(Update: See the comment thread below — it helps to flesh out the ideas I’m pushing in this article a bit better.)
There has been much debate over the social networking phenomenon known as Facebook.
It’s CEO — sometimes called youthful, sometimes called rash and arrogant, but almost always called genius, — has taken the company from Harvard to multi-million dollar company in just four years. A feat accomplished by few, and very remarkable by no stretch of the imagination.
Since it’s inception, it’s inspired doubt and pre-judgment by many investors and the press alike, as many were befuddled to see the young Mark Zuckerberg turn down reported offers of $750 million and even $2 billion.
They said he was stupid — that there’s no way a social network can be worth more money than that.
For the meantime, he quieted all naysayers of his decision not to sell when Microsoft pumped $240 million into Facebook for a mere 1.6% share, which many have tagged as a $15 billion valuation of the Facebook.
There have been heated battles all over the technological blogosphere, which has even reached the ears of the mainstream media.
Will Facebook fail? Or will it, as Mark Zuckerberg has done for years, continue to prove all the naysayers wrong?
Is social networking really the future? And if it is, is Facebook the Moses that will take us to the web 3.0 promised land? Or will it be another form of social networking, or something without a coined phrased yet?
Facebook’s biggest weakness is not its security issues, not its continued flogging in the blogosphere and mainstream media for every misstep, not even its management team, which features Founder Mark Zuckerberg and two old friends of his.
Facebook’s weakness is in the very thing that makes it so interesting.
The social graph.
This term has taken off, mostly because it’s one of Zuckerberg’s favorite ways to describe the secret sauce behind his personal project-turned-billion-dollar-corporation’s run away success.
He, like his friend and mentor Willam H. Gates III, has been accused of robbing the idea for Facebook, both in part, and in whole. Zuckerberg’s admiration of Gates, may be the reason why the young padawan doesn’t want to give up the reigns of Facebook for another CEO.
But really, just as Microsoft, once your raking in the millions, it becomes increasingly less and less important where the idea actually came from, as the focus shifts from past (i.e. cool story of a kid in a dorm room developing a billion-dollar company) to the future (i.e. how does this company rake in the revenue to match its valuations and uber-confident investors — Peter Thiel, particularly).
The attention then shifted to Microsoft, for being foolish enough to value Myspace’s so-called biggest rival at a valuation greater then Ford Motor Co., one of America’s oldest and most-storied companies.
So with the recent drop in numbers, especially in the UK, a lot of the doubters have returned, saying this is the end of Facebook.
I, however, profusely disagree.
This is not the end of Facebook — rather Facebook, I believe, will be with us for a long time. Rather this is the beginning of the micro-niche, community-driven era.
Facebook, which was once the poster-boy to the community-driven aspect, mostly lost sight of this in its attempt to build a social graph of the world. That may be all fine and dandy, but in the end, in hindsight, it’s failure to focus on the micro-communities that exist within Facebook itself may be its biggest detriment.
For some time now I’ve argued that Facebook is in danger of becoming an AIM — but the web 2.0 version.
There was a time where AOL instant messenger was the rage, and indeed its parent company received massive valuations as well, but in the end, there was no end for AIM — and I believe the same will hold true for Facebook.
If you look at instant messenger, there are still companies building businesses on the back of it — and other chats as well — just look at Meebo and you shan’t need to go any further.
But is AIM the hot talk of the day? No, but almost every single friend I have on AIM is on Facebook, and vice versa. And they’re actually on AIM a lot longer. They leave their AIM chat up 24 hours a day, seven days a week, almost year round, with that rare exception of losing power.
Everybody uses AIM — in America at least, outside the country MSN is the default– yet nobody talks about it anymore. It’s simply something you use every day without any regards to the magnitude of it or the users there.
Let’s even look at Skype for a minute — a product that has 12 million users on it at any given time — yet it gets nowhere near the hype Facebook does, although it has had its run in with billion dollar valuations.
But let me get to the crux of my argument — Facebook will be relegated (unless it can turn it around) to the back of everybody’s mind as just yet another tool we use to keep in contact with each other.
Unless it can get back that luster of its micro-communities. Facebook Groups, I’m sorry, simply does not cut it. Join and forget is what I call it — users join a group and probably never even think about it again. (Yet the media loves to cite statistics of how many Facebook users joined a certain group).
