broadstuff

One of the greats , an inspiration to every awkward kid wanting to study science rather than the more popular stuff.

John Battelle on the "Next Big Thing":

Today I was in a meeting with a number of consultants to a very large technology company. Their job: market research, essentially. They called to ask me my thoughts on the media and technology world, in particular as it might play out in the next five or so years. They were responsible for helping the Fortune 50 company navigate an increasingly complicated world.

.............

I've been a student of technology cycles for a couple of decades, and often times what's directly in front of you is, in fact, the next big thing.

So when I got this question: "What's the next big thing after social?" I didn't lose a beat in answering: "Location."

Now, many, many folks before me have been saying this for years. I'm in no way first. But I'm an early convert, in particular, as it relates to what I call the conversation economy. And the reason is simple: Once someone can declare where they are, they add extraordinary context to both search and social, and to their expectations of what a search or a social connection might yield. For an example, see The Gap Scenario.

In short, location is a key factor in the future of search, social, commerce, and media, among a lot of other things. And that's why the news today that Google's Marissa Mayer, long the VP of Search Products at Google, is taking over responsibilities for the location business, strikes me as a Big Deal.

That Google is re-allocating Marissa Mayer here is a sign of a hyper market, to be sure. It is a time for image, as with location there is still very little substance - generation 1 failed, generation 2 are resorting to ever gamier tricks to keep user interest. But to be very publicly Seen To Be Doing Something.....well, just look at the headlines generated today to start!

The holy grail of location is localised, personalised, highly valuable advertising (compared to the appallingly low rates that most social advertising gets)

Well, as readers of this blog will know, we think Location based service opportunities are overhyped (that has never stopped fools from being parted with their money, of course) for the following reasons:

1. Fundamentally, its a feature, not a stand-alone business. Location will be integrated into other things you do (cf Twitter). This means, apart from a few Location companies being bought at fairly low cost, we are not going to see large exits. The real money will be made by people like Google rolling it out into their large distribution channel.

2. Dreams of high advertising values are a chimera - the mass audience volumes aren't there, and the personalisation/understanding of intent is lacking unless there is a deep understanding of the rest of the customer dataset. This will be like Second Life for a few months as every Big Brand feels it has to be seen, and then it will fall away as they realise that you don't want to buy X every time you go near place Y. And the privacy safeguards required - certainly by EU law - will limit a lot of the data rapine that will be required hor high personalisation.

3. Most of the "location based" services that add a lot of value to the user do not lend themselves to advertising anyway, and also they tend to require other services to interact with them (see point 1 above) which dilutes/complicates/adds cost to the Ad value chain. Can you imagine if every time you wanted to read a map on your iPhone you got an Ad pre-roll? Or that you had to syndicate your personal data across 4 service providers every time you needed to know the nearest X joint, and they had to bump up the Ad rates to you to cover the cost of paying 4 separate people and managing the process?

In oher words a small number of small companies will sell at a nice little price, the big guys will build it in as a "stickiness must have" and it will be just another feature in the service mix. Location will be like email - a feature you must offer, but not something you can intrude on too much before people shy away from it. As to the Googleshuffle, whisper it who dares, but Google Search is in need of a major revamp that probably only a fresh head can bring, so that is probably another contributing factor.

As to what the Next Big Thing really is - well, thats obvious, you just look at where the money is* - it's Web TV 2.0. But more on that later......

*Bear in mind that Social Media is still a zero billion dollar industry - there is as yet no evidence that Facebook et al can turn a profit. In theory they can, but whether it is anything like what is required to justify their valuation requires you to believe some far fetched hypotheses, frankly. The only real money made to date has been by large companies paying hype-level prices for social media companies at the top of it's hype curve. Which, of course, explains the Rush for Location

Anil Dash, talking about the overstated Death of Blogging on O'Reilly Radar:

If I spend an hour writing a couple hundred words about a really interesting challenge that we face as an industry, as a society, as a culture, sometimes I'll get the person that I'm writing about to respond. I could write something about Twitter and get somebody that works at Twitter to respond, or write something about government and get someone who makes policy to respond. That's still a thrill. It also kicks off really meaningful conversations. I think that's all you can hope for.

That was the promise we had when we all first discovered the web. Someday it would bring us all together and we'd be able to have these conversations. It's not perfect. It's not ideal. But in some small way here's somebody like me -- with no portfolio, I didn't go to an Ivy League school, I didn't have any fancy social connections when I started my blog -- and it has opened the door to me having a conversation as a peer, as somebody taken seriously, in realms that I would have never otherwise had access to. That's the greatest privilege in the world.

