A very astute and logical analogy that hadn't occurred to me. Thanks for the nice, concise write up.

Facebook's real identity concept works well when communicating with ones family and friends.

However, most of everything else, people will slowly come to the realization that it's not a good idea to use real identities.

Reviewing a restaurant or small business? Probably not a good idea to leave a lifelong trail of clues about oneself.

The B2B Facebook solution: https://work.fb.com/

dude! rss feed!

Relevant poster: http://www.businessinsider.com/craigslist-versus-startups-ch...

Ebay is too big, yes. I live in NYC, so I prefer to just meet someone and exchange cash & product. Going through ebay would be so much more work.

This is completely anecdotal. I could just as easily argue that the vast majority of businesses across cultures, demographics, socioeconomic factors use a variety of tools to promote themselves. In Canada, we have plazas, traditional websites, and more to get the word out. B2B, B2C, whatever you want to call it.

For the other cases you mentioned: Groups to collaborate, Events to organize - these are all completely underwhelming alternatives to other market products. The biggest tragedy of Facebook is that it has enormous scale but it can't write comprehensive products that satisfy all of that scale uniformly. You get the lowest common denominator, which is why customers go for niche alternatives.

Excel is not Facebook. Yes, Facebook is big. Excel is big in its industry. However, Excel has just enough of a balance between niche and scale. Excel is about computation and reporting. It solves a very specific need that is fortunately applicable in all types of applications. As soon as you try to go outside the bounds of what Excel can do (large data analytics, more customized reporting, interactive applications) you stop trying to rationalize Excel and start using other tools. People do the same with Facebook. More people do it with Facebook because Facebook doesn't effectively solve as many core needs.

Yeah that makes sense!

I can't argue with stale format other than to say that if you're visiting restaurant websites wanting a unique browsing experience then I expect you're in an extreme minority. Would you happen to also be opposed to bootstrap?

As for poor information, I don't see how that's the result of Facebook. Plenty of restaurants neglect all sorts of information on their websites. Add in that plenty didn't bother with websites before, but now have a Facebook page, I'd say Facebook has drastically increased the amount of information available on restaurants.

Restaurants need opinions from customers to influence other customers. Tripadvisor, and a bit less Yelp, are the main tools in internet to promote their business.

I'm finding more and more new businesses are avoiding the self-hosted Wordpress option.

People are increasingly aware of security as a problem - it only takes one business you know to have their WP install hacked and start distributing malware before you say "hey, maybe not" - and things like Squarespace offer very attractive themes, no need to keep updating the install, and a lot less technobabble.

(I must admit I'd almost never recommend someone without technical knowledge set up their business website using self-hosted WP these days. Go for a WP-specialised host that'll handle the caching and security, or go for something like Squarespace.)

Yep. In an absolute sense, Google's search engine is nothing but the honey that attracts what Google is actually selling. More or less a tourist attraction (albeit useful in its own right). This is supported by the fact that Google has started to diminish the integrity of the results to "sell" more to advertisers (by adding more sponsored results over time).

searching for special characters, e. g. ~=

Indeed, there seems to be some support for `link:HASH:URL` search operator, but only works for very large volume websites, e.g. it works on news.ycombinator.com but not on small and medium websites.

still... it could be partially useful.

Yes, but the product being sold is broadcast time slots, not audio/video.

If that's true, then what's their programming called?

Programming is their product, and customers buy it by paying attention (or to netflix, hulu, comcast, etc more directly). Attention is the currency, and ads let them exchange attention for USD.

They don't even make the ads. Their product, like Google's is eyeballs.

So AMC and HBO are making different things? No, of course not. They both produce content and distribute it through cable networks. One of them charges advertisers to deliver the product to viewers, while the other one charges the viewers directly.

To be fair, if you're an advertiser, then the product is eyeballs. But if you're a pair of eyeballs, then the product is the content. They're not mutually exclusive. Same with google. If you're a searcher, then the product is results. If you're an advertiser, then the product is relevant searchers.

Don't I pay with my attention to their ads?

