Been busy reading...

I haven't posted for a few days because I have been trying to finish “The Facebook Effect” by David Kirkpatrick.

As well as telling the story about Facebook so far - it is only six years old, after all - The Facebook Effect is about several other things.  

It is about what Facebook is.  To me, and most other individuals, it is about easily keeping in touch with family and friends.  To David Zucherberg and the team at Facebook however, it is about creating the best platform possible for me to keep in touch with my family and friends.  To those who have already, and the many more who will in the years to come, design applications to run on Facebook (the platform), it can be almost anything they want it to be.

It is also about how Facebook works.  At its core, it is about people; particularly about people sharing - so it is also about data; and it is about how people share - so it is further about transparency; and so naturally, it is also about privacy - and about how people won’t share things with their friends transparently unless there is also privacy.  

It is also about the Facebook effect.  The stand out example is the story of Oscar Morales.  He lives in Colombia, where FARC, a guerilla army, has been terrorising Colombia for years.  One night, alone in his bedroom, he used Facebook to tell his friends that he had had enough of FARC.  Just over a month later, 10,000,000 people in Colombia and another 2,000,000 in cities around the world marched against FARC.  The ‘National March against FARC’ was initiated and coordinated from Oscar Morales’ bedroom.

The common thread is how Facebook works dynamically.  My family may not change very much but my friends do and what I share changes daily.  The other thread is of course, scale; there are over 500,000,000 users and an extraordinarily high percentage (over 50% apparently) visit the site everyday...

You might ask what this has to do with the Market Network; how can the Facebook Effect be applied to improve insurance?  My thinking at the moment is extremely crude but it is simply that both the Facebook Effect and insurance are both about data, sharing - 'the premiums of the many paying the losses of the few' and scale. 

So, I am not just reading but thinking too.  More to follow.