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The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

robinsloan.com

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Re: The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

#101

Post by detst »

ececconi wrote: post #92
ajross wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of truth to this (though I'm generally a big skeptic when people talk about "research" in the abstract; and I remain genunienly "WTF are they thinking!?" about Glass). Google tries stuff, fails a lot, and stumbles on as many successes as they engineer. Facebook has executed really well on their core stuff, but... what else? I mean, they've been on a huge hiring binge now for four years. What do they hav…

Connecting people and giving them a new way to communicate with each other is a big waste to society? Facebook has fundamentally changed the idea of the weak tie for many people. If that's a waste, then I don't really know what else is meaningful in life.

> If that's a waste, then I don't really know what else is meaningful in life.

The "strong tie"? I'm just not so sure changing the "weak tie" is such a net positive for society. I'm not going to claim that FB doesn't have its positives but I'd rather see a society building strong ties with fewer people than weak ties with many. (and, frankly, doing nothing but wasting time for hours per day)

Re: The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

#102

Post by [deleted] »

taligent wrote: post #28
joelrunyon wrote: post #4

It seems that Google's products have future utility to them that seems to be lacking from FB. Facebook is focused on sharing. That can be an action, but until the action is focused, it doesn't seem to be useful (other than as a time-suck of course).

I fail to see how photos which provide pleasure, foster relationships, enlighten and educate is not useful but a camera you wear on your head is.

[deleted]

Re: The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

#103

Post by jes5199 »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #97
dkarl wrote: post #63

Facebook as a photo sharing app is a fascinating example of the service being generic and the context for the service being the main focus of competition. A bar sells drinks, but providing a competitive lineup of drinks is much easier than providing a competitive context in which to consume them. Coffee shops sell coffee and wifi, but they compete against each other as contexts within which to consume coffee and wifi…

>a small advantage that can't make up for the fact that it isn't as universal as e-mail or texting Well, I'm a teenager, and sadly Facebook is far more universal as a means of contact than texting or e-mail, personally. I don't have the email addresses or phone numbers of most of the people I know (often because I don't know them well enough), but I do have them friended on Facebook.

Yeah, that's true for a lot of people who don't realize it. It's much easier to Friend somebody you met at a party than it is to exchange email addresses - and then you never have to ask "is this address still good after all this time?"

I have over 400 facebook friends. I only have 200 contacts in my email address book, and most of those are probably stale.

Re: The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

#104

Post by jes5199 »

toemetoch wrote: post #66
antidaily wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Meanwhile, they've ruined Picasa with G+.

Odd that you'd state that. My flickr-feed is dwindling because photographers are moving to Google+ for picasa's quality service.

really? I post photographs on G+ entirely out of network effects - that's the site that my friends check reliably. Flickr is like a black hole, now, socially. But the Flickr user experience is still nice compared to G+'s clunky too-much-javascript.

Re: The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

#106

Post by 27182818284 »

excuse-me wrote: post #45

"Imagine actors and athletes doing what they do today on Twitter—sharing their adventures from a first-person POV—except doing it with Glass." Imagine having to click on a dozen copyright notices and pay for each image you see on Google/Facebook because the image they just took is owned by $ACTOR in europe, but $STUDIO in USA and $AGENCY in Japan but a blank page because Facebook doesn't have a right to use it in Can…

Why is this different than say Instagram by a celeb which happens all the time?

Re: The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

#107

Post by tlrobinson »

51Cards wrote: post #33

"Google is getting good, really good, at building things that see the world around them and actually understand what they’re seeing." That statement spells it for me. With Google I see research, I see pushing tech boundaries and hardware experiments, I see new ways to interpret the world. With Facebook I see a huge lump of data but nothing really too groundbreaking. I don't deny Facebook's momentum... it's huge and i…

If I were Facebook, publicly I'd focus on growth, while quietly building killer applications with the massive amounts of data they have.

Consider how many photos they have with users' faces tagged. They'd be crazy not to leverage that data. With the right facial recognition technology they will own that space, which would be extremely useful in products that compete with, say, Project Glass.

Ditto with location data, but they don't quite have the same monopoly there, so I wouldn't be surprised if they acquire Foursquare in the next year (perhaps more difficult than Instagram give the stock price)

Re: The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

#108

Post by nooneelse »

dkarl wrote: post #63

Facebook as a photo sharing app is a fascinating example of the service being generic and the context for the service being the main focus of competition. A bar sells drinks, but providing a competitive lineup of drinks is much easier than providing a competitive context in which to consume them. Coffee shops sell coffee and wifi, but they compete against each other as contexts within which to consume coffee and wifi…

Interesting angle. I suppose this illuminates how best they could go about the things they are rumored to be considering

For example, the payment processing system. This angle says they should focus most on the non-one-to-one transactions like group dinner and movie outings, splitting the rent, etc. If me paying for such things through FB helps me settle the bills and get repaid (or get to mark someone's timeline with a cheapskate whuffie point), then I have an incentive to start paying through FB, and encouraging others to do the same. Lots of other apps and services have tried to capture these transactions, but they seem to usually suffer from needing all/most of the people in the transaction to sign-up for yet another account. That is the hurdle that FB has already crossed for 4/5 of the last movie outings in my anecdotal experience.

Cell phone... well I don't see how this social context angle helps with that, since phones are already well into that context. But browser, sure. Social web-browsing has also been tried before, also seemingly always failing to overcome the hurdle FB has cleared.

Re: The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

#109

Post by confluence »

dxbydt wrote: post #99

to gauge marginal positive externalities, invert the principal component & see what remains. as an example - suppose you wake up tomorrow and google search stops working. never mind why - some random bug impossible to figure out, so it just stops working. Then what are the positive externalities that remain ? Well, gmail. youtube. android. gdrive. maps. picasa. blogger. reader. googledocs. googlecheckout. etc etc etc…

Reminds me of a Charlie Munger quote:

that to get closer to the right answer, scholars should "invert, always invert."

You have a strong point there. Most top 100 websites I see are just frontends to databases.

I kid you not.

Their competitive advantage is proprietary data holding and network effects to get more data.

  Google - search + database frontend.

  Facebook - database frontend.

  YouTube - database frontend.

  Yahoo! - search + database frontend.

  Baidu.com - search + database frontend.

  Wikipedia - database frontend.

  live.com - database frontend.

  Twitter.com - database frontend.

  QQ.COM - database frontend.

  Amazon.com - database frontend.
Most of the stuff is just a front end to a database.

Their positive marginal benefit derives from holding that data, using it as leverage to get more data, and then serving it back to their users in a tight loop.

Re: The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images

#110

Post by jarek »

Splines wrote: post #29
stesch wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Apple will bring out a cool version in 2020.

How do you make wearing a headpiece cool? I wear glasses and imagine some teeny tiny thing embedded in one of the arms. What could 20/20 people do that would be socially acceptable? Maybe a bluetooth headset looking thing?

> What could 20/20 people do that would be socially acceptable?

Wear glasses with non-corrective lenses.

I went from never wearing glasses for ten years to wearing glasses every day. (I was previously using contact lenses.) Hardly anyone batted an eye.

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