Facebook seems ripe for disruption, or at the very least it shouldn't be that hard to compete with it as it was a while ago. Former early adopters and addicted users are getting tired of it and want something new, better, less spammy.<p>It's also in the nature of early adopters to move on by the time a product or service becomes <i>too</i> mainstream. They just need to see something else that is compelling first. But I think many of them are already using it much less than they used to.<p>I think a true distributed P2P social network would be very interesting for them, but it would also need to get the execution right. I haven't heard much about Diaspora lately, but something interesting came out a few days ago with BitTorrent trying to make a P2P social network around torrents. I think that's an intriguing idea, and it's a bit similar to what Opera tried to do with Unite.<p>As a side note, I think all social networks so far have had one major design flaw. I've joined other social networks before Facebook and they all seem to suffer from the "too many friends" problem, which does become a problem once you start having hundreds or thousands of friends.<p>I think there needs to be 2 categories of "friends": true Friends and Followers. When you accept a request it should make that person a Follower by default, but it should give you the option to make him a Friend also. So many people add others on Facebook now, when it's just so they can see more info about them or their private pictures, with no real intention of "befriending" them later on. That's why I think most requests should become followers by default, and only choose to make them "Friends" when you really know the person.<p>I think Twitter's model works a bit like that. You can have thousands of followers, but only a few "friends" where you basically follow each other. Just something to think about for whoever wants to build the <i>next</i> social network or whatever, so they don't repeat this huge mistake that almost every social network has made so far.
How about reason 0: You depend on a platform that can shut you down in an instant without any justification and without possibilities to reactivate your app?
Reason 3 is why I am constantly advising friends not to take "promote your business on Facebook!" classes, especially when there are other, more direct avenues available to them. I've come to the conclusion that social and marketing are an awkward mix, and most people route around attempts to inject the latter into the former.<p>On the other hand, social media is a great way for your customers to tell their friends if they've had an exceptional experience with you. So I believe making it easy for your customers to talk about you is far more valuable than building on Facebook itself.
There are many more problems with FaceBook IMHO. That doesn't mean you should move away from it simply just use it to your advantage.<p>(Shameless plug)
<a href="http://000fff.org/how-to-think-like-facebook-and-twitter/" rel="nofollow">http://000fff.org/how-to-think-like-facebook-and-twitter/</a>
Hold on a sec - replacing facebook with something else is not that simple and i'd venture probably unlikely.
there's a huge network effect that facebook has in place. it is not just for games. it is starting to drive traffic to various news outlets: (<a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385095,00.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385095,00.asp</a>) and it is probably just getting started.
There is something substantial to facebook that makes people come back. And naturally as a company is growing and adding more features, the API is going to change. I personally use it a lot to share news articles with my "friends", but the ability to now share those articles with only certain friends, directly from the news website - which hasn't been implemented everywhere yet, is pretty interesting and shows that facebook realizes that there are friends and there are "friends".<p>It would be far easier to have disrupted something like Google, which doesn't have the same network effect as Facebook - but even that has been very challenging for anyone to do.
I agree. The Facebook API is a mess. It is too costly for developers to chase the changes and the API itself is too restrictive. It's like AppleScript, a great idea, pity you cannot do much with it.
Facebook platform is only good for games. No other type of app can get traction there, because facebook is an entertainment medium , no matter how hard they 've tried to become more "serious". The thing is, it has gotten increasingly off-putting for indie game developers to follow facebook's labyrinthine platform roadmap. Their platform designs and updates are notoriously amateurish and short-sighted. I believe they have changed 3 platform leads, each of whom introduced a new API. Their weekly code pushes regularly introduce bugs along with the fixes.<p>For us, it's taking more time to adjust to facebook's everchanging APIs, policies, designs etc, than adding features to our games. The fact that facebook nonsensically banned Adsense advertising does not help either.<p>That said, facebook is still the most efficient amplifier that can provide exposure to web apps.<p>I would personally vouch for another provider that can offer a stable social gaming platform. There were rumors about a google game network, and i m hopeful about it