More Facebook Hyperbole

This is about Facebook. I think they’re going to win this one. In fact, I think they’re going to win all of them for the time being. It doesn’t matter what you believe their current problems are, they’re going to win. Not in the awesome sense, of course. But they’re going to win in the Wall Street investment bank sense. The empire sense.

I read a lot of geek news. A lot. For the past couple months I’ve noticed a huge upswing in buzz about Facebook. The company, its interface changes, its longstanding privacy issues, who’s getting what, who’s getting shafted, who got shafted before, who’s coming on board, who’s leaving, who’s investing, who’s going to bat for them in Washington, even what kinds of parties they throw and who gets to go to them. Mostly, it’s been negative in tone.

In the midst of this I’m sad for Facebook-the-idea, the people who work there, and the people who own chunks of it. It seems like it could have been great. I mean great in the noble sense. I don’t know if any of what I read about the company is true, but I know it makes me sad when I read it. I feel dirty afterward, like I’m reading gossip. It just doesn’t come off as a noble enterprise.

Not only that, it smells like inevitability. The takeover kind. The we-have-more-money-and-more-users-than-all-of-western-society kind. How do you beat that back? Truly, I don’t think you can. Facebook has reached the size of most empires. Did you know that this planet had less than one billion people until around 1800. Facebook could reach one billion registered users next year, or very soon thereafter. Maybe by this Christmas. All of them legitimate? Maybe not. Even at half, would it matter?

At that size, that’s not just a business. That’s a power. That’s a world power. That’s an economy. That’s a culture. You can measure GDP in there. Alright I’m stretching, but hear me out.

It’s true that they don’t have Apple’s design and market cap (yet) or Google’s utility (yet) or Amazon’s product offerings (yet) or Walmart’s physical distribution capabilities (yet) or the infrastructure held by the telecommunication companies (yet) but they have something that most companies don’t: the voice of the people. Or at least, they have the attention of the people. At the push of a button they can put a message in front of millions and millions of people around the world simultaneously, in their native language, just about anywhere on the planet. Even the Superbowl can’t do…okay, even the U.S. government can’t do that. And the Superbowl only gets one day of the year.

It’s even better on the receiving end for Facebook. They’re an aggregator of all shared sentiment, emotion, and consumption of every conceivable kind around the world. They know you and what you did last summer. And at their size, they can probably guess with high probability what non-Facebook people think, do, care about, and consume as well.

They’re kind of like a web inside the world wide web. What Prodigy, AOL, and Compuserve tried to be before the real web took over. Only Facebook is slowly succeeding, and branching out into more territory. Like bacteria that bathe in anti-bacterial soap just to show you how badass they are. They’ve mutated beyond the reach of antibiotics. And I’m stretching again.

So there are a lot of geeks and non-geeks aware of that growing power who are starting to shout about it more and more. And I commend them for asking tough questions and for trying to expose practices that could be considered shameful at best and harmful at worst. There will be some victories there, I’m sure. At the very least, some fortunate few will reap rewards from lawsuits and we’ll feel good about that. We’ll watch the biopic of the lead lawyer on Netflix inside of Facebook. Together. Competitors will get acquired or squashed. Or acquired and squashed.

But I think, like all world powers they’re probably going to run their course. There’s too much momentum and not enough friction. And certainly there is nothing large enough to repel them. Not even government. Especially not government. Why? Because everyone believes it’s in their best interest to meld with Facebook. The incentives to join, to integrate, to stay, to share, all of it, they all point to helping Facebook succeed. For as much as we bitch, I don’t think anyone really wants them to go away.

Of course, I don’t think they’re going to hold the world captive for all eternity. If it’s one thing history demonstrates, empires come and go. But they have to play themselves out. They have to wither internally before the gates come crashing down. I think Facebook is a long way off from that day.