Social Networking 2.0

Once upon a time, $FB was the 5th fastest growing social network, and yet it came out on top. Two things made it possible: User Generated Content (UGC), and Real Identities.

The way I look at a social network is that there is a two-sided market. You can do distribution, you can do monetization. With YouTube or Spotify, it is both acquiring an audience and it is monetizing those users. In Web2 those two things are bundled. I think that there is a really interesting opportunity right now to unbundle those two things.

Facebook and Twitter represented Social Networking 1.0, where you were expected to be your whole self online; that expectation, though, was like a legacy company using computers to run their analog business model: it may have been more efficient, but it wasn’t at all an optimal use of technology. The entire magic of software is that it is malleable... See more