

Vision - scottrblock
http://dcurt.is/vision

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Mahn
Well, he has a point, but I wouldn't call that visionary; many people have
suggested before the possibility of a future where an important part the
connected population never used a PC before and rely exclusively on their
smartphones. And understandably so, the only way companies like Facebook or
Google can grow is by getting the "remaining" population online, and that in
turn might be enabled with the advent of the cheap smartphone. Of course
whether it will happen and what would be the impact if so are different
questions.

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loceng
Right, except they don't understand social, and simply taking over a phone to
make your whole website the interface doesn't really change that.

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mgrouchy

        > Right, except they don't understand social, 
    

I'm assuming you mean that they don't understand Mobile because a social
network that has over 1 Billion users likely understands social fairly well.

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iamdave
This is just my $0.02 (drachma would be better, truth be told) but there are
better indicators of 'getting' social than 1bn users.

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kloncks
What "better indicators of getting social" beat getting 1/7 of the World's
population to use your service?

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iamdave
Analogy time: would you call someone who has $1bn someone who "gets" hard
work, perseverance and financial savvy because they won the lottery (editors
note: the author is not comparing Facebook's success to winning The Powerball
_per se_ ), based only on the notion that they have a surplus of money in the
bank?

Let's move away from the lottery for a minute, but keep our handsomely wealthy
hypothetical person in the picture. You meet Bob. Bob shows you a bank
statement with $1bn on the balance line. Bob tells you his business is doing
great and he's living his dream.

I will put down 1/7 of my next paycheck that the very first question you ask
Bob is: "What's your business" or some variant thereof.

The point: Bob has a lot of money and you want to find out what he did that
'got' him the money, right? He networked, he made a product, he refined the
product, he took his product to market-eliminating what worked, building upon,
refining and reproducing what does. Those are the indicators you look at.

Simply having the users doesn't tell you a whole lot, or have we already
forgotten the tale of MySpace (or Xanga, or Friendster)? I maintain it's how
Facebook got _and kept_ those users that matter to Facebook 'getting' social.

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loceng
Good analogy. I still don't think they "get social" - they watch numbers and
react to those - which misses far too many nuances.

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iamdave
I don't think they do either, tbh.

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loceng
Ha. Perhaps not, or just not properly.

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mtgx
It's all mighty convenient that Facebook has the "vision" of having
smartphones be about people, not apps, when Facebook's strength is people, not
apps. I mean the so called "vision" is just an extension of their mission.
Nothing really breakthrough from their point of view, although I could see how
others from the outside would look at it like that. But for Facebook is just
another extension of their mission, just like the auto-sharing feature.
Facebook _needs_ the web to rely on as much sharing as possible, and they now
also _need_ mobile to be about people - regardless of how good or bad it is
for the user in the end (privacy concerns, etc).