Thatb is my experience too - In Social Media, Twitter or a Facebook update is a far weaker commitment to a narrative than a blog post. I think Gladwell was onto something when he talked about weak tells in social media, and I think blogging is one of the stronger social mediums. I would suspect that a blog post has far more influence than a similar number of twitterwords say. (If I were Gladwell I'd be wryly amused that the best Revolution that Twitter has so far enabled was chaning the Gap's logo back. I mean, talk about making a difference.....

This also resonates quite well with my other post today about eBooks being a Snacking Medium.

One of the things I have felt, from the inception of online books, is that reading 300+ pages of a novel is too damn hard on them - in my view they are for snack sized media - a good academic paper, a short story or so. Every medium has its "optimal" mode and this - in my view - is the eBook's. Thus it is with some interest I read about Kindle Singles:

Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch "Kindle Singles"--Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book. Kindle Singles will have their own section in the Kindle Store and be priced much less than a typical book. Today's announcement is a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Amazon in making such works available to readers around the world.

"Priced less than an average book" is interesting - in my view full length e-Books should be priced less than an average book, I think the industry is still music c 2000.

Of course, 100+ years ago writers such as Dickens were serialised in much smaller chunks than their full tome novels. For those interested in applying for this newest of New Mediums, you can register interest over here.

Kindle Singles also puts me in mind of the digital version of "dating by cruising the bookstore" - I'm sure one can build (ahem) Yet Another Social Network for this - a sort of literary lovegety

TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy on Spotify's twt that they are now the No 2 music site in Europe and "closing in on the world title":

A lot of our startup heros have an arrogant swagger: Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs. (Some would even venture to say Michael Arrington…) Arrogance may even be a good thing. A grounded, humble company would never think it could beat huge, well-funded competitors.

But here’s the thing: When you’re going to be this arrogant for this long, you have to, at some point, show something to back it up. Just read the comments on every Spotify post we’ve done over time to see how weary even the fans are getting of the endless promises of a US launch and the blase downplaying that the labels may have an issue with, oh, say, giving away music for free. And, yet, we get this Tweet today announcing the company’s impending world domination.

Let’s ignore for a moment how few people actually pay for the service in Europe. Spotify, how about a single US deal before you spike the football?

For TechCrunch, surrounded by the creme of Silicon Valley hypesters, to call Spotify "arrogant" is - well, if Americans didn't understand irony before, this is it! Clearly Spotify's US PRs haven't handed over the month's protection money

Actually, I'm glad articles like this are still being written on AOLTC - partly so I can snark 'em, but more because my main worry with AOLTC is that, in order to secure Big Ad $, it will go all safe.

There has been a lot of hate vibe directed at Malcolm Gladwell by the 'Net bloggerati, for daring to suggest that Social Media activism is more about people sucking up to causes that will yield them online social capital than due to any actual strong feelings, and thus one should not really expect them to die on the barricades, or even put up any money, for said cause. The article was in the New Yorker last week, I read it and thought - yeah, typical Gladwell, state the well known (among the people who study an area) in a new way for mass appeal and get it 80/20 right and I moved on - but everyone seems to have got very huffy this week (clearly being seen to disagree with Malcolm Gladwell is becoming yet another of the causes he critiques ). The core of his argument is as follows:

The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

This is in many ways a wonderful thing. There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

He highlights the difference between what in game theory are called "strong tells" and "weak tells" thusly:

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires. The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece. The next biggest Darfur charity on Facebook has 22,073 members, who have donated an average of thirty-five cents. Help Save Darfur has 2,797 members, who have given, on average, fifteen cents. A spokesperson for the Save Darfur Coalition told Newsweek, “We wouldn’t necessarily gauge someone’s value to the advocacy movement based on what they’ve given. This is a powerful mechanism to engage this critical population. They inform their community, attend events, volunteer. It’s not something you can measure by looking at a ledger.” In other words, Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.

Cue hundreds of huffy Social Media bloggers, including the Huffington Post. More interestingly perhaps, I did a Twitter parse of comments on the subject over the last 3 days or so, and it was on the whole far more positive about the Gladwell article than the Harrumphosphere would have you think - as with the Facebook Movie, the Wisdom of the Commoners differs from their A-List blogging betters.

My take on all of this, since you asked?

