Do Pageflakes and Netvibes have any chance against Facebook?

Get over it,
it’s like a spam. Today four applicataions? Ok, fine, but what if year after now you will receive 400 applications on every single day? What then? What if your “friends” feeds contains 100.000 new links per day. How you find something interesting then? And when someday 10 of your “friends” turn out to be pedophiles, what does this tell us about you Robert?

surely that is the point?

Facebook is becoming a network of friends and a platform for social discovery of services and interactive communications within that environment. MySpace was (is?) a game for users to ‘chart’ by having the most friends – this was exploited by unsigned bands which drove MySpace’s exponential growth.

Facebook remains a network of much closer friends with whom you have a much closer (and therefore more reliable) relationship.

If one of your facebook friends turns out to be a paedophile then maybe you have to ask yourself if you are using it as a game (a la MySpace) or as a network and a platform?

If it is the latter, then maybe you should choose your friends more carefully…

Whether Facebook can retain this “social-relevance” as it grows remains, for me, the most interesting aspect of its future evolution.

Priit: if someone on my friends list turns out to be “bad” (however I define it) then I unfriend them and they are gone.

Also not EVERY app is sent my way. Only the most popular out of my friends list.

And only your very best friends send you an e-mail? Yep
By the way, if you have thousends of “friends” then how do you know about them anything? I only have handful and if i’d like to be on track with them it would took me a lot of time to do that.
And unfriending does not help if the significant query run before that. You can define significant by ourselves. A new job for example.

i don’t like the idea to have a home page. i prefere to choose the sites where i go.
i like netvibes and facebook. but i prefere netvibes, because i am french.

Priit: out of the 3700 people on Facebook I have met about 40% of them and know pretty well about 10% of them.

But, remember, I give a LOT of speeches and am a professional networker (I’ve collected about 4,000 business cards in the past 10 years).

Robert, if you’re saying that a FB container on PF or NV (or YM, for that matter) might have legs, then I’d have to say that hell has frozen over and we finally agree on something. For better or worse (probably worse), I’d “prefer” to run different social networks until there is a miracle from G-d (or a breakthrough at PARC … same difference in this sector) that would really enable me to run various types of networks on just one platform. But I don’t see this happening in the near(er) term, so I’ll have to live with multiple online social networks: Different networks for different friends and acquaintances.

BTW, why do you still have a Hotmail account? Is this a retro thing on your part?

David: it’s hard to change an email address that is stuck deep inside Google results sets. That’s what happens when you use the same email address for almost a decade. And, anyway, it all comes into Outlook anyway. If anyone cares about being “hip” they can come over and Pownce me. Heh.

Yeah, see I’m not even sure the two compete. I know the trend is toward one-page startpage and all that, but I go to facebook for one thing, and netvibes for another. Actually, I’m such a tool-geek that netvibes won’t even cut it for me anymore. Google Reader is superior for news, Facebook kills myspace and Twitter, and GCal or 30 Boxes beats out Outlook.

I just use what works best. Firefox and IE7 both allow you have multiple start pages, why not use them?

I like to read the latest news without being bitten by a vampire or a zombie…

If I ran one of those two companies I’d apply for a job at FaceBook.

I like to read the news without being bitten by a vampire or a zombie…

“Do Pageflakes and Netvibes have any chance against Facebook?”

No

I think the heightened knowledge of users will play a big part in any long-term success of Facebook.

MySpace was a new experience for most people and so many fell into the trap of the “get as many friends as I can” game, the “animated pink and blue GIFs are awesome” game and the “subject people to obnoxious music when they browse my page” game.

I like to think that the users behind the recent surge of Facebook popularity are now aware of how the nativity of their MySpace days eventually ruined the platform.

Social networking has grown up, I imagine the average age of the user group has too, and so the result is a community thinking how only adding real friends, not spamming the various communication channels and having some imagination in profile photos will result in a nicer place to ‘live’.

I think it’s kind of similar to the era when e-mail was first introduced én masse to offices. It resulted in chain mails of jokes, scams and warnings being forwarded around by over eager staff. After eventually realising the hideous result of their actions, people seem a lot more mature and sensible regarding email now.

I prefer Pageflakes and Netvibes to Facebook. Why? Facebook is only accessible to members. Moreover a lot of content goes into Facebook, nothing comes out. This means you invest time and effort in a social network where you’re content will always stay on an island. This is a bad thing in my opinion because it breaks with the 2.0 trend to interconnect content between services and networks.
Here in the Netherlands relatively few people use Facebook, and in order to stimulate more people joining a social network is (a) to have friends already use it (not the case here in the Netherlands) or (b) to have the content available to everyone so people can see what a cool social network it is (what it does, what the interface looks like etc.). Because netvibes and pageflakes are open, I’d put my money on PF and NV.

“Do Pageflakes and Netvibes have any chance against Facebook?”

