what is FB really about?

Room Luís Pina where
the event took place

Lisbon is an extraordinary place! At the global scale it is nothing but a small village of ~1M souls at the centre of a country that was once great and is currently in a deep economic and self confidence crisis. Nevertheless, it is a place where you can find yourself in a small room of a charming historic building with about 20 people exchanging ideas with David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect and eminent tech blogger.



Last Friday's event reminded me of a good friend of mine that has been living in London for 10 years: he has essentially given up attending concerts in London because quite simply it is virtually impossible to get tickets. Instead he books flights to Lisbon for the dates in which the tour visits this town. Often the tickets are so much cheaper that he doesn't even spend more (especially considering most of the time concert is followed by dinner and drinks).

Anyway, I found the chat, that included local tech celebrities Jonas and Rui Lorenço in the panel, extremely interesting.

More importantly, I came out of it with two bullet points representing 2 interesting and thought provoking insights that I had not thought of. I want to share 1of them in this blog.

What is (really) Facebook?

Well, David has a very interesting view: Facebook is (or ultimately wants to become) part of the internet infrastructure having on its side 1) the personal data, 2) the social web of connections between  individuals and 3) the algorithm that determines who is interested in what.

Google may have hit the jackpot whilst pursuing its goal of "indexing, organizing and generally making available all the information in the world" but with the prospect of someone adding the "web of social connections" to concepts like search and shopping suddenly having an algorithm that yields the most relevant pages out of an anonymous query string does not sound so hot anymore.

There's a great article on Techcrunch published just 3 days ago that explores further this idea that FB may eventually drag Google out of business.

For the time being, however, I think both these two ideas are still futuristic science fiction. I say this based on my own personal experience with FB: whilst they may be getting somewhere in terms of "personal data" and "social web of connections" their algorithm for defining what goes on my news feed page sucks! They hardly ever get it right.

Having said that, we know how fast things change and it is quite possible that with the billions of $$$ Mark will have at his disposal once he goes public he stands a good chance of getting on board someone to get that algorithm right (as well as solving some other issues such as the completely subjective use that each person makes of FB that casts doubt that the FB friends are an accurate representation of the "social web of connections" between individuals).

In these days "futuristic science fiction"may well be upon us in a couple of years....