(i) Gladwell is mostly right - social networks are by and large comprised of weak links, and those weak links are not what you need to create concerted action. Game theory looks at weak vs strong tells to gauge the likelihood of a player's commitment, and I am sure you would not be surprised to know that painting your avatar green in support of Iran is not a strong indication that you will be prepared to die on the streets of Tehran. Clicktivism is clearly more about garnering social capital than actually doing anything (Tom Lehrer had a go at "slacktivism" in his satirical "Folk Song Army" in the 60's - see above YouTube video of Tom and his 88 string folk guitar)

(ii) But, he has underplayed the impact of Social Networks in informing large numbers of people and allowing them to see that others think the same way (or not) and slowly, drip by drip, change opinions of large numbers over time.

Update on this thought after exchange in the Comments:

- I think what social media is good at is to threaten inaction, eg product boycotts - which is why consumer companies are very responsive, whereas say regime change has different drivers.

- Maybe social media is thus better at Gandhi style passive protest - passivism rather than activism?

As always its in the comments to the blog posts that you get the real gems - in a fairly standard harrumphblog, one commentator (Jeff Rivers) notes:

The simple (sad?) reality right now is that all this connectivity and access has resulted in exponentially more mundane conversation about the minutia of our lives and a fractional shift in social activism or discussion of anything bigger than ourselves. The signal to noise ratio is ridiculously high in social media right now and I don't see that trend changing. Maybe it will when we all get used to playing in these new media.

Gladwell could've saved himself some grief - and you a lot of time crafting this eloquent response - if he'd just subtitled his original article:
"Why the revolution will almost certainly not be tweeted"
or
"If the revolution is tweeted it'll probably get lost in a sea of tweets about Justin Beiber".

By the way, the level of argument in above said harrumphblog is at this leve:

Malcolm Gladwell’s take on social media is like a nun’s likely review of the Kama Sutra — self-righteous and misguided by virtue of voluntary self-exclusion from the subject. But while the nun’s stance reflects adherence to a moral code, Gladwell’s merely discloses a stubborn opinion based on little more than a bystander’s observations.

With enemies like that, Gladwell doesn't need friends

Or, to update Tom Lehrer:

"If you feel dissatisfaction,
Tweet your frustrations away.
Some people may prefer action,
But give me a hashtag any old day"

And the rousing Chorus......

So join in the Clicktivism Army,
Twitter is the weapon we bring
To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice.
Ready! Aim! Tweet!

With one's avatar turned green or whatever, natch.......... (marshmallow white says Paul Kedrosky)

On Thursday the London Future City series of lectures is looking at the impact of Technology in re-innovating and reshaping London. The aim of the debate is interesting:

London has historically been the home of great innovations, and now the potential is even greater than ever with the development of digital technology. But can we recognise the real innovations hidden around us or are we distracted and dazzled by the short-term allure of shiny new technologies? Does London have the ambition and vision to use innovation to transform the city or will we stick with the status quo?

That bit about the ephemera vs the real innovations caught my eye (and that fellow S. African and Big Pototo Norman Lewis is speaking), as it is something we often puzzle over at Broadsight, to wit:

- Which are the real, lasting innovations and how do you see them early

- Why do so many people seem to be lured by the ephemera, even when they are fairly obviously snake oil.

So, as a way of getting my non-talk in first, as it were, here are some takes:


How do you tell lasting Inovation early on?


Over the last 5 years at Broadsight we have been doing quite a lot of this sort of work, either for startups, VCs, or large organisations wishing to understand or launch or defend in a market space, and we have over that time developed an approach which seems to be quite useful.

Firstly, our experience leads us to believe that any Innovative technology will only have impact if it can drive some form of arbitrage on what exists today. In other words you have to look at its economic impact.

Secondly, this economic impact is dynamic - ie it is not enough to say "X gives Y benefit" as the other players in the space will then react to it, and thus any modelling has to be dynamic not a simple linear progression

Thirdly, even if there is a potential economic arbitrage, it does not follow that there will be uptake unless there are social vectors that will drive it (Porn being a fairly frequent early social vector for new media formats for example)

Fourthly, even if there is a social vector, there are often legal or regulatory barriers that can come into play (for example, the "digitisation" of the legal servies industry is far harder than in other professional services as it has a lot of arcane regulations around licencing, secure documents etc)

For a bigger example, take Location Based Services. Our research into Generation One services, done about 3 years ago, predicted that they would largely fail as there was just not a sufficient economic arbitrage from the technology at the time, nor a large enough social vector (aka "jumping the chasm" in their case) for them to prosper on. They by and large failed. What is thus interesting is that the 2nd generation have used Gaming mechanisms to create a different social vector, and by and large are using prize-fuelled datamining to create a bigger economic arbitrage. So far so good, but our analysis now predicts that they will start to fall foul of regulations around data protection, in Europe at any rate.

