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Thursday
Feb042010
Facebook Could Eat the Web
Young Urban Professional
Like almost everyone else on the planet, it seems, I am spending more time on Facebook than any other site. The lone exception is Google. The reason I know this is that Safari, my browser, lists Facebook as my most visited site when I access its top sites feature.
In addition to using Facebook to check in on what my family, friends and colleagues are up to, I have been using it as a newsreader for months. The screenshot below is my reader. This is something that the company suggested everyone do here. Although I suspect that most users haven't taken the steps top create a dedicated news list as Facebook suggests, there's not doubt that the social network is becoming a critical source of information. Yesterday, Hitwise published a fascinating report that illustrates just how large Facebook looms as a source for news.
But something bigger is going on here...Facebook is eating the web.
Yes, Facebook is becoming the web for millions and millions of people. As I have written before, there's already a wealth of amazing things you can do within the site without ever leaving. What's more, as I also speculated, the site giving rise to headless media companies like Zynga that don't need a web site to succeed.
In short, I believe Facebook is unstoppable. They aren't just the next Google. They're the next web.
Here's where I see things shaping up from here.
First, Facebook will move from being a solely place where people connect to each other to a site where people connect with businesses and, more importantly, the people who work for them, as I wrote yesterday. This, as my friend Robert Scoble, points out is an area where others dominate. But I expect Facebook will catch up fast. They will buy Yelp and/or Foursquare - or just implement similar technology - and become the yellow pages of the web.
Facebook may not even need to buy Yelp to make it happen. They are already slowly becoming the yellow pages. Everywhere I go I see signs like the one above telling us where we can find a local business on Facebook. In addition, last night during a fascinating session on the future of journalism (archived here), Sree Sreenivasan from Columbia Journalism School noted that movie posters don't have URLs anymore. They just tell us to go find them on Facebook. That's significant.
Second, Facebook will start to give web developers more tools to build entire rich micro-sites that exist solely inside the social network. Check out what 1800Flowers is already doing. Such a move will encourage more companies to focus 100% of their web marketing efforts on maximizing their Facebook presence. And why not? The site has 350+ million users, half of whom log in at least once a month. It's much easier to go where people are than to get them to come to you.
Third, Facebook will get serious about search. It's an untapped monetization pipeline that can bring in billions - especially when they couple social algorithms with crawlers. Phones too.
So what could derail Facebook? A lot. People could tire of it. But I don't see that happening. In fact, I see us putting more of our content inside Facebook and I see them making it all easily searchable and accessible from any device and leveraging connections to make it all even more powerful.
Now history says I will be wrong. AOL tried this and lost. But AOL did not have the algorithms and social connections that Facebook has in place, so I think we're in a different era. Facebook could eat the web or, perhaps more likely, become a parallel universe web. But, the question is this - will the web allow itself to be eaten or will two webs emerge? Time will tell.
Reader Comments (49)
Nicely put but Facebook isn't ever going to eat the web for 2 reasons:1. When it IPOs, all the creative talent and great strategic thinking will drain right out of the organisation.2. People are fleeting and fickle and as soon as all the youngsters get too sick of their parents stalking them they will be off to something new.3. The future of the social web is distributed and shared, not centralised and controlled. Facebook is in the black right now but it's not making massive amounts of cash. Once it starts really having to make lots of cash it will begin pissing people off quickly.
Good take, Steve!I recently spoke with a large gaming company that is looking to make their Facebook page their primary portal for the brand.Bold move, and I haven't heard of too many other Fortune 1000 companies considering thinking that way, but it could be a harbinger of things to come.
Completely agree. I made the decision a year ago to focus more on FB than the other two -- Twitter and LinkedIn. I even have a private team room on it for my company. FB has the volume and has building out features at a good pace. And the Group aspect is key. -- most people need other people and FB helps with the kum-bi-ya of bringing people together! Scott
I absolutely agree with you, Steve. Facebook is big and will be bigger. So we have many regular users from all around the world in some social networks, but some geeks will continue try startup services described in TC that will not have the future until integrated in facebook :)
I really hope Facebook won't become the web. It's closed and limited. You can do great things there, but once it gets too crowded of businesses (and it's happening) many will have the same problem than in the open web: lack of attention. The users will be there (like in the internet), but there will be too much noise.
