Response to: Will Facebook Be Tomorrow’s Google, and Google Tomorrow’s Microsoft? - Bindu Reddy

Response to article:

Will Facebook Be Tomorrow’s Google, and Google Tomorrow’s Microsoft?

Bindu this is a nice piece, but I think it isn't timed well for maximum credibility. A bit like doing a human interest piece at the moment on how environmentally considerate BP is deep down

Personally, I also don't buy the advertising thing. To me that advert you've cited actually makes Sony look cheap to me. Show me the same product within an elegant print environment like Vanity Fair or Vogue and I still feel good about it. But Sony alongside cheap adverts for obscure stuff does them no favours imho. The trick is getting brands as part of the 'conversation' but here's where FB are coming unstuck... Firstly, they can't own the conversation and manipulate it, they just provide the platform for where it takes place. Secondly and more importantly, I also passionately believe that for any sophisticated and established brand they have to consider one fundamental problem with this new world order; namely:- 'if they want to stand out from the crowd, they can't become part of it!'

Robert Scoble has recently highlighted the issue too and effectively echoed what I've been saying for some time; that Facebook is a Chris Anderson 'Long Tail' or the 80% of the 80:20 rule. The rich and elegant 'HEAD' or 20% is actually outside the platform and is the place where trad media finally converges properly online. This hasn't happened yet, which is why people like Martin Sorrel at WPP still have a certain disdain for Social Networking in it's current guise. (and he's the guy really writing the big cheques...)

Facebook have created a PR catastrophe recently on privacy and if it weren't for their scale, I think it would have been one of the all time great own goals. They still could prevail as you suggest, but certainly not on the current path they are travelling and probably not unless they eat some humble pie too.

I see Facebook's only route being to accept that it has become inadvertantly another ubiquitious utility like the telephone which carries our private conversations in a new fashion. We would no more expect adverts in our telephone calls than we aren't actually irritated by Facebook ones now and more importantly, we would certainly be incandescent if telephone networks started making our conversations public without permission so as to allow publishers to sell to us during our calls. So Facebook should in my view work to a freemium model and work with the owners of the conversation, perhaps by sharing revenues, then maybe we would be more inclined to open up. Sticking FB flags on content territory and privacy without asking and on the assumption you can then remove them if you want is colonisation of our data and privacy and inherently immoral. I would myself pay a modest fee for an advert free arena to connect socially with people I like. If you then think of them as say a service provider/ ISP, they would have 500 million potential monthly billable Clients and wouldn't need to p**s people off. If they want to utilise my private data from there then they can treat me with some respect and negotiate accordingly...

I assume though at the end of the day, Facebook is ruthlessly tunnel visioned on a sale to Microsoft or IPO and Mark Z is by all accounts only concerned with us DF's if we get in the way of that goal.

Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/15/facebook-google/#idc-cover#ixzz0o3C5WidC