One of the most useful aspects of YC are the weekly dinners. You know, face to face interaction with other entreprenuers. It's very valuable. It might be worth while to organize a weekly gathering for entreprenurs working on similar projects.
I've thought about the same. One of the things in the extended profile thing that I'm building is location. In some of the hotspots a monthly dinner would definitely be cool.
Hmm, ok, what the hell, there is no try, only do. If you're in Berlin, dinner at my place Saturday the 19th. We'll do it at least monthly. Contact me. Just between our apartment and my next door neighbor we've got three startup junkies, and that's already enough for a good conversation and to put the hurt on a case of beer.
I'll set up a calendar for startup-related events (that need not be related to news.YC). I think it'd be good to have a place where people can post in their blogs and try to get groups together. I think as soon as you've got three people together you can already have a meaningful meetup.
I'd say that for most people on facebook, it's easier to replace google than to replace facebook. You can always use Yahoo or MSN for search, they might not be as good, but they're good enough. You can use Yahoo maps or Live Earth. And you can use Yahoo email, which is getting really good recently. But it's hard to leave facebook unless all your friends leave with you at the same time to a new social network.
Not to mention that in this country, it's still not even the most popular social network. And even if it becomes that, it did so only because it replaced MySpace. I don't see what is any more irreplaceable about Facebook than MySpace.
Facebook is different from MySpace for exactly the use case of keeping up with your friends. Facebook is the only social network so far that rigorously enforces real names, identities and relationships through both social design and brute force. MySpace has degenerated in to a social game to rack up more points in the form of 'friends'. They are completely different, which is why Facebook is catching up to MySpace so quickly and MySpace is sinking.
Right, this is the "aha" one of the parents mentioned. The major problem with the internet is the lack of accountability, accountability is necessary to form trust, and trust is necessary to form good social networks.
> I don't see what is any more irreplaceable about Facebook than MySpace.
That's exactly it. You're probably not seeing how they're different. When you used Google you saw that it's different from Yahoo, but I'm sure many people didn't see the difference. After all, they're both search engines. Same here: although they're both social networks, Facebook is very different from MySpace. When I used Facebook the first time, I got that Aha moment you talked about.
I thought I did in the first comment. It's hard to get all your friends to move with you at the same time to a new social network. Not that it can't happen, everything is replacable. It's just much harder than replacing google, because with Google I can switch on my own.
that's an interesting perspective, but I don't think is really valid. People will easily/hardly change their default social network but really easier than switching from Google which is a point of reference to those who are used to it. Even if you tried to switch from Google, how many are the alternatives? Like you said only two. And whenever I tried them they never make me stick to them.
And this is easier to happen because more people can build a community than a search engine.
I disagree.
As months go by, it's going to be even harder for anyone to come up with a social network as big as FB. Why ? FB's critical mass!
As it's been said, all that differentiates Facebook for an individual user is the presence of that users friend’s on Facebook — which forces them to use Facebook to connect with them.
And this is precisely why FB is not a founding member of the OpenSocial foundation. Facebook is threatened by OpenSocial’s ultimate aim of connecting user profiles and enabling users to easily manage and port their data across any social network.
