Venture Geek

Food for thought (via Scott Mcleod)…

I have been spending a bit more time on Facebook lately, mostly out of curiosity — every time I go there I feel old. I seem to be on the cusp of the Facebook generational divide, and that seems to be mostly because I happened to have been back in school over the last couple years. If I had been out of school I may not even be in the gray area.

The Facebook generational divide can be summed up easily: If you are in college or graduated college in the last two years you are very likely to have a Facebook account. If you graduated college more than two years ago you are, on average, not that likely to have a Facebook account. Now, this is based on purely anecdotal evidence, and it seems to be changing a bit as Facebook gets so much attention in the “mass” media.

In my world, LinkedIn is much more popular — on Facebook I currently have 9 “friends”, but on LinkedIn I have over 200 contacts. And that’s not because I haven’t bothered to connect with those same 191 people on Facebook — most of them simply aren’t there. But, for the people I know under 25 or who are still in school, Facebook is an integral part of their daily lives. When I look up my college or my high school or other interest groups I might associate with, the vast majority are people basically of college age. Even in my MBA class, only a handful of my class of 2006 classmates seem to be on Facebook, but nearly all of them are on LinkedIn. But, when I look up the MBA classes still in school today, the numbers go way up — that single year makes a huge difference in Facebook adoption, and that’s why I feel I’m on the cusp of the generational divide.

The fact that all of those people are unlikely to just jettison their Facebook accounts after they graduate is a big part of why the valuation of Facebook is often quoted as a ten figure number. To me, the question is whether Facebook can maintain its dominance as THE place to be for the college and high school crowd, or whether it will suffer from the all-to-common issue of the next generation wanting something fresh and new.

The concept of population pyramids is how I think about this. I first learned about population pyramids in a geography class in college (yeah, they actually taught a geography class in college). Here is what a population pyramid looks like:

In brief, a population pyramid shows the distribution of age groups inside a broader population, where the two sides represent males and females. The question is can the Facebook graph stay triangular (or least rectangular), growing the total population over time, or will it look more like a diamond, as the next generation falls off in their adoption in favor of the next new thing?

I say, let a billion diamonds bloom.

There is a broader question here of whether the low barriers to entry that made Facebook possible in the first place will continue on the Internet, or whether increasing expectations of the kinds of experiences we expect combined with any number of market-based or regulatory hurdles make it tough for the next group of kids with an idea and a computer to create something millions of people use. The whole Net neutrality debate plays into that question in a big way, but that’s another post for another time.

TechCrunch pointed to the video embedded below yesterday, and I think it’s a nice piece showing off the difference between web “pages” and the web as a means of delivering information. The video makes this a distinction between HTML and XML, but that seems like a detail beyond the larger point to me — in the end people don’t care whether what they are seeing was created as a static HTML page or dynamically generated with lots of AJAXy goodness. But, the broader point about the evolving nature of the services we use to free information/content/data from form is finally becoming commonplace. I also think it’s great this was created by a professor of cultural anthropology — that in and of itself, perhaps, proves the point about the enormous power the Internet is having on our society.

I love the concept of OneWebDay, but I can’t say I’ve seen much tangible evidence of it other than it being mentioned. It’s probably because I don’t live in San Francisco any more.

Anyone doing anything to celebrate?

Douglas Rushkoff: “…most of what we see in America passing for a generation gap is really just target marketing.” (from the comments to this post)

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia asks folks to blog about his new vision for changing political campaigns. And to the handful of folks who read this fledgling blog, I’m happy to oblige. Personally, I think this kind of thinking is, at best, ahead of its time. Don’t get me wrong here — I am a big believer in the power of peer publishing to change the very nature of our collective media experience (and, thus, our entire culture and society), but I think the notion that “The candidates who will win elections in the future will be the candidates who build genuinely participative campaigns by generating and expanding genuine communities of engaged citizens” underestimates the continued power of “mass” media methods to sway the electorate. I want what Jimmy says to be true, and in many ways the organization of the Christian Right in this country proves his point, but maybe I’m just cynical. Maybe it’s my midwestern roots — when I go back there I realize just how much of a bubble we live in here in the Bay Area (and coastal urban areas generally) when it comes to technology adoption (let alone political leanings). Having just graduated from UC Berkeley business school, where despite the fact that most of the student body considers itself reasonably tech-savvy and certainly tech-interested, I suspect more than half the class couldn’t even tell you what a wiki is, let alone how it can be used as part of a new paradigm of political campaigning. So, I wish Jimmy and his crew all the best, and I will continue to do my small part to spread the gospel of peer publishing and media empowerment, but until the MySpace/YouTube generation starts making the decisions in the halls of power, we might have another few cycles to go with big-money, image-based politics. I hope I’m wrong.

The world doesn’t need yet another blogger supporting Net Neutrality, so I won’t explain why I think it’s critically important — instead, I’ll just point to people like Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) who can speak to the topic with infinitely more authority than I. Now, that said, it’s not yet clear to me that the regulations being proposed will have the intended effect. The bottom line for me is that the end-to-end principle of “dumb” networks is one worth fighting for.

(via Lessig, where the discussion on the comments is perhaps more interesting than the original blog posts [as usual])

Robert Young’s piece about the evolution of advertising on MySpace and other social networks made me cringe. Judging by the comments on the post many others had a similar reaction, though the tone seems to be more about the business feasibility than the social implications. In short, Young suggests that MySpace could act as a “talent agency” to identify users who are brand-friendly, and then use those folks as, in essence, spokesmodels for micro-demographics of their friends.

In the same session I read the thread on Slashdot about Craigslist, where the varied reasons a company might “turn down” huge profits was discussed. The common theme here is when business models and what the people using a service want come into some kind of tension.

In general, advertising models always exhibit this tension, of course. Even in an age of context-sensitive advertising, where the relevance is certainly much better than the broadcast-style interruption model, the ads are still the thing used to pay the bills, (I’m reminded of Comedy Central’s web site, where the annoying Flash ads are literally wrapped in a box that says “Payin’ The Bills” as if it’s “us” (you and Comedy Central) vs. the advertisers.

But, back to Young’s suggestion of having kids vie to be noticed by an advertising executive on-high in order to become a shill to their buddies. On the face of it, I tend to agree with those who think that leaving aside the cultural critique, the business model just isn’t sound, since the whole point of building of the model is to build “trust” between advertisers and audiences (the origin of Young’s idea is that advertisers are scared to have their ads placed on parts of the site, like profiles, that can’t be controlled for content that they would find objectionable to be associated with). Knowing that your friend was trying to get noticed and is now trying to entice you to buy something in order to be rewarded is hardly a way to build trust. I certainly hope that most people would just plain not subscribe to such blatant commercial exploitation of their friends, but I suppose that history has shown people will do strange things for their 15 minutes (or 15 clicks, if you will). I can’t claim to any longer have a finger on the pulse of the youth, but from I’ve seen on the amateur video sites and other centers of peer publishing, they would find some way to appropriate such crass commercialism to their own ends.