My quick take on the Skype/Facebook partnership is that it doesn’t sound like much, but this will be huge, especially for families. I can guarantee this will push @jenxmusic’s parents over the edge to finally join Facebook so they can talk to their grand kids. (Disclosure Microsoft is a client, we’ve done work with Skype on the acquisition and Facebook is a Microsoft partner.)
I’m not going to go into great detail on this because I want to focus on some remarks that Mark stumbled over in his kickoff to the announcement.
People are sharing twice as much via social networks than they were last year and they will share twice as much next year. This isn’t that there is twice as much being shared in general but that each user (new or old) shares twice as much as they did last year. So on top of new user adoption you have the fact that those new users will share twice as much next year as will the old users.
THAT’S HUGE!!!
Why are people sharing so much? One reason is comfort with the tools. A second is the positive feedback we receive from sharing (think hamster and feeder) but the third reason is the proliferation of sharing tools.
As Mark was talking about these facts I couldn’t help but notice that the live stream itself was covered in ways to share. The page has 4 different like/share buttons, a link to copy and paste and even a tiny tweet button. Plus any comment you made on the live feed wall could also be posted to your own wall.
Here were my favorite quotes from The Zuck:
Social networking is at its inflection point.
The metric for the last 5 or 7 years has really been about user growth.
The driving narrative for the next 5 years won’t be about wiring up the world.
Companies that are really best in class are thinking about how can we offer our product and do it in a social way, with social infrastructure. One thing that is really important is how do you measure these things. The next five years won’t really be about measuring active users.
One of the most interesting metrics is the rate of sharing, which is growing at an exponential rate, twice as much as it was a year ago, and one year from now will be twice as much as it is today.
The one thing I will point out is that I think Mark is underestimating this growth curve. “Sharing” will take on a whole new meaning as every aspect of our lives and all of the information we create will be infinitely share-able with friends, family, co-workers, our doctors or any other person, group, entity or machine.
What is share-able and the ways in which we can share them have only begun to manifest themselves.
The [Like] is the equivalent of the DOSS hot-keys (which still work) and we have yet to enter the world of real social computing.
Thanks to TechCrunch for the quotes and the exponential growth slide.
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