The leaks to Businessweek keep coming, and this time Google is the purported 2 Billion dollar suitor. The scary thing is this actually makes sense to me. Google’s motives are not much different from any intelligence gathering organization; they are particularly interested in the life-bits of the new web generation. Taking a step back, let’s explore how this makes sense.
Design and implementation of technologies that capture mindshare require a number of elements: a problem, a granular understanding of that problem, a granular understanding of how that problem is to be solved, a sense of how users approach the problem, and a sense of how users will approach the designed solution. The user equation, or how the user fits into the picture, is an ongoing area of study, particularly in IS departments.
The web is generational. Every few years a new generation matures, each taking a set of skills forward that they acquired during their social maturity. Simply put, we acquire our social-technological skills when required, and the course of our life-interaction with technology is charted by these acquisitions. When I was an undergrad, we communicated with email, IM, and cell phones. My friends, to this date, remain proficient at email, IM and cell phone use. Today’s undergrads communicate with email, IM, social networks, game communication channels, blog comments, text messages, photo messages, cell phones, and a host of others I can’t even think of. Social trends drove adoption, and now these students will have lifelong experience and comfort using these technological channels. (Of course, some of my friends today are comfortable with the tools undergrads use today, but I’m talking broadly, and I keep close to very net-conscious folks. I think you get the point, though).
I’ve gone down this tangent to explain the value of the data Facebook owns. Put simply, Facebook owns the data, use patterns, preferences, communications and adoption trends of the entire next web generation. Whatsmore, the data is incredibly clean, trustworthy, and segmented as a marketer could only dream. But don’t get completely trapped by the marketing aspects, there’s something much greater in Facebook’s data. Facebook owns the data of the first generation to live their entire lives online, a generation that we will spend our lives studying and trying to understand. These young people are out of our frame of reference, and they will completely drive the next 30 years of the social web. Does anyone doubt me on that?
It takes broad thinking, broad ability to operationalize, and a very long view to take on such a project, meaning there are only a few companies that could do it. Boiling it down more, there’s really only one company that I can think of that would actually take a project like this on. It is Google. Google, for all its faults, wishes to deeply understand its users, and it wishes to be part all aspects of our web interaction in the future. An investment of 2BN into a corpus of data like the Facebook’s would be a key strategic acquisition, one that frankly makes sense for a company creatively thinking about the next 30 years.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I have no idea who will buy the Facebook, and I’m not trying to win any speculation prizes with this blog post. The eventual owners of Facebook could easily be a media company, a multinational products company, or a government contractor like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin or Boeing. Any of those could easily put Facebook’s data to work, for anything from trend research to homeland security. That said, I do feel the Facebook is worth 2 Billion to only one company, and for that one company, Facebook’s real value is a whole lot more than 2 Billion dollars.
Postscript: If you’re interested in seeing results of studies regarding Facebook use on a college campus, you can check out An Evaluation of Identity-Sharing Behavior in Social Network Communities (pdf), in which a randomized study design found that 90% of undergraduates used the Facebook (data from Summer 2005). Additionally, you can check out Student Life on The Facebook, a blog post that I’ll be turning into a journal article this summer. Using a whole-network design, this study found that over 94% of freshmen at UNC had a Facebook account.
Tags: facebook, situational relevance, venture
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
Don’t count out the professors! My wife finished her doctorate last spring and is a prof now. Since last Fall, she’s been on facebook, along with many of her students. Knowing the data mining that goes on with Facebook, I told her she was crazy, but now she has her colleagues hooked too.
Fortunately, when I was in grad school (‘94-’96), email via Pine was the popular thing, so I still managed to study some.
But you’re completely right about the generational aspect. I’ve been using internet tech since ‘94, but I have no pre-grad school perspective on this thing. My undergrad college didn’t even have email, at least that I knew of. It’s kind of weird to think about.
-Chris
Sadly, I was naive to think I could post a reply on Digg.com in response to an article about free songs on Facebook. I had said that facebook = data-mining; I guess the majority of those reading the thread thought I was silly. I got modded down to -7.
Anyways, going back to your post, I kinda think you have a point with the future of social networking, sites like facebook are catchy if not contagious. I guess I don’t mind social networking so much as the data mining. It bothers me that sites like facebook foster a false sense of security and most people will buy into it. I mean, this site right now wants some name and has probably recorded the ip address from which i’ve accessed the website, although probably for reasonable purposes.