Facebook: In town to make friends
The wealthiest 26-year-old in the world has been in London with some of his senior colleagues, trying to extend the hand of friendship. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, dropped in on David Cameron in Downing Street, then went to meet a gathering of developers, and the odd journalist, at a "developer garage".
So what did we learn? Well first of all, when a young guy in a hoodie and trainers from a company that did not exist six years ago can get access to a prime minister when he drops into town, that's a sign of how rapidly the world is changing. Neither side was saying much about the visit - though the - except that it was about how government can use the internet more to engage with the public.
During the election campaign the Conservatives were enthusiastic users of Facebook, so perhaps we will now see the coalition government making the Budget a Facebook event to which we're all invited - or putting a "Like" button on the Inland Revenue's website.
And the main message that Mark Zuckerberg and his colleagues gave to the developers they met at the Barbican was that this process of taking what the firm calls its social graph right across the web was moving ahead at a pace. Over 300,000 sites have now installed social plug-ins, integrating their users' activities with their Facebook lives, since they were launched in April.
Examples on display at the event included Playfish, the casual games developer which now lets users play games like Fifa Superstars through Facebook, the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's new iPlayer which encourages users to tell friends about favourite programmes, and the music-streaming service Spotify, which allows its users to share playlists with their Facebook friends.
Incidentally, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in his brief address to the developers that he was a big fan of Spotify, which is interesting as the firm has not yet launched in the United States - they're obviously preparing the way with accounts for VIPs.
So a vision was painted of a world brought together by Facebook, to the benefit of users and developers.
In a speech peppered with "awesomes" Mark Zuckerberg told us,"every year that goes by there's just more and more ways of getting information and the world just keeps getting better and better. So it's a really exciting time to be developing."
What we heard little or nothing about was how this added up as a business - for the developers or for Facebook - and you might have thought that everyone was there just to spread the message of peace, love and sharing. The answer is of course that the more "sticky" the social network can be made for users through the exploitation of this social graph, the easier it will be to sell advertising.
What also seemed clear was that Mark Zuckerberg was far more comfortable talking to a crowd of young developers than he would be presenting his company to investment analysts or financial journalists. If Facebook's future includes a stock-market flotation, then he might find he needs to hire someone older, greyer and less likely to wear trainers, to talk balance sheets while he concentrates on the geeky stuff.
I'm 
Comment number 1.
At 21st Jun 2010, _Ewan_ wrote:Incidentally, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in his brief address to the developers that he was a big fan of Spotify, which is interesting as the firm has not yet launched in the United States - they're obviously preparing the way with accounts for VIPs.
Or possibly Mark Zuckerberg knows how to open a VPN connection. Attempts to geographically restrict services on the internet are trivially defeatable by anyone that knows what they're doing, and has access to a PC in the 'allowed' area.
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Comment number 2.
At 21st Jun 2010, meterreadergoldersgr wrote:Well for all the benefits of the internet revolution,great for research,booking a flight--a massive negative is its affect on social cohesion--isnt the internet the 21st Century social cancer???? All i can see is it imploding soon-within 10 years..
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Comment number 3.
At 21st Jun 2010, Chippy23 wrote:Who are the Inland Revenue? They haven't existed for 5+ years.
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Comment number 4.
At 22nd Jun 2010, Philip Lane wrote:'The wealthiest 26-year-old in the world' has been to Downing Street.
Presumably he's been invited to join the cabinet. He has the qualifications.
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Comment number 5.
At 22nd Jun 2010, U9746596 wrote:I recently opened an e-commerce store and decided that I should advertise on Google, after all they are the masters of PPC. After getting five clicks Google suspended my account, they would not tell me why, only that I had broken the T&C and never to contact them again about the issue.
This forced me to look at other ways of advertising, at first I was a bit unsure about how useful facebook could be, but after looking into it a bit more I am starting to understand their social graph, I really think that they could be on to something that can threaten google. The basis of it is that a friends endorsement is always going to be more persuading than what a marketer tells you, and the fb social graph is all about endorsement. Google's social power is actually very weak.
I think it will be very interesting to see how fb develops in the next 12 months.
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Comment number 6.
At 22nd Jun 2010, hackerjack wrote:Well for all the benefits of the internet revolution,great for research,booking a flight--a massive negative is its affect on social cohesion--isnt the internet the 21st Century social cancer???? All i can see is it imploding soon-within 10 years..
