Question
If someone were to want to build a successful competitor to Facebook, what are all the most essential ingredients?
Answer
I disagree pretty much completely with the answers so far.
Facebook is entrenched, and owns the market position outright, whatever its deficiencies. How many "improved" keyboards have attempted to displace the venerable QWERTY do you think? Ain't gonna happen. There is even an urban legend, which may be true, that QWERTY was explicitly designed to slow humans down to speeds the original mechanical engineering could handle, by putting common letters like e and a in sub-optimal places, and making sure the word 'typewriter' could be easily typed by salesmen, entirely on the top row. When the mechanical engineering improved and you got to nice electromechanical ones, QWERTY stayed entrenched.
QWERTY is a winner-take-all standard, and to some extent FB may be that way too. But I don't think so, because LinkedIn is a good counterexample that shows it is not a winner-take-all standard we are dealing with here.
But LinkedIn is not an answer to your question because it confines itself to owning a slice of your social identity rather than all of it. MySpace has similarly confined itself to music etc.
The right type of precedent to analyze is something like Coke vs. Pepsi. The products are not particularly different (c'mon admit it...), and don't even evoke the kinda religious fervor Mac vs. PC does. Most Coke drinkers would accept Pepsi and vice-versa.
But Pepsi still managed to take away a big chunk of Coke's market. Why?
Perceptions and positioning. Coke is classic and "American" like apple pie. Pepsi is a more youthful, hip brand.
So a Facebook competitor must come up with a different social brand that appeals to a different counter-narrative. In Coke v. Pepsi it came down to classicism vs. coolness.
I don't know what it will be for FB v. anti-FB. To a certain extent it can't be predicted, because the watershed distinction will be created by the competitor successfully repositioning FB and confining it to a pigeonhole. FB doesn't have a core narrative yet because it doesn't need one. It will need one when a competitor creates one. Coke became "classic" in response to Pepsi trying to reposition it as "old fuddy-duddy" I would guess.
The one qualification to this answer is that FB v. anti-FB may be more like Mac v. PC, since the FB product has a lot more complexity than Coke, and a lot of actual features people make decisions about. But it will still come down to an overall brand narrative perception, not features. Just as with Mac v. PC.
I do think we can predict the timing though. The competitor won't emerge for at least 5-10 years. A credible competitor usually only emerges after the market has been matured and defined by the first monopolist.
Facebook is entrenched, and owns the market position outright, whatever its deficiencies. How many "improved" keyboards have attempted to displace the venerable QWERTY do you think? Ain't gonna happen. There is even an urban legend, which may be true, that QWERTY was explicitly designed to slow humans down to speeds the original mechanical engineering could handle, by putting common letters like e and a in sub-optimal places, and making sure the word 'typewriter' could be easily typed by salesmen, entirely on the top row. When the mechanical engineering improved and you got to nice electromechanical ones, QWERTY stayed entrenched.
QWERTY is a winner-take-all standard, and to some extent FB may be that way too. But I don't think so, because LinkedIn is a good counterexample that shows it is not a winner-take-all standard we are dealing with here.
But LinkedIn is not an answer to your question because it confines itself to owning a slice of your social identity rather than all of it. MySpace has similarly confined itself to music etc.
The right type of precedent to analyze is something like Coke vs. Pepsi. The products are not particularly different (c'mon admit it...), and don't even evoke the kinda religious fervor Mac vs. PC does. Most Coke drinkers would accept Pepsi and vice-versa.
But Pepsi still managed to take away a big chunk of Coke's market. Why?
Perceptions and positioning. Coke is classic and "American" like apple pie. Pepsi is a more youthful, hip brand.
So a Facebook competitor must come up with a different social brand that appeals to a different counter-narrative. In Coke v. Pepsi it came down to classicism vs. coolness.
I don't know what it will be for FB v. anti-FB. To a certain extent it can't be predicted, because the watershed distinction will be created by the competitor successfully repositioning FB and confining it to a pigeonhole. FB doesn't have a core narrative yet because it doesn't need one. It will need one when a competitor creates one. Coke became "classic" in response to Pepsi trying to reposition it as "old fuddy-duddy" I would guess.
The one qualification to this answer is that FB v. anti-FB may be more like Mac v. PC, since the FB product has a lot more complexity than Coke, and a lot of actual features people make decisions about. But it will still come down to an overall brand narrative perception, not features. Just as with Mac v. PC.
I do think we can predict the timing though. The competitor won't emerge for at least 5-10 years. A credible competitor usually only emerges after the market has been matured and defined by the first monopolist.