I ended my post on September 30th with:
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?
A trillion dollar company that is the major player worldwide in music, movie entertainment, TV, news media, and book offerings and distribution? In the video below, the last person interviewed, Co-Founder/CEO of Friend.ly Ed Baker, thinks Facebook "has the best shot at being a trillion dollar market cap company in the next few years".
Clara Shih, Founder of Hearsay Labs who is recorded on the video below prior to Mr. Baker, thinks that the new Timeline Facebook format (not yet available to individuals - yes, there's a ton more changes coming) will be helpful for small businesses. Small businesses and their owners will "really be able to connect at a much deeper level with their customers" and enjoy "a new level of authenticity and customer loyalty that will result".
Ed Baker also says that "users always have mixed feelings about change....in the long run people are going to love this a lot more than what they did before". Facebook users have noticed that the News Feed of information is no longer chronological, and they aren't seeing the information that they used to see. This is because the artificial intelligence running Facebook, called Graph Rank, is making decisions about content and filtering the information that Facebook users see. According to Bret Taylor, Facebook's CTO, Graph Rank looks for patterns and its main job is to figure out what's most interesting to the individual user.
Why would the individuals from Germany be concerned about the influence of a trillion dollar company deeply engaged in the music, film and TV media, print, news, and journalism industries, with control through artificial intelligence over what 800 million people see? I don't get it, do you?
Thanks for sharing 117 seconds of your day,
Smitty
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