Borak: The Rise Of Facebook

Superpoking, Ninjas, Pirates and Zombies. If you're one of the 42 million members of Facebook, you'll know them all too well. Perhaps a little too well, as you find yourself struggling to fend off the requests to kick, bite, or bitch slap. There is no doubt that the talk of the town now is Mark Zuckerberg's creation, whose figures has seen a phenomenol growth of over 500% from just 10 months ago, dwarfing the 20% of MySpace, which only a year ago was the hottest property on the web. Not any more.

So heavy is the buzz on Facebook that its 23-year-old whizkid creator could become one of the richest internet entrepeneurs if he gets his way in a bidding war between Microsoft and Google. As rumours go, Microsoft—a dinosaur of innovation who are chomping their way into the web's Y-Generation—are prepared to pay some $500 million for a 5% share in Facebook, valuing the social networking site at $10 billion, or about $238 per profile.

That Zuckerberg's creation is worth that amount is ridiculous. The math doesn't add up: its yearly revenue from advertisements is about 70 cents per profile; similar questions were asked when MySpace was bought for 580 million—what more for 10 billion. Most of this valuation is just based on hot air, but this is just how things are in the new internet age, which is increasingly driven by the one thing you can't put a price on: “Free.”

One of the key success points of Facebook was its free sign-up, which put it on equal par to MySpace as far as cost to the user is concerned. And on that even ground, Facebook's slick interface and third-party apps clearly trumped over the messy, and closed MySpace platform. More than that, Facebook is now being accepted as a verb (“facebooking”), and so is becoming a barometer of how social trends are progressing in the free web culture that we live in now.

With its thousands of free third-party apps available you can see how quickly hype comes and fades—a foresight that Zuckerberg himself might want to take heed of his own creation. Just a couple of months ago, Scrabulous, an app that allows users to play Scrabble with each other, was the biggest thing on Facebook. Now it seems, much of the hype has cooled down, with users being bored with it as quickly as a cat does with a rubber ball. Ditto for zombies, ninjas and pirates. The speed of this hype is scarily fast; just when Scrabulous developers have updated their servers, up comes the memo that hey, it's not that cool anymore. Not that it's surprising really. After all, the cost of abandoning it is literally nothing.

This mob-trend mentality, which developed as free content and applications boom across the web is now throwing old business models into chaos. Not that it's all that bad. For a couple of things, it's elevated consumer power, and accelerated innovation. In an environment where everything's given for free and everyone has their say in the participatory media culture, it's up to the consumer to determine what doesn't or does work. The trumping over of MySpace's boggy interface is just one one example of this power; on other news social websites like digg and reddit, it's users, not editors, who decide what stories are the biggest of the day.

This new mob-driven hype machine, though cheaper and self-generating, is not without its flaws—as mobs go, it's a fickle minded one that doesn't owe any allegiance to anyone except for what serves their purpose best. This miscalculation of hype against value also makes another point that there are many out there, including marketers and so-called media men, who just don't get “it.” This point struck me as I was reading a press release about a youth survey that concluded that “The internet is like oxygen to the urban youth, who seems unable to survive without it. Activities include downloading music, movies, chatting, and playing games.”

Wow. These are the kind of boob comments made by boardroom execs who obviously don't use Facebook. Not that these executives are much older; it's just that the speed of which technology has accelerated trends and cultures have made the older age much faster, creating a “generational” divide that's measured in months, not decades. You may be only 30 years old, but you might as well be grandpa to a 20-something if you don't know what torrenting is.

This new media world is just the opposite of the old passive media. It's an amazing, and surely chaotic turnaround that has left many struggling to get with the times. But it's not all doom and gloom for the oldies, for just as quickly as one might age without being connected, it's just as easily that one can get reconnected. It doesn't take a cent. The caveat for marketers and the disconnected is that there's no shortcut to understanding the internet generation is about; you have to sign up and be a part of the mob that you seek to understand. You can't analyse from an omniscient point of view.

Infuriatingly this method of understanding new media—being a part of it rather than above it—makes it hard for many to see where the Net Generation is heading to. The irony here is that while I'm criticising the how much Facebook's value is generated by hype, I'm also responsible for generating that hype. The journey to understanding media lies on a twisted and dark road, and we can only see as far as our headlights. Still, it's one heck of a journey, so sit yourself back, take the wheel, and enjoy the ride.

TEXT John Lim