Granted I don't hand cash over, but the user is still paying if you really want to stick with "products are paid for" argument

Advertising "slots" are google's product, just like physical billboard installations are a product of ClearChannel etc. AdWords is the mechanism Google uses to sell this product.

The fact that the revenue isn't directly related to the product doesn't make the product not the product.

That is exactly what makes it a product.

Product - Definition - an article or substance that is manufactured or refined for sale. e.g."dairy products"

In this case, the product refined for sale is the users.

Search is one of Google's products and not all products are sold directly as a revenue source.

A product is anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need. That nobody actually pulls out their checkbook and pays for a Google search doesn't mean it's not a product and that there's not a market for search.

Not worth responding to because it's all semantics. You define product as something that must be sold. Others define it differently.

Okay folks, Google's one and only product is TRAFFIC.

Search, Maps, Mail, Android are given away free as their competitive strategy of generating huge volume of traffic.

Google's business model is to charge their customers the possibility to redirect some of that traffic. And because advertising is speculative they can reach high profit ceilings.

It's an old-school dot-com point of view. Own eye balls, monetize clicks.

Facebook went and ate Google's lunch by following their playbook and improved upon it by focusing their product around SOCIAL ACTIONS.

Facebook produces huge volumes of interactions. Every like, every heart, every comment, every follow. By the time Google got around moving the battleship they've already lost.

You want to be the next big thing?

What is that one thing everyone does all the time? Catch that.

A product is something that is produced. You don't have to sell it.

Search is a product. In economic terms, it is called: A Loss Leader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

Search is sold at $0, to drive customers into the Store where they can see the real product.

buffer

bit.ly

Hootsuite

Great example: Datasift.

Tweetbot

Klout, and they were never shut out.

paper.li

FQL has been deprecated since Graph API v2.1 (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog#v2_1), and will only be usable with <=v2.0 apps until October 30th 2016 (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog).

The Graph API has not longer the ability to retrieve the /home endpoint which contained the newsfeed, since v2.0. The only this a app can retrieve is the user's own posts.

Stopped working with Pidgin for me, switched to Trillian and it works fine. Caveats being it doesn't work with messages that include links and also group messages. 99% of cases it's fine.

Zuck says he wants "to be electricty" but it seems he also wants to tightly control what is plugged in and how it's used.

So really he wants to be AT&T circa 1965. Nice work if you can get it.

Good point!

but eventually the market changes

Yup. Classic example of innovator's dilemma. These are the opportunities startups need to constantly find and solve.

Proof that simple ideas seem so simple on the surface yet become these big opportunities. What you do with the idea/initial success is what separates these successful companies.

Not really. Before Bing had 20%, Yahoo had 20%. Now Yahoo search is powered by Bing. MS pretty much bought the marketshare with the Yahoo deal and Yahoo was happy to have someone else do the heavy lifting on search. I believe Yahoo search is also the default on Firefox now.

IE defaults can only take you so far.

default windows search. people who never change it because it just works (well enough)

Yup. I don't know if anyone researched it, but I bet it highly correlates with browser usage. On a couple of websites I run, I notice that IE market share is much higher in the US than Europe.

In hindsight, it was a massive miscalculation as

Assumes the OS would have been as widespread as it was w/o the licensing that MSFT ended up doing (and it would not have been). That is what it made it the defacto standard operating system.

Microsoft had the luxury of offering it for free because of revenue from Windows and Office.

I could agree that the browsers were at least comparable, until Netscape disappeared and MS had little incentive to improve IE.

Which led to feature stagnation until the Firefox rose from the ashes...

It has a well-deserved bad reputation now, but Internet Explorer 3-6 were, pretty indisputably, far superior products to the competition from Netscape. And not just because they were free and bundled with Windows. Of course the undead Netscape-as-Firefox would later end up for its own part becoming far superior to IE6 back in IE's near-abandonware period.

IE won the competition on Apple Macintosh where both browsers were competing on even footing. (Neither was associated with the OS maker; Apple shipped both on system CDs.)

