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Facebook is a very poor attempt at an "everything app" - and that's wholly due to who its founder is, his unethical tactics, and him not being a creative person.

Walled gardens and trying to control and extract as much wealth-value for yourself, and lazily to maximize profits and reduce effort and intelligence-skill-sophistication required, goes contrary to nature and how tribes work - where adequately sharing of resources, and arguably distribution skillfully with purpose, is necessary for [social] cohesion.

Facebook was so successful solely because it piggybacked on the VC and advertising industrial complexes and was first-to-market; externalities wise though they weren't successful - Facebook and what Mark created and maintains has been net harmful to society, and arguably to a very severe degree; though he's not solely to blame, other systems and processes had to be corrupt, captured, in order for the scale of harm to be able to unfold, cascade.




Well, I can't imagine any "everything app" that wouldn't have those flaws.

Anyway, most people fled Facebook because they didn't want a single identity linked to every kind of thing they post. That's why the alternatives keep their users even when they are owned by Facebook.

Also, FB wasn't first-to-market.


Indeed, it's difficult to easily imagine a platform that requires enough complexity to facilitate a relatively free market ecosystem where third-parties voluntarily integrate in reciprocal relationship; it's not straight-forward, not obvious, perhaps will be obvious in hindsight once the working model is clearly defined.

Re: "FB wasn't first-to-market"

What platform then first connected close peer groups via requiring a university/college email address for login, for the platform to then quickly associated those users with each other relevancy wise - leading to the network effects that quickly launched Facebook?

(Zuckerberg knowing that there only needed to be one such platform, why he lied to/misled the ConnectU twins who were actively paying him to develop ConnectU - to which he launched TheFacebook first to get an advantage)


Long before Facebook, even before MySpace became huge our small national social network (actually a SMS and logo site that exploded) allowed you to choose a school and show you other people from that school that you could filter by age. Everyone below 20 was using it.

More or less the same thing


Examples of multiprotocol applications are seamonkey, pidgin, miranda, but they use open protocols and purely clients.


Facebook could have been an "everything app" if they had bothered to really try; as it is they ate almost all small business/small group "websites", sadly.


> a very poor attempt at an "everything app" - and that's wholly due to who its founder is, his unethical tactics, and him not being a creative person.

This would also apply to any App associated with Musk.


Beyond moral/privacy reasons, I don't get why you say an app from China wouldn't work.


Culture and consumer expectation is a big part of product/market fit. It's really only the current crop of SV companies that have sometimes managed to transcend this culture gap and operate identically in every market while making a profit. (To see an SV example of this bombing, Uber did not fare well in China or SE Asia.) But traditionally, companies like Walmart, KFC, etc. have had many failures branching out of their home markets because of a lack of product market fit.

China runs a risk of any sufficiently isolated economy; its consumer preferences start diverging from the rest of the world's. The intentional isolation of the Chinese economy through measures like protectionism and the Great Firewall only increase this risk. It's not limited to China though, Japan has similar issues. As an example, until the advent of smartphones Japanese phonemakers were producing increasing amounts of esoteric features that only Japanese consumers wanted.




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