The blogging world has collectively fallen in love with Facebook. If you listen, you’ll hear everything from “Google Killer” to the “Precursor to Web 3.0” coming out of the blogospere. Since I am a fan of long odds, I am going to go on record as making another prediction. Facebook is probably the finest example of the “youthful exuberance” that is still the driving force beyond much of the tech sector.

Let me explain.

History Repeats Itself

Betamax

Before Facebook there was MySpace. If you take a look back, you’ll see many people making the same predictions that now shower Facebook about Rupert Murdoch’s pet project. Why not? It had (has) the eyeballs, the mind share, and the market cap to make it the “next big thing”. The question becomes, what happened? The answer is that Time happened. If you look at the web as iterations towards some end goal, MySpace was Facebook 1.0. It introduced popular culture to the idea of a social Operating System — a place where you could go to core dump your thoughts and feelings for the world to see.

If you want to see Facebook BETA, look no further than Xanga and LiveJournal. In their heyday, they were seen as the beginning of big new things for the web. In a way they were, just as Facebook will be. The end result, however, will not likely be what we expect.

Future Perfect

Mind me, right now in someone’s basement the real killer app for the social web is being built. Chances are that the difference between this application and Facebook will only be minor, but the end result will be a substantially better user experience.

Facebook, despite everyone’s claims to the contrary, was built as a network for college students to keep up with one another. It is not designed as a tool for business communication, it is not designed as a tool that my grandparents would be interested in using, it is not designed (like Google or AOL) to be so valuable to the public at large that leaving it would cut them off from the wider world.

The Missing Piece

What Facebook lacks is what I like to call “barriers to exit”. Ask someone over at Friendster what that means. There is absolutely no reason that people can’t just pick up and move over to some other service, except for maybe brand loyalty and inertia. In order for Facebook to work well, it needs people actively updating their profiles, and the only reason that people do so now is that they don’t have a more interesting place to store their profiles.

AOL’s barrier to exit was the fact that it held your credit card ransom, it takes a lot of effort to call up to cancel a subscription. Google relies on the fact that it is materially superior to the competition (at least in the mind’s of its users) and it provides a commodity that is universally useful for all demographics, namely searching for generic keywords. Facebook relies entirely on two of the most fickle pillars that any company has ever banked on — the opinion of college students, and the attention of the Web 2.0 early adopters.

Web 2.0 Roundup

What is the future of social networking? I’ll put my money on the fact that it isn’t Facebook. The smell test is whether my Grandparents would find any value at all in the product. They would use AOL because it is simple, and they would use Google because it helps them find recipes or search the family tree or whatever it is that they want with the wider Internet. The idea of Facebook to them would be, at best, silly.

Future Social Network developers take notice, if you are in the market to create the next truly disruptive technology take a look outside of your tidy tech bubble, these are not the people you will need to impress. Until you create a social network that is as valuable to me as to your Grandma, you will have some work to do.

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