“Grammatical errors” – i love adverbs.

ps Nirvana & Pearl Jam are dangerously close to being called classic rock…

1) These same kids were all using myspace 3 years ago when they were in high school – now none of them are. That should scare facebook.

2) Facebook’s growth is incredible. Wow. If it keeps growing this fast for just a couple more years, they won’t even have to be that creative in coming up with new revenue streams to be a $15b company.

3) Anecdotal, yet somewhat related data: I started using facebook my last semester in college, spring 2004. It has obviously changed a lot since then, and I still log in quite frequently (usually once or twice a day). However, I wonder why I do – I don’t quite understand what I “should” be doing on fb. I have no interest in 99% of the applications developed on the new platform. I log in, see what my friends have been up to over the past couple days, and log out. Maybe I just don’t get it.

4) One of the most frequent banners I see running on fb is for classmates.com. I don’t see them getting too many signups from the fb crowd (didn’t fb destroy their business model?). How high of a CPC/CPM could they really get if that’s the best they can do in terms of ads?

5) Areas for fb growth:
a) Online marketplace. This seems like a no-brainer, a craigslist with built-in trust. I know it’s there now, but I imagine this could someday become a big earner for them… if they can hold onto people after they leave college.
b) hyper-contextual ads based off of mining profile data. another no-brainer, but given the above data, will fb users notice them? I say yes. My friend who runs a web startup in his spare time bought a reasonable amount of fb ads last year and got surprisingly good response; so much so, in fact, that he plans on another buy this year.
c) a good online music store. i’m sure there are tons of folks working on doing this. i hope they succeed. to the extent that broadband becomes even more ubiquitous than it is now, what better than to keep music in the cloud, and what better for facebook than to be that gatekeeper? even a “traditional” online music store, done right, could succeed based on the strength of peer trust for recommendations, “taste-making”, etc.

sorry for making this a facebook-centric post – seems i’ve got that on the brain these days…

Kudos to Jason for taking the effort to reach out to my generation to hear what is actually going on. My company has been able to build a massive user base on Facebook for the exact reason that we understand Facebook because we use it ALL the time.

Every time someone brings up the MySpace coming platform and the massive user numbers there, I can’t help but roll my eyes.

NO ONE that I know has a MySpace and I’d like to think I have a pretty large and diverse set of people in my social network. If Jason had gone a step further and asked for word associations to MySpace, he would’ve probably heard stuff like “sketchy” “alternative” “annoying” “flashing spam” “outsiders” “goth”, etc.

My generation is going to use Facebook and as we get older, we will continue using it. The kids younger than us will also make their entrance onto Facebook and fill our spots as we get older. Eventually, my generation will replace the older people right now who aren’t computer savvy and don’t use Facebook.

Conclusion: Facebook is clean, mainstream, and it the only social network that people around me actually use and find valuable consistently.

Again, kudos to Jason for stepping outside of the tech world and connecting with the actual young people who use this. Go to any college and I am sure you will the same results.