David Kirkpatrick, the author of The Facebook Effect, stopped by my office today and spoke to a bunch of us about his experience writing about Facebook. Besides being a fantastic speaker, he really made me think a lot about the importance of adding functionality to your site even if you don’t think it’s important to your users.
Kirkpatrick explained that the actual functionality of Facebook is still very primitive, and that there was a time when Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, didn’t even want to include photo sharing as a part of the site. Can you imagine what photo sharing would be like if Facebook hadn’t decided to include it as a part of their service? To me, and I’m sure to many of its other users, it is one of the most important aspects of the service. This made me think a lot about how important it is to anticipate the needs of your customers when creating your site and providing them with content. Often times it is impossible to know what your customers are going to latch on to, which is why it is also important to take risks on their behalf.
Thanks to a small risk by Facebook, there are now more than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month on Facebook.
What risks should you be taking for your customers? What functionality should you add to your site?
Some other cool things David Kirkpatrick taught me:
1. He believes Facebook as a company is not transparent, but that they will need to be in the future. He also mentioned the fundamental difference between institutional transparency and personal transparency. People want institutions/companies to be transparent, but they aren’t always willing to be transparent with their own information. Facebook preaches personal transparency for its users, but doesn’t want to be transparent as a company.
2. He believes that Facebook will soon be subject to government regulation. While Facebook is already subject to certain government regulations in many countries, there are some countries that still do not regulate the site. Kirkpatrick mentioned that Facebook will become one of the many global entities that doesn’t have one governing body in charge of regulating their site.
3. He believes that Mark Zuckerberg thinks about China every day. This didn’t come as any surprise to me as Zuckerberg is constantly talking about growing Facebook’s user base. What Kirkpatrick didn’t know was how exactly Facebook was going to make its way into China.
I’m reading the book right now and I suggest that you do too!
What functionality will Facebook add to their site next?
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