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Facebook Changes Everything

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This article is more than 10 years old.

Facebook is expected to reach 1 billion users this summer and the company is assumed to be getting ready for a $100B IPO.  While it’s hard to imagine that, 10 years ago, the social network didn’t exist, its growth (from 1 million to 1 billion users in 8 years) is not only a sign of what “has been” but more importantly of what “will be” in the tech industry over the next 10 years.

This past year, I’ve had the honor to present and participate in some of the greatest tech events of our era such as Web 2.0 and the MIT Analytics Conference.  Every event does a great job at featuring “disruptive technology” (a term coined by the great Clay Christensen) .

To be more specific, I think what we’ve witnessed over the last 10 years is “disintermediation.”  The music industry went from selling physical albums, to selling tracks, to selling subscriptions. The book industry went from a world where publishers selected content they felt was “fit to print,” to a sea of self-published authors who can reach audiences without ever physically printing their manuscript and make millions (any author published in the ‘old era’ as I’ve been, knows that this new method sounds better!).

If we’ve learned anything from the works of Chris Anderson (the Long Tail) and Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus), industries will be further turned upside down because of the power and scale that’s given to social systems like Facebook. We are progressing to a model where everything can and should be easily customized.

Think about it: if you can walk into Starbucks and customize any drink, why couldn’t you assemble a set of tracks from disparate artists into your playlist without paying extra? Wait, you can! Many services provide this functionality already: a notable one is Spotify, which acquired 1M new subscribers following its partnership with Facebook (needless to say; there is a market).

What's next?

Let’s start with books.  If you can disassemble and customize music selections, why couldn’t you do the same of books? What if you could automatically assemble the chapters from a variety of books, which only cover the topics you’re interested in?

The Amazon Kindle, in its simple and brilliant design, offers the possibility of viewing ‘popular marks and highlights’ inside a book. The functionality also lets you know what other readers have marked or highlighted, This technique which, by the way, should change the way we read books (you can get a great sense of any book by scanning through the highlights and the TOC before you actually read the book), is the key to naturally pushing the publishing industry’s rigid business model closer to disintermediation. Technology might need to be pervasive at first in order to move the business: the reason why public libraries have limited available copies of digital versions of books is not a technology reason, but a business one.

How long do you think all of this will last? Pretty soon, Amazon and/or Facebook will create a ‘read books with your friends’ application and the publishing industry might have to fold under the overwhelming crowd’s demand (if you don’t believe this is near, check out the digital book numbers).

Speaking of reading, What Should We Do About our Schools?

Another glaring example is Education. The majority of our system is optimized for a solution that barely works for the majority.  What if we could personalize education the same way we do our coffee, music and eventually our books?

Fortunately, some entrepreneurs are already working on the issue. Take a look at projects such as the Khan Academy, or the School of One. The Skill Map and Playlists methodologies they have developed reflect the evolution of our understanding in this space.  We all know that everybody’s learning style is different.  Every day now, we are getting closer to easily modifying the teaching model to accommodate theses differences.

As we provide customized education that helps cater to individual learning styles, we will also be able to focus on teaching the skills needed for the future versus training for the skills of the past using an aging approach. I hope these new advances will help me settle the ongoing argument I have with my wife on aging skills (I don’t believe we should teach cursive; she does). Finally, if you didn’t believe in the value of a student self-identity, watch Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk “schools kill creativity.”

Keen observers and successful entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel and Dave McClure are funding initiatives that challenge the industry. Check out the Thiel Fellowship for instance, a program offered to under 20-year-olds, whom Peter pays $100,000 to spend two years 'building the technology companies of tomorrow' rather than attending college.

What Does This Mean for You?

If you are a C-level executive, how does all this relate to you? By 2025, 75% of the global workforce will be Gen Y or Digital Natives (people who were born into the digital age). Do you think they will tolerate the rigid systems we have grown up with?

They will want us to move from systems that work poorly for all, to systems that work great for each...and that’s what Facebook and the future have in common.