next my name should be in Newsweek for something *I* do.

I’m delighted I can help tremendously accomplished writers like Steven Levy write important articles about Facebook, now gracing the cover of Newsweek.

Near the top of the article: Karel Baloun, an engineer who worked at Facebook until last year, recalls vividly the baldly stated prediction of one of the company’s cofounders: “In five years,” he said, “we’ll have everybody on the planet on Facebook.”

Unfortunately, this quotation attributed to me has a history. Likely it refers to a positive, supportive comment I made one of Dustin’s Facebook Notes, which only Dustin’s friends could read. It was on a somewhat tongue-in-cheek Note joking that at the then-tremendous growth rate, FB would register everyone on the planet by a certain date. I think he intended it as a dramatization of a fantastic growth rate, and the power of geometric growth, which FB epitomizes on so many levels.

While Dustin certainly wasn’t claiming that everyone on the planet would register, I think the quote does register accurately the huge, uncomparable ambition of the company. *Someday* everyone with computer access will either be on Facebook or willfully avoiding it, and that date may very well be within 5 years. I predicted in June that FB would be larger than MySpace in one year, and it looks well on track. Google is only 9 years old, reached its peak 30% share in it’s 6th year, so FB is growing share much more quickly. So the quotation, in my mind, is both reasonable and representative.

Overall the story is both a great read and accurate. The ConnectU lawsuit is already old and irrelevant, and according to techcrunch yahoo dangled 1.6B right after youtube sold for a touch more than that, and various blogs suggest that facebook was actually quite interested it in, until the deal broke apart, perhaps because the techcrunch leaked docs showed that yahoo was bending over backwards to justify the price, and in the end couldn’t stomach it due to a weakened share price, as I predicted in mashable in Oct ‘06. Shows you can never know what’s good for you. “News Feed ads are “well targeted—people like the content,” Zuckerberg says, unconvincingly.” - a great quote, and I’m certain FB is working extremely hard on this.

FB’s other key challenge is enabling grouping and selective access to friends, as in “The social graph will get incredibly meaningless,” says Berkeley’s Danah Boyd. “Do you really want to be speaking with everyone you ever met?” This will be a much harder challenge, and I spend several pages of my book on it. This is a huge opportunity, and I hope FB opens up the F8 API enough for an Application to solve it.

Now I hope that my next appearance in Newsweek is for “I Am Green“!

16 August 2007 | Uncategorized | Comments