Facebook groups are completely inefficient, and even cumbersome to be a part of, and in many cases they don’t accomplish their purpose.
Everybody, from Bill Gates to Matt Brezina, a friend who co-founded Xobni, think that email is the next great social network– but up to a point. By making the connections in email, it certainly is one of the many pieces to the puzzle, but there has always been — and still exists — a gaping hole in the whole social network sphere.
A social network based on need.
I’ll give you an example.
Just yesterday I met with a friend from high school, who was considering transferring out of Penn State U to go to music school. Apparently, a girl who had went to our high school, two years my senior, just recently got signed by a Major label. And there’s also another high school alumnus that plays guitar for the Jonas Brothers.
I’ve been trying to help Liz Ester, break into the music scene for about 8 months now, and we’ve been traveling 6-8 hours every weekend to do it, meanwhile there are artists from my hometown who have had major successes. Facebook didn’t tell me that, Linkedin didn’t connect me with them.
That’s a failure, rather a need, of social networks — and it simply doesn’t exist.
Thank you Facebook for telling me what the favorite movies are of folks in my network, but I’d rather know that someone is an A & R, a budding musician, or even a music producer — and start making friends and connections, and help Liz advance in her career.
Instead, I’ve put 10k miles in 6 months on my car as I travel around looking for anyone to help her out with her career. In fact it’s been someone who watched a youtube video of hers who has been the most useful in connecting us with someone.
The gentleman, a police officer from New York City, referred us to some helpful friends of his — from which we may finally see a small breakthrough in Liz’s budding career.
We all know the old adage “it’s not what you know, but WHO you know.” Well I give social networks an F for helping me find people relevant to my interests and pursuits.
I’m interested in technology start-ups, but for now more people seem to be interested in Techcrunch and even the blog I contribute to — Venturebeat – then building up their local or regional social networks in order to connect with entrepreneurs in their area who can actually HELP them get to their startup to the next level.
I have respect for all the traffic and word-of-mouth (not to mention Venture Capital interest) that a major blog can give a start-up, but what about a community of start-ups, both locally and nationally, that connects people with shared interests and goals.
So far Meetup has been the closest model to this, but it needs a lot more press time, as well as a wider user base to be able to draw in the necessary crowds to make it worthwhile. I’ve been trying to connect with the NYC tech meetup crowd, but the success of that group isn’t fair — the group’s head is a co-founder of meetup.com itself.
To be honest, a lot of the failure of social networks - Facebook included — is that it a) only exists to connect you with old friends or b) because it’s cenetred around a lot of miscallenous junk that has almost no meaning or relevance to my life.
Your favorite show is Sex and the City? Great. You like the Count of Monte Cristo? Ok, we have something in common. But that doesn’t help me know you any better — it doesn’t tell me your story, our shared interests, your passions, your dreams, your hopes, your aspirations.
It doesn’t tell me that Stephanie Smith, a girl from my high school, is becoming a major musician meanwhile I’m struggling through the “bleeding” period facing the ridiculous rising price of gas, and the long journeys to other states just to get help to break into the music business.
It doesn’t tell me that a fellow high school alumnus is an associate at a VC firm, or that another high school alumnus has a start-up on the verge of mass-success. What about my next-door neighbor who is the HR manager for a start-up I wrote about on VentureBeat? I didn’t find out until I was demo-ing the app.
Even more interesting is that the associate of that VC firm, high school alumnus at the cool start-up, and the HR manager for the startup all know each other. But they didn’t even know they were all working in overlapping fields. Two of them, in fact, both live in New York and had no idea.
Where was Facebook when I needed it? And LinkedIn? Honestly Youtube has been more helpful than myspace or facebook or linkedin or yasn (yet another social network) to connect us with people interested in furthering Liz’s music career.
The point, although you may have lost it from the beginning (I understand this is an incoherent rambling that may not be too cogent) is to say that Facebook has not done anything to build it’s micro-communities.
And that, ultimately, will contribute to a downfall — IF there is one. I do not fool anyone to consider myself a prognosticator (although I’ve tried once or twice), but I do think that Facebook at some point will need to build it’s micro-communities with in itself or it will not be successful.
Connecting with people in our geographical, company-related, or university-related networks is cool, I get that, but how do we build a more robust micro-niche community of communities within those larger networks?
We. shall. see.
