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January 1 - January 6, 2020
But it’s also hard to deny it nurtures relationships, even love. And there is evidence that these connections make us happier.
We now have a Benjamin Button class of products that age in reverse.
Wearing your Nikes makes them less valuable. But posting to Facebook that you are wearing Nikes makes the network more valuable.
Newspapers can reach millions, and many more if you consider how their stories pop up on the three platforms.
But they gain almost no intelligence from this contact.
the three dominant platforms—search, commerce, and social—k...
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the New York Times has only skele...
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It sees the stories I read and share, but it’s an algorithm targeting a cohort,
not a feed-based platform designed specifically for me.
Facebook’s algorithm can be used to microtarget distinct populations in spe...
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It offers unparalleled granularity, assuring that advertisers only spend money on people who are already in-market.
dumb companies correlate closely to losers.
Some digital companies also lag. Twitter, for example, doesn’t know much about its customers.
The result is that while the company can calculate changing moods and appetites in different areas of the planet, it struggles to target individuals.
It aces humanity but gets a C in humans.
This is the reason Twitter’s relevance, similar to Wikipedia or PBS, will always outpace its market value. Good for the pl...
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No company is higher or farther to the right on this chart than Facebook. It crushes on both reach and intelligence. This power gives...
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Its prospects are bright, opportunities everywhere. There are interesting problems to solve, and ridiculous amounts of money in play.
Zuckerberg understands images are Facebook’s killer app,
much of it residing in the Instagram wing of his social empire. We absorb imagery sixty thousand times faster than words.19 So, images make a beeline for the heart.
Facebook bought the photo-sharing site in 2012 for $1 billion. It’s proving to be one of the greatest acquisitions of all time. In
In the face of ridicule (“A billion for a company with nineteen people?”), the Zuck was steadfast and pulled the trigger on an asset that’s worth fifty-plus times what he paid for it.
One way to appreciate the brilliance of this acquisition is to look at Instagram’s
“Power Index,”
the number of people a platform reaches times their le...
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This social index reveals Instagram as the world’s most powerful platform, as it has 800 million users, a third of Facebook’s, but garners...
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The birthing, and killing, of new products makes Facebook the most innovative big company on earth.
Less celebrated, but just as important, is Facebook’s willingness to quickly back off when it gets pushback from users or the federal government.
Facebook knows that its hold on users re...
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Despite the considerable effort those users have put into constructing and maintaining their pages, a sexier competitor could still draw them away by the...
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Jeff Bezos highlighted in one of his famous investment letters that
what kills mature companies is an unhealthy adherence to process.
Facebook benefits from the ultimate jujitsu move: it will likely become the largest media company on earth, and it gets its content, similar to Google, from its users.
In other words, 2 billion customers labor for Facebook without compensation.
By comparison, the big entertainment companies must spend billions to cr...
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what would CBS, ESPN, Viacom (MTV), Disney (ABC), Comcast (NBC), Time Warner (HBO), and Netflix be worth combined if they had no content costs?
Simple—they’d be worth what Facebook is worth.
One in five people on the planet are on Facebook each day.
Users indicate who they are (gender, location, age, education, friends), what they are doing, what they like, and what they are planning to do today and in the near future.
A privacy advocate’s nightmare is a marke...
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What’s creepy is how good Facebook is getting at it and the number of platforms it can gather and share data across.
“Creepy” is correlated to relevance.
a cold war between privacy and relevance is being waged in our society.
Data hacks are now deeply, inextricably woven into our lives. Privacy and security have become collective action problems.
There is so much data about us available, that it’s easy to identify us by a few data points.
If you carry a cell phone and are on a social network, you’ve decided to have your privacy violated, because it’s worth it.
the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March 2018 revealed that most of us were unaware the extent to which our personal data was being used.
With knowledge of 150 likes, their model could predict someone’s personality better than their spouse. With 300, it understood you better than yourself.
Why would a cool, progressive company like Facebook ever misuse our data?
Because Facebook’s interests are increasing its user base and time spent on the site.
