Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

The Facebook “surge” surges on, in the Facebook world at least. BUT are other social networks really “scrambling” to respond?

Moreover, should start-ups really abandon all notions of independence and declare their Facebook allegiance, as I heard Internet “court jester” Esther Dyson advise yesterday in her Web 2.0 conference keynote in New York City.

SEE: Google Beware: Facebook Love Blooms

While Dyson’s outpouring for a Facebook future was notable in its intensity, what was even more striking was the immediate MySpace rebuttal, rather the lack of one.

After Dyson rallied the audience towards an F8 world, Shawn Gold, MySpace SVP Marketing, took to the podium for his own keynote honors. In stark contrast to Dyson’s wistful imaginings of Facebook as the Web’s “social arbiter,” Gold laid out hard statisitcs showing how MySpace IS the Web’s social network, worldwide.

What Gold did not do, however, was address Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg or F8.

Dyson’s ambiguous notions of a Facebook “attention economy” seemed to leave many conference attendees a bit puzzled. Gold’s MySpace story, however, drew “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience, literally.

Nothing inspires metrics driven marketers, apparently, like big numbers, very big ones. Gold on MySpace, by the numbers:

1.5 billion page views a day,
320,000 profiles created daily,
12% of all time online is spent at MySpace,
Average page is visited 30 times a day…

Gold offered a “back of the envelope” brand marketing ROI calculation. If “only” 100,000 MySpacers put a brand’s logo on their pages, at 30 views daily, the brand would reap 3 million impressions in one day.

The MySpace story is not a uniquely U.S. phenomenon, either. MySpace proudly underscores it believes in global friendship:

MySpace is a worldwide community. Your choice will not prevent you from making friends and viewing content from users in other countries (nearly twenty of them).

What’s more, MySpace is “friendlier” than Facebook.

Tom Anderson has 183,902,697 MySpace friends, and I can see them all via his open profile at the number one (by far) social nework (or social utility, as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg insists) that Anderson co-founded and later sold to News Corp.

What about Facebook founder, and still owner, Zuckerberg?

Can I get to know him at Facebook? NO. Can I see his “face,” can I be introduced to his friends at Facebook? NO. How many Facebook friends does Zuckerberg have? Not the 184 million Anderson boasts!

Why does it matter? Because “opening up” to become a third-party application platform does not actually open up a closed Web-based application, contrary to popular perception.

Via a Google search for “Tom Anderson MySpace profile,” I “hooked-up” with the very open, social Tom at MySpace, immediately.

Via a Google search for “Mark Zuckerberg Facebook profile,” Zuckerberg, himself, was nowhere to be found.

Not only does MySpace dwarf Facebook in actual numbers of registered users, MySpace benefits, big time, from the old media notion of “pass along” audience.

Any one, at any time, can browse MySpace profile pages to their hearts content, and all the while deliver more page views and ad impressions to the MySpace bottom line.

Facebook, however, is not an open platform like MySpace, it is slammed tightly shut; No one can see any Facebook page without “registering” with an email address.

ALSO: Beware Ning Love: Where is YOUR Social Network?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Although Esther Dyson needs no introduction in the online world, the Web 2.0 NY conference underway today nevertheless profiles her as the “Internet’s court jester”:

“A person of no insitutional importance who somehow manages to speak the truth and to be heard when and where it matters.”

Where does “it” matter today online? Facebook is the face of Web 2.0 going forward, Dyson proclaimed in her opening keynote this morning on the “future” of Web 2.0.

Dyson recounted that while she has recently assured that “Google is not the end of the world” (Dyson is an investor in would-be Google killer Powerset), she has not been able to answer the perennial entreaty, what is the “next phase of history”?

Until now. Until May 24 to be precise, when Facebook unveiled F8 to the world.

Dyson, of course, is not the first Internet veteran to declare that she has seen the future and it has a big “f” in it. Is there any Web “visionary” that has not pre-ordained Facebook the Web’s one and only future?

SEE: Facebook: The End of Innocence

Why such near unanimous, virtually unconditional “love” from the Web’s best and brightest? Although just weeks out of the gate, Facebook is nonetheless deemed to be THE Web’s “platform,” from here on in.

Dyson is unequivocal in her advice to start-ups post May 24, 2007: “Throw out your development, go use Facebook.” WHY, though? It doesn’t matter if you are “better,” what matters is that you are “standard,” Dyson advised.

Three weeks is apparently sufficient for determing the Web’s standards these days.

Mark Zuckerberg, of course, concurs. At Facebook’s coming out party, he quipped, Google here we come:

“We’re the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S. and we can’t seem to get our act together,” Zuckerberg joked as he fumbled to synchronize his presentation slides, which were in disarray. After laughs from the crowd, he regained his composure and added, “We recently passed eBay in traffic and we’re working on passing Google, too.” (AP report)

Why is Dyson so gung ho for Facebook? It is the first platform for the “attention economy,” she said. While it is “not the only one,” the Facebook approach is optimal, Dyson believes, because it “mirrors the world” by allowing people to “build their own walled garden with their own gates.”

Dyson’s view of the Facebook “trusted friend” notion matches Facebook’s own position vs. a vs. MySpace. Facebook touts its Facebooker “you can only be my friend if I let you be” modus operandi as being (far) superior to the MySpace everyone is Tom Anderson’s friend point of view.

Dyson did allow, however, that being the Web’s “social arbiter” could turn out to be a dicey proposition. Not only does real “friendship” risk being devalued, but the Facebook platform itself may be deemed responsible for any “unfriendly” behavior on the part of ”friends” in one’s network.

Dyson’s concluding toughts though, perhaps unwittingly, were actually the most on the mark regarding Facebook’s real future.

While sighing in relief that she wasn’t asked one particular question–”What is Facebook’s business model”–Dyson was not playing the “Internet court jester,” it was her most telling remark.

ALSO: Facebook vs. MySpace: Who Needs Privacy?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN