facebook bankruptcy part 2
More thoughts on Facebook Bankruptcy....
(me, previously)
Social networks only succeed when the value they return a value that is worth the investment -- in this case, the primary investment is time.
Fred Wilson kicks in with some interesting comments:
I've done that a few times on this blog, both times related to email overload. It's a dangerous thing to do. Bankruptcy is a loaded work, particularly coming from someone who's in the money business. The media loves to run a headline with the word bankruptcy in it. I still get pinged by journalists wanting to talk to me about "email bankruptcy", a term I did not coin, and I've been working hard to distance myself from.
[...]
Giving up is not the answer. As much as it feels good. Our mutual friend Tom Watson has some words of wisdom for Jason. Get through the bankruptcy Jason and come out the other side with a clean balance sheet and give Facebook another shot. It's going to be worth it at some point.
Jason has also closed comments on his blog. I've said my piece on that before too. That's not the right answer. Take some time off from blogging Jason. It's exhausting. Blogging and running a company at the same time is a ton of work. You might need a vacation from blogging. You certainly can't take a vacation from Mahalo.
Pretty much right on the money. I think the term Bankruptcy is showing up here not because it makes good headline (but that doesn't hurt), but because there's a growing recognition that time has value -- that in fact this may be the most valuable resource we own. And what we're seeing, finally, is a shift from "this is a neat technology" to "is this a good thing to invest in?" -- only we're not investing money necessarily, we're investing time.
Money is easy. you write a check. time? There's no credit card for hours. Either you have them, or you don't. Use them or they're gone. Use them badly and realize the wrong things got done, and you can't take a mulligan and try again.
Get involved in too many things, do none of them well -- or burn out. And maybe that's where Jason is at right now, burning the candle at both ends a bit too much, and trying to find that new balance, and coming to realize that things like Facebook need to be tools, not priorities.
Now, what things like Facebook need to realize and make possible is that people are going to want that, and either the tools facilitate it, or they're going to get tossed.... This is part of the maturation of the product and of the social networking environment in general. The long-term winners will not be the ones with the most features or the best API or the open interfaces -- it'll be the ones which give users the best return on their investment, and that investment is the time and energy spent interacting with the site.
And no, I'm not JUST talking about things like server response time or page reload efficiencies. Those are, frankly, givens. It's how users can determine what their acceptable budget of hours are for a given site, and then be able to take advantage of that site while not exceeding their budget of hours.
Here are a couple of really simple ways a site like Facebook can start allowing users better control:
1) allow me, as a user, to specify how often requests are queued up and sent to me. Maybe if I'm Scoble, I want every page view SMSed to my phone so I can revel in my popularity (giggle), but if I'm Jason or Fred, maybe I only want these updates presented once a day, so I'm not constantly dealing with the interruption of new requests coming in and feeling like I need to resolve them. That would allow me to set aside a time every day to "deal with Facebook" -- and let Facebook manage that, not me. Much cleaner, and if you allowed someone to set that "interrupt basis" to, say, immediate, hourly, four or six hours or daily, people could experiment with finding their comfort zone here.
This problem is starting to look to me like the same problem we have with email: it's effectively OTHER people pushing interrupts on you, in a way that triggers some kind of "if I don't respond to this, I'm being a bad guy" response, even if the request was unwanted and unsolicited. So -- find ways to reduce the number of interrupts caused and give people ways to manage it....
2) which leads to my second idea; if the problem is similar to the one we see with email, treat these requests like email, and give us features to deal with them the way we've learned how to deal with email: folders and filters. Allow me to divide and conquer the problem and automate certain classes of operations; let me get stuff I know I don't need to deal with out of the way, to make it easier to find the things I do.
Simple, well-understood ways to give the receiver of all of these update requests ways to manage them.
The real problem here is one of scale. It's real easy to generate requests; it doesn't take long, and then you're done. But if you're on the receiving side of those requests, resolving each one might not take long, but the aggregate can be both time and energy sapping. For social networks to survive and thrive, they have to start looking at how to make it possible for a person's popularity to grow while still being manageable -- to avoid the "choke on your own success" problem. It's not just getting faster, it's getting smarter, so it requires changes in thought and process, not just fewer seconds or cycles.
Every system hits points where the old ways stop working; successful systems rethink themselves to solve those problems. Looks like Social Networking is hitting one of those points -- and it's not just Facebook. It's the mainstreaming of the space. Facebook just is the popular poster child today.
It's a challenge, and a competitive advantage waiting to be found...
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