I 100% believe IE 5 was a far superior product than the competing Netscape 4.x. Previous to IE 5, maybe it's debatable.

I don't know if you were around then, or just speaking out of MS hate... but in the late 90s IE was the superior product. So much so that I often missed it because I was a Linux user and so didn't have access to it; Netscape had gotten really really terrible. Until Firefox came out the better option was IE.

I worked in a shop in 2000/2001 that was doing early Ajax type stuff (for a dashboard that controlled some embedded hardware.) It wasn't possible to port it to Firefox even at that point, even at that point IE had some leg up.

Later, MS let IE6 bit rot forever. And it was loathsome.

I remember well when IE 5 came out. I really, really wanted to use Netscape 4 but IE 5 was just so much better.

Yea, the fiasco with OS/2 2.0 in particular is more complex than this, with both Microsoft and IBM being involved. It used to be my favorite topic.

Thanks, yes I did (edited)

You make solid points, but just as people's attics become cluttered with crap that they never use but are reluctant to throw out, I think you could argue users innately feel the same with their personal photos / friends / posts on FB.

I was confused about downvotes because I was at -2 for awhile (maybe I offended snapchat employees ;), but I appreciate you rebutting me. I do believe if there was to be a huge contender to Facebook, it would need a messaging component to grow out of. However, I still do not believe FB made the purchase primarily out of fear of competitive threat. I think FB Integration in a tencent model can make them more money than FB ads (while driving more targeted FB ads).

Why couldn't WhatsApp just (yes, the tech is hard, but getting massive amounts of subscribers is way harder) build a social network for all it's subscribers? Migrate photos, don't abuse your users like Facebook....I think it was a legit threat.

WhatsApp is huge in India. Most of the friend use it more often then facebook. If there is any conversations going on then its on whatsapp.

Facebook has been doing a good job trying to disrupt itself. I"m talking about the acquisitions of Instagram, WhatsApp, and, probably most importantly, Oculus.

I mean let's not crucify Zucky for being a faithful adherent of the Google Gospel on Privacy.

Everything Facebook learned about mining and selling -- they learned from Googs.

"Beads are worth more than money on Bourbon Street."

They don't buy low-sell high like a simple trader, they are more like a manufacturer buying the raw material and processing it by adding context and selling the material as a finished product.

You left out the one that was founded the same year as FB.

Well, there are nightclubs that you can only get into if you are a hip young influencer. Facebook didn't require anything like that, just an .edu email address. That let in a lot of very un-hip people, and a smattering of oldies.

If you were running a nightclub, I think you'd appreciate the distinction between "let in hip young influencers" and "let in anyone with a student library card". ;-)

Google didn't launch Orkut. Orkut did. Google only acquired it later, from what I recall

nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut_B%C3%BCy%C3%BCkk%C3%B6kt...

Facebook won, because Murdoch (Time Warner) bought MySpace and started to milk it, instead of investing more money. MySpace was written in the ill-fated Coldfusion language and web framework and porting MySpace to a newer dotNet based Coldfusion version paved their way to a slow unstable server platform, years long stagnation, very high Microsoft product license costs and so. MySpace stagnated, that's why Facebook had the chance to win. And MySpace had the chance early, because Friendster stagnated because they could scale their website to keep up with their growth.

As someone who uses both Facebook and G+ occasionally, I find Facebook to be vastly inferior in terms of interface, functionality, and mobile applications. The main reason G+ or any other company will have trouble competing on features (which are easily added) is simply userbase and lack of interoperability.

With something like webmail you can switch providers based on your preferences but nobody else needs to do anything. You can keep emailing the same people like you always have. But with Facebook-style communications networks, you have to use their service to communicate with people on it. And since Facebook was the first to really get everyone to join (not just the teens and twentysomethings who had Friendster and Myspace pages), it has that critical mass of users.

So even if I think the G+ app runs better and looks nicer on my phone or the service does a better job of letting me specify who sees my posts, it won't make a bit of difference if I want to have a group chat or event planning page with 10 friends and Facebook is the only platform we all have in common. I don't own Google stock and I'm surely not going to start pestering friends and family to pull up stakes and move to G+ because I like it better. And that will be the case for a while I think...at least as long as the closed-network Facebook-style services are concerned.

