but yes, i am going on record saying that facebook will probably not be the last word in social networking. someone else will come along and figure out how to do it better, just like what happened to friendster and myspace.
They do have some strong network effects, but just like its predecessors, this market moves too fast for that to create a durable lead, I think.
Also, social networking is subject to the whims of fashion. I think part of what facebook used to kill myspace was that myspace was full of lower class people. Facebook seeded themselves from colleges, giving themselves a nice middle class base to build upon. Facebook has largely abandoned that level of control now, and it has yet to be seen if the seeding was enough.
There were a load of online auction sites, then eBay won. You could wrongly say that people moved from auction site to auction site, but that wasn't the case.
Maybe there will be the next facebook, the next ebay, the next amazon, but I'm skeptical.
I was under the impression that most of the 'me too' auction sites came /after/ ebay showed how it was done, then they died, because they were trying to beat ebay by being like ebay.
hah. I actually think Google is in a similar place. they aren't the first search engine, and I think their strongest claim on being the last isn't so much that they have some kind of moat, it's just that they've hired four out of five people who might compete with them.
I actually think the search engine market has the opposite of a network effect barrier to entry. If you made a search engine that was half of google's 'native effectiveness' (by which I mean googles effectiveness before the spammers start mucking it up) assuming your search algorithm is different enough that it's not gamed in the same way as google's, you will have a search engine that is more effective than google until it becomes worth the spammer's time to mess you up.
I think google's talent pool is interesting, though. they have a whole lot of really good people, and they are probably exploiting that talent better than any other company of similar size. It really seems like they should own more markets than they do.
I think Google's biggest weakness on that front is that they have nearly all their employees thinking that google is both competent and altruistic. I don't see the same internal dissent with my friends who work at google as I saw when I worked at Yahoo. At Yahoo, we'd point out what the company was doing wrong. At google, the employees seem to think their masters know best.
(this aside, the essential problem with search engines is that the advertising business model creates a conflict of interest; if the search results are that much better than the search ads, nobody will click on the ads. On the other hand, nobody has come up with another business model for 'generalized search')
