In
the storm that is Facebook's IPO, we pause to take note of the way the social network
has transformed the way we live now.
Is Facebook worth the
$100 billion or so its pending IPO suggests it is? Who the good gracious knows.
But one thing we can all be certain about is how the social network has
radically changed people's behavior and expectations online in the eight short
years since it was a nary more than a twinkle in the eye of its baby-faced
founder(s). Those changes have had the monumental impact of facilitating the
formation of entirely new industries and dramatically shifting the way brands
market themselves online.
There are
things we do online today, that we take so much for granted that we forget that
some of them didn't exist even as recently as two years ago. And others were so
radical they inspired outright rebellions when they were first introduced. And
yet all of these things are not only commonplace today, they are the presumed
paradigms. To operate any differently would seem downright odd.
If past is
prologue, we're confident
Facebook will continue to innovate in the years to
come, thereby continuing to transform how individuals and businesses interact
online and creating a whole new set of economic opportunities. Whether that
translates into enough revenue to merit a $38 share price, we'll leave up to
the number-crunchers on Wall Street. For now, however, we want to pause in this
brief respite before the Nasdaq frenzy slated for tomorrow to pay homage to a
few of
Facebook 's game-changing innovations.
The Death Of Email
I was in
London last winter, and while walking through a train station, I overheard two
people talking about coordinating with a third person. "I'll reach out to
him on
Facebook ," one of them said. When I was in Afghanistan last year,
at the rec center of every single military base I was on, anywhere from half to
two-thirds of troops were on
Facebook . When you only have access to computers
for half an hour at a time, Facebook becomes the most efficient way to let
friends and family know what you're up to and catch up with their news. When I
found out that an old boyfriend had had a kid but hadn't emailed me the happy
news, I was momentarily upset until a mutual friend told me, "I think he
just posted it to
Facebook ." The social network has become one of the primary
ways that people communicate today. Certainly it hasn't supplanted email
altogether, but, globally, it has become the go-to channel for a slew of use
cases that used to be managed by email or phone--or simply not communicated at
all. So much so that it's spawned an entirely new industry of social
networks-for-business, like Yammer, Chatter, Podio, and Edmodo.
Zuck And Cover
May 2007 Instagram wasn’t Zuck’s first experience with $1
billion offers. Five years ago, those offers were for
Facebook , the ragtag
operation of a college dropout who transformed it into Palo Alto's sweetheart. Read "The Kid Who Turned Down $1
Billion."
March 2010 Two years and 550 million members ago,
Zuck was in a good place:
Facebook had all but vanquished MySpace. His company
was finally making money. And he was ready to take on a new dragon: Google. Read Most Innovative Companies 2010.
November 2011
Facebook is both smaller and younger than Apple, Google, and
Amazon, but Zuck's ambitions are huge. And his growing pool of star engineering
talent could be enough to put
Facebook on top. Read "Why Facebook Will
Win" from our "Great Tech War Of 2012" feature.
April 2012 One thing that could have derailed
Facebook’s road to Internet domination was Zuck’s lack of experience. Why
growing up was the most important thing the “Boy CEO” did to solidify his
company. Read "American Idol."
Sharing
In the good old days, if you wanted to let friends and family know about
something cool you'd found on the web, you'd copy a link to the website into an
email and send it off to your nearest and dearest. What a difference two years
make. Yes, it's barely two years
since Facebook made it possible to slap the Like button onto content on
external websites, which in turn has expedited communication about everything
from news stories to videos to photos to fundraising appeals, making Facebook
the leading referrer of traffic to many content sites, as well as probably
being responsible for helping get innumerable Kickstarter campaigns funded.
Single Sign-On
Remember the days when you had to produce a unique user name and
password for every site you visited on the Internet? Then, remember how freaky
it was when all of a sudden sites started inviting you to sign in with your
Facebook credentials, and how we were all worried about what that meant about who
would suddenly know what about us?
And yet,
today, we take this system (which has been adopted by others, like Twitter andGoogle) for granted.
And maybe even get a little cranky when we have to set up independent log-in
credentials at sites that don't integrate with Facebook. And this system
(Facebook Connect) hasn't just made our lives more convenient, it's helped
accelerate a whole new industry of apps and websites that have been able to get
up and running faster, because they haven't had to build their own identity
management systems but instead were able to just plug in to Facebook's (the
same way they get up and running faster because they can use Amazon Web
Services rather than building out their own server infrastructure).
Personalized Ads
Raise your
hand if you've had this experience recently: You're watching TV (probably
online), and the ads come on. You notice that they're for things you have no
interest in, and you actually get a little ticked off. After all, all these
sites are now supposed to know so much about you. If that's the case, you
grumble, then why are you being shown an ad for a minivan, or a Disney
vacation, or any number of products and services you'd never in a million years
think of using? Thank the social network for that. It now gives advertisers
unprecedented specificity in who they want to reach. That's why, for example,
Airbnb will pop up in my right rail when Oracle OpenWorld is in town, asking if
maybe I'd like to rent a room to a conventioneer. To which I respond: "You
know, that's a pretty good idea…." Suddenly the ads are interesting again.
Facebook
Pages As Company Websites
Try this: Open up a consumer magazine, like a cooking magazine, for
example. Flip through the ads, and make a note of how many list a Facebook URL
as their web address, rather than a company website. Remember back when
producers of packaged foods or house cleaning products tried to get you to go
to their websites? No more.
More often
than not, they'll send you straight to their Facebook page. The social network
has created powerful tools for brands to build excitement (and evangelism)
among consumers, and companies are choosing to use those pages as their primary
home on the web. Even GM, which provoked a stir earlier this week when it was
reported the automaker was killing its $10 million Facebook advertising budget,
said it would nevertheless continue to invest in its brand pages--to the tune
of $30 million, no less--because, the company said, "it continues to be a
very effective tool for engaging with our customers."
Searching Gives Way
to Discovering
Back in
the late '90s, with the arrival of sites like Amazon and
Google, commentators bemoaned the loss of serendipity. The web was now a place
where you had to know what you were looking for in order to find anything. No
longer would shoppers, and others, have the delightful experience of browsing,
as they did in real-world stores, or libraries, and tripping across something
splendid but thoroughly unexpected. The social network is helping shift the
balance back toward discovery.
It's increasingly the place, for example, where people discover the news, via
links friends share. And it's also making discovery possible on other sites, by
giving those sites tools that let their visitors filter content by Facebook
friends, whether it's Yahoo, for example, that integrated with Facebook to let
you see what your friends are reading on its news sites, or design store Fab,
which allows you to browse a feed of items that your friends are buying and
favoriting. The result is that the web is increasingly a place for serendipity,
facilitated by Facebook and your friends...
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