Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson was interviewed by John Battelle as part of the Conversational Marketing Summit. Some bits from Fred truly stood out, mostly about the state of social media. Here they are, grouped by topic (so they’re not necessarily in the order they appear in the interview) [1]
On the disruption caused by the Internet:
The Internet is… one of these… once every hundred years kinds of things that it goes all the way through pretty much all industries. Certainly, the Internet is going to do this to every industry that is end-to-end digital. The media industry I think was the first because it is probably the most end-to-end digital, but there are many more industries.
[How Fred would fix the NY Times] I would get rid of the paper. I would shut down the paper… I would stop covering stuff that is covered better elsewhere. I’d stop covering business, The [Wall Street] Journal does it better. I would stop covering sports, The [Washington] Post does it better, and I would focus on what they do uniquely well, their opinion, their national political news, their world political news.
GM’s going bankrupt and there’s all this innovation going on in the technology space at the same time. And you just think about that for a second. What we’re witnessing is sort of the – or The [New York] Times is another good example, we’re witnessing sort of the dwindling of the industrial era and the rise of the information era.
On platforms on the Internet:
Tim O’Reilly has this thing about the internet-operating system. And if you look at what the internet-operating system is, it’s the internet and a bunch of functions that come with it. Your search function is Google and your purchase function is Amazon and your list-something-for-sale function is craigslist or eBay and you could go on and on and on. And I think Twitter has the opportunity to be the function, which is tell the world what you’re thinking, right? If you have something that you just want to say now, you do that by posting it to Twitter and then the internet takes it from there. So, it’s a short message input function.
I think of, sort of the four big channels in social media as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and blog comments.
… in order to continue to be a piece of the internet-operating system, you need to be an independent company because if you sell delicious or you sell Flickr or you sell whatever else it may be, it gets sucked into something that’s not part of the internet-operating system.
Twitter and Facebook are growing at like 40 percent month over month, the number of incoming visits. And those visits are coming from what I called passed links – links that are passed from me to you. And of course, with the re-tweet function in Twitter in particular, that can get amplified very, very quickly. And so I think that, you know, email is another form of passed link. It’s the original form of passed link, but emails can get passed around virally but most emails don’t have that kind of amplification factor that social media does.
AOL, Yahoo and MySpace are all very good examples of it, that don’t have deep technology innovation in their DNA. And, you know, it seems to me that that is an absolute requirement if you want to be a platform and I think, that if you don’t want to be a platform, then I don’t know what you should be aspiring to be. I mean, I don’t know that there is anything else that you would want to be [2].
On the social graph:
… the problem that Facebook has and they know it, is that there are a lot of people out there who are not friends, who are really powerful social recommenders and you’re not just going to have them in your social graph in the original instantiation of the way Facebook was setup… I think, blogging to me is the proper model and I think that the people who started Twitter launched Twitter with the blogging model, which is I can follow you and you don’t have to read me. And we don’t have to be friends, but you can be influential…
[1] In fact, I highly recommend watching the full video/reading the transcript.
[2] Fred also says that he doesn’t think “there is going to be one magic bullet that solves the problem in terms of monetizing social media” unlike the banner ads model of the early days and the PPC model of the search-dominated era.
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