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Ask HN: Compete with Facebook?

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Re: Ask HN: Compete with Facebook?

#31

Post by Gibbon »

cheald wrote: post #17
nostrademons wrote: post #5

You have to come at them obliquely. If you set out to build a better social networking site for everybody you'll fail, because they have more resources and more expertise. Instead, try to figure out a niche that they're failing at - either an activity or a population of users - and that can be expanded into a full social networking site as it grows. Twitter's attempting to do this with status messages, Zynga with cas…

> for everbody This is key. It's arguable that Facebook is successful because it was exclusive to a smaller niche (college students) when it was starting out.

IMHO Facebook make a colossal mistake when they opened up the service to the entire world.

Now that they've let the genie out of the bottle, there's no going back. With 500 million users, every feature they add is a monstrous engineering challenge and every change they make is an impossible political challenge, guaranteed to piss off a major portion of it's users.

How do you market to 500 million people? How do you govern a sytem with that many users in any meaningful way.. you can't. There's nothing you can offer that many people except for lowest common denominator stuff like advertising.

The biggest challenge in business is finding a market you can clearly define, that can be reached easily. Had Facebook stayed "closed" and only available to college students, that's exactly what they would have had.

Imagine the possibilities.. Facebook would have been a right of passage for freshman students.. you go to college, you get a facebook account. College students and their families are some of the richest people on the planet.. just imagine what you could have offered them?

If a college social network is the primary product.. what are the related products, information, services and media? Dating, food, moving, insurance, travel (spring break!), textbooks, banking, car rentals, housing, used goods, career counseling, job searching, recruiting, training, social events, clubs.. the list is endless.

But with a market of everyone.. which products do you offer? When you picture "everyone" do you have an image of a person in your head? Of course not.. but "college student".. ahh you know immediately what to offer them.

Imagine how many companies would beg to offer their services and products on a college-only facebook network?

That's how you compete.. find a specific niche you can clearly define and build deep relationships with your customers.

Re: Ask HN: Compete with Facebook?

#32

Post by Mgccl »

Why do you want to make a new social network?

If you goal is to make money, then ignore this comment.

If your goal is to make something better than facebook, you want to ask yourself, why you want to reinvent the wheel? Unless you have some great idea. Don't.

Check out Diaspora, maybe it's better for you to work on that when it comes out. They have some good ideas. You can also look around other open source SNS.

Re: Ask HN: Compete with Facebook?

#33

Post by mindcrime »

nnash wrote: post #26

Personally I don't feel the need for a facebook alternative, and I'm sure that a majority of people feel the same way. Otherwise there wouldn't be 500 million facebook users. I'm happy with using facebook to connect with all my acquaintances, twitter to interact on the micro level and tumblr to blog. Here is a question you have to think about; "What can you possibly offer that would change my mind?" I think everyone…

II agree with everything you said, and still... I think there's a place for more social networks, if we redefine "social network" a little.

What there are are tons of communities, any of which a given user may or may not be a member of... and as long as people prefer to show a different face when interacting with a given community, or keep their interactions with the members of a given community separate - whether as a convenience, or for privacy reasons, whatever, there will be room for "social networks" around interests, geographic areas, etc.

So, yeah, a "social network" for Doctor Who fans, a "social network" for Mazda RX-8 enthusiasts, etc. This space is mostly filled by "forums" now, which don't necessarily have (or need, and this point is probably key) the same suite of features as a "full fledged social network."

But if there was a way to take advantage of all these discrete communities of interests, yet still give a user convenient access to their entire social-graph at all times, and a void "profile fatigue" and "password fatigue" then one could probably accomplish something.

Whether or not what Diaspora are building, or one of the other varied "decentralized social network" projects, remains to be seen. And how the hell you monetize it if you could build it also remains to be seen. But there point in all this rambling was really just to say that there are needs for "networking" that Facebook isn't filling at least not alone. Now the combination of Facebook, Gallifreybase.com and rx8forum.com may fill the needs of the hypothetical Doctor Who watching, RX-8 driving, social-networker. So would one really want to compete with Facebook or with rx8forum.com and gallifreybase.com?

Re: Ask HN: Compete with Facebook?

#35

Post by keefe »

nostrademons wrote: post #28
keefe wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is that how it went, or did they build a superior product that they first launched to a niche?

