<story><title>The Maturation of Mark Zuckerberg</title><url>http://nymag.com/news/features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/?mid=nymag_press</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peterwwillis</author><text>The crazy thing to me is how well suited people of Zuck&apos;s age group are to running companies suited to web technology. A more &quot;mature&quot; CEO would not have the right mindset to steer something as pliable as a web app into a product that keeps up with the non-stop competition for users&apos; attention. If something cooler comes around the corner and enough people latch onto it, you&apos;re fucked. Zuck gets this because he probably thinks exactly how his target audience thinks. So the question then becomes: What happens when Zuck is too mature to see what&apos;s coming next?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brandall10</author><text>What target audience?  Doesn&apos;t everyone and their mom use Facebook now, pretty much?  Seems to me its biggest competitor for attention is TV.&lt;p&gt;To me this stuff is fairly simple - but I don&apos;t use Facebook anymore fwiw.&lt;p&gt;There were a bunch of prior attempts at large scale social networking like this and they pretty much all ran into issues with scaling.  Facebook handled this adeptly, plus they didn&apos;t allow their user-base to turn into a total cesspool through ridiculous customizations + features that made it act like a hookup service ala MySpace, which is why they ate their lunch.&lt;p&gt;Now the network effects are extreme with nearly a billion served - so it&apos;s not exactly hard to keep users&apos; attention when most of their friends and family use the service as well.  And I haven&apos;t seen any viable competitors come across except Google+ which doesn&apos;t seem to be a real threat.  So I&apos;m not sure who exactly is nipping at their heels unless we&apos;re thinking of a different way of attacking social ala Pinterest (and formerly Instagram :)... which I think is what it will take.  You won&apos;t outdo them by being a better them. It seems to me most of their innovation has been in a way to set up better ways to monetize or lock in their mass of user data.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Maturation of Mark Zuckerberg</title><url>http://nymag.com/news/features/mark-zuckerberg-2012-5/?mid=nymag_press</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>peterwwillis</author><text>The crazy thing to me is how well suited people of Zuck&apos;s age group are to running companies suited to web technology. A more &quot;mature&quot; CEO would not have the right mindset to steer something as pliable as a web app into a product that keeps up with the non-stop competition for users&apos; attention. If something cooler comes around the corner and enough people latch onto it, you&apos;re fucked. Zuck gets this because he probably thinks exactly how his target audience thinks. So the question then becomes: What happens when Zuck is too mature to see what&apos;s coming next?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mquander</author><text>I don&apos;t understand your point.  What does maturity have to do with &lt;i&gt;&quot;the right mindset to steer something as pliable as a web app into a product that keeps up with the non-stop competition for users&apos; attention?&quot;&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>