I don't see them being unseated until something new really takes off the way the current form of social networks replaced mass email chains for people sharing links, pictures and weekend plans with friends and family.

I remember getting pulled into Facebook because classmates tagged me in photos. Then when I signed up, it was extremely useful because you could see and meet other people in classes for study groups, etc.

It was also great at delivering status updates, well at least until people started saying "John Smith is." lol.

The other powerful thing Facebook did that no other social network did was handle growth. Friendster and Orkut, they were painfully slow to use even in their early days.

Very very true. Orkun was HUGE in Brazil. I had immigrated to Australia when it became popular and no one in Aus had heard of it, Facebook started surfacing a least 18 months later and for a time I had Brazilian friends on Orkut and everybody else on Facebook. What convinced most of my Brazilian friends to switch was the ability to tag people in photos and poke people.

Yep, poking was really important.

Orkut was hugely succesful in some places. Yuuuge.

Hard to say. I can actually see it happening at the moment (my son's school friends are having babies now). Whether that will transfer to the next generation is another matter, but Facebook's user base and engagement levels are still growing.

Something with 1.5 billion users isn't likely to disappear in a hurry.

Since Facebook already owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus Rift, and can afford to buy any startups it wants, even a decline in core Facebook use wouldn't be terminal.

Heh, I still remember how much I disliked the Feed when they introduced it. In retrospect, of course, I was wrong: no matter how much I thought it was a disaster, it was a huge reason for Facebook's rapid growth.

It'd be a bit amusing if what has been the reason for their growth eventually ends up being the reason for their decline.

I imagine even if you have extremely interesting acquaintances with interesting things to say, they are more than likely saying those things places other than Facebook.

Similarly, FB has kept me due to its platform for music. Not music itself, but most artists use FB as a central hub. Further, the events are spectacular for me. I have found no better way to discover events than crowdsourcing it, aka scrolling my FB feed.

Mark Z himself may look at the early-stage product and conclude that it's not anything special.

And maybe he is even using it right now... I am thinking about Slack...

Capitalism isn't morally neutral because it concerns collectives of moral agents (companies), their goals and the goals of their customers and those they interact with.

Evolution operates on genes, an amoral physical process.

Capitalism is the operation of people, a morally-laden process.

Right, they are very different things. GP's point about morality stands, though: it's orthogonal to both markets and evolution.

I actually think it's a lot "sexier."

By Taleb you surely mean von Mises, by von Mises you surely mean Schumpeter, by Schumpeter you surely mean Karl Marx.

The speculative nature of capital has always been a core theme in economics. Yes, including "freshwater", "neoclassical" or "orthodox" economics.

The key for me was to change my personal definition of success from winning the lottery to simply doing things well on a consistent basis.

Most likely, and I think both would've been successful regardless. But their success and impact would've likely been greatly diminished if they were not in the right place and right time before the dotcom bubble popped.

Capitalism, darwinism, stratification (in geology), etc. are probably special cases of a more general "selection + fixation" process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Darwinism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_and_Repetition

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1780937997?keywords=intensi...

Another excellent book on this topic that echo's your viewpoint in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.

Meh? Their business is getting your attention so they can sell it to advertisers. They're also not stupid. That attention doesn't have to exist on FB. They can just acquire it - whatsapp, instagram, etc.

I think it also addresses a very crucial point often overlooked: the market will adopt & adapt the easiest tool to satisfy a need, rather than the best tool for the job. Databases are far better suited to maintaining - say a membership list, and FB Groups are far inferior, but are much easier - hence will be adopted, tweaked and repurposed in a hacky way to accomplish the task. The tool is adapted to the job at hand because you already know how to use it. Yes, it is true - when you have a hammer everything does look like a nail.

