Why Social Networking Is Still in Its Infancy
During an interstitial moment at last week's TEDxBrooklyn event, the founder of TED, Richard Wurman, was interviewed on stage. He began rambling about the invention of the printing press -- and then said something that offered tremendous perspective on the social Web.
Gutenberg's unsung innovation, Wurman said, was pagination: the idea that published information needed some kind of index. "All of the sudden, you had to have a way to find things," he said to the TEDx crowd. "Suddenly, you have people looking things up, which leads to other references, like the dictionary," and ultimately to search engines like Google (GOOG).
Chris Dannen
Wurman is widely credited as being one of the originators of "information architecture."
Indeed, the power of indexing is so vast that it's inseparable from our information technology. But it's vital that we recognize it's only in its early stages. In other words, social networking is in its "pagination" phase: it's an accomplishment just to have so many people joining.
But it's hard to hold the long view. The players already seem entrenched. As of November 15, Facebook is worth an estimated $41 billion; if that's not staying power, then what is?
Think of Facebook as merely the first company to index a large portion of the world's population in one database, and it's the first to make that database user-generated (and therefore relatively accurate.) Of course, this system isn't perfect; only about 1/7 of the world's population is currently on record, but no matter. Just as pagination was to Gutenberg, Facebook is to humanity: it has created an information architecture for people.
So it isn't a mark of hubris when Mark Zuckerberg points to the "map of the Internet" displayed at the Web 2.0 conference and remarks: "Your map's wrong," as he did last week. As he elaborated:
The biggest part of the map has to be uncharted territory -- this map makes it seem like it's zero-sum, but it's not. We're building value, not just taking it away from someone else.Zero-sumness is the idea that Facebook is playing a win-lose game: when Facebook wins, someone else (say, Google) loses. But what Zuckerberg is arguing (and what his fictional doppelganger argues in "The Social Network") is that the social graph is so new, so incipient and so unexplored that hardly anyone knows what it will look like in 10 years.
Chris Dannen
For more about zero-sumness, check out Robert Wright's book Nonzero.
David P. Hamilton
Nonzero is a fascinating read. So is Wright's latest, The Evolution of God, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Chris Dannen
Some have argued that the technology industry is getting increasingly "non-zero-sum," since so many of the most popular tools -- Facebook, Twitter, Google -- are also platforms that only thrive with input from others.
As an incisive piece on Fortune.com argued, major tech companies might be in the throes of rapid over-valuation thanks to an excess of capital and a shortage of engineering talent. Maybe Facebook isn't worth what investors are betting. Maybe when the phenomenon of "pagination" is mature, the industry will adjust and some of the engineering talent will depart from their day jobs to create startups, ready to sow disruption that will leave Facebook looking like the Yellow Pages.
Related: