The Competition
Facebook wasn’t always the guaranteed winner in the college
space. ConnectU and a bunch of alumni sites like reunion.com
preceded Facebook, and competitors have followed.
Around October 2005, Xuqa shot into existence, and into super
growth prominence, basically by unethically crawling thousands of
facebook pages and emailing bogus invitations to join. Xuqa was
set as a “porn word” and the piracy blocked, after which the site
traffic died back a bit, and then mostly flat-lined at around half a
million members. Xuqa looks like it has achieved critical mass to
54 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
45 I, on the other hand, killed more trees than most of the rest of the engineers
combined. Seems like only engineers older than 30 print stuff. One management
strategy I used while leading a 5-9 person major product push, involved printing
out all of the significant user facing screens, putting then up on a wall, and having
everyone scribble on them. Positive outcomes were that we actually did get
feedback, and everyone in the company could impactfully and viscerally feel the
level of progress. Unfortunately, it was physically tied to a wall, and was hard to
version and change, and finally it ended up as a large paper salad under my desk
after the office move. I also led the heavy use of Trac, which now shares wide
internal use with Basecamp.
survive for a while, by offering unique differentiating
characteristics, including peanuts as a currency, kisses, secret
crushes, etc., and a crisper, flashier user interface. They were
able to build the site so quickly by hiring at least 20 Pakistani
engineers to build it in one summer, and still their engineering is
based out of Karachi. Just recently, Xuqa differentiated itself more
strongly by turning itself into a game, making the acquisition and
use of peanuts into a core purpose of the site46.
Bebo.com claims huge membership and usage numbers, which
they have been unwilling to confirm or explain to me, and Alexa
still shows them as in the low end of the US top 500, though
growing fast. And many, many other social sites are pure
vaporware, or are not differentiated enough to overcome the first
mover challenge. While Myspace and Facebook have first mover
advantage with strong network effects, plenty of opportunity
exists for supplementing the leaders in specific niches, or even
surpassing them with a superior offering.
Late comers without a significant sponsor to pay indefinite losses,
may need to make ethical compromises, sometimes against their
larger competitors, but also against their users. I can’t believe
that Xuqa’s full profiles are open to google and anyone in the
world. However even the general market leader hasn’t appeared
heavily concerned about privacy: Myspace shuts out obedient
crawlers, and bad crawlers can result in your picture (and full
Karel Baloun 55
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
46 Rule of Marketing: If you can’t be first or second in your category, make a new
category in which you are first.
profile, unless you are diligent with your privacy settings, or
unless you are in that line of work so happy about that) getting on
http://myspacehotties.net/. Myspace also leaves all information
on the site itself fully open to any member. I can search for
anyone and see their everything just by registering a meaningless
account.
Is that because users are clueless or truly unconcerned about their
privacy? Facebook is, relative to these sites, good on privacy, by
limiting profile view to friends and the users own networks, and
adding some field specific privacy controls. But only a very small
minority of users modify the default privacy settings.
Facebook wasn’t always the guaranteed winner in the college
space. ConnectU and a bunch of alumni sites like reunion.com
preceded Facebook, and competitors have followed.
Around October 2005, Xuqa shot into existence, and into super
growth prominence, basically by unethically crawling thousands of
facebook pages and emailing bogus invitations to join. Xuqa was
set as a “porn word” and the piracy blocked, after which the site
traffic died back a bit, and then mostly flat-lined at around half a
million members. Xuqa looks like it has achieved critical mass to
54 Inside Facebook
Copyright, Karel Baloun, 2006. All rights reserved.
45 I, on the other hand, killed more trees than most of the rest of the engineers
combined. Seems like only engineers older than 30 print stuff. One management
strategy I used while leading a 5-9 person major product push, involved printing
out all of the significant user facing screens, putting then up on a wall, and having
everyone scribble on them. Positive outcomes were that we actually did get
feedback, and everyone in the company could impactfully and viscerally feel the
level of progress. Unfortunately, it was physically tied to a wall, and was hard to
version and change, and finally it ended up as a large paper salad under my desk
after the office move. I also led the heavy use of Trac, which now shares wide
internal use with Basecamp.
survive for a while, by offering unique differentiating
characteristics, including peanuts as a currency, kisses, secret
crushes, etc., and a crisper, flashier user interface. They were
able to build the site so quickly by hiring at least 20 Pakistani
engineers to build it in one summer, and still their engineering is
based out of Karachi. Just recently, Xuqa differentiated itself more
strongly by turning itself into a game, making the acquisition and
use of peanuts into a core purpose of the site46.
Bebo.com claims huge membership and usage numbers, which
they have been unwilling to confirm or explain to me, and Alexa
still shows them as in the low end of the US top 500, though
growing fast. And many, many other social sites are pure
vaporware, or are not differentiated enough to overcome the first
mover challenge. While Myspace and Facebook have first mover
advantage with strong network effects, plenty of opportunity
exists for supplementing the leaders in specific niches, or even
surpassing them with a superior offering.
Late comers without a significant sponsor to pay indefinite losses,
may need to make ethical compromises, sometimes against their
larger competitors, but also against their users. I can’t believe
that Xuqa’s full profiles are open to google and anyone in the
world. However even the general market leader hasn’t appeared
heavily concerned about privacy: Myspace shuts out obedient
crawlers, and bad crawlers can result in your picture (and full
Karel Baloun 55
I’ve found something to put here. Your turn.
46 Rule of Marketing: If you can’t be first or second in your category, make a new
category in which you are first.
profile, unless you are diligent with your privacy settings, or
unless you are in that line of work so happy about that) getting on
http://myspacehotties.net/. Myspace also leaves all information
on the site itself fully open to any member. I can search for
anyone and see their everything just by registering a meaningless
account.
Is that because users are clueless or truly unconcerned about their
privacy? Facebook is, relative to these sites, good on privacy, by
limiting profile view to friends and the users own networks, and
adding some field specific privacy controls. But only a very small
minority of users modify the default privacy settings.
No comments:
Post a Comment