slur crudeness…

credulity ungrudgingly…

There seemed to be a point at BlogPhiladelphia where everyone seemed to be grasping for what should be the obvious – what is the business model?  How do I make money?  How do I convince my boss that we should be blogging? What is blogging wo…

I agree that there will always be a need for expert information from one’s subculture, but that will not be the majority of people–who the marketers want. Marketers want formula and Facebook can provide hubs of similar people.

Oh yeah, and are you THE Paul Allen?

I blogged about the implications of Facebook platform just hours after the launch, at http://www.paulallen.net, and days before it became evident that some Facebook apps will get millions of users very quickly.

I’d link to the Facebook Alexa chart, but I’m posting from a blackberry in the Philadelphia airport. But I predict Facebook, by opening up its platform, will jump quickly from 100,000 new users per day to double or triple that. It already seems to have had a very nice spike.

But I don’t see the social graph, however much I applaud it, becoming more important than search–ever. It will become a primary layer of the web experience, but not the biggest moneymaker. And potentially if users feel exploited enough because these are their relationships after all, an open source social network will emerge, which, like Wikipedia, will become a public good that all can benefit from without fear of someone else profiting. Om Malik has discussed the potential for feeling exploited.

Google exploits all the anchor text from all the links created by all the webmasters, but it doesn’t feel like exploitation because it’s all aggregated and not personal.

While Google will pass Microsoft in market cap in the next 2-3 years ($300 billion plus), Facebook will likely IPO and be worth tens of billions–an order of magnitude less than search which is far more monetizeable, but still an amazing accomplishment for a very young company with a very young CEO.

I agree with earlier comments that there will be a long tail of social networks emerging. I use Facebook everyday, and more and more often. But I use LinkedIn 2-3 times per week, and get far more professional value from it than I do from Facebook.

There is a list of social networking sites on Wikipedia (again sorry I can’t link to it right now, you’ll just have to SEARCH for it) that shows about 60-80 social networks, and you’ll be amazed to see how many already have a million or more users.

I started MyFamily.com in 1998. We raised tens of millions in capital for this idea. Had MyFamily.com remained free (it went to a paid subscription service in August 2002, if you can believe it, when it had at one time been growing by 20-30,000 users per day) it would likely have 50 million users today.

But the “wisdom of the crowd” post bubble would no longer support a free site feeding members to a paid service (Ancestry.com) and so MyFamily.com nearly died.

So there is proven opportunity in the space that Geni, FamilyLink.com and other family social networking sites are playing in, even if there is more opportunity in the non-family social networks.

By the way, I really disliked the book Wisdom of Crowds. I don’t agree with the theory, even if you have a smart diverse group of people guessing how many gumballs there are in the jar. Sometimes ggregate guesses are lucky, but most often they are wrong.

I would ten times rather have a single expert with the right tool, that a crowd guessing anything, a Warren Buffett with a model and a formula, that a million day traders wildly affecting swings in stock prices as their wisdom changes.

For example, I read about a hedge fund that had exclusive access to audience measurement data a few years back (was it Comscore, or something else?) that could use the tool to accurately predict growth rates of web sites and whether publicly traded companies were going to hit their revenue forecasts (based on traffic and conversions that are measured in real time)–give me an expert analyst with that data over all the guesses of the crowd, any day.

Have you tried BlueDot.us for this (http://bluedot.us)?

Yahoo’s already got Yahoo Messenger, which means it already knows which users are friends and which ones aren’t. One would imagine it’d be trivial for them to put together a “social networking” page that shows what those friends are doing across all Yahoo’s properties.

Social discovery – it is the latest in Web 2.0 talk. StumbleUpon was bought by eBay for $75 million and Last.fm was bought by CBS for $280 million. Related to this new form of finding “the information that i want”, this article on TechCrunc…