Facebook Killer?

Of course, I mean killer more in the sense of an app-killer (and not even a killer app, though it would take a killer app to be an app-killer).

Once upon a time there was Livejournal. This allowed individuals who wanted to blog to blog. Blogger (which I'm using now) is quite similar.

This worked for a little while until people realized they had nothing to say in their blog and updated it so infrequently that no one bothered to check in. Good idea for a while but requires insane amounts of dedication to keep it going.

Then came MySpace. It was gaudy, but it had a bunch of things that made it appealing, none the least of which was the fact bands, big and small, often had a MySpace page and thus having a MySpace page was cool.

It was easy to install an audio player and have visitors wince as you impale them with your musical tastes. Even were your visitors deaf, you could pummel their retinas with shockingly bad backgrounds that made text well nigh impossible to read.

MySpace was more like a friendly poster of things about you. The key to its popularity, other than the aforementioned background and music was your list of "friends" collected like so many baseball cards, and the inane comments they would leave on your comment board. Appealed to high school kids until they learned better taste.

Big point. Blogging was completely optional which is good since most people have very little to blog about.

Finally, Facebook. Originally aimed at Harvard kiddies then spread to other Ivy Leagues, then universities, then high schools, then just everyone. Facebook solves the problem that these other two sites had. You had to visit your friends page. If they weren't updating it, you weren't visiting it.

Facebook neatly inverts the problem. You get a feed which Facebook algorithms gloms together from all your friends, and you get the information that's most up-to-date. Information being used loosely, of course.

Thus, the friend that never posts anything except once a year, still gets their info sent your direction so you can see it. More active friends have their content sent more frequently.

Two other things that made Facebook succeed. First, status. This is microblogging a la Twitter. You get feeds sent to your main page when the status updates. Second was tagging of photos. That way, you get to see your friends in photos.

Due to recent security concerns, you don't get to see every photo your friend appears in. In particular, if your friend's friend (who isn't your friend) posts a picture of your friend (call him Al), you don't get to see that picture of Al. Facebook used to let you see these photos by default, but I guess a few people got concerned their parents or some such would be able to see embarrassing photos.

The other aspect is the myriad of addictive games, including the now defunct, Scrabulous which allows the Facebook fan who is tired of reading status and looking at pictures, many hours of uninterrupted interruption.

And Facebook's UI prevents gaudy backgrounds so you don't have to deal with your friends' awful tastes.

But with all that, is there room for other Facebook-like competitors to succeed? What could possibly be missing that could allow someone to jump in and create something so compelling that people would leave Facebook? One wonders.