When I started working with social networks back in 2004, nobody really believed in them. Not even Google. Nevertheless, they have become mainstream. Almost all people under 25 are using them and older people are quickly signing up. Among all these networks, Facebook is clearly the leader and the fourth largest world site, which explains why Clara Shih’s new book is titled “The Facebook Era”.


Shih has mainly written about the business side of this revolution, which has a lot to do with online marketing and CRM, but we can also extract some general characteristics of this new era:

1. The networks are at the same time places where people hang around (and connect) and platforms where developers create new stuff (apps). There are emotions and coding taking place. The people who will make the most money out of this revolution are the ones that know the best how to combine emotions with software.

2. There is somehow a competition for the number of connections and, so far, not so much for the quality of them. This will probably change in the future, as people realize that having more than 500 friends does not make much sense. New tools to distinguish between closed and not so closed friends will also be necessarily. At the same time, the role of influencers is being hyped because of the importance of the number of friends (Facebook) and followers (Twitter).

3. As a result, people who use networks are changing their expectations when connecting with other users. You share thoughts, photos and videos because you expect your friends’ reactions and you want them ASAP. In the old non digital times, connections were more sporadic and probably not so multimedia. As a result of this permanent connection, people are “needing” things like Facebook to be part of their work. There will be a big demand of social networks in companies and organizations.

4. The world will become more standardized. It’s very hard to make different interfaces for each nation, besides changing the language, and Facebook is being so far very successful in all countries where it’s spreading. It’s not yet number 1 in Germany and Brazil but it is growing much faster than its competitors. Asia will be harder, but I am sure they will also become number one in Japan, Korea and China. It’s just a matter of time. As a result of this standardization, we will see things like people sharing their political thoughts more easily. This is so far a very American custom, but as it is part of Facebook, more and more people will find it very normal.

5. As the Web becomes more and more social and less and less anonymous, we will see how things like spam and scams start to lower down. This will allow the Internet to be more widely used for things like electronic commerce and all types of services, including Government ones. Online voting will also be very easy. We already tried it with the Startup 2.0 competition and the results were very positive. I expect the UN to develop on Facebook and allow “international elections” in not more than 5 years. By then, Facebook will probably have more than 2 billion users, becoming clearly a very strong “democratization power”.

The video is an interview I made to Clara Shih last week at fbFund in Palo Alto.