Super-interesting post, but I have to totally disagree. First of all, I'm not sure we - or you - should be surprised that you're using Facebook so much for news. You work in social media, at the top of your game, and you run a PR firm for God's sake. I'm sorry to have to tell you that your social media behaviour is going to be about as different from that of a 'civilian' as it is possible to be. On top of that, we know that media owners are piling into Facebook along with brands, desperately chasing audiences. You're in it, they're in it -but none of that is evidence that Facebook is going to eat The Web.Second - there is just the one Web. There are lots of private bits on The Web - but they're not new Webs - I guess Facebook is just the biggest private network on The Web. The Web is the foundation social technology, and arguably a social network itself, that Facebook is built on top of it - Facebook is like tiny app inside its belly. As a social network The Web is a *lot* bigger - it has about 1.8 trillion users. I think it's difficult to understand this sort of scale and so it *seems* like 375 million is active users is a much bigger number than it really is. 23 million new FB users over 30 days this January IS incredible and unprecedented for a Facebook-style social network, but these numbers are dwarfed by the size of other types of social network - like email, phones, or The Web as a whole. In reality, Facebook just isn't anywhere near big enough to eat The Web, or to better it in any way, at err... being The Web. Nope, The Web will eat Facebook, and as Mike says above this will happen when they IPO. That's when when the huge, hungry Web will literally eat all the talent, just as the money guys start thumping the table. That's when people, probably only super-early adopters to start with, will begin to tire of it. Try and think of one thing that Facebook will be able to do that The Web won't be able to do in 3-5 years, but on an unimaginably huge scale. The Web will have a much more developed social layer - totally interoperable and, importantly, wired right through the basement of the Web and converged with phones and telly and everything. Facebook's not going to do that - it wasn't designed to be The Web and it could never eat it. No, The Web will gobble up Facebook just like it did with all those other massive social networks we all felt would last forever while we were going through that phase. We will all eat it, you included. It will be yummy, and then we'll move on to the next meal. That's what us humans are like - utterly insatiable.It's merely a kind of cognitive trick that makes us think Facebook will be here for ever. It's a massive suspension of disbelief but without it we would be emotionally unable to use Facebook at all.What will come next is a fascinating thought.
I have to disagree too. Remember when Facebook recently took away the username of somebody? You simply can't own your online identity via a Facebook URL. Domain names are the only way to have full control over your namespace and that won't change for a very long time. It might take a while for people to realize that but I believe the web will stay open.
Spent some time with a couple of guys from Facebook on Wednesday while on a tour of South Africa and one thing is clear Facebook is becoming a portal. If you add the Open Graph API to your mix above (major announcement coming in April) I think they could just eat the web!
Blech. good comparison between Facebook and AOL. And that's why I don't think it will take over. Some of us know better than to buy into something so restrictive, invasive, and poorly functioning. We may use it as a necessary evil, but it would certainly never be my venue of choice.Fantastic input by Tim M.
Yet today Facebook's new design removed the option to have easily accessible left menu home page links to groups such as a "newsriver" list or your pages
I don't see this happening.Facebook is a walled garden - it will never offer the richness of content available on the open web, nor will developers ever have the flexibility that they have in the wild. The last time I checked Facebook's terms of use were far more restrictive than those of the web (which doesn't have any!).
I'm with "Tim Malbon said..." Interested to see the new design when it gets rolled out to me though.
Yep, couldn't agree more. I think what's most interesting is that people can view Facebook "pages" without having an account. So you start to wonder, what's the value of the yourcompany.com site over having a major Facebook presence. There's no longer a lot of compelling reasons not to move most of your digital focus from a "site" standpoint into or around Facebook.
hmmm.. I see more and more people getting tired of facebook, they are getting fed up of being tagged, poked and prodded by friends, not to mention the various marketing companies spamming their feeds with marketing messages..Everyone talks about this magic 350 million users, but I would love to know how many of them are recently active..ie.. were online in the last week.. People do use the web more than once a month, so to say that Facebook is going is going to eat the web is a bit of a push... a parallel universe yes perhaps.. and for some, their permanent home, but for most just a place to visit every now and again.
Pete, see the TechCrunch link I put in. More than 1/2 log in daily. Also, they hit 400M users today.
Is Facebook the new Web or is it the new AOL, in terms of the easy way for non-tecchy everybodys to surf the Web? Or is that the same thing> (Or are we all just blowing smoke, let's wait and see?)
