Facebook - Too Big To Fail

You know, at the end of 2009, we heard a phrase that was introduced into our vocabulary that most of us had never heard before, and the phrase was "too big to fail." Remember? Banks and other financial institutions were deemed to be too big to fail, meaning that if they were to fail, the argument went, that the entire financial infrastructure of the country and maybe of the world would be in jeopardy. Well, I was thinking about that phrase the other day when I heard that Facebook had just reached 500 million active users. 500 million. And I thought Does that make Facebook too big to fail? You know, those of us who've been in the tech world for any length of time have pretty well developed an expectation that whenever something comes along and is successful, it will eventually be replaced by the next big thing. You know, in the world of, uh, social interaction networks. This goes way back to CompuServe back in the early '80s. AOL was a huge platform through which people connected to one another and this new thing called the internet. MySpace became a huge phenomenon in the early aughts as people discovered ways to connect with one another and to share information and, uh, music and all kinds of ways to communicate with one another. But I think that this new platform, this new phase that we've entered where Facebook has become this important resource for many of those 500 million people puts us in a different league. You know, we, we often hear, well, wonder what's going to come next, what's going to replace Facebook. I have a sneaky suspicion that that's a question that people are going to be asking for a long time, and that's not going to have an answer. Why? Look, take a look at, first of all, the fastest growing category of people on Facebook people like me, grandparents, people over 55. Now, my peers are not likely to be looking for the next big thing. Why are they going to Facebook, many of them? Because their children, and maybe even more importantly, their grandchildren, are on Facebook. The information that, that they want to be able to have access to is on Facebook. Now, what we're developing is a legacy of connections and of communication that even if it were technically transportable, even if all of your Facebook information was easily exportable from Facebook and then importable into the next platform, the fact is the barriers to doing so not just technical, but psychological barriers to doing so, uh, get to become prohibitive. I think we have gotten to a point where the next big thing isn't gonna matter very much to people who are only concerned about being able to stay connected with their children and their grandchildren. Oh, and to play Farmville and, you know, all the other things that happen on Facebook. So what does it mean if Facebook is too big to fail? I don't think it means that Facebook is going to have to be bailed out by the government. I think what it does mean is that the responsibility that Facebook has to those users is going to be realized as more and more serious. Look, if you lose information on some service that has a little bit of video that you've made, if your blog were to go away, that, you know, that's not trivial, it's not insignificant, but it's not like all of this history of social relationships that are being built in Facebook. So Facebook, too big to fail, I think. And I'm not going to listen to too many of these what's going to replace Facebook stories at this point because I don't think anything's going to replace Facebook, not for— I don't know, not for a very, very long time. And that means that the responsibility that Facebook has is tremendous. To be able to live into this reality of being too big to fail to many, many, many hundreds of millions of people. So those are my thoughts, and I'll see you out there, probably on Facebook.