Edge Principles: Love > Indifference
So, in a convergence of the Facebook is evil and the blogosphere is lame threads, we have
[email protected] telling us "no one" cares what Facebook does with their data.
Hmmm. That's interesting - because it's so willfully obtuse.
Here are some people we can lump into the nobody category: Doc, Dave Winer, Jason Calacanis, I seem to recall Fred chiming in as well, little old me, tons of others.
The point: when you sell out, you stop looking at - or even caring about - real innovation.
Of course people care about Facebook's value proposition.
How do we know? Well, there's an existence proof the size of Jupiter. Microsoft didn't succeed online at all, despite Facebook's market power^5 billion. Cooler players offered radically better value props - and consumers defected.
As a matter of fact, getting people
to care is a massively powerful source of advantage in the edgeconomy. And so Facebook's approach - "ah, they won't care" - is totally obsolete. Getting people
not to care is easy - anyone can do it; there's no advantage in it.
It's shades of General Motors or Wal-Mart or other massconomy players. They should be doing exactly the opposite. But that's another story.
More important is the converse - what
[email protected] is totally blind and oblivious to.
When people like Doc, Dave, Jason (etc)
also care, the probbility that even better services are actively nurtured goes up a billionfold. That's what the old TechCrunch would have talked about. But, as it is for Facebook, money is the root of all evil.