Facebook is the buzz when the Valley meets Cambridge
The Judge Business School seems to be a large playground. Today’s “toddlers” came from Silicon Valley, ready to meet start-ups, entrepreneurs, students and an interested crowd.
Amicably, as Americans are, the conference was very entertaining and a good opportunity to learn about what is “Hot” at the Silicon Valley: Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, User-Generated-Media, Facebook, Data Privacy, Consumer-Media-Applications, Facebook. Oh, and did I mention that we talked about Facebook a lot?
The experts were good. Kara Swisher’s dry humour about how much she is annoyed by Facebook or Reid Hoffman (from LinkedIn) witty about the seven deadly sins working in Social Networks stick to my memory.
Facebook deserves the buzz. But discussions only scratched the surface. It seems to me that real hardcore-information is sometimes hard to get and the experts are reluctant to give it away. How to avoid the problems which scaling a social network involves? How to best organize the user-support? Which features are sticky? What are the essential characteristics of succesful Social Networks? Innovative new ideas? A viral user-base? An appealing design? Or is the random factor very important? How important is data-security? Hans-Peter Brondmo made an interesting remark that we need to look at user-data as an asset that is individually owned, which should be protected from theft but which also could be sold if the user consents to it. Would the users care more about their data if they really own it?
The answer to these questions are more likely to help decide whether there is a Web 2.0 bubble. The question is not whether technology stock prices are too high or companies are bought for incredible sums. The question is not whether there are too many start-ups or too much Venture Capitalists running with the herd.
The last bubble burst because everybody had wrong expectations about the behaviour of people on the Internet. The expectation was that by 2005 everything would be done on the Internet. The question is really: has the behaviour changed enough to change the way money is earned on the Internet?
November 19th, 2007 at 09:03
[...] of the most important things a number of Europeans pointed out, for example, was our obsession with the ultra-trendy (this year, that would be Facebook), at the expense of the much more important paradigm shift (a significant shift toward a more mobile [...]