I think the central point of the story is that github is more like a social network than many of us realize. It's interesting, and could indicate some useful future direction for the service.

if the story were titled "Github - a major social network" or "Github - more of a social network than you may think", would that change your opinion of the story?

It's surprising to me how much of the criticism here on hacker news ignores the central point of the article, and instead focuses in on individual phrases or semantics.

I agree with you that they could have chosen a better title. But I found the article interesting and thought provoking.

I don't think the criticism you're refering to is frequently directly at the articles; They're reactions to link-bait. Link-bait depends on sensationalism, which I think is opposite the goals of HN, so people don't respond to it well. Nevermind that its inherently misleading, which isn't a way to endear readers. It hurts credibility, etc..

Your criticism of the title would be more credible if you also acknowledged the point he was making. As it stands you came across as dismissing the entire article as stupid.

And I wonder if the hyperbole in the title is really link bait, or just the opposite, troll bait. I'm not sure the title helped the article's ranking on HN.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on what "troll bait" is in this context. I'm not following.

I think his point is that Github is about actual work artifacts, while all other business networks are basically talk about a more or less specific topic - more flexible, but also less focused.

Github is much closer to the topic at hand. There is almost no way around attaching comments to a piece of code.

But Github is about one specific kind of real work. The conversations that happen on Jive and Yammer are also real work, as are the documents made in corporate/public wikis (which are studied extensively) and the work assets made and stored in SharePoint and Google Docs. I don't disagree with the author's premise that GitHub is great and should be studied, but it only covers one small portion of one type of work.

You missed the tiny little word "artifact". The discussions on Yammer and Jive are work related and are part of the process, but are not rarely directly attached to an artifact. You would talk about the artifact, but its not "there". It is produced somewhere else, in the depths of IT. That doesn't mean that Yammer ain't interesting.

SharePoint and Google Docs are not social networks. They are sharing solutions like Dropbox is. Your corporate wiki might qualify, but thats hard to study.

I did not miss the word, just disagreed with his premise that assets are an important distinction.

That being said, wikis are not hard to study, its incredibly common and they are high on the list of the favorite things to discuss among collaboration researchers and have been for years - I've experienced this working with several, but you can also look at research such as http://www.citeulike.org/group/1136/article/114322 to see more.

He uses a metric for importance other than just size.

That said, his points that there were 600000 software developers in the US 10 years ago and more than a million GitHub members now, SO there must be significant developer mindshare seems nonsensical unless maybe if you assume GitHub is completely dominated by Americans, which anecdotally doesn't seem the case to me (I spent a few minutes looking for a breakdown of users by country, but didn't see any).

Also, confirmation bias.

For sure about the confirmation bias, but I would propose that the post is meant to encourage scholars to come up with their own falsifiables and prove it one way or another.

The 600,000 vs 1,000,000 means: A lot of Americans, and the excess are people who are not from the USA or have multiple accounts. But the main point is that in gross numbers many of those 600,000 have accounts.

Because the thing that overthrows Facebook could very well be collaboratively created on GitHub. The conflict between Facebook's business interests and its user's interests is the biggest painpoint and thus most ripe for disruption.

> Note also that Linux powers Facebook, Google and much of the rest of the web, and Linux itself relies on GitHub for collaborative developement.

Now that is not even hyperbole, but just plain incorrect. Linux does have an official git mirror on github. None of the development of Linux is done via GitHub.

Thanks. I removed the false statement as it was ancillary anyway. That said, in import it was not false. Linux is collaboratively developed using Git, and as Torvalds himself said when he did temporarily move Linux kernel dev onto GitHub, "But hey, the whole point (well, one of the points) of distributed development is that no single place is really any different from any other, so since I did a github account for my divelog thing, why not see how well it holds up to me just putting my whole kernel repo there too?"

I'd not be surprised if he makes a permanent move once GitHub fixes a few things:  https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546.... On the other hand, he is a known control freak.

I hate to say it but Facebook is not going to be overthrown, ever. It's planted very firmly. Backed by mega corps and huge international banks.