Facebook is already being displaced by Snapchat, people don't want to share their lives with every single person they meet, Snapchat solves this problem. It's also a mobile-first social network and difficult enough to keep the older crowd away, while building a massive user base of the younger generation. The facial filters feature will 100% try to be copied by Facebook with their recent acquisition of MASQRD, but it's too late, because they don't fundamentally think of social networking the same way. I was at the airport and I spotted at least 3x as many people using Snapchat over Facebook. If you don't have it already, do yourself a favour and read this http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-how-snapchat-built-a-...

The Innovator's Dilemma:

http://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Chang...

I wonder if every time Nathan Myhrvold googles something he thinks, "... fuck".

Facebook.... <story is yet to be written> but the same thing will happen to them.

One thing to consider is that Mark is very aware of this based on his purchases of companies like Instagram. At the moment it seems like facebook wants to try and buy anything they perceive to be that new up and comer.

But this does not mean that the Facebook will fail in its current use case.

You are most likely currently using an IBM-compatible PC running Microsoft Windows on which you run Google for searches and Facebook to reach friends.

There are some losers in those stories and they are losing to direct competition: IBM is losing on profits because they made their system open and anyone can build IBM compatible PCs, Microsoft is losing because people were for some strange reason ok with Apple creating a closed operating system (iOS) where they take 30% of any transaction that runs on it. Microsoft are trying to change this with Windows 10 and UWP, but hopefully it will fail just like Bing.

"blindsides [Facebook]"? How about brain-playback of emotional states with VR experiences to relive your friend's lives?

You're right -- this has always been true. The only people bummed out by it are the people trying to recreate Facebook's core value proposition (maintaining a digital representation of our meatspace relationships) themselves. But the reality is that the available market space for "social" is very small because Facebook occupies so much of it with a very general purpose product.

This has always been the case in the startup world too: you always look at markets over $10B with caution, because that's big enough to interest AGAF (Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook) if they're already in an adjacent market. Your only hope is to target a less-profitable sub-sector of that market, develop expertise and hope that AGAF didn't bring their A game to that market (in which case, your company makes an excellent acquisition target at crazy valuations as AGAF bid against each other!)

I read a dozen books about Google's origins many years ago and I thought I got it from that. Searching for it today, the closest equivalent source I could find was Myhrvold talking to Joe Kraus in 1995[1]. It's possible that Myrhvold repeated that lecture again to Larry and Sergei which I read in the Google books, or I misremembered and shifted the target of that quote from Excite to Google. I didn't read any book specifically about Excite so not sure why I would have done that. However, it's also possible the authors writing about Google weaved in a side note about Excite which my brain merged into the "Google story". Hopefully, my imperfect recall does not detract from the point that the smart guys at Microsoft misjudged what "search" could become.

[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=ktm885vGIXEC&pg=PA68&dq=go...

I agree with the comparisons given here until we get to Facebook. I think the main difference here is the increased saturation the internet in developed countries and the market penetration FB has obtained. Facebook has achieved 1.6 billion users a month compared to Myspace's 76 million at its peak. It will be hard to supplant such a behemoth that's willing to absorb the obvious threats it perceives (e.g. Instagram and WhatsApp).

It's not what they can't do, it's what they WON'T do. They must decide your idea is bad and you must prove them wrong.

I think a lot of the successful Social-Network-for-X apps hit a critical mass before FB groups became popular. It's going to be much harder to do that now because now Facebook for X is the X group on Facebook.

Maybe we need the ability to use VBScript in Facebook status updates.

Excel is ubiquitous because you were much more likely to have it bundled for low cost on your new 2MB RAM Packard Bell with Windows 3.0 than Lotus123.

Yep. If you think in terms of the long tail, Facebook takes care of the people who have super generic needs on the spike side and they take care of the markets that are too small to pay attention to on the tail side but in the middle is a lot of space for competitors to do what you are saying and charge for a little structure.

It also depends on the region. In Germany, Facebook's market penetration is much lower than in the US. In my circle of acquaintances, only about half of them have a Facebook account, and even less admit using it regularly.

