Molecules

Although I think Facebook has a real future if it concentrates on building out it’s me centric hub, the future is less clear despite buying $35M worth of time to figure it out according to Todd Chaffee from IVP:

From a business perspective, it is a media property that is growing very quickly. These newer media properties that have emerged are massive compared to older media properties.

[Some people say] Twitter is whatever you want it to be. But at the end of the day you have this open, one-to-many network, and to enable that is this platform. But who cares? The reality is that it is a network/platform which has millions of users and thousands of applications.

He goes on to explain how Twitter does three things; firstly it facilitates social connections. Yep this is true, however people that follow Robert Scoble are acting in a hub and spoke relationship not a peer based relationship. Secondly it taps the wisdom of millions of people. This is a bit more dubious because it is hard to see a lot of wisdom flying around inside 140 characters, it is however a great popular voting mechanism. And thirdly it is for social expression for the masses. That is of course people are listening, and mostly they are listening to the few who have the ability to build a community of interest.

Twitter may indeed be open, real time, scalable and persistent but the proof is going to be in whether enough people care to make a difference. The numbers we don’t have is where those communities of tweeters are combining and what velocity those binds are held.

This is just like chemistry where there are very strong atoms (big time tweeters) who are bound with a group of followers to create a compound social interaction. The big question is whether these bonds are worth anything, that it can it be monetized.