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by David Gillespie

on May 27

Facebook is the butter of the new media world

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I just got told I could write about butter and it would be interesting. So, here it goes:

Butter is bullshit. I actually love butter, we all do (unless of course you’re opting for low-fat soy butter with reduced salt and Real Original Flavour™ in which case do us all a favour and switch to celery, your friends will judge you less – yes they do judge you, obviously they also lie). Without butter, sure, your brownies might suffer a little, but we can figure out ways around that. Butter is, ultimately, fairly dispensable. And you have to churn through a bunch of other good stuff (milk, cream) or steer it away from cheese to get it to happen. I love butter, but it is still a crock, and I’m calling it out.

Facebook is the butter of the new media world. Blogs lit up last week with rumours Microsoft was going to acquire the part of Yahoo! it most wanted (search) and in the same move try to take Facebook for $15 - $20 billion. Seems people are done questioning the value of sixty million pairs of eyeballs, even in the absence of a sustainable business model. For those that haven’t done their homework, that’s why the web crashed the first time around, nobody knew how to make any money.

Facebook then made headlines again when it stopped Google’s Friend Connect from being able to communicate with its system, saying it cared more about users' privacy. This is a half truth, Facebook does care about users' privacy, but only because it sees that data as valuable and doesn’t want anyone else to have it. I saw a flurry of comments about this in the past few days,all centering around a notion of somebody owning user data. What I found so disheartening is nobody volunteered a simple, solitary truth: the users own their data, and services like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo etc. get to hold it for us while we find somewhere better to put it. And bet your ass the second we find somewhere better to put it we will.

Personally I don’t care, I’ve already talked about why marketing at (yes I mean “at”, not “to”, and they are different though neither is very good) people on Facebook is not a winning strategy (in more than one place), though that isn’t a very sexy story, not for the industry hype machine anyway.

Let’s not kid ourselves, Facebook wants to be the Microsoft of the web. People are running around saying that game is already over, and it is in fact Google. Wrong. Google is not the Microsoft of the web, and it never will be. It won’t be because its DNA doesn’t allow it to be.

Contrast this with Facebook. To quote one of my favourite writers, “Sillicon Valley’s poster-child of a better future is playing the strategic games if a dead industrial past.” Facebook is taking the technology and the principles that allowed it to exist in the first place and folding them in on themselves, technology and principles born out of a distaste for business as usual as it existed in the 20th century. The end result is not game changing, the end result is sand through an ever tightening grip. Personally I think the one reason traditional media flocked so whole-heartedly to the space is they recognise the same soulless void that has driven their own businesses for decades; I like to call it the Warren Beatty manoeuvre, one hand playing with a girl’s necklace, smiling and chatting while the other creeps up her skirt.

There’s never been more information more widely available, and trying to control what people do with it is the digital equivalent of telling rain which way to fall in a thunderstorm. Facebook eschewed a bunch of good stuff to get to where it is, using ingredients that were good for a whole lot of other, better, products and services. Now they’re desperately trying to maintain hold on user data, under a daft assumption it was somehow theirs to play with in the first place.

Even Rome fell people, look for history to repeat itself.

Endlessly.

4 Comments

BrianT
  • Wrote on 27 May, at 06:34PM
You're hilarious Gillespie.
David Gillespie
  • Wrote on 27 May, at 07:54PM
*ahem* Always happy to entertain! ;]
ebennet8
  • Wrote on 29 May, at 01:16PM
I hate Facebook. Why cant we just pick up the phone and have a real conversation? Call me old-fashioned.
David Gillespie
  • Wrote on 30 May, at 01:46PM
ebennet8 - if you logged in to Facebook you'd see that nobody has anything to say. Thats why we dont pick up the phone!

Along these lines though, the other day I wandered straight past a friends house. Saw them that night for a drink and mentioned this to them. "Why didn't you come in for a cup of coffee?" they said. My response was I didn't want to intrude, which took me down a whole chain of siloed-existence thinking. Are we really living in an age where we don't feel we can knock on the door of a friends house? Maybe ...

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