Thus, we believe that as private companies, Location Based services are still a risky investment. However, for any Future City project they will clearly be every powerful, so we believe the optimal outcome - for a city like London - is for the city's public services to make some of their data available for innovatve servie providers to build services, and ensure the economic climate is such that datamining is not necessary for these services to succeed as an economic model

Why are most people lured by Snake Oil?

We have done no empirical research on this, but in a way watching the evolution of social media - and the behaviors on social media - allows me to make some hypotheses.

Firstly, just as the devil has all the good songs, most Snake Oil is based around overpromising an impossible dream. The Gartner hype curve describes this in graphical form, and against this the rational, fact based analysis looks boring, hard and stuffy.

Secondly, you cannot fool all the people all the time, but you can fool a significant number for a period of time, and this time period - typically characterised by words such as "New X" during and "Bubble" after the event - is the period in which a fever pitch can be whipped up, excited new entrant fools parted from their dumb money, and those promoting it can make out like Ponzi bandits (Such as appears to be happening in Silicon valley startup valuations right now). "You just don't get it" is the cry to every criticism.

Thirdly and thusly, the Press/PR machine is just not interesed in The Truth during The New X event. The speculative money is going into fuelling the story and no-one likes a grumpy nay-sayer, nor does it shift copy (unless they can do it really well, like Andrew Keen). As an aside, I could name a number of "Tech Journalists" from quality UK newspapers who interviewed us on the fate of Location Based Services in 2007/8, who didn't like our message of caution, and thus didn't even bother to mention our cautionary tale in their breathless praises of Dopplr et al at the time (but I won't, so long as the requisite marked 20 pound notes find their way to Broadstuff Towers )

My point here is that London needs to be careful - there has been, and is, quite a lot of government funding being thrown at "technology innovation" projects right now, and here is a strong risk that they are hijacked by popular snake oil merchants rather than boring, useful and economically viable projects.

So, to the various committees making the innovation spending decisions we would recommend:

(i) Firstly, using some sort of analysis like we do above - what services would create economic arbitarge for Londoners and what do you have to do to drive organic adoption.

(ii) Secondly, if it looks or smells like something ascending a hype curve, run a mile. This is territory for VC investors, not government co-investment.

(iii) Thirdly, make sure your advisory bodies are composed of the grumpies as well as those leading the New X charge from the barricades. If you look round those bodies and can't see the dumb money, its you

Here endeth the lecture Now go to the real lecture.....

Speakers:
Iain Gray, chief executive, Technology Strategy Board
Adam Hart-Davis, writer and broadcaster
Dr Hermann Hauser, co-founder, Amadeus Capital Partners
Dr Norman Lewis, chief innovation officer and managing partner, Open-Knowledge UK
Oliver Morton, Energy and Environment Editor, The Economist and author of Eating the Sun
Chair: David Rowan, editor, Wired UK

Update - to the above point, I see that 4IP has been shuttered..... suffered from buying into a market awash with snake oil and high prices, perversely now is a better time to invest as the game is better understood and the customer base is larger.

Reading about Jason Calacanis' new Tech Media pre-startup, Launch in the Grauniad I saw this:

"When I started with Peter Rojas blogging was a new format that was faster but still had quality and insight," he said. "Now it's even faster but it has lost that quality and insight. You have a bunch of people writing short stuff with no research and knowledge base. They have no credibility."

What the market needs, he says, is depth, knowledge and thoroughness. Launch will take the form of an email publication which might seem against the grain, but is something Calacanis is convinced suits a more exclusive, more engaged audience.

"If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it's the deepest most intimate relationship you can have online. Much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog," he says.

"I want high-quality insider information, a celebration of entrepreneurship and taking risk. I want it serious and insightful rather than salacious and link-baity."

Wry smile from Broadstuff Towers here - like every other blog writer, I guess we know the truth - worthy, in depth pieces are fine but if you really want to generate traffic, then short, topical ephemera are what really do it. And yes, people tell us that its quality, not quantity that drives influence, but as far as today's metrics, and thus perceived valuations work, quantity has a quality all of its own.

Add to that the economics. I have a rule of thumb that says roughly every time you double 500 words, you triple the time taken to write it.

So big, qualitative pieces cost more to produce and are less valuable in the blog market. A real recipe for success then......