And to give some evidence beyond my obviously skewed social context, most restaurants have a simple static website with a menu and map, instead of a Facebook page (or in some cases, in addition to a Facebook page).

I meant that Reddit is another Excel-esque competitor to your startup. Or another way to look at it is that Reddit is your early validation for demand.

A wonderful little comment.

You're a poet, sir.

Excellent comment. IRC and Craigslist are examples of something "old as country roads" on the internet.

I think they're saying Reddit's another Excel-like competitor for your startup, not a competitor for Facebook.

Then reddit is doubly a competitor, because they're apparently stable with 0.05% of Facebook's revenue. Facebook might falter if their financials go south, reddit has no where to go but up.

If your customers don't buy your product because they can get it for free on reddit, it doesn't matter how much they pay reddit for it.

So is Facebook. So is anything with users.

It would be more accurate to call r/DataIsBeautiful a collection of people passionate about data visualization + 5.2 million people who were automatically subscribed when they joined Reddit. It was made a default subreddit and now most of the posts are simple line graphs which support a popular opinion or ideology.

Eh; Reddit has a huge user base but many of them are cheap and Reddit advertising is more of a niche than a household name at this point. Additionally, Facebook is much much MUCH more interactive than Reddit; most of the users on Reddit are lurkers. I think that something like ~10% of the DAU actually post content, which is really, really low.

And at the end of the post, a twitter handler.

Facebook is unbelievably limited for any signs of creativity - even MySpace was like a generation ahead comparing to what Facebook is nowadays. Most creatives/content producers use it as a glorified Twitter; women use it for bragging about status/observing status of others and everybody else seems to have relegated it to the most banal things (hi family!). If you pay for ads, some strange Italian or Asian company does all the clicks on your ads, so unless you have a sure way to attract people with herd-mentality to your ads, B2C is useless as well.

Yes, but is that enough to overcome Facebook's pull?

I've gotten far more use from Nextdoor than facebook. I generally use it to find local services for my house, and whenever I have, I have gotten better service and lower prices than when I went calling around myself.

Excellent service, IMHO. The interface is a bit ... unpolished -- trying too hard to be polished? I only say that because of the high degree of polish I see elsewhere, but I guess that really isn't of that high of importance.

I guess, in the end, I want all services to work like reddit & HN, minimal and usable, maximum text on screen.

I don't think the verification by postcard process is essential. Most Nextdoor users are confirmed through other techniques such as IP address geolocation, SMS, referral from existing users, etc.

I did, and still think it's a bad analogy.

No mistery here: ppl are glued to phone screens.

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/1272900?hl=en

Yes, it can.

No, that's kind of the point of the article. You might have a nice SaaS for someone to manage pot-lucks at the office, but if someone in the office just passes around an Excel spreadsheet, your startup is going to go.

I think we're both just re-iterating the point of the author--maybe slightly differently

Really? I'm not a facebooker per se.

However I do use nextdoor that I check once or twice a day for community related news/events/etc.

"Facebook is the Facebook for X" is way I summarize it.

That's been true for a few years now. We've faced it when trying to launch a ridesharing startup (before Uber was a thing); everyone was already organized around Facebook groups.

This article is bad. The "threshold of utility" that you have to cross is VERY low. If you previously could justify a startup that competed withe very minimal features of many of these facebook products, than that says more about the startups market than anything else.

I successfully avoided ever working in Excel when I worked in quant finance, and I also do not have a Facebook account. So... for me anyway, the title checks out.

it gets better and better. I'm in my 2nd year without fb and haven't looked back since. Removing linkedin was great too. I never had instgram or snapchat. I had twitter but found it largely the most useless out of them all.

I use skype for chat. I like reddit and sometimes HN when there are interesting discussions going on.

Could you explain what you mean?

I use the messenger part of it and I have a page to share stuff about the game I'm making, but I rarely ever use the timeline or other stuff like that.

Isn't this Blogs + Link Aggregator/Forum ?

Nope, Tumblr is already up.

