Kirkpatrick had one significant advantage over the makers of The Social Network: participation by Mark Zuckerburg. Kirkpatrick loves Facebook and reveres Zuckerburg, so his book isn’t exactly a hard-hitting expose. Techcrunch accompanies their review of the book with this image:

I don’t think Kirkpatrick is wrong; Facebook is an undeniable phenomenon and Zuck is a remarkable guy. I just don’t love FB as unreservedly as Kirkpatrick does.

Facebook as revolutionary tool

Kirkpatrick sees Facebook the way Clay Shirky and other tech utopians see Twitter: as a tool for overthrowing dictators. FB was conceived as a way to organize meeting your friends at the mall, but Kirkpatrick observes that it can be used to organize them to do more ambitious things too. Events in Egypt would seem to bear him out. However, Kirkpatrick later mentioned that FB is every bit as useful to law enforcement and other government entities. Detectives go to FB as their first investigative stop, and Mubarak’s secret police used FB to monitor dissidents and spread misinformation for years before the protest movement took off. So it’s a little simplistic to see FB purely as a way to stick it to the man.

Kirkpatrick sees FB first and foremost as a broadcast medium. A normal person doesn’t have, or want, the kind of genuinely public profile that suits Twitter or blogs. Most people are only writing online for an audience of people they know personally. FB is the first broadcast medium that automatically distributes content across your social network — you just post stuff and an algorithm handles the rest. FB’s algorithm has become opaque lately and it’s hard to figure out why a given item appears or doesn’t in my newsfeed, but the essential point remains valid.

Facebook games

FB is the biggest game platform in the world, by an enormous margin. Zuck and company were apparently quite surprised by the success of games in FB. It didn’t surprise their investors, though. I went to a talk by Reid Hoffman a few years ago and asked him if FB would ever charge money. No way, he said; the big money is going to come from in-game purchasing of virtual goods. While it seems insane to me that anyone would buy a nonexistent cow in Farmville, buy them they do. Facebook’s cut of Zynga’s revenues currently comes to about a million dollars a day, and there’s no reason that number can’t grow dramatically.

Facebook ads

Zuck doesn’t much like advertising. According to Kirkpatrick, the movie does get that aspect right; Zuck resisted introducing ads into FB early on, and even now, the ads are much less obtrusive than you might expect for a commercial web entity. FB is the most targetable advertising platform of all time. Zuck apparently hopes to have FB ads be so well-targeted that they’ll actually be a welcome presence in your life. That’s sweet.

I don’t know that FB ads will ever be useful, but I do expect their targeting to continue to get more precise. Google’s inferential targeting methods are comparatively blunt; they don’t even get your gender right a quarter of the time. FB knows your gender, age, relationship status, profession and more, and they know all that information about your friends too. This enables the kind of laserbeam demographic specificity that marketers have long yearned for.

What is Mark Zuckerburg trying to accomplish?

Kirkpatrick understandably wasn’t too impressed with The Social Network. He thought the “Mark Zuckerburg” character in the movie was a more accurate portrayal of Bill Gates. If anything, Kirkpatrick thinks Zuck is even more focused and ambitious than Gates, and while Zuck isn’t as profound a technical thinker, he does understand psychology a lot better. (I was unsurprised to learn that Zuck’s mom is a shrink.)

Zuck wanted to change the lives of college students, and there’s no doubt he’s accomplished that. Zuck now wants to change everyone’s life. Kirkpatrick doesn’t say why, or to what end. He means to be admiring, but he ends up making Zuck sound like a Bond villain. I think Zuck has done a great job making it easier to keep touch with your acquaintances and other weak ties. But FB isn’t the medium I’d use for any serious connection with people close to me. Pushing FB’s users to make their posts more public and more accessible to advertisers doesn’t exactly foster genuine emotional expression. FB is a staggeringly effective way for me to share witty banter and mass announcements, but I wouldn’t want to carry on any serious intimacy there.

I have no doubt that Zuck will get his wish to see FB become ubiquitous. The US has the most FB users because it has the most internet users overall. But there are other countries where FB users represent a much higher percentage of internet users. These are the countries where the internet is first and foremost a cell phone experience rather than a computer experience, and FB is one of the big drivers of smartphone sales. In Asia, you can get an FB-branded phone, and there’s been discussion of introducing something similar in the US.

Whatever is motivating Zuck, it isn’t (primarily) money. He’s certainly had ample opportunity to cash out. Three years ago Microsoft offered Zuck fifteen billion dollars for FB. Now, of course, Zuck will end up being worth a lot more than that, so maybe he is motivated by money after all, but still, imagine turning down that kind of cash before you’re twenty-five.

In the village, there is no privacy

Kirkpatrick cites the startling fact that as of a year or two ago, a majority of humans are living in cities for the first time in history. He sees FB as a way to return to village life. My early months with FB were a surreal and thrilling reunion with people I knew from every age and stage of my life, many of whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in years. It’s nice to have mobility and freedom to come and go, but it means that my friends and family are scattered around the world irretrievably, and that can be hard on the emotions. FB brings us back together like nothing else I’ve ever experienced.

So that’s the good. The not-so-good is Zuck’s outspoken commitment to forcing transparency on our internet interactions. Since secrets are increasingly difficult to keep in the internet age, Zuck no longer sees a point in trying. This is the exact point where I depart from him. Zuck has the chain of causation backwards — FB is one of the major factors making it harder to keep secrets on the web, but I don’t see where that gives Zuck permission to unilaterally change people’s privacy settings to make it harder still.

Of course, no one has to join FB. But surely there must be some happy medium between having everything I type into the internet be public and not typing anything at all. I can reasonably expect my bank account to be private, and my e-mail. Is that naive? Maybe I’d like a forum to be able to talk about what’s going on in my life in a way that people close to me can access easily and that others can’t. I thought FB would be that forum, but I was wrong.

Strategic self-commodification

Jacqueline Maley, writing in The Age, observes:

[N]othing that occurs in people’s lives, as represented in social media, is disappointing or mediocre or even just neutral. Indeed, life, as reported on websites like Facebook and Twitter, is never merely good or mildly pleasing. It’s fabulous. It’s wonderful. It’s amaaaaazing.

The more people I get connected to and the more public my posts are, the less substantive my activity on FB becomes. At this point I mostly only use it for innocuous jokes and trivia. I can’t imagine using FB to write anything vulnerable, or self-doubting, or angry, or really anything too personal. That severely limits the usefulness of the site for me. All my interactions on the site are starting to feel like advertising, of myself, my associations, my ideas. I don’t like that feeling. It’s not that I have any problem at all promoting myself online. I’m perfectly happy to practice strategic self-commodification on LinkedIn and Twitter and even on this blog. But being surrounded by my fellow villagers, slick self-promotion feels weird. It certainly is annoying when my friends use FB to market at me, and I’ve had to unfriend a few of the pushiest ones.

Resistance is futile

Whatever my misgivings are about my privacy, I still use FB every day. It’s an effortless way to share links and news, and much as I love Flickr, if I want a photo to get seen by people I know, I’ll put it on FB. (They get fifty million photo uploads a day right now.) I like seeing what my friends are doing and thinking, and I enjoy bantering with them. And for my loose ties and casual acquaintances, it’s easier for me to write FB messages than to try to keep track of email addresses, much less snail mail.

I know several novice internet users for whom FB is their entire online experience. FB likes that idea and they plan to run with it. Right now FB search is pretty lame, but Kirkpatrick expects them to dominate search someday. They’re planning some sort of tremendous e-mail service that would gather every interaction you’ve ever had with someone into one big thread. (Yes, but will it have BCC? That’s all I’d ask.) FB evolves constantly and fast, and so its growth is unpredictable. All I can say with certainty is that the growth isn’t going to slow anytime soon.

Back in the nineties there was a thing called groupware. Kirkpatrick astutely observes that groupware was the business precursor to FB, and that it had tremendous potential to change the nature of business. In studies, Lotus Notes and the like were shown to meaningfully improve productivity. But groupware never really took off on a grand scale. Kirkpatrick thinks it’s because middle management felt threatened by the hierarchy-flattening properties of social tools. Now social media has arrived in the enterprise, whether middle management wants it there or not. Plenty of big companies block FB on their intranets, but that doesn’t keep people from using it on their phones. Smarter organizations are trying to bring an FB-like functionality into their workflow by rolling out tools like Chatter and Yammer.

FB isn’t likely to dominate enterprise settings, but I do expect it to become omnipresent elsewhere on the web. For all my skepticism about FB and privacy, I’m relieved when I arrive at a site and discover I can log in using my FB profile, rather than having to create yet another login/password pair. I’m even happier when I can use my Twitter handle for that purpose.

Kirkpatrick doubts that any company poses much of a threat to FB. Google might dominate search right now, but social search is going to be more important in the coming years than algorithmic search, and Google hasn’t shown much adeptness at getting people to tell them about their social connections. While the Goog might be jealous of FB’s ubiquity and possible future search dominance, the two companies need each other. FB is going to sell a lot of Android phones in the next few years. Kirkpatrick describes a lot of “3D chess” going on between Google and FB, and Microsoft and Apple too. But he doesn’t see anyone seriously rivaling FB in the social world. A bigger challenge will come from governments, who may decide that they want control over their citizens’ online identities, and that it’s time to crack down. Until then, I, for one, welcome our new social network overlords.

The panel:

• Moderator: Jeff Leeds, Editor in Chief, Music, Buzzmedia
• Angel Laws, Founder and Editor in Chief, ConcreteLoop.com
• Jessica Suarez, Writer, Stereogum
• Tamar Anitai, Senior Editor, buzzworthy.mtv.com
• Rob Bonstein, Senior Director of Digital Marketing, Epic Records
• Sarah Weiss, Head of Markting, Bowery Presents

The panel is taking place in the Buzz Media office, a grungy downtown space. The walls are hung with art made from stuff found on the ground. Being here makes me feel like an old, old man. It doesn’t help that I have a job interview later today, so I’m wearing my most conservative suit. Meanwhile, Rob Bonstein may be a Senior Director, but he looks like he’s about twelve.

Nevertheless, here I am. The setup in here is distinctly less slick than yesterday’s presentation at JWT, which is a colossal, gleaming midtown ad firm. This is a grungier downtown space with a flaky PA and flakier internet.

As far as this panel is concerned, social media is coextensive with Twitter. The word “Facebook” isn’t uttered once in the first hour. When someone finally does mention it, it’s in the context of driving traffic to Twitter. The panel considers Facebook to be like MySpace for adults, except without the music-playing functionality.

Transparency vs mystique

Should bands have separate personal and professional Twitter presences? The panel can’t agree. On the one hand, transparency is the fundamental social media value. Who doesn’t love behind-the-curtain access to their music heroes? Mystique seems like an outdated concept in the social media age. On the other hand, when rock stars reveal the mundane reality of their lives, they run the risk of puncturing the whole fantasy we’re trying to project onto them. There’s a reason you don’t see Lady Gaga posting Twitpics of her wearing sweatpants.

The panel is unanimous that a musician’s public persona needs to be “on brand.” Otherwise you get too much cognitive dissonance, like M.I.A. and her infamous truffle fries. It makes sense to expect musicians to have a consistent persona, but it asks a lot to ask someone to equate their personhood with their brand. The idea frankly creeps me out. Kanye West succeeds at admirably at inhabiting his persona at all times, but he’s either