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How to beat Facebook: build a better experience
If you want to take the lead, build a better experience than the leader. This means finding the key unmet needs (of users, customers, readers, whoever) and delivering an experience that delivers on those.
This approach would work - some day, inevitably, will work - for whatever company wants to overtake Facebook.
In this post Gina Trapani states it well:
Facebook is king of the social networking hill because Zuckerberg is a great editor with a sharp eye for product. When he was building Facebook, he looked at the leading social networks at the time--Friendster and MySpace--and purposefully exploited their weaknesses. Friendster was constantly down; MySpace was ugly. So Zuck made Facebook's design white and clean, launched it only at Harvard first, and scaled to other universities slowly to keep the site fast, stable, and reliable at all times.Similarly, to beat Facebook at social you have to look at its faults, and capitalize on them. Facebook's Achilles heel is the way it forces its worldview on its users. On Facebook, you can only "like" something. You can't love it, or hate it, or say it made you laugh, or made you sad, or unequivocally recommend it to your friends, or recommend it with some caveats.
A few months ago a new service called Diaspora got a lot of press attention for being a potential "Facebook-killer" (though that was the press's narrative - the creators never, to my knowledge, presented themselves that way). I joined early on through supporting their Kickstarter project and have watched the site with interest since it launched. It still seems early stage, as I haven't managed to figure out enough about the experience. (Someone in the know, please educate me!)
Update: Facebook is valued at $117 per "Like", according to Daily Artifacts.
Not possible, once Facebook sees you're getting traction they will duplicate your feature/experience and steal your thunder.
Many of these analysis seem shallow to me. I especially laugh when people keep pointing out how "like" is a weakness. The fact that you can't "dislike" something is one of Facebooks biggest strengths and why people actually look forward to logging on, they know they are only going to get "likes". Similarly, it is the simplicity of "like" that makes it successful. Do we really need multiple levels of like??
@ATLville: Like the way FB stole Twitters's thunder? Sorry, doesn't often work that way, especially for free Web apps. You can't just glue on a new feature to trip up your perceived competitors. Taking that route distorts your focus and takes your eye off the audience/customer. FB adapted their status feature, but *couldn't go far enough* to sideline Twitter without shooting themselves in the foot.
My hacker friends say Diaspora is a big mess. I haven't had a chance to play with it much but in the brief moments I saw it, I got confused. Maybe that will get fixed, maybe not.
I have to admit that I'm still confused when I open it up. (They should have called me, I would have been happy to talk!)
Facebook has done what no other network has -- brought in many of my friends including those not big on computers and tech. I can't see how another service that exploits FB's weakness will draw them in. They've already adapted to FB. They know how to use it. They won't want to try another service.
I know I sound like I'm saying "That can't be done." But I also know my friends.
Many of us don't want to keep switching services every time something better comes along including geek people like me who already invested a lot of effort into our original services.
Yes, I was on Myspace and Friendster, but I never did much on those two services.
Someone already exploited Facebook's weakness. I believe they go by "LinkedIn" (implied sarcasm). Facebook is for personal use, they suck at business networking.
On another note, I think Twitter is in trouble as people migrate to Facebook as the "rss" reader of choice. I see Twitter settling in as a gloried "TMZ" with a dash of AOL chatroom.
I like Twitter's extreme brevity, and all my tweets show up on FB, anyway. It's great for posting references and disembodied notes. FB is better for extended conversations. Blocking and cleaning out spam and porn is a major FB issue that has done in many a good page.
I wish Diaspora all the luck, they certainly need it if they think they can in any small way steal some of the lime light from the behemoth FaceBook.
Davey
http://ifund.ie