We shouldn’t care about Facebook’s IPO for many reasons. Of course, that’s easier said than done with the massive amounts of news being generated about it, and the “what does it all mean” media? Instead of looking at the past, I think it’s more important to keep focus on the future. Now, where to start?
It all comes down to a question far more existential in nature, and posed by John Battelle:
What kind of a world do we want to live in?
We’re in the embryonic stages of determining how technology, social media, and content can change society. Every Monday I’m left speechless as I read the raw honesty in Still Sundays:
Until we can understand that social media is not a tool to conquer a dream, a goal, a number, a love, a friend, a family, we are going to keep running into dead ends with newer and latest tools that really do more of the same.
But is it more of the same? Or are we progressing at such a fast pace that it’s hard to see the greater good? On a micro level, we need to look at the major players and who will come out on top in the race to win cyber world:
Creating the dominant platform matters so much because it will give the winning firm the lion’s share of the world’s eyeballs. More eyeballs means more direct sales of hardware, software and services, and advertising. But eyeballs offer something even more valuable, something tech firms prize more than anything else: data.
Information we access on the web is no longer sacred. Users care more about their ego, and how they’re being portrayed to the world. They’re willing to sacrifice personal information for efficiency. Case in point: the Facebook Open Graph, a controversial feature recently released which enables “frictionless sharing.” It allows applications to deeply integrate into the Facebook experience. Whether it’s the music you listen to (Spotify), the TV you watch (GetGlue), or the images you find on the web (Pinterest). Facebook captures this data into reports that highlight interesting summaries. These summaries can now be featured prominently on your Timeline, which correlates nicely with The Open Graph. As Carl Sjogreen, the director of product management, of Facebook Platform describes in this video, “Activities you do outside of Facebook in the real world are connected with times in your life, and fit very naturally into Timeline.”
Timeline and Open Graph reveal how data from across the web is merging, and simultaneously creating separate, highly-targeted ecosystems. Facebook dominates the social graph, and other companies will undoubtedly give rise to other platform solutions. Whether these ecosystems exist on the web, or in the closed gardens of an iOS app, everyone is now a user, a data provider, or content provider in some way or another. And many people don’t seem to mind because we’re all a part of an opt-in ecosystem with core shared values. Things will go private, public, private, public…again and again. The key is to pick the appropriate tools so that it’s easy and convenient for us to directly manage our profile on the service. This in turn enables brands to reach out to us, the users, in a creative and consistent way. 
Andy Weissman argues that information (content) wants to be distributed friction-free and believes that it’s a massive opportunity that should be at the center right now. I predict it will be. But we’ll need to know how to use it appropriately. Nokia is on the right track with their IdeasProject, an online community for everybody from all around the world to brainstorm. It enables the two-way exchange of ideas between users and developers around innovation. In Yochai Benkler’s editable online book Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom he writes:
This new freedom holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere.
Is this the kind of world we choose to live in? I certainly hope so.
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