Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss Amazon topping the list of consumer electronics retailers, Wall Street's reaction to Zuckerberg's testimony, the Washington Post's less positive take on his testimony, "withervanes" in Florida alerting passersby of news headlines, smart-home devices in new homes, Facebook and new European and US rules, and more.

Al in Shreveport, Louisiana listens on 710 KEEL and asked: "Just heard you and you're mentioning why hasn't anybody come up with competition for Facebook. I would like to get on another platform. But I know it's very expensive. Is anyone in the process of making a competitor for Facebook?"

 

Al, if what you’re looking for is basically a Facebook clone, as in something that looks like Facebook and does what Facebook does, the only popular ones we know of are RenRen in China and VKontakte in Russia.

If you have a minute, look them up, they are shameless copies of Facebook with the only real difference being the alphabet you see on the screen and the logo.

If your concern is the privacy of your data, you probably don’t want to go with Chinese or Russian versions of the same thing, not to mention that you’d have a hard time finding a lot of your friends in either platform.

Just last week, when Mark Zuckerberg was testifying before Congress, Senator Lindsey Graham and he had the following exchange:

Senator Graham asked: “Who’s your biggest competitor?”

Zuckerberg answered: “Senator, we have a lot of competitors.”

But after that he couldn’t really name a single one, instead, he kept talking about how different parts of Facebook have their own competitors, each in their own way.

When asked: “You don’t think you have a monopoly?” Zuckerberg laughed and after a long pause said “Ah, it certainly doesn’t feel like that to me!”. But he still couldn’t name any direct competitor that does exactly what Facebook does, and he even had to give an evasive answer as to why they bought Instagram if not to eliminate a growing competitor.

Instagram was a threat because it’s one of a few other social networks that don’t look or act like Facebook but are very popular. And even with how different they are, they are a threat to them. Their own Instagram attracts more young users than Facebook does these days, and Snap’s Snapchat does too.

Both of those are photo-centric, both rely more on sharing moments for a short time rather than on writing a type of diary on a timeline, so they’re not exact Facebook replacements, but they’re the social media of choice of a new generation.

We also addressed questions about updating the graphics on a laptop, and video out adapters for Android!

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