Facebookers: Choose your words more carefully
At the FourSquare Conference in New York put on by the private investment firm Quadrangle, Facebook CFO Gideon Yu made a gonzo statement that is being picked apart by the blogosphere.
As reported by Sam Gustin of Portfolio, who apparently was the only journalist to witness the event, Yu, the former YouTube CFO and Yahoo treasurer, said regarding his current and former employers:
"There are these small bands of people who are trying to take over the world," Yu said. "This is so much more fun than working at a hedge fund or an investment bank."
The "small bands" is ok, but "trying to take over the world" is not going to win friends. You are too easily characterized as a relative of Dr. Evil.
Yu may have visions of world domination, but more likely he is just happy to be with another group of young entrepreneurs who are lapping the competition and haven't yet experienced crushing defeat, and to be in line for another huge financial takedown.
Even the trite phrase "trying to change the world for the better" would have been a better choice of words. Instead of being perceived as colonialists intent exploiting the populace, Facebook's leaders would be viewed as just good old fashioned American capitalists profiting from their social graph, which isn't such as great characterization either. As Nick Carr incisively extrapolated from Facebook's description of its new ad platform: "The social graph, it turns out, is a platform for social graft."
Umair Haque rips Yu's statement apart, giving Facebook a tongue lashing:
What makes revolutionaries - well, revolutionary - is the desire to change the world. For the better.
Almost all of today's new market leaders, interestingly, share this trait: it is a deep genetic difference that underpins advantage. The deeply felt desire to change the world for the better is ultimately how radical innovators are able to explode value propositions, redesign value chains, etc.
But that's not what Facebook wants to do. Facebook wants to take over the world.
See the difference?
One is about improving things radically, about innovation: the other is about capturing rents, about scarcity and control.
We can put this a bit more formally. Facebook wants to play games of coercion and domination: I threaten, you obey. This is really what F8/SocialAds/ etc are.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't help the cause either when he stated in slam dunk fashion that there will be no way to avoid the mixing of the social graph and advertising: "There is no opting out of advertising," he said.
It's reasonable to expect people to pay with their eyeballs for the privilege of inhabiting Facebook's cyberspace. But as a site built to serve its members and to mirror the real world of relationships, there should be an option to avoid being a vector for ads from Coca-Cola or others exploiting Facebook's social graph.
Other tidbits gathered from the Foursquare event: Zuckerberg said the company has no current plans to join the Google-sponsored OpenSocial API movement but it is "conceivable" if it gains traction. Yu said that Facebook is raising $260 million in a Series D financing round.