My view, from about a year into writing this, is that blog media works best as a sketch media - watercolour vs oils etc - at least with the current reading tools, I can see that e-Readers and Tablets may change this over time.

Discuss

So I open up Techmeme and see that quite a few management changes at the top have been announced by various Web 2.0 (or thereabouts ) darlings - the interesting thing is I have never seen so many on the Techmeme leader board at the same time:

Skype is recruiting itself a Cisco CEO (it doesn't get more Corporate than that) probably in preparation to sell itself (again) or IPO - TechCrunch :

Skype’s new CEO is going to be Tony Bates, a senior VP at Cisco, who runs its Enterprise and Service Provider groups, which together account for about $30 billion worth of Cisco’s business. Bates will be moving to Skype HQ in Luxembourg and will begin his duties at the end of October. CFO Adrian Dillion will be acting CEO in the interim. Since it’s spin-off from eBay, Skype has a completely new executive team, including a new CFO, general counsel, chief marketing officer, and head of engineering. Now Bates will top off the new team.

Bates is a heavy hitter, especially in the enterprise world, where the bulk of Skype’s future revenues may come from. He was responsible for about 80 percent of Cisco’s business and even more of its profits. He had 12,000 employees reporting to him. Someone like Bates doesn’t leave that kind of a job unless he thinks Skype is going to become a major company with serious upside.

Skype's future is in the Enterprise space - what are they smoking? P2P is anathema to secure corporate nets. Also VoiP isn't that hard, well not for the big Telcos and large SI's that play in that space and own all the customers. Skype's only real strategic advantage is high consumer/SOHO penetration.

Anyway, next up is Twitter, which has put current COO Dick Costolo into the CEO position (Costolo flogged Feedburner to Google, you may recall) - TechCrunch again:

As COO, Costolo has been integral in Twitter’s attempt to make money. Efforts to do just that seem to ramp up everyday. And Costolo has been able to help Twitter bring aboard an impressive roster of talent. In Williams’ post, he mentions: Ali Rowghani, Adam Bain, Mike Abbott, Katie Stanton and Kevin Thau. All but Thau came aboard after Costolo.

Williams [Twitter co Founder] notes that Costolo has been a CEO three times before in his career, so he’s confident the transition will be a smooth one. Of course, this is also the second CEO change for Twitter as Williams himself took over from creator Jack Dorsey almost exactly two years ago.

Twitter tells us that Williams’ title will now just officially be “co-founder” and that he’ll be focusing on product strategy and vision. It’s worth noting that with the New Twitter roll-out, the company made it very clear that the product was mainly the brainchild of Williams. While that’s undoubtedly true, they were also undoubtedly setting up the company for this transition.

T'was Costolo wot puts Ads into Feeedburner and thus p*ssed off many of its users, but he did flog the company to Google before they caught on. They closed it eventually, of course. Let's see what he can do for Twitter.

Last up, Farmville manufacturer (grower?) Zynga recruits a Yahoodie - All things D:

For Zynga–the fast-growing San Francisco-based maker of such online hits as Farmville and Mafia Wars that got its start on Facebook–mobile is becoming a critical new platform for growth, as consumers use a variety of increasingly functional mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers.

It’s also the fastest growing area internationally, where mobile phones are more widespread and where Zynga is seeking its next spurt of growth.

Sources said Zynga had been pursuing Ko for months. Before heading the Audience unit at Yahoo (YHOO), Ko ran its mobile operations, which included heading product development, making distribution deals and more.

Asia, Mobile, Online Social gaming for Real Money.....be a tough battle with the Japanese and Koreans who really invented this sort of game genre.

So, a "rush for seriousness" all of a sudden? It has, of course, probably got a lot to do with the Need For Money now that Risk Capital is running away from the space. It is also worth reflecting on this as London plays host to it's 6th or so Future of Webs Apps (FOWA) conference and ring the changes in Web 2.0 since it began. I was looking at the photos of the speakers all looking very traditional webcool (see the video above - kudos Jas Dhaliwal for link), but reflected that soon it will be no more of the Founders in T-Shirts that characterised the Future of Webs Apps Past, and we will see more Men in Suits in Future of Web Apps Future. 2002 Revisited.........

