Last night, my wife - who has left me for Mark Zuckerberg - told me that there was a new methodology for confirming friends on Facebook. She said it was annoying, as thought Fred Wilson.
I didn’t think much of it, figuring it was simply a glitch, especially when - as Michael Arrington points out - friends are added even if you press cancel.
Apparently, it was a glitch. But if Google was the Database of Intentions and Facebook is the Database of Connections, then Facebook’s value is maximized if Facebook knows the nature of every single relationship within its database, otherwise, it’s just a massive database of people who are increasingly connected but represent a very myopic skew of the world.
If Facebook pushes the envelope, it will eventually want to know how two people are connected, otherwise, it’s nowhere near as powerful. And don’t kid yourself, power of information and power over other companies is what drives Facebook now: if Facebook can differentiate the relationships between:
a) family members,
b) business acquaintances and
c) fellow graduates,
it can proceed to suck out any value from Geni.com, LinkedIn and Classmates.com, for example. Otherwise, it just becomes too successful for its own good, in the sense that once everyone is on Facebook and continues to add one another haphazardly, it loses a lot of value…
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July 23rd, 2007 at 11:15 am
I think that they have already made a lot of headway in mapping out relationships: http://blog.searchanyway.com/2007/06/facebook_the_next_search_the_n.html