They're related concepts, but I'd say that they won by building a superior product for a niche. I first got on FaceBook in the fall of 04, when they were still "elite colleges only", and first checked out MySpace around that time too (I did end up creating a MySpace profile, but abandoned it after like half a dozen visits). MySpace was better as a general social-networking site . It had all sorts of features that Fac…

That's an interesting perspective about the use case - I signed up at about the same time, never use the account and deleted it a few years later. I was more the steady girlfriend type than the party type in college, so perhaps that use case passed me by.

Re: Ask HN: Compete with Facebook?

#37

Post by nnash »

mindcrime wrote: post #33
nnash wrote: post #26

Personally I don't feel the need for a facebook alternative, and I'm sure that a majority of people feel the same way. Otherwise there wouldn't be 500 million facebook users. I'm happy with using facebook to connect with all my acquaintances, twitter to interact on the micro level and tumblr to blog. Here is a question you have to think about; "What can you possibly offer that would change my mind?" I think everyone…

II agree with everything you said, and still... I think there's a place for more social networks, if we redefine "social network" a little. What there are are tons of communities, any of which a given user may or may not be a member of... and as long as people prefer to show a different face when interacting with a given community, or keep their interactions with the members of a given community separate - whether as…

It isn't just forums that are filling the gap it is sites like Ning, and Wordpress plugins like buddypress that are allowing people to develop their own "social networks" as well. Which has me thinking that it is probably better to create a service that allows individuals to design and develop their own communities that cater to whatever interest they may have.

Re: Ask HN: Compete with Facebook?

#38

Post by possibilistic »

@mkice: Please email me (echelon@gmail.com). I've got a massive engineering project that I've been working on for some years, and I definitely need help on it due to my busy education schedule. It's along the same lines of Diaspora, but a much broader scope: give all data a decentralized, ontological API and a node-based exchange platform.

I've taken some ideas from the Semantic Web community, but scaled them down so they're practical. I use a subset of RDF that maps cleanly to an SQL/ORM. Models are generative based on the ontologies you define. Types are hierarchical "Resources" that are uniquely identified (and sometimes dereferenceable) by URI and can be exchanged from the original source or via a p2p mechanism.

If this or any similar platform gains traction, Facebook is history. Blogs are history. Reddit, etc. -- it can all be emulated (and improved) on this platform and everyone can write code for it. No more data silos.

Personally, I'm not so interested in the social networking aspect, but social network tools can be built upon this. I'm more interested in creating a tool to route interesting information to and from relevant parties. I want an optimal web reading experience, and not even hacker news can provide this. (ie. I want to algorithmically find peers with similar skills/interests and fetch their highly-ranked stories/comments, data mine, personal interest profiling, etc. Can't do that without success/adoption of the platform though.)

Re: Ask HN: Compete with Facebook?

#39

Post by coryl »

Gibbon wrote: post #31
cheald wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for everbody This is key. It's arguable that Facebook is successful because it was exclusive to a smaller niche (college students) when it was starting out.

IMHO Facebook make a colossal mistake when they opened up the service to the entire world. Now that they've let the genie out of the bottle, there's no going back. With 500 million users, every feature they add is a monstrous engineering challenge and every change they make is an impossible political challenge, guaranteed to piss off a major portion of it's users. How do you market to 500 million people? How do you g…

Ermm, you can still easily target college students because they add their colleges to their Facebook network. Users tag their interests, music they listen to, books they read.

From a business stand point, I really can't see how you could say facebook made a colossal mistake by opening to the world. It made them rich and one of the most powerful websites on the Internet.

Re: Ask HN: Compete with Facebook?

#40

Post by whatusername »

jgg wrote: post #24
Kilimanjaro wrote: post #15

I want a social place but not to share pics with my family and friends. I want to share knowledge and expertise. I want to ask questions, get answers, share code, show off my projects, learn from the experts, chat with colleagues, network and socialize. Start with a facebook clon for hackers, then, like reddit, expand to all possible interests. Let people create their groups of interest and then grow, grow like weed.

Start with a facebook clon for hackers, then, like reddit, expand to all possible interests. Let people create their groups of interest and then grow, grow like weed. People like (and find it convenient) to split into tribes they identify with. Look at Usenet, Reddit, Facebook, IRC, etc. What if you took this niche-based grouping and applied it to a social network? Imagine, for example, that I sign up with your site…

Did you just describe Ning? I think I created a login once -- and i'm pretty sure that's exactly what it did.
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