David Kirkpatrick: The Facebook Effect

May 19, 2010

I recently met up with David Kirkpatrick to discuss his upcoming book on Facebook. In the below video, he identified three things you might not know about Facebook:

1- Identity. Facebook doesn’t want to be a website, but the identity infrastructure of the Internet. In time, Facebook has the potential to pose a threat to the governments in terms of identification documents. Imagine one day printing out your Facebook ID instead of using a passport.

2- Mark Zuckerberg controls everything about Facebook. As a direct reflection of Zuckerberg’s beliefs, Facebook is constantly trying to push the boundaries for privacy online. Zuckerberg generally believes that people’s perception of privacy will change over time.

3- Monetization. The lack of an actual business model has had people questioning whether Facebook really is a business – or just a phenomenon. The answer is found in Facebook’s corporate strategy, which is more concerned with improvements and growth than monetization. Once they are large enough, however, there will be many, many ways of monetizing the platform.

More insights into the phenomenon of Facebook can be found in David’s book “The Facebook Effect” that comes out in June.

Discussion

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newbedave

david kirkpatrick was given all the emails and was made fully aware of how zuckerberg stole facebook from david in the beginning i gave kirkpatrick 80% of the emails kirkpatrick then ask if there was more ' yes there is more but ask kirkpatrick that he must reveal the truth the other 20% was email from paul ceglia to me dave made contact with paul ceglia and was in discussion about a platform for my idea the facebook
as for kirkpatrick you are a prick
kirkpatrick falls victim to the bane of many business historians infatuation with the subject
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Rolodexter

There are books on the "eBay economy" and the like, and really, when journalists title their pieces this way, it's sort of misleading. There's a good deal of things going on that are more essential, that transcend proprietary systems and brands. In this, there's descriptions and narratives of extraordinary events, real world, actual events of often political significance; these events are seemingly facilitated by Facebook. But really, any technology might suffice. It just so happens Facebook's the branded system of choice, currently. But there were riots in the streets of Manila and the greater metro areas, when EDSA 3 broke out, and all that was coordinated at the grass roots by text message. And those protests resulted in ousting President Estrada!
Cory Grassell

Regarding #3: Perhaps I'm naive, but many of these social-media "phenomena" are being started by teens and young adults. Forgive me, but what do they know about owning a business? Most have only worked on paper routes, let alone operating the world's highest-trafficked website. I understand they have advisors, but still...
Jörn Steinz

I wonder how independent Mark Zuckerberg really is. After all Russian DST now owns 10% of FB; 32% of DST are hold by Alisher Usmanov, who is known as the hard man. Hence, guess Mark might have to obey to more business interests as it seems from the surface.

All the best
Joern
http://www.strongquickly.com
http://www.mydecision.eu
Clement

Mark Zuckerberg has control of 3 seats out of 5 at the board. So whatever the sharholders say (DST, Accel etc) he gets the final word because he has the majority of votes.