CASE STUDY OF FACEBOOK BY NISAN GABBAY

Not only have I been fantasizing about the Veyron (see previous post), but I've also been digging into the nature of several Social Networks: most notably Facebook and LinkedIn. In this post I'm going to pop off about Facebook...

While I think the success of Facebook is a given, and many folks have their reasons for its success. The best of such discussions, I think, might be Nisan Gabbay's post about Facebook. Do check it out here.

But what Gabbay's analysis reveals is what we already know: colleges are communities and Facebook unified those communities by bringing online what was formerly dispersed offline. What I am interested in is what the users of LinkedIn and Facebook will be doing next. What will they be doing within their networks as well as within the context of related/partner services and/or completely separate services?

I'm not particularly interested in Facebook or Linked in as businesses. I'm more interested in what their user base thinks it needs, what the user base thinks it wants...both in the context of the social network experience and outside it. What I notice most about Gabbay's other analysis of consumer success is how little time is spent on what actually creates the success of LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and so on... The consumers experience is the definitive parameter.

Some of what is discussed is necessary but not sufficient. There is only one requirement of a consumer business that is necessary and sufficient for success: consumer adoption. Many businesses well designed for a "niche" that easily make use of "viral" marketing, require friends or acquaintances for use, and sell well in "consumer PR" fail--in fact they fail miserably and often.

The magic of Facebook as Gabbay reveals in detail is that they provide an experience for their target users that "feels" right to them. Entrepreneurs can argue themselves blue in the face about what will make a "hit" but what invention consistently proves (in Film, in Music, in Quantum Physics, etc...) is that the next success is the one the expert overlooked.