Facebook Factor: Sharing and Oversharing

Attention: This is not about whether you should buy Facebook stock (you’re too late), or whether Mark Zuckerberg should have rung the stock exchange bell in a hoodie (who really cares).

It is about why a company that doesn’t make anything, that relies on its users to create content, is now worth more McDonald’s or Disney. In short, it’s about the future of social media.

In a brilliant post, Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed (and a co-founder of HuffPost) explains the surge in social, in a way that made me think: This is about far more than making friends and posting photos. What we call social—pals telling pals about cool stuff—is transforming the media business, turning all of you into a marketing force for our products. (By the way, thanks.)

“When the world shifted from portals to search, Google was the big winner,” Peretti writes. “Now the shift is from search to social, with Facebook as the big winner. The mega-trend is Portals → Search → Social. That’s the big defining shift on the web and we are at the very beginning of the transition to social.

“Portals are about impressions, search is about queries, and social is about sharing…Facebook has a huge opportunity to build a defining company that directly impacts people’s lives.”

But there are other online giants. What about Google? “Google’s core business is search. Search is private and nobody sees what you search for. As a result people search for things like nude celebrities, weight loss tips, and tax forms—all things that are too embarrassing or boring to share with your friends.”

The oversharing thing has been bothering me. Apps like The Washington Post’s Social Reader have proven pretty popular, but there is a creepiness factor. As Peretti puts it, “This creates lots of problems, including all my friends seeing that I clicked a story about Snooki being pregnant.

“Of course it is hard to not click that story—I mean Snooki is f’ing prego?!! Who is the baby daddy??! And it is totally fine that you want to click that story, you just don’t want to put the full force of your identity behind it and recommend it to everyone you know: ‘I, Jonah Peretti, recommend that you, my dear friend, read this story about Snooki being pregnant’— it just feels off.”

For the record, I’ve never clicked on any Snooki story. But who wants to leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs?

One fuddy-duddy reservation I have is that if you mainly click on your friends’ suggestions, you are limiting yourself to the sensibility and world view of like-minded people. But what I love about social is that it takes promotion out of the hands of slick corporate types and democratizes the process. So if you like what you see here, tell all your buddies.