Facebook is down right scary in the way it has permeated the life of almost every person on the globe. It's monolithic and we have little insight into what they will actually do with all of our data. A little government + facebook cooperation and we'll really be a dystopia.

With that said, I don't use Facebook and hope some more people wake up and smell the coffee too. We need a decentralized network, as that is the only way to avoid corruption.

I think that fluid dynamics serves as an appropriate analogy for understanding social networking. Companies like facebook interact with a force that's very similar to fluid flow and equally subject to the conservation laws. As with fluids, it's convenient to view your community as a continuum of users whose desires are well-defined individually, but vary continuously between each other because of socialization.

From this, it logically follows that changing one aspect of the system could cause ``unforeseeable'' consequences in another. I hesitate to say ``unforeseeable,'' because really it's a complete failure by the decision makers to understand their community's intra-member interactions. So, claiming that facebook isn't going anywhere is flawed, because as soon as the users' needs change, altering one service could be like closing a release valve and increasing the temperature of water in a pipe: eventually, there'll be an explosion.

> I hate to say it but Facebook is not going to be overthrown, ever.

Just rhetorical exaggeration, right? But just in case you're that naive: IBM, Microsoft, Windows, Google. The Roman Empire, the British Empire. Need we go on?

I give Facebook ten years max. It may already be near its peak.

IBM, Microsoft, and Google -- None of them have been overthrown.

The Roman and British empires lasted hundreds of years.

Facebook will be around long after you and I are dead.

It's not another myspace or friendster. It's a firmly ingrained institution that people probably value more than their wallet at any given time.

"Overthrown" does not mean "disappear", it means "no longer king."

IBM was once the king of computing. It was overthrown by Microsoft. Microsoft was then king, but it is no longer, though those living in the past will point to its continue dominance of the PC, a dominance that is both declining and becoming more irrelevant. Google was crowned the king of the web, with users spending most of their time on google.com, but now they spend far more time on Facebook.

> The Roman and British empires lasted hundreds of years.

We're talking technology, not geopolitical power. The former operates on a vastly accelerated time scale, aka "Internet time". I recommend you read the Innovator's Dilemma, or at least the cliff notes on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation. There's a nice list of things many of which weren't expected to be overthrown so quickly.

I'm wondering if you might actually be a celeb: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U.

Overthrown implies a zero sum of land, etc. How relevant is IBM to modern computing? Sure, they're doing some great work in supercomputing, but there's no monopoly they control like they once did. MSFT has a solid monopoly, but their relevance is lessening though still influential in some circles. Google is young/ambitious enough that it has its skunkworks projects - gGlasses is an extension from search, and self-driving cars is from maps/geo data, but it's still not really entirely defensible from their central data monopoly.

You can say that a website that most people on it use for less than five years will outlive us ?

I don't think FB is going out of business anytime soon, but as time passes, I think that it's core value is more like its original vision -- i.e., a social directory. Seems like it'll become a repository of all your social contacts and your virtual passport when signing up for other sites and will cease to be the place where you spend all your time communicating with friends and discovering new things.

Sounds like you're suggesting Facebook may eventually become the next YellowPages. I could see that happening. It's mostly what I use it for anyway—remaining available to people who, since joining Facebook, seem to have forgotten I'm still reachable via phone, email, and IM.

> I hate to say it but Facebook is not going to be overthrown, ever.

For ever is a long time. As eevilspock said, I'll take this as an exaggeration rather than literally. However even then I have to disagree. Virtually any prediction we make (pundits, bloggers, analysts too) certainly will be wrong regarding the tech sector. Disruptive technologies are unknown to us until they are surprised upon the general public. Facebook may stay around for a number of more years, or some new tech will push it into non-existance.

The great thing about guessing about the future is that it is free, and you don't get called on it if you're wrong.

Lastly, the only thing we truly know about the future, is that it will be unlike anything we can imagine today.

MySpace anyone?

100 people creating value >> 1 billion people wasting time.

Guess you should write your own blog post. :-)

"The Most Important Social Network: Real Life"

Good one.