Will Google “Friendster” Facebook?

Good thinking here … yes, there will be many seismic aftershocks to their earthshaking movements in the social network space. Facebook still has some snobby Harvard country clubby brand blowback, i.e. we’re cool, you’re not, too exclusive I think. It’s not as welcoming and INclusive as an open social platform should be. The tension between “cool cliques” and “openness” in social networks is always a fine line. Even the openness of the platform from a dev point of view makes a fundemental statement in terms of brand warmth.

One word – Orkut.

Everybody says “it’s big in Brazil”, but Google haven’t done enough with it to give it global appeal. Larry and Sergey have to be careful that any further work in the social netwroking field doesn’t end up like Orkut.

If they knew what made Facebook successful, they would have done more with the site.

Scoble – Trick or Treat?

Trick – well if google end up owning the social graph too then i will start to worry. It depends how open this is, but yet again it comes back to the question of open data. Forget the API’s – think of the data. Who own’s that is the interesting question.

Treat – well, Google do so many things well and this could yet be something else that really changes the field. What we will see happening over the next couple of years is niche social nets with a common framework. Ive seen it coming for some time – perhaps google have too. Facebook seem to have saw it, but had the idea they could bring everyone TO their site – google seem to be doing the opposite.

Spooky stuff!!

Just Twittered you back on this but I completely agree with your premise — the social graph (and Google’s the one company that I think can pull this off) will kill FB. One other note about why Friendster died — and this same thing is starting to happen on FB — SPAM. When I joined Friendster 2-3 years back, 90% of my friend requests were attractive 18 year old girls that wanted to “get to know me better.” Yeah right!

Halley: Facebook’s PR is WAY too controlling, too. Very secretive. Sorry Brandee, but that’s the truth. (She runs Facebook’s PR and gave me Marc Zuckerberg’s sister to interview, but she isn’t the one to really talk about some of the issues that end users — or even “whales” — care about).

Looks like Brad Fitz’ thesis http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/ is coming together! What if Google bought Friendster? Friendster is already releasing a public API by November 30, right?

“didn’t take care of bloggers”

Hahaha. Aww, poor prima donner bloggers.

Google has a good infrastructure in place, so the real challenge for them is simply to build on a working community. If they can center a social network around some of their existing products (ie. Blogger), it just might work. Of course, that is if people are willing to use it.

I have accounts on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, but I really only use them as conduits for people to find me. I rarely log in unless I have some non-spam friend requests to process.

I have to disagree with Friendster re: bloggers. What killed Friendster in the domestic market was a plethora of site access issues over an extended period of time. Many folks actually enjoyed the service until the site kept going down…

Note: Friendster, along with other social networking sites like Hi5.com, are actually doing quite well outside of the USA. The primary problem is that the marketing dollars are in the more developed countries…so it will be harder to monetize the traffic like Facebook & MySpace can.

Damon: you might be right about the final nail, but I dropped Friendster far earlier than that. Just like I dropped LinkedIn a year before I got into Facebook although if LinkedIn goes away history will write that it was Facebook that killed it.

I find that if companies stop caring about bloggers they lose momentum, which ultimately leads to death.

Hi Robert,

I would add a few questions:

7. How about privacy. Will I be able to control it and have easy ways to set privacy situational (Google knowing everything about me becomes a bit scary)
8 Will Facebook, MySpace and other succesful sites join in or stay out?
9 What is really the user benefit? I understand the developers issue that is being solved, I understand Google making ‘the one ring that binds them all’ (quote taken form Matthew Ingram), but how is integrating a whole bunch of web sites in a new layer really going to help me as a user? It sounds as if it is more sexy for the tech community than the Internet user himself?
If interested I wrote more about that user perspective here:
http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2007/10/31/google-hits-back-hard-with-its-opensocial-plans-but-will-the-user-benefit/

What’s this mean then for the little guy and future development of social media platforms, do you think? Will Google be the platform and I just build my own social page on top of that; similiar in concept to meetup.com? I could see it as high barrier to entry for other Facebooks of the future to compete especially with the momentum Google has now for mobile.

Well, I wrote about this. It stands to reason that Google will get the developer support, and then we can take our information across platforms if we use these applications. I for one love Google, and have lost my love for Facebook, although I still go there every day. I just find it a pain in the ass to be able only to access my Facebook friends through Facebook. And it’s lost the exclusive, clubby aspect now that it has-what-30m people on it.

Google + Jaiku + OpenSocial = things are brewing in online land.

Exciting times. Could swing either way, but finally having a single multi-micromedia-multi-user-chat-social-profile-app video blog thingy would be, um, awesome.

Go Google.

Friendster’s performance was horrible. Facebook is fast. That’s why I stopped using Friendster, and why I signed up and use (sometimes) Facebook.

I think there was an article in Wired about Friendster’s downfall that I can’t find.

Remember Friendster? More like remember SixDegrees, they (by they I mean original owners sixdegrees, inc. and later YouthStream Media Networks) own US patent #6,175,831 or the “six degrees patent” that Tribe, Friendster, LinkedIn et al paid big money to use and brought on the likes of MySpace and FaceBook…

They always seem to get overlooked in the 2.0 bubble of social networking

Remember Friendster? More like remember SixDegrees, they (by they I mean original owners sixdegrees, inc. and later YouthStream Media Networks) own US patent #6,175,831 or the “six degrees patent” that Tribe, Friendster, LinkedIn et al paid big money to use and brought on the likes of MySpace and FaceBook…

They always seem to get overlooked in the 2.0 bubble of social networking

#10 Damon got it right — not being friendly to bloggers may have been what soured Robert on Friendster, but it was performance and overly strict rules that did it in with everyone else. Friendster didn’t provide for affinity groups, so users made their own. Rather than embracing the “fake” people, Friendster tried to stop what their users wanted to do with the service.

Aaron: and look at what Facebook is doing today: they have severe limitations on the usage of their social graph that other companies are about to exploit big time.

When MySpace’s executives came up to me and talked about its new developer platform that’s coming soon the first thing they pointed out is that they want celebrities on its service and don’t limit you to 5,000 friends and that you can use fake names (both of which are necessities for corporate and celebrity uses).

And Facebook isn’t all that fast. The reason that there’s a limit to 5,000 friends is because the service starts falling apart when you get more than 2,000 friends. It’ll be very interesting to see if Google does better.

If it does there’s a very real chance that they’ll “friendster” Facebook. No matter what angle you look at it from. Most users are really going to like a much more open approach. They won’t know why, but if a social network shows up on every blog out there because it can be componetized and has an open API then that’s really going to disrupt Facebook’s ability to remain the “darling” of the industry.

I don’t think of Open Social as a “new Google social network” so much as a shared API for app developers to build apps that work across many social networks (and for users to share a single core profile, including their connections, across them).

Doesn’t really compare directly with using Facebook, because we’re now talking about working across a bunch of disparate networks that happen to share some data rather than a single (though pretty nice) walled garden.

these social networking sites are of 0 of value. Look what happened with skype. They all depend on obnoxious advertising that is more offensive and intrusive than on t.v.,and that’s saying a lot. I have found no great social contact with people on these hi-tech networks. Just filth and bad grammar. It makes you think people are more rotten than ever. These should be called anti-social networking. People still people whether you meet them for lunch or on one of these stupid networks.

Well, I’d have to say if Google built it around gaming, that’d be kick ass