The Idea Blog

Here’s a great article in the Financial Times (actually, on FT.com), sent to me by my friend Peter.

Such challenges: advertisers want to get at Facebook users, but Facebook users threaten to stop using Facebook if advertising becomes an important part of its presence. Facebook users also don’t want to – and won’t – pay to use it. Facebook is clearly a phenomenon, but even with 250+ million users, how long can it or will it be relevant?

I think of Facebook like chocolate: it’s good, sometimes really good, but it has little, if any, nutritional value. I’ve “connected” with a number of people with whom I went to high school, but I don’t really know what to do with the connections. I haven’t spoken with most of them in nearly 40 years, and I doubt either they or I will do much speaking now. We probably don’t really care what each other is reading or watching or whose kid has a ball game or whose dog is nursing puppies. Do we?

My crystal ball tells me that Facebook and LinkedIn and the like will ultimately end up as truly valuable when one of them – or a new one of them altogether – ends up being an individual’s (and a company’s or brand’s) identity on the web. Here’s Mark Burris from Isle of Palms, SC. There’s his photo, his connections. Here’s who he is, what he’s done, what he’s read and is reading now … and so on. We’ll be drawn to the people who tell us what we need to know about themselves, and we’ll not be attracted personally or professionally to those who tell us little or nothing.

Increasingly, our identities will be available on the web. Not our being or our essence or any of that stuff, but our identities, the avatars of our being. Maybe … or something like that …

Anyway, read the article. It’s very good.