After watching the F8 Developers Conference keynote address by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (total play time an hour and forty minutes) several times, and then slowly reviewing while taking notes, I've come to a conclusion:
We all need to pay attention to what's going on with all the Facebook changes. Regardless as to whether or not you personally or professionally use Facebook, or even if you don't use it at all, there's a whole bunch going on here of which you need to take note.
Future Facebook Domination: The Music Industry
Remember the days before Napster and iTunes, when a friend would show you his music album or cd collection and that was how you "shared" music, hand to hand? Somewhere along the way, with the help of Napster and Apple, the entire music industry was redefined, reinvented, rethought......irreparably changed. One friend bought the cd, shared it through computers and mp3 players like Apple's iPod, and the music industry and recording artists stood on the sidelines and thought: how do we make money now?
Facebook is planning to rethink and reinvent the music industry, obviously to their financial advantage. Collaborating with a dozen partner businesses, the most prominent being Spotify, Facebook plans to share music between friends automatically through Timeline (see Friday September 23 post of this blog). According to Mark Zuckerberg, the key is to help you discover so many songs that you end up buying even more content than you ever would otherwise. Cha-ching$$$ ! Want to buy that song your friend is listening to for 79 cents without leaving Facebook rather than logging on to iTunes to buy it for 99 cents? Cha-ching$$$ !
Facebook users on Spotify listen to more music and a greater variety of music, and according to Spotify CFO and Co-Founder Daniel Ek, Spotify has 400 million playlists to back up that statement. Question: where did Spotify get access to 400 million playlists? Hint: Facebook has 800 million users and for the first time they reached a milestone of having a half billion individual users log on in a single day.
Didn't realize your personal playlist of songs was so valuable, did you? Or maybe you didn't know it was being shared? Do you also not realize that, after you personally log off Facebook, Facebook continues to track every website you visit and every page that you view?
Future Facebook Domination: Movies, TV, Books, News
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings sits on the Facebook Board of Directors. He was initially uncomfortable with sharing Netflix user info with Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team. But after he realized the value of doing so for Netflix users and the company he heads, Facebook is now pioneering movies through social media with Netflix and a dozen other companies. According to Hastings, Netflix is in 44 out of 45 countries on Facebook. Hasting explained that there seems to be an outdated privacy law about video disc companies, but luckily the US Congress has a bill today in Congress to update that old privacy law and will allow Netflix to "turn on" in the US through Facebook.
Hmmm. Even the US Congress is willing to help Mr. Zuckerberg and friends.
So What?
I'm running out of time for today, but I wonder how valuable a company would be if they were the major player worldwide in music, movie entertainment, TV, news media and book offerings and distribution. And how influential. One thread of 145 comments that I read about the Facebook changes contained three comments from German individuals. Essentially, they said we witnessed about 80 years ago what can happen when the control of media and information is willingly relinquished to a single source.
Luckily, today we still have a Congress that sits under a Constitution and Bill of Rights that require our government to protect freedom of speech. We do, don't we? Not even a trillion dollar company can change that. Can it?
Thanks for sharing 198 seconds of your day,
Smitty
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