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Comment by volida | Hacker News Reader

The serious question is if it can be replaced not if its currently popular.

there are already so many social networks, so facebook is not dominant where as Google has penetrated globally due to its quality.

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I'd say that for most people on facebook, it's easier to replace google than to replace facebook. You can always use Yahoo or MSN for search, they might not be as good, but they're good enough. You can use Yahoo maps or Live Earth. And you can use Yahoo email, which is getting really good recently. But it's hard to leave facebook unless all your friends leave with you at the same time to a new social network.

that's an interesting perspective, but I don't think is really valid. People will easily/hardly change their default social network but really easier than switching from Google which is a point of reference to those who are used to it. Even if you tried to switch from Google, how many are the alternatives? Like you said only two. And whenever I tried them they never make me stick to them.

And this is easier to happen because more people can build a community than a search engine.

I disagree. As months go by, it's going to be even harder for anyone to come up with a social network as big as FB. Why ? FB's critical mass! As it's been said, all that differentiates Facebook for an individual user is the presence of that users friend’s on Facebook — which forces them to use Facebook to connect with them. And this is precisely why FB is not a founding member of the OpenSocial foundation. Facebook is threatened by OpenSocial’s ultimate aim of connecting user profiles and enabling users to easily manage and port their data across any social network.

Not to mention that in this country, it's still not even the most popular social network. And even if it becomes that, it did so only because it replaced MySpace. I don't see what is any more irreplaceable about Facebook than MySpace.

Facebook is different from MySpace for exactly the use case of keeping up with your friends. Facebook is the only social network so far that rigorously enforces real names, identities and relationships through both social design and brute force. MySpace has degenerated in to a social game to rack up more points in the form of 'friends'. They are completely different, which is why Facebook is catching up to MySpace so quickly and MySpace is sinking.

v important: "real names, identities and relationships"

Right, this is the "aha" one of the parents mentioned. The major problem with the internet is the lack of accountability, accountability is necessary to form trust, and trust is necessary to form good social networks.

> I don't see what is any more irreplaceable about Facebook than MySpace.

That's exactly it. You're probably not seeing how they're different. When you used Google you saw that it's different from Yahoo, but I'm sure many people didn't see the difference. After all, they're both search engines. Same here: although they're both social networks, Facebook is very different from MySpace. When I used Facebook the first time, I got that Aha moment you talked about.

still you don't answer if is irreplaceable and why

I thought I did in the first comment. It's hard to get all your friends to move with you at the same time to a new social network. Not that it can't happen, everything is replacable. It's just much harder than replacing google, because with Google I can switch on my own.

Whether Facebook can be replaced is an interesting question.

I'm leaning towards "no". For any site to replace Facebook it would require either many, many users to make the transition to another site or to outright leave making the site less useful for its users, and I honestly don't see that happening. Facebook is honestly nicely designed, has plenty of users and I can't see any killer app or nicer equivalent of Facebook appearing to make moving worthwhile.

The only thing that could replace Facebook is an unprecedented sharing of data between many significant players allowing interoperability between sites much like how E-Mail works. The existence of DataPortability may be a slow but sure approach towards this goal but there's too many factors to consider influencing whether this will ever actually happen. I certainly hope so in the long run - one site having the amount of influence that Facebook potentially can worries me.

Disclaimer: I don't actually use Facebook, and probably never will.

Unprecedented sharing of data is starting to happen, and friendfeed is setting itself up as the hub of that sharing.

People are extremely fickle. A few years ago in the UK, everyone was on friendsreunited. Then they all moved to facebook/myspace. If there's a new thing with some cool feature, they'll all move to that. Facebook is just the current fad.

It will continue to be very relevant for college campuses for a good while yet.

How facebook will be replaced.

http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2007/11/google-opensocial-and-...

http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2007/11/social-network-transit...

I'd argue that Facebook has the best 'quality' when compared to the other social networks in the USA. The UI and feature set are much better than any of its competitors. Facebook is dominant in the USA; the only competitor is MySpace which seems to fill a different niche.

Facebook = keep tabs on people you know, or sorta know.

MySpace = meet random people you don't know, get spammed by porn bots, irritate your ex by posting salacious photos of yourself with a new fling, browse photos of potential mates in a criminally inappropriate age bracket from yourself, etc.

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