Facebook the real deal

I am in New York City for a few days, and it’s incredible how many times Facebook has come up thoughout my visit.

Whether it’s conversations with friends, finding who’s in town, or peeking over the shoulder of random web surfers, the site has grown rapidly since March 2007. Today at the Apple Store (Fifth Avenue) it has become clear Facebook is the real deal. It’s perhaps the only dot-com today that merits a $6 billion price tag, or higher.

Back to the Apple Store. Out of the eight Macs in a row on one wall, four of them were being used by folks checking their Facebook account. Two of them were using the Inbox messaging, showing clearly this has become as important (or more) than basic e-mail.

I find this particularly interesting, because this starts to mirror of what you see in China, where only half of the Internet users have email. To Internet veterans, not having e-mail sounds bizarre, yet in the age of spam, phishing and hyperactive marketing, I would not be surprised if teens today wind up using email only for simply registering for sites in the future. More and more, the Facebook Inbox is the spam-free, high signal to noise ratio channel of choice. For Chinese users, they prefer online live messaging using QQ or MSN Messenger.

In January 2004, Microsoft’s Bill Gates pledged he would fix the spam problem in “two years.” It’s been over three years and it’s nowhere near fixed. Gates did what you would expect Gates to do — throw money at the problem. He described a “monetary risk” method of punishing strangers for sending mail to known users. “In the long run, the monetary (method) will be dominant,” Gates predicted.

For now, young Facebook users have found their own way — simply create ad-hoc closed groups of friends and acquaintances. And the brilliance of Facebook is that it is embracing the idea of providing a platform to evolve and grow with the community. The Web 2.0 darlings like Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Squidoo and the like are all special cases of what can be done inside a Facebook.

Some have tried to come up with a way to describe this impact.

• Facebook is the new Google. Not a very apt description, as a search engine is a one-shot tool and people can flock to a better engine overnight. Facebook is about building profiles and social capital. It’s also an application enabler.
• Facebook is like Microsoft Visual Basic. About the worst insult you could dish out is to sprinkle VB mojo all over something. While the “toolbox” functions are a decent analogy, Facebook provides the right mix of social discovery functions with the flexibility of a development platform. There is nothing close to Facebook right now in terms of that combination. VB is just a programming framework, nothing else more.

What about the #1 “social networking site” MySpace? MySpace look like an 8-track tape player compared to Facebook’s iPod-clean design and functionality.

What will become a challenge for Facebook is how to go international — different languages and locales. We’ve already seen the weird way different spaces can get fractured. Just look at auction and social networking sites — Ebay dominant in the US, Yahoo auctions popular overseas, Orkut taking over in Brazil, Xanga a must for Hong Kong teens, et al.

All indications are that Facebook is going to stay away from an acquisition. If things keep going this way, a public offering will be one of the biggest of the Web 2.0 era.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 11:19 am and is filed under China, Technology, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.