Facebook's undeniably leading the Social Networking space. Is this going to be permanent?
Can it be toppled? What would it take to do so?
Guarantee privacy and revolutionize functionality. Here's how:
Privacy; The Zero-Knowledge Database. By relying upon the client to compute deterministic indexes based upon user-input, you can abstract the relations from the database into the client space. The result is that you have two items, say a pet and owner that look like this: Pet: id afb142, name Spot Owner: id dsf513, name Data
When Data logs in with his username and password, those values are never sent to the server -- instead, they're used along with other information to create keys <afb142> and <dsf513>. This process is deterministic given the sign-on data, but difficult to reverse-engineer (a one-way, trapdoor function or hash). So, Data knows his pet is Spot, but anyone else, even with full access to the database, doesn't.
This database design facilitates collaborative filtering, demographics analysis, et cetera.
On Functionality: Pro-active social networking. Facebook loses because it tells you what you know (or what your friends know). We've seen that globalization's promise of expanding our horizons is wrong -- we only become more niched. Yet, despite being very focused on a few topics, no one is exploiting this in a useful way. If you know that I enjoy older Country music and that I like a well-made cocktail, why can't your social networking site hook me up with a suggestion about what to do this weekend?
Right now, most people hear about new things through their contacts. But, their contacts have to be introduced to them through exploration or diffusion through their contacts. This process is slow and requires extensive contact networks of people with similar interest to find one another. The system, however, knows who likes Hank Williams and it knows who likes a perfect Vesper. Through some basic analysis; why can't it suggest to me a bar and a band this weekend based upon what other people with similar taste are doing?
Imagine waking up in the morning and logging into NotFacebook... it tells you about a few articles on HN, Reddit, and a number of blogs. Some are bloggers you know and love while others are new-to-you bloggers writing about subjects you enjoy. The system also recommends dinner at a restaurant that's recently enjoyed positive reviews from your fellow mushroom-hating, meat-loving epicureans. I knows you and Sam are free (Sam has similar taste, after all, and is a good friend of yours).
That would kill Facebook, I think.
But even now, Facebook's influence on our lives is fading away. As nearly everyone starts using it, and as everyone starts forming connections with anyone they have briefly met, it's power becomes greatly diluted. In many ways, it is becoming LinkedIn - a sterile place where everyone only puts forth their public persona.
It's certainly more complex than that, to do a real analysis you need to go feature by feature. Some become more useful as everyone connects (market place, events, causes, messaging, chat) but other things clearly suffer. Facebook used to be a place to share the kind of personal photos only your good friends see, but no longer. Your status used to be a very personal microblog, now you have to be much more careful.
Facebook used to be about your personal life, and more and more it's about your public life. Most teenagers will probably reject using Facebook in meaningful ways because of this. And that's the beginning of the end for Facebook as we know it.
Soon it will be nothing but infrastructure for our public net existence. Sure they will continue to make money, but I do expect the people who used to spend hours a day on it to start channeling their attention elsewhere.
If you want to compete with Facebook, become the tool that lets people follow each others' personal lives again. Let Facebook continue on it's trajectory to become a digital address book.
That being said, they are making obvious moves to continue to add to their defensibility. Their understanding and manipulation of the network effect is unparalleled by any other company out there. It will be a long time before they go.
I would suspect the thing that replaces them is nothing we can quite imagine. I do think facebook has probably "won" social networking in the browser space, the company that beats facebook will have to have a product that connects people better, and I would argue one that offers an experience that transcends what is possible in the browser. Within the current browser-based paradigm facebook is extraordinarily competitive and I do not expect them to lose there, but of course that goes without saying. The key to replacing a company like facebook is finding a new space where it is too big to pivot to compete in, and dominating that space. Right now facebook's organization and processes are setup to completely dominate the browser and innovation in that sector (from recruitment to product design). You'd need to force them to shift gears more quickly than they could, and I think a new platform would probably be the best bet.
But anything anyone says on this thread is wild speculation and should be taken with a grain of salt.
It's a sure thing. Remember when people used to talk about what could possibly unseat MySpace, if anything?
I hate to be debbie downer on this one, but ~$180,000 is a lot of money to be contributed to a project like this, which from the technical aspects that we know so far (which of itself does not say a lot for something with it's ambitions, and given the name which seems to be almost a southpaw sucker punch to Facebook with the exodus/diaspora of users), might not even gain any sort of mainstream traction to be worthy of more than a cursory blog post from CNet once it launches.
If I meet someone, I can exchange a lot of information with them by merely sharing my Facebook information. I can then "stalk" them and learn a lot about them. If there are n independent servers (for security), I'm now limited. I have to expose myself on a multitude of sites or convince others that my sys-admin is the most trust-worthy in existence. The sys-admins need to make money, though. Even the most altruistic sooner or later run out of funds, right? You could argue that each of the n servers will be designed to share information and the user interface is no different than Facebook today -- however, if that is the case, then a malicious individual can add a node to the cluster and then scrape any and all data that comes by.
So, either it shares information freely so that anyone and everyone can exploit it, or it requires a lot more involvement from the user. The avoidance of which is exactly the reason people don't simply use: Flickr, MeetUp, evite, LinkedIn, Google Calendars, Twitter, PlentyOfFish, OkCupid, et cetera.
I would like to use Buzz/Twitter/Identica/whatever to post one update. And then all my social connections will be immediately notified of the update regardless of what client or website they prefer to use.
Eventually "social networking" like features will be ubiquitous and your social graph will be federated across many different sites using standard protocols. Facebook won't be anything special, but just another portal (view) into your social network experience. Unless they try to remain a "walled garden" in which case they'll be nothing, eventually.
I'd say it'll take a few years of things going the way they are now before the public at large starts taking their privacy a little more seriously.