Marc Andreessen wrote yesterday dismissing comparisons between Facebook and geocities. It was particularly interesting to me because I had heard this same comparison made months ago from a friend of mine. He makes 2 main points in his post
Point #1: if Geocities was basically Facebook before Facebook existed, then Yahoo today would be, basically, Facebook. Social networking services inherently have network effects due to viral growth; the big tend to get bigger (unless they commit suicide); Geocities the hypothetical ur-social network would therefore today be absolutely enormous; Yahoo owns Geocities. Yahoo, some people have pointed out recently, is not Facebook.
Uhm, what? Sorry Marc, I love your posts about entrepreneurship, career building, and great people, but this logic is simply ridiculous. The WSJ and Ballmer’s comments do NOT state that Geocities is exactly the same as Facebook and Ning, but that it represents the same basic social networking fad. Geocities got huge, fast. It was the 3rd most trafficed site on the internet in 1999. As of today, Oct 6, 2007, in the US, MySpace holds the position of 3rd according to Alexa (with Facebook sitting at #5). These sites all offer user generated content, and offer a way for people to ‘express themselves’ and connect with other people with like interests.
Andreessen’s second point details the feature lists of Geocities, Facebook, and Ning (of course, with the longest list). To me, the feature differentiation argument isn’t very relevant either. As Berman points out in his article
GeoCities grew popular before broadband, meaning that it would appear terribly crude to modern eyes. There was no video. It took hours to upload a photograph.
Geocities’s features were all that one could reasonably do on the internet back then, and it still got ridiculously hot and eventually fizzled out. Friends and social graphs? Geocities had link rings. I applaud the success of MySpace, Facebook, and Ning, but I personally don’t think its going to be nearly as big as it is now, in a few years. In other words, I don’t think that there is any chance that Facebook can sustain the traffic growth they’ve had in the past. Hype breeds hype, and I still think thats largely what is currently fueling all of this social network growth. Nobody wants to be left behind, so they all join. But what long-term value is there in these networks? Keeping in touch with old high school friends? Meh. Pictures from the crazy party last week at Leo’s house? Meh. I see them being used for gossiping, name-calling, popularity contests, and online dating, and those things just aren’t that important as you mature.
