Facebook: Is there a Moore's Law for sharing?

Love it or hate it, that new look to Facebook - the one that everyone has been up in arms over - stems from our increasingly comfortable attitude about sharing tidbits of information about our personal lives. Admit it. The old site was getting cluttered with all of those shared status updates, vacation photos, posted items and applications for good karma, virtual gifts and sports fan networks.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, said the comfort level with sharing was relatively low when the social network launched in 2004. People were wondering what type of information to put into the profiles - full name? mobile phone number? pics of the kiddies? Facebook's introduction of privacy controls, giving the user more control over who sees what, helped the users get over that initial hump, Zuckerberg said.

When there was only a little information that people could post, people would update their profile maybe once a month or every couple of months. Then we added things like photos and groups and the updates became more regular like once a week, once every couple of days, and now with status updates and all the different applications that people are using, the rate is increasing so much. Now most people probably update stuff on a daily basis.

During an on-stage chat at the conference, Zuckerberg compared the exponential growth of sharing with Moore's Law, a prediction more than 40 years ago by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip would double about every two years. "One of the things that we have thought about at Facebook - we don't have any conclusions on it yet - but an interesting historical analogy is Moore's Law... I wouldn't be surprised, although there's no definitive link yet, if something like that exists with the rate of sharing."

Zuckerberg said the redesign was due, in part, for an expected uptick in even more sharing - as if I now want to know what my friends had for breakfast, how long they spent in the shower or what they picked up at the grocery store. Given all of this information that Facebook is gathering about its user base (and how valuable it is to advertisers), you would think that Zuckerberg would put a bit more emphasis on a revenue-building plan, instead of putting revenue on a backburner while the company grows the membership base.

Even MySpace, which has compiled a ton of information about its users, launched an ad network that some observers are calling the site's "Google Moment." MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe told TechCrunch over the weekend, “We expect MyAds to be a significant revenue source for us. It has already exceeded our launch expectations in the pre-launch phase.”