An article in the New York Times discussing the waning popularity of Myspace mentions yet another social networking service (YASNS): Bebo. Bebo is doomed.
Being a geek, the technical details are the first thing to jump out at me. The site runs on Java server pages and proudly displays a "Powered by Oracle" button. I suspect most hacker-types will consider my assertion proven at this point, but everyone else probably needs an explanation of why this is a problem. Paul Graham has already written a better explanation than I could, but to summarize: Java and Oracle are not the tools that smart technical people select for their projects.
One of the most telling non-technical signs is that they don't eat their own dog food. The about page has profiles for all of their staff, but these pages obviously aren't Bebo profiles. Why should users use this service to tell the world about themselves if the people who made it don't?
There is, of course a more fundamental issue: the Myspace model is broken, and the world does not need YASNS that just provides a slightly better implementation of it. Myspace and services like it fill two niches. One is the niche that used to be filled by free web hosting services like Geocities and Angelfire: a place for people to show off how "cool" they are using bad web design and animated GIFs. This is probably a bad market to go after because the target market has a short attention span, leading them to jump from service to service. The other niche is actual social networking. These sites are horrible for that purpose because they encourage users to behave in an autistic manner. Normal people don't try to accumulate huge lists of friends, yet that's exactly what these services encourage. The biggest problem with going after this niche is the network effects encouraging people to stick with established service; it's hard to collect a huge list of friends on a service with only a few users.
Perhaps YASNS built on the Myspace model could succeed, but they'd have to have a revolutionary feature set. Bebo does not, and I don't see them building one on top of Java/Oracle. These guys are doomed.
Update: see a new version of this on doomedstartup.com.
last updated 2 years ago #
I was just looking at my stats and noticed a hit from Google UK. It turns out, my blog is the number twelve[0] Google result for 'beebo profiles'. Maybe I should get in to SEO... or maybe I should buy a domain and lampoon some more doomed startups there. I could put ads on it and maybe be able to afford more absurdly expensive beer.
[0] Due to the absurdly expensive beer, I didn't notice that there was a 10 hit offset on the search results.
Zak 2 years ago #