The Steve Rubel Stream

I see the point that FB is - now! - the operating system for our social lives. But I am sure it will not be for ever. And between playing farmville and organizing meetings with friends on one hand - and consuming news and other stuff on the other, there will be a difference for a long time.

The splinternet thing is much more convincing for me.

I'm in complete agreement. Like you, I've been trying to get my clients and network on board with this idea for a while. I've been calling it the 'fractalization of the web,' which, while it makes perfect sense to me, does not seem to be catching on as a phrase. Oh well, I'd rather have a good idea than a good name for it ;-)

In any case, I think the central point is that people trust people and people act upon trust. With that in mind, it naturally follows that people would be more inclined to follow the content referrals of people within their network than those of robots. The title of my first article on this point last summer was "In the Future, the Web Will Be Mapped By Humans, Not Robots ( The massive amount of content connections within networks like Facebook are on the verge of becoming their own web.

More recently, I wrote a second article on The Future of Search (http://www.newfangled.com/search_is_a_work_in_progress), which continued the thought but pushed a bit further into some of the trends that I see advancing the socialization of search - the fractalization idea, the greater efficiency of human referrals, trust, and web-enabled equalization.

It will be really interesting to see how this all takes shape, but I'm confident that human trust will be a significant driving force of wherever we end up.

-Chris

Even with FB connect, what I use a lot in client projects, this does not mean FB is more than the hub - it IS the most influencial hub, but not really driving traffic e.g.

Nobody should ignore FB. Everyone should evaluate how to utilize the momentum of FB. But keep in mind that this doesn't mean consolidation but broadening the arenas.

Facebook understands that by making engagement easier more people will be likely to do so, why can't traditional media....

Here are my concerns though about Facebook becoming this centralized thing...will people be resistant to populating all of their content/ social media spaces to this one place? I ask this because of privacy concerns and issues.

For the first time this weekend, I caught CNBC's Inside the Mind of Google http://www.cnbc.com/id/33980309. And there was a point that Eric Schmidt made--the day people stop trusting Google, is the day that Google fails. (In essence, people stop using Google services/products because they don't trust Google with their information.) I'm thinking that Facebook isn't fully there with the trust of its user base yet, given all the hullabaloo around privacy issues and updated privacy settings on the site.

When Facebook can earn mass trust and people start to feed it more instead of still feeding everything else, plus Facebook, I'll agree with you 100%.

People will ask there Facebook friends where to eat, they will poll rather than Google. They want the interaction.

In other words, if Facebook truly was this powerhouse ready to compete with Google, you'd think its traffic would be equally valuable. But it's not even close. That means its yield--the ability to convert traffic to cash--is really low. In fact, most of the value in FB such as fan pages and product referrals are not even directly monetized.