“Do Radiators and Gas-Fires have any chance against Smoothie-Makers?”

Tell you what, stick my FB newsfeed into a NV module and i’m happy. I couldn’t live without netvibes now but it’s nice to have a social presence on the web too. Why do people make this comparision between tools that are for totally disperate purposes? Maybe the guys at FB would like to see it take over the internet but i just can’t see it happening!

I’m a tool-geek too (though i’m sure there’s a less worrying nomanclature for that!) so right now anything that doesn’t fit exactly as i want into NV gets stuck into an ‘anyURL’ module and i still have access to it from the single tab inside the client browser; isn’t FB just a tool anyway? I guess it comes down to browsing style and preference but surely the only point here is that the web has no ONE concrete purpose, it is multi-faceted and suggesting that people will implicitly choose ‘superpoking’ over reading news truly bemuses me.

Rant over.

I think you are overstating the fact. I love Facebook, but the first page I see every morning is still my iGoogle homepage. I like collecting information, not seeing what my friends are up to. That’s part of my life, but aggregating, reviewing and making use of collected information is much more important. I do agree that Facebook is a great portal into my life, but it’s not my entry point to the internet. Not yet anyway.

That said, I have no interest in social networking aspects to my personal home page.

Who says they’re even playing in the same ballgame? Netvibes = private, but shareable. Facebook = public, shareable. I get the feeling you haven’t really explored all the options available on Netvibes. It’ll rock your world if you dig into it. But it’s not necessarily about having everyone in your living room, although, you could invite them in in various ways.

Agree with Jeffrey.

I go to FB for one thing (or many things) and I use Pageflakes for another! But at least as far as my usage of these sites is concerned, FB and Pageflakes are not competing at all.

And for the record (call me old-fashioned) google is still my home page

“and know pretty well about 10% of them.”

I don’t buy that for a millisecond. Knowing someone “pretty well” isn’t glad handing them at a sequence of conferences! You don’t have 370 friends, in the pre-social-network sense of the word. If you were diagnosed with cancer and laid up with chemo lets see how many of these 370 “friends” do more than send you an e-getwell card via facebook.
I demand you use a made-up word if you are going to say that “your facebook friends are more interesting”. Spell it Friendz or Fvriends or phriends.

Like Pritt, I am interested in how ‘social networking’ would mature and scale.

Google was best place to start… for searching static pages (or single service). With following characteristics :

1. Google covers most static pages
2. Prioritizes and presents top 10 (rest are mostly useless)
3. Allows to preview
4. Just a gateway – doesn’t holdup

As web is becoming more atomic (RSS, widgets…) the main challenge is have a service which can do to widget/service(web2.0) world what Google search did to Static web (web1.0).

Whether one service can become the only container or will we use multiple containers is to be seen.

I assume that openProfileTM (in lines of openID) can be the magic that will be a better glue to web2.0 world. Currently everyone (Facebook, Myspace, Netvibes…) require proprietory profile, which cannot be shared with any other platform.

Shameless Scoble. Have you even polled 10 normal people? No one has Facebook as their start page. You have no statistics to back this up. I’ve asked 20 people at my office, all of whom have used Facebook to varying degrees, and not a single one has it as their start page.

How are you even invited to speak anywhere? What do you talk about? Facebook, iPhone, and Pownce? Seriously now, no one cares. Go home Scoble.

I guess I never pictured Page Flakes and Facebook to even go up against each other, one is a social plateform and the other is basically a location to get everything all at once.

Seems to me the better question is, Page Flakes concerened about start.com or iGoogle. (speaking of which why iGoogle, is Google suddenly owned by Apple? I like how Apple sues the “iVibrator” but not Google over igoogle. Once again a two headed Apple. But that is for another discussion.

Facebook is cool, but it’s going to eventually turn into another MySpace, I guarantee it. People are going to want Facebook to open up more and more, and they will end up doing it and it will be their demise.

Nearly everything on the web works this way, it’s amazing at first, then it gets duplicated a 100 times, and so long cool factor.

What happened to YouTube.com ever since they were bought out I have heard almost nothing about it. It’s a never ending circle, and Facebook will eventually feel it as well.

Micah: you should visit my Facebook Profile page. It’s becoming a place where everything flows into from around the Web.

Have you ever noticed how the more you indulge in hyperbole, the more hostile your comments, Robert? Is it worth it?

“Facebook is becoming the home page for many of us. Why? Because our friends are a lot more interesting than anything over on Yahoo News or TechMeme or other places.”

So you’re no longer interested in discovering new people, hearing different viewpoints?

“Micah: you should visit my Facebook Profile page. It’s becoming a place where everything flows into from around the Web.”

Wow. I can’t think of statements that are more likely to push away a more discriminating audience than statements like that.

Ever thought of taking a break until after the baby is born? You sound…brittle.