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Negative effects? Poppycock.
The addition of sites like Facebook has increased social cohesions, allowed people to regain/maintain friendships from their youth and share memories of events.
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Comment number 7.
At 22nd Jun 2010, Aidy wrote:@_Ewan_ #1
Put "War Games" back in the box....I think it's just more likely that there are keys available to those who need them that disables the geographic verification aspects of the system.
@ringsting-iom #5
Alas if I'm looking to buy your widgets then I'll go to google and search for "buy widgets online" and if your site is promoted at that point it is a great way to drive traffic to your site. While a recommend on Facebook may also be to an advantage, I don't go to Facebook if I want to find where I can buy widgets, and neither does anyone else. Like many I don't even have a Facebook account and no-one needs an account to access google.
@hackerjack #6
"The addition of sites like Facebook has increased social cohesions"
Actually many people think the exact opposite. There are schools of thought that people are substituting "real" friends for on-line ones and we are losing the art of face-to-face socialisation.
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Comment number 8.
At 22nd Jun 2010, U9746596 wrote:@Aidy
You are like me...you go shopping when you need to buy something. Google etc work a treat. There are certain demographs where this holds true technology, specialist equipment, tailor made items.
But a huge amount of retail is impulse buying. My wife goes in to town shopping on a saturday, she doesn't have anything in particular on her mind...she just wants to buy something and acts on impulse. The facebook social model is much more useful for impulse buyers.
While you may not have a facebook account, there are over 200 million active daily users which is certainly a big enough pool for me and my small store to work in.
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Comment number 9.
At 22nd Jun 2010, Chris wrote:@Aidy
Yeah, VPNs are like totally Wargames...
Where on earth would Mark Zuckerberg possibly find access to servers located in another country that he has access to, ever? It couldn't be possible.
Seeing as they probably are going through different licenses, I'd imagine the US Spotify will have different content to the European variant, so disabling a block would be somewhat counter productive to the whole testing procedure.
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Comment number 10.
At 24th Jun 2010, marcdraco wrote:A guy with a single viral idea is the suddenly vaunted as the best thing since sliced bread. Can't anyone else see what's wrong with this? Doesn't the phrase Single Interest Group ring any bells?
And Aidy does have a point regarding social media.
The large social networks have had a invisible force driving them: venture capital. America is flooded with it - seems they haven't learned their lesson from boom and bust economics.
In evolution we call this sort of meddling eugenics, you might have heard of it. In business terms it means whoever has the deepest pockets monopolises the market and exploits it for their commercial gain.
In the short term, we seem to be getting something for nothing... but in the long term prospects look rather bleaker.
The most relevant example that comes to mind is Internet Explorer - a small browser that I guess most of you will have had some experience of. (Arhum).
Microsoft gave it away. How nice of them. That meant we didn't have to spend £80ish on Netscape Navigator - yes folks, there was a time when browsers cost money just like DVDs...
Netscape gave us some important technologies - Javascript being the best; but Microsoft bundled IE and the rest is history.
While the 95%+ of active users of a the early 2000s used IE, the the web developed, but Microsoft was in control. So it did things its own way.
Even today, although it commands a smaller market share, Internet Explorer is only just coming into line with established standards. The upshot of this is this, if you use IE 8 or 9 then you should be able to see most websites the way they should look.
Microsoft's dominance - achieved with lousy technology but LOADS of money - established IE as the browser of choice but in the end WE ended up carrying that cost because development has been stinted and developers have to work across multiple, diverse and buggy platforms: dodging bugs (for the most part) in Internet Explorer.
Why should you care?
Developers cost money. Good web programmers cost lots of money and every minute they spend working around cranky bugs in lousy browsers eventually end up costing us. We pay at the till - it's like a tax we're not even aware of.
There is a point to this - the way these businesses are funded is bad for the web. They give every impression they are massively successful yet that is really a thin veil over what's really going on. We really don't know (yet) if Twitter or Facebook can sustain their exponential and explosive growth using the current ad-based, free content model.
The cracks are appearing already in other areas - just ask anyone who relies on their income from Google Adsense how revenues have started to drop.
Anyone else remember the sale (and subsequent re-sale) of FriendsReunited? That must have burned someone. My pension I shouldn't wonder.
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