The Facebook Movie is out this weekend, to critical acclaim. It apparently paints Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg as an ambitious, single-minded, semi autistic, unscrupulous and basically thoroughly unpleasant little sh*t (ie all those traditional things a Silicon Valley CEO should be ). In fact it is apparently so OTT that some even start to root for him! (I should at this point say I have yet to see the movie and am going from the perception of the vast amount of press and friend's responses in said digital new meedja). Needless to say, his friends* are rushing to his defence - Messrs Lessig and Cohler for example:

Lessig:

But as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed. As I watched the film, and considered what it missed, it struck me that there was more than a hint of self-congratulatory contempt in the motives behind how this story was told. Imagine a jester from King George III’s court, charged in 1790 with writing a comedy about the new American Republic. That comedy would show the new Republic through the eyes of the old. It would dress up the story with familiar figures—an aristocracy, or a wannabe aristocracy, with grand estates, but none remotely as grand as in England. The message would be, “Fear not, there’s no reason to go. The new world is silly at best, deeply degenerate, at worst.”

Not every account of a new world suffers like this. Alexis de Tocqueville showed the old world there was more here than there. But Sorkin is no Tocqueville. Indeed, he simply hasn’t a clue to the real secret sauce in the story he is trying to tell. And the ramifications of this misunderstanding go well beyond the multiplex.

Personally I thought reaching for George III and de Tocqueville is one straw of desperation short of wrapping Mr Zuckerberg in the US Flag and Constitution! Then there is Mr Cohler quoted in Venturebeat:

Cohler came down on the fiction side, describing the movie as a “Hollywood fairy tale.”

Beyond the premise, Cohler said there are “a billion little details” that were off. For example, Zuckerberg and his cohorts in the film talk about how the site has to be cool, but Cohler said that’s getting things backwards. The team always wanted the site to be useful, not cool.

The problem they both - and Facebook - have is this thing of Perception vs Reality. I recall one of my Business School professors telling me, 20 years ago, that in marketing perception IS reality. And the one thing the new digital media does is amplify the message from any company, for good or ill. And the thing about this movie is that, whether true or not, it tells a story not that different from the de facto perception of Facebook in the market. You just have to Google "Facebook" and you see a story of fallings out, lawsuits, worries about data scraping and mining etc etc. "By their deeds shall ye know them" is a very old - and apt - aphorism, and Social Media is a very powerful way of getting those deeds out into the Body Public.

Against the broad backdrop of technology history, Facebook sounds quite a bit like Microsoft in its heyday, or Oracle, and Saint Steve is no picnic to work for either. But the problem they have, the perception among many industry watchers, is that there is more dirty laundry to come, and their creation (as one Venturebeat source puts it) is "tied up with original sin". Which is of course what will magnify the amplification effect of social media's fascination with Facebook even more.

Not, of course, that all this has any impact on Facebook's growth yet - 500 million users is pretty impressive - and to get there so shortly probably requires most of those qualities Mr Zuckerberg is accused of having. Of course, 10 years from now when he is part of The Establishment and has his own Charitable Foundation, all those qualities listed will have undergone semantic shift and he will be re-cast as an ambitious, determined, driven executive "not known for taking prisoners" and will join the pantheon of Great Visionary Executives. Perception will have changed into a new reality.

Update - many more have leapt to Facebook's defence, it has been quite interesting to see the various angles used given that, as I note above, the direct "it's not true" approach won't wash:

- The New York Times says its a Generation Thing, oldies think its a morality tale and the youth think its cool, that omelettes need a few eggs broken etc. Sounded more to me that he was talking more about a good old ethical tale, is does the End Justifies the Means vs the Orginal Sin Will Bring You Down. Which, of course, is a classic setting in any great tragedy - this is MacGeek.

- Then there is the Daily Beast arguing that its crap beause it only treats women as doting groupies, sexed-up Asians, vengeful sluts, or dumpy, feminist killjoys. I am so disappointed that they have not also taken the opportunity to excoriate the film for ignoring so many other needful minorities. Shame on The Beast

- The Huffington Post argues (via Jeff Jarvis and Antonio Vargas ) that its simple - Hollywood doesn't understand Facebook, and it's really just Olde Media being snarky about New Media owing to not understanding it.

- In a related spin, SAI tries to link it to Cyberbullying of Brave New Media

- TechCrunch argues that the film disappoined vs expectations on its openingweekend, only bringing in $23m vs a budgeted $25m despite the hype. Oh, and Batman - The Dark Knight brought in $158m on it's opening weekend so this movie is clearly a flop.

Unfortunately for les critiques, these sorts of noises are unlikely to do much more than drive people to see the movie. Isn't social media wonderful as a marketing tool

Incidentally, like many others I love the Taiwanese Video Precis up top.....

*That is, the friends who were not vigorously contributing to the movie, or suing him......