@Tim, thanks for the insightful comments. I agree it's easy for any person's opinions to be skewed by their own worldview. However, I try to maintain a broad perspective by talking to lots of different people. (Also, I don't run a PR firm.) One thing worth noting is Facebook Connect. If this becomes widely adopted then that only adds to the thesis.
I'm with Tim Malbon on this one - many of the early adopters have left Facebook. Of the 200 people I know who used it two years ago, about 3 use it with any regularity now. This is a pattern I suspect is being regularly repeated. Yes quite a few people log in now and then just to see if anyone mailed them, but most people I know don't use it anymore. It's the Friends Reunited of our time. Also Facebook isn't the biggest or most successful communication company on the web - Skype has 500 million users, much greater utility and usage, a clear revenue line and is now free from the dead hand of E-Bay.Whether Google buys Skype and Foursquare or Facebook buys Twitter, or vice versa, I do agree that this year will see a number of mergers and takeovers which will hasten the consolidation of communications platforms. Ultimately, however, the open web will trump the closed and limited world of Facebook.
The vast majority of innovations that benefit us most are not happening within Facebook and it won't be long (only 3-7 years perhaps) before someone (much smarter than me) figures out how to turn the Facebook platform inside out to give us the outside-the-system control and privacy we (want but haven't articulated).A user-focused system, not a corporate-owned system built around advertising business models. No logging into some other system. Secure, not searchable by people we don't know. It would be completely adaptable and able to connect where ever we want, based on our own interests or specifications. Something better, more evolved and positioned for the user. This (in my opinion) won't happen within one company. This leap is usually too hard for one company to make because it's too difficult to tear down and start over with new (better) assumptions - that undermine established corporate business models and revenue streams. Goes against most company's DNA. The vast majority of our innovations will happen outside Facebook - because the vast majority of people (creativity) is outside Facebook. The beauty of innovation is its complexity, ugliness, and step-by-step progression in fits and starts where people ride on the backs of each other to take ideas to the next level. Sometimes slow, sometimes great leaps ahead in thinking. Always unpredictable. And never held within one company or culture. I think we'll soon see some 15 year old kid come up with a completely revolutionary set of platform tools that allows us to break out of the "Facebook platform" model. Something that turns this all upside down.
I agree with many of your thoughts about Facebook. It's becoming a central location to get all your info-- your friends info, events and now newstreams and product info. It's much more easier to have it one place. The personalization factor is what is making it sucessful. I can find out what my best friend is up to as well as what my favorite newspaper is reporting. The question is when will it become information overload?
I'm with Tim on this too. But I think there's 6.8 gazillion web users.
Well, to me, the larger argument is that this is yet another case of the market preferring a well-integrated PLATFORM and resulting rich user experience over a loosely integrated, linky one (where the user experience is all over the board). iPhone v. Android is another variant of the same theme. As to AOL, the reason it failed, beyond the FEE v. FREE conundrum, was that it delivered a less than the sum of the parts experience when placed alongside the web, whereas I'd argue that both iPhone and Facebook deliver more than the sum of the parts experiences in terms of their relationship to the web.Yet, another reason that Google, historically, a loosely-coupled company that prays to the Church of Algorithms, must fight its DNA to get more integrated (Nexus v. Android) and more human (social platforms and services).The larger question wrt Facebook is whether it's a brand that you can trust, a topic that I blogged about here: Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust?http://bit.ly/8xySuWCheck it out, if interested.Mark
@Mark, is closed the new open? Seriously. Good points.
@Steve, I chuckle a bit because that's a pithy line, but I think that the truth is that while it's in our nature to define things in ALL or NONE terms, the truth is usually more nuanced. It's the AND prevailing over the EITHER/OR.Facebook and iPhone are succeeding because they're not walled gardens in the traditional sense. Plenty of fertile ground in them there gardens, but the walls have windows, doors, pipes, plumbing and all sorts of reliable utility services. Lattice works.
"They aren't just the next Google. They're the next web."Really? Come on. I love the exploration of how Facebook can get bigger and more powerful but but here's the real test. If Google went away tomorrow, most of us would suffer the loss of an advertising source, the best search engine out there, and a supplier of tons of free applications and services. If Facebook went away tomorrow, someone would (and probably will) replace them with another great, walled social platform.