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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

No, but it explains how the bubble is going to deflate. Within two years, Facebook will be MySpace. We just haven't discovered what the replacement will be yet.

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I assume the downvotes are for the bubble comment, but I agree with you on the other point. Social seems like an inherently fickle business to be in. The ficklest. So much of it is basically style and fashion and trendiness - things come into fashion and things go out of fashion. MySpace did, and imho Facebook will to. I mean really, what's to keep people there if something else that all your friends were using came along? I think a lot of people like joining something new, and social web apps scratch that itch. There's almost zero cost associated with leaving - maybe figuring out what to do with that chunk of your day that you have back now.

Anyway, not surprised at all to see this report.

People don't leave the social network scene. They simply move to a new social network. As a social network moves to monetize, it becomes increasingly more intrusive and less functional. This reduces its utility to a point where another social network, which may not be to the monetizing 'step,' will have higher utility and thus will see an explosion of users, investment, etc.

"As a social network moves to monetize, it becomes increasingly more intrusive and less functional."

Well put. We agree. I don't have the link handy, but there was a post floating around on here a couple weeks ago about having customers, not users. Point being, social et all might be the sexy thing to be into, but from a business perspective it's basically a distraction. The real money is and probably always will be in the enterprise, government, health care - sectors where costs of acquiring, adapting, and leaving technology are all significant and so are the profits to be made.

Anyway, that post made an impact on me.

Then just after that our 3rd boy was born in Morristown Hospital in New Jersey. Supposedly voted "the best hospital in New Jersey". I was pretty amused to see that the state of the medical art that was networked all over the hospital was still running largely on Windows 98. I have to guess the contract to upgrade that software when it does come along will be worth what? Half a billion dollars? For one hospital? Anyway, I digress...

What is Instagram was to be the replacement? Can Facebook, with a lot of cash from the IPO, avert the same fate as MySpace buy buying its supposed successors?

Potentially, but the problem becomes that none of these companies will ever make money - you can't stay on the VC treadmill forever, and over time it's going to be harder and harder to monetize 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM USERS'

The other problem is that you can't pick the winner in every horse race. Facebook obviously won this round, but it just as easily could have been Orkut or any other social network that was out there. The traction model is almost certainly chaotic.

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