of interesting discussions with diverse viewpoints. Friends of mine who have never, ever met one another are good virtual friends as they meet up in my discussion threads. There are even FB friends of my FB friends who have asked me to become directly FB-friended by me (a request I have honored) so that they can get in on all the link postings. This has been a fun and unexpected aspect of FB for me. I block ads on Facebook and all other websites, and I use Facebook Purity to block other FB annoyances. I never, ever play FB games or do anything on FB that directly costs me money. I like the way I can free-ride on FB and enjoy a service monetized by people who have less intellectual ways of having fun.

Re: Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?

#22

Post by jamesjyu »

timdellinger wrote: post #7

I suppose Mark Cuban thinks Facebook is going to turn into a 1991 AOL: a one-stop shop for all things internet, a lens through which you experience everything. This is the same Mark Cuban who said that Twitter will replace Google for searching... I think he's a little out of touch with how people use these services. Facebook is attempting to expand in scope because they're ambitious, but at the end of the day, they'r…

The difference between Facebook and eBay is the overwhelming success of the FB platform. Yesterday, Mark said that it only took a fraction of the time to get to 100MM connect users than it did for normal FB users. They are betting big again on the platform by basically giving publishers even more power with social plugins and the graph api.

You are trivializing FB by saying it's just a templating engine for people who don't want to design their own webpage. FB is much more than that, and they will be even more interesting if they prove their graph api idea.

In this way, FB is more like a Google than an eBay.

Re: Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?

#25

Post by sunchild »

timcederman wrote: post #16
sunchild wrote: post #4

"If you are like most, you kill more time hopping around on Facebook than you do exploring the Net." Uhhh...not even remotely applicable to me, unless by "the Net" he is referring to a Sandra Bullock movie.

The article did say "like most", not "like all".

I think it's safe to say more people click "the Net" than Facebook all day.

Re: Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?

#26

Post by loup-vaillant »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #8
loup-vaillant wrote: post #6

> Facebook knows more than all of us like to admit about its users. They have our personal information […] People will eventually realize what a dystopia this is. So my guess is that Facebook (and similar services) will become obsolete soon (within a decade or two). Just sell easy to use personal web servers[1] that you just plug into the wall, and they are toast ($99 is much cheaper than my privacy). [1] By "easy",…

> $99 is much cheaper than my privacy To you and many of us certainly, but do you really think that's true of the average user? Especially given the tradeoffs (most residential internet connections would be terribly slow and unreliable for such a purpose) it seems very unlikely that the average person, who has only the vaguest understanding of technology and probably hasn't given much thought to their privacy, would…

Fixing the asymmetry of our internet connections will require political effort. But we don't need the reliability. We already know how to make suitable backups, like fall-back MX.

"Average user" mostly means "clueless user". This is unacceptable. Everyone should know a minimum, like the difference between a web browser and a search engine. When they do, they will easily see the privacy problems.

I agree $99 is too much for most people. But this is only the current price of a Sheeva plug. I think we can eventually lower it down to $30, which would be more like it.

We have both the hardware and the software. Packaging the whole only takes a dedicated GNU/Linux distribution (or even just a meta-package). So, without the political and teaching issues, Facebook and Gmail could be made obsolete within the year. With them, we'll need a decade. But, to quote Eben Moglen: "It's not that it can't be done".

Re: Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?

#27

Post by loup-vaillant »

dasil003 wrote: post #11
loup-vaillant wrote: post #6

> Facebook knows more than all of us like to admit about its users. They have our personal information […] People will eventually realize what a dystopia this is. So my guess is that Facebook (and similar services) will become obsolete soon (within a decade or two). Just sell easy to use personal web servers[1] that you just plug into the wall, and they are toast ($99 is much cheaper than my privacy). [1] By "easy",…

That's a nice utopian vision from someone aware of our eroding privacy, but the only way the average consumer would care enough about privacy for that to be viable in the market would be for Facebook's data to grow a couple orders of magnitude more comprehensive then it is now over the next decade. Then if the US government were replaced by east-german style totalitarian regime to the point that violent revolution wa…

Do you have any Idea of the current comprehensiveness of the data they have? Do I have to remind you how they use it? Facebook is already spying it's users (for censoring and commercial purposes), and Google do semantic analysis of your e-mail (to send you ads).

So I don't think we need a totalitarian regime for people to realize they might want a personal server. It just takes a little teaching. Personally, as soon as I have a provider which let me send mail on my own, I will buy one.

Re: Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?

#28

Post by dasil003 »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #27
dasil003 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nice utopian vision from someone aware of our eroding privacy, but the only way the average consumer would care enough about privacy for that to be viable in the market would be for Facebook's data to grow a couple orders of magnitude more comprehensive then it is now over the next decade. Then if the US government were replaced by east-german style totalitarian regime to the point that violent revolution wa…

Do you have any Idea of the current comprehensiveness of the data they have? Do I have to remind you how they use it? Facebook is already spying it's users (for censoring and commercial purposes), and Google do semantic analysis of your e-mail (to send you ads). So I don't think we need a totalitarian regime for people to realize they might want a personal server. It just takes a little teaching. Personally, as soon…

Do you have any Idea of the current comprehensiveness of the data they have?

Yes.

It just takes a little teaching

Sadly, no.

Re: Is Facebook the new Internet and how soon before Microsoft tries to buy it?

#29

Post by loup-vaillant »

dasil003 wrote: post #28
loup-vaillant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any Idea of the current comprehensiveness of the data they have? Do I have to remind you how they use it? Facebook is already spying it's users (for censoring and commercial purposes), and Google do semantic analysis of your e-mail (to send you ads). So I don't think we need a totalitarian regime for people to realize they might want a personal server. It just takes a little teaching. Personally, as soon…

Do you have any Idea of the current comprehensiveness of the data they have? Yes. It just takes a little teaching Sadly, no.

Well, I don't expect the "little teaching" to take less than 10 years. Yet what I think of is still relatively little: crude definitions of a computer, a program, a network, a browser and a web site, a search engine, a mail client and a mail server; and then a little feel about what computers can remember, with an emphasis on catastrophic scenarios, like with the browser history. I think it can be done in 10, maybe 20 hours per persons, assuming a competent teacher.

So: am I asking too much? Do we need even more than that (except a 30 buck, very easy to use, low power server)?

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