Facebook, Privacy, etc
So Facebook is taking some big risks with essentially making their profiles public, Myspace style. I don’t really give a shit about the whole privacy thing and how they made it so most stupid people would willingly open up their profiles for public consumtion. What interests me is the risks their taking in the name of constant growth. Basically, this is one of the big things–aside from crappy custom profile designs–that made Myspace fail. Things were too public, and everyone could view your profile and it became a popularity contest vs. a place to truly maintain long term relationships. I’m not saying anything new. I’m just stating my context for my rant here.
What I’m curious about is why Facebook doesn’t do anything innovative? They’re playing it so boring. Why don’t they do something already. Why don’t they just make a full fledged search engine already. Not that that is necessarily innovative, but why don’t they build a new product to grow. In the United States, the only place they can go is down is my guess. I could be wrong. I haven’t scrutinized the metrics. But my guess is they should stop trying so hard now and do something else, rather than risk fucking up their core business. Their hope is obviously to now get all this search engine traffic, which is pretty much a totally different type of traffic. I guess it’s worth trying out. It definitely COULD be big. It’s also just really risky. I’d like to see them try doing things that we see at all the semantic search engines: twine, powerset, etc. It’s been speculated for years now that they would make the super social search engine, but there’s not a peep about them doing anything serious here. I’d like to see something that deserves the fanfare of a big event that consumed everyone much like Google Wave and Microsoft’s Bing did last spring. I want something grand and different from them. It’s about time. It’s about time that they join the big boys and start offering different product lines. To me that seems like a safer route for them. They already mastered the social network. Keep adding little nick-nacks here and there, but don’t rock the boat. That’s my advice. And then give us something with artificial intelligence already!
Facebook, you have potential to be really big. Lets see something already.




Tyler replied:
Facebook Connect isn’t innovative? It’s single handedly building the foundation to a social eco-system….
The next BIG thing you’ll see them do, will be a social payment platform where you can checkout anywhere online (and later offline) to make purchases or do transactions…
December 16, 2009 at 9:07 pm. Permalink.