Aug
24th
2010
Tue
24th
2010
Maniacal Rage: The Problem with Facebook's "Places"
Except that Facebook has never competed on feature set - they’ve been very careful to position themselves in an ever-escalating round of “this is who you can share stuff with on Facebook”. First Harvard, then your friends at other schools, then everybody with an invitation, then everybody. There have always been technically superior alternatives, but they hit the social circles in the right way and were just effortless enough to gain market share. I think it’s naive to say that there will never be another Facebook, but it’s going to take a long hard road to unseat them as the default. It won’t be accomplished by making a better product - only by making a product that makes it easier to communicate with some set of people (and then maybe eventually the entire set of people).Here’s the thing about Facebook that really gets under my skin: They are slowly incorporating the features from every other independent web application on the internet. This is not inherently a problem—companies get bigger and they begin to have the resources to widen their feature set—the issue…
