>On Feb 10, 2011, at 4:30 PM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> > Isn't "social media" redundant?
>
>What's different about this stuff is the immediacy and endless capacity to
>link, retweet, click, echo, etc. etc. It's not at all clear that it's good
>for social bonds. It can also be a means of alienation and displacement.
>
>Doug
For organizing groups, though: it's indispensable. I don't know what you're reading around the topic for, but I've found the book _The Facebook Effect_ fascinating. The indispensable character of facebook is exactly what Zuckerberg has in mind when he describes it as a "utility" and as a "platform."
Wrote a bit about the book on Ted's blog.
Zuckerberg wants facebook to be so ubiquitous it's like a telephone or a source of heat/cooling: a utility. Something indispensable to daily life, so much so that his goal is for it to become background, unremarkable. But he also has a klew about the political character of facebook becoming a utility, which is one reason he hired Sheryl Sandberg away from Google.
Apparently, Zuckerberg drove her nuts, vetting her for about 50 hours during the interviews, including going to her home after interview dinners and hanging out until she had to kick him out at midnight. One thing Zuck was especially interested in was her background working in government. Why? According to Zuckerberg, quoted by Kirkpatrick:
"We spend a lot of time talking about her experience in government
In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we're really setting policies."
The platform business is a recent twist to the concept of FB as a utility: EffBee becomes a platform through which you get to all manner of *other* web services - the ubiquitous EffBee logins everywhere is an example of the sense of EffBee as a platform - a springboard from which you engage in all kinds of online activities, even if they remove you from EffBee to participate elsewhere.
shag
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