Minority Rapport

Facebook is stickier than email

In 1999, three portals – Yahoo, Lycos and Excite – dominated. Today, one stands. What saved Yahoo? Yahoo Mail. How? Mail is sticky like your phone number: you rarely change it. Abandoning your email is like you skipping town and not telling your friends. Of all yahoo.com visitors, 50%+ use mail.yahoo.com. You check email everyday. Yahoo pulls you to its other services.

How is Facebook stickier than email? Facebook is email, plus more (a lot more). You use Facebook to send friends messages. Facebook Inbox will become your spam-free email – only Facebook can do it because all your friends are on it. You trust it with your personal information, photos and friends. You use your real name and connect with friends doing the same thing (unlike MySpace). Abandoning Facebook is like you flattening your house, burning your photos, changing your name, skipping town and not telling your friends. Yes, Facebook is that useful. (Facebook users, anyone disagree?) That's why 50%+ users return daily. Facebook's network effects make it impossible to duplicate their network. Facebook is the phone number you will never change. Facebook is built to last more than anyone. Now, which do you think is stickier?

Which is more dynamic, Facebook or Google?

It's Facebook. Why? With a community of 20 million+ real friends (and growing fast), anything is possible (yes, anything). Google does a great job in search. It facilitates you getting to where you want to go. But what can you do with real friends you cannot do with a search engine? Yahoo Answers is a start – Facebook can do it better on a larger scale. Want "social search"? Facebook can do it, no one else can. Facebook will be able to do everything a search engine can do plus a lot more. Best of all, everybody wins: you get what you want, when you want. Facebook will be the next great facilitator, and more dynamic.

Facebook is better than MySpace

Surprisingly, PC World left Facebook people off their list of top 50 most influential people on the web. Last summer, Business 2.0 left Facebook off their list of influencers. This reminds me that, amazingly, Facebook still flies under the radar of industry observers. (Remember, of course, that Facebook is a top 10 website in traffic!) Over time, the company will get the recognition it deserves. Of course, its 20 million members are well aware of the utility of Facebook, but the mass media is not. If you were not in college when Facebook was around, but you want to understand its influence, go live in a dorm on any college campus. Sit in the library and popular hang outs. Facebook is everywhere. Facebook is an essential communication tool, social facilitator and utility for college students. If you can’t do that, go invite all your friends to join – the more you have, the more it will become a daily source of information for you.

Facebook’s utility puts it in a class of its own – MySpace is not in that class. Facebook’s privacy options enable users to share only what they want to share. Facebook is the biggest photo site on the internet and has achieved that because friends share photos with friends they otherwise would not share with anyone else. Facebook users are comfortable with sharing in the Facebook environment. In contrast, MySpace has to deal with friend, comment and messaging spam – as a result, MySpacers are restricting their profiles to just their friends. Even with that privacy, MySpace does not and will not have the same structural advantages as Facebook. Facebook does it by community and enables finer tuning. At best, MySpace users are a mish-mash of no privacy and some privacy, but no consistency. From the perspective of sustainability, Facebook is built to last because it enables real life interactions. MySpace is built to die because it enables irrelevant, non-friend communications that empirically kill online communities. MySpace has an edge on Yahoo Finance – notoriously a source of spam – in terms of longevity of quality content, but that’s nothing to hang your hat on.

It is too late for MySpace to change. Any adjustments they make now will only patch underlying competitive disadvantages to Facebook. Facebook, in the long run, is the only network that matters. Beyond that, Facebook can build useful tools MySpace simply cannot – that is a topic for future posts.