Facebook Is The New Yahoo? No, Facebook Is The New AOL.

Mike Elgan makes a case for Facebook’s future: becoming obsolete, sidelined, and non-innovative. He looks at the recent efforts of Facebook to copy features of Twitter and Google+ and suggests that Facebook is the new Yahoo:

Mike Elgan,  Why Facebook is the New Yahoo

I don’t think Facebook will die. In fact, I think the company will continue to survive indefinitely. I think Facebook will become the new Yahoo. Here’s what I mean.

It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when Yahoo was the hottest company in Silicon Valley. Everybody knew, or thought they knew, that information portals would yield all the power and influence online.

As millions and billions of people got Internet connections, they would all need directories to help them find resources online, as well as search. Yahoo leveraged its traffic to drive usage of e-mail and a gazillion other services.

But the portal era faded away, replaced by the search era. Google rose to dominance to become the hottest Internet company in Silicon Valley.

But you know what? Yahoo is still a going concern. They still have a lot of traffic and bring in a lot of revenue.

But as a driving force, as an influential driver of news and information, Yahoo is out in the woods. Once the darling of Silicon Valley, Yahoo has become this… thing — a service nobody can describe, a kind of machine that acquires companies, then closes them down.

Yahoo has no vision. It has no purpose. It’s dispensable. Yahoo continues like a zombie, animated by the life it once had.

And that’s what Facebook is becoming. Yes, they’ll continue to have users. And yes, they’ll continue to make money. But Facebook is looking increasingly like a one-trick pony that doesn’t have the vision to reinvent itself for the post-Facebook era.

Facebook is the new Yahoo.

I’ve made the case for several years, so I buy it, although I usually refer to Facebook’s fall as coming from the rise of social operating systems, which haven’t happened yet, and compare that coming fall to that of AOL:

Stowe Boyd, Facebook is the new AOL

Facebook is managing the chaos of social interaction on the web, normalizing it and standardizing it for us, just as AOL made the web neat and tidy. That seemed a winning proposition in the late ’90s, which led to astonishing valuations for AOL. They acquired Time-Warner using that wealth, and in 2002 Time-Warner wrote off $600M as AOL started to fall. Now, AOL has been spun out, and has no central role in our experience of the web. 10 years is a long time. Time-Warner is now the second largest entertainment company in the world.

The moral of this story is that you can make a business out of simplifying what is chaotic and confusing, but only at the outset. As people become habituated to what at first was scary and headache-inducing, they will move away from controlled experience to more personally managed negotiation of the world.

‘But, all my friends are on Facebook!’ That was true in 1999 about AOL, too. All my friends had AIM accounts, so it was the best place for instant messaging. Until Yahoo and MSN offered audio and then video, and blogging broke loose. And then everything changed with broadband.

And what is going to be the equivalent of broadband for sociality online? What is going to come along to destabilize the Facebook stranglehold on our ‘social graphs’? Simple: sociality has turned out to be the most interesting thing to emerge from the past decade of the web. It’s not all the servers, the cloud computing, the data, or even the explosion of materials online: its the social dimension, and the tools we have built to explore that.

At the same time, we are witnessing an almost unprecedented era of invention around new devices, form factors, and operational premises for computing and communications. Smartphones, tablets, app stores, and the emergence of activities like geolocation, massively parallel gaming, social TV, and so on. These are leading to a deep rethinking of the operating environments we rely on, in our PCs, mobile and gaming devices, and formerly internet-deaf devices like TVs and appliances.

The next generation of operating environments will be social at their core. Our current operating environments are based on standard understanding of things that programmers care about, like files, directories, and access controls. The average person could care less.

We will see social operating systems where following people’s activities, or creating likes, or publishing profiles will all be built-in. These will not be features of apps, or managed as metadata in walled silos. The primitives that structure our social connections will be built into the fabric of the next generation of operating environments, just like file systems, URLs, and HTTP are well-integrated into today’s.

[I found out after I wrote that piece that Jason Kottke used the same metaphor in 2007.]

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