Curiously, Facebook announced buying Instagram a few weeks after this email.
And Instagram, under Facebook's leadership, apparently adopted Renren's "strong culture of cloning things" to the letter: first targeting Snapchat (2015-16), and now targeting Twitter...
Or as someone replied below:
> "I personally am pretty in favor of this approach in life generally... I would love to be far more aggressive and nimble in copying competitors at the interface / last mile level"
While people are complaining about how to see the emails... Zuckerberg is right, and in 10 years since Facebook (or anyone else) has done nothing to address the problem. Or to build similar products.
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Some quotes:
In China there is this strong culture of cloning things quickly and building lots of different products instead of just focusing on one thing at a time. This allows them to plant lots of seeds, and although it yields lower quality products in the short term as they're cloning and the markets are growing quickly...
They (Renren) They also have more features than us, including:
They have built their own version of Pinterest. In addition to your own timeline, you can have board pages that people can follow. They are tightly integrated into their NF.
They have built their own version of Tumblr. Same deal as with their version of Pinterest.
They have built their own standalone messenger app, where one key feature is using it like a walkie talkie -- basically like Voxer. Apparently Tencent QQ has also released a Voxer-like app which is really blowing up in China.
Renren has also built their own games and they have 6 of the top 10 Chinese games in the iOS app
store.
They have also built out a full music product where they have licensed all the music in China
themselves.
They have done some innovative things with commenting, like enabling people to easily fork comment threads to turn them into separate threads if they want.
Threads doesn't have a public web interface yet; you can only share Threads and see just that. I'm sure that will change in the near future, but I imagine that is why you're confused.
I get this feeling there’s a perceived opportunity of perpetual innovation in social media space. I don’t want to say “everything that can be invented has already been invented”. But I don’t think that underlying technology and society has changed so much there’s going to be a thing that’s going to rival twitter or fb in the next couple years.
I'm not so sure. Technology is one thing, but finding the right format for social networks may take many iterations. I find Twitter to be extremely toxic for instance, but there's some value to it. There must be a way to improve this initial idea. Keep the good, and minimize trolls and hate speech, and encourage people to stay courteous. Same thing for Facebook.
> everything that can be invented has already been invented
From a technology perspective I think this is broadly correct - these are essentially just crud apps, there’s nothing new. (i know there's plenty of cool tech around scaling it to billions of users, just not in the core functionality)
But in addition to being technology products, these apps are entertainment products. And as long as people have the capacity to get bored, there will be continued opportunity to innovate on the entertainment experience. It doesn’t even have to be novel, just recycle some app ideas from ten years ago. I’m sure vine will be back soon.
Unless Elon thinks he invented the solar panel, the electric motor and the rocket he might as well complain about himself. All entrepreneurial activity is taking something that exists and making it cheaper, nothing wrong with it.
Original creations are, by their very definition, spontaneous and discontinuous, if you could plan them they wouldn't be original. If there was a method to originality you could copy it, therefore everything truly original is by necessity accidental. The entire debate about copying is silly.
And Instagram, under Facebook's leadership, apparently adopted Renren's "strong culture of cloning things" to the letter: first targeting Snapchat (2015-16), and now targeting Twitter...
Or as someone replied below: > "I personally am pretty in favor of this approach in life generally... I would love to be far more aggressive and nimble in copying competitors at the interface / last mile level"