Its widely hypothesized that Facebook will announce tomorrow at its F8 developer conference the availability of a firehouse of user data. According to Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist of Core Search at Microsoft, it won’t matter. Facebook data is crap, except for those few people that actually care about YOU. This is a pretty credible comment considering the source and the fact that Microsoft has, due to a strategic relationship, had a firehose of the Facebook data for some time.
Some analysts currently value Facebook at a $50 billion dollar market cap and, according to Hitwise, Facebook reaches more monthly users that Google.com, so Jan’s statement is pretty bold. But not really. Jan is not questioning the value of Facebook, but commenting on the broader public value of Facebook’s data stream.
At Chirp last week, Dick Costolo offered his interpretation of twitter’s unique value as the “public interest graph.” Who people follow, what people tweet about, what they retweet and what they link to when combined create a real time interest graph that uniquely deviates from one’s social graph. But isn’t this just semantic positioning for Twitter to differentiate itself as it rolls out its monetization platform?
Perhaps a bit, but underlying the semantics exists a foundation of reality. What’s the graph deviation, why is the interest branch more valuable, isn’t Facebook already doing that and if not can’t they easily replicate?
All questions I’ll try to tackle in subsequent posts, but I’ll leave you with this thought. Its not the size of the graph that is most important, but the mix of size and connection value of the network fabric. Interests represent emotional or intellectual connections that motivate individuals and group of individuals. At its core this is more meaningful than loose social acquaintances and casual game players. Tapping into this meaning unleashes, arguably new, user and advertiser value.