It is really Facebook's own fault. The way their comment system is setup is awful compared to anything else out there, even Digg's version in 2006. And searching by page or group for a topic is just useless. It is just people's profiles, and pages aren't separated into subpages like forums are. Everyone I know uses forum software like phpbb or Wordpress comments to connect. Facebook is mostly just for family photos and baby pics.

You are free to create a FB group for more serious enthusiasts.

That's pretty much precisely the problem that afflicts Google+ Communities as well. They're all but useless, with the exception of small, and usually private communities set up around a specific focus.

For specific task-oriented project support, if you're not part of StackOverflow/StackExchange, it's pretty much old-school BBSes. I've also found blogs are quite active for discussion.

"Social" ... is oversold, and actively kills multiple potentially useful categories. It does however point to massive holes in discussion and discovery across other platforms.

Interesting - I find the same thing is true of filmmaking groups.

Facebook conversations tend to be very ephemeral - requests for help, "yay we got into X festival", etc. If you want in-depth discussion, you need - again - old-school forums or at a pinch Reddit.

I had the same experience:

1. I joined a couple FB group for American expats in the country I live in. I quit them both when I realized that most posts are people complaining about the people and food options here or pictures of their recent booty of American junk food. I joined with the naive assumption that people actually moved here with the same amount of enthusiasm I had when moving here. I was quite wrong.

2. I joined a gluten-free group along with my wife. We both quit when we realized that 95% of the posts were just people asking "is this gluten free?", with pictures of the ingredient list on the side of boxes.

At this point, FB is a news aggregator for me and only keep the account just to avoid drama with certain people.

I'm a pretty avid cyclist and there are marketplaces for second hand bikes & accessories that I look at almost daily. I have also bought quite a few things through there too.

Interface has definitely improved of late - Facebook clearly are prioritising adding in functionality like being able to give reviews on sellers etc.

The super smash bros melee tournament scene is pretty reliant on facebook. Every region/area has its own facebook group where people post about events and find each other. Tournaments (both large ones* and small, local ones) typically use facebook events as their primary page (I'd even go as far as to say that facebook events help drive up attendance. I've seen local tournaments get more attendance because the TO made a fb event). I think fighting game communities in general make solid use of facebook groups and events.

* smash.gg is also used heavily for majors as of late though

My local gym has running & cycling clubs and uses fb groups to coordinate events, provide a social area for members to share stuff, and maintains pages where they curate important information for the group.

FB isn't the only way to do this, of course, but it's certainly low friction for most members, since they generally already are guaranteed to have a personal FB account.

There is a Dutch Facebook group for determination of plants and animals, people post pictures there and there is always a real expert around who can actually identify your bird feather / tiny spider / insect / fungus / etc often down to the exact species (out of 800 in some group of beetles, say). It's a wonderful group to lurk in.

He's not wrong, but I hate it. Facebook pages are walled gardens, and I certainly don't want to have to use the Facebook client to fetch them.

This continue destruction of the open Web must end.

Interesting premise. Excel is my number one indicator for what could be a startup—if you find a complex spreadsheet that's an important part of someone making money, you have a good shot at doing it better. Businesses don't use Excel because its good at solving their problem. They use it because they don't know how to do it with anything else.

This was really hard to read because it scaled to my 27" 1440p screen and that's really wide for so little text.

I dunno. My perception of facebook users in the US is it's mostly suburban moms. So I guess if you target that demo, then FB is your Excel.

Away from that demo, I think you can still build a service for a community.

Trying to organize anything, even a meeting, over Facebook is a huge pain. Facebook is not a collaboration system. It's just not designed for that.

I think Facebook is the new Internet [for many people]. The worst thing about this is not the competition with other companies but the competition with core Internet protocols and its meaning. All this while they have an embedded search engine that sucks!

Here's the comparison with Excel: it has eliminated thousands upon thousands of low-end coding jobs. But now knowing anything else carries a huge premium.

It used to be the case that if economists who wanted to do any quantitative analysis at all had to know Fortran 77 - and punch cards in batch mode. Now people in my field who know some Matlab are already seen as wizards.

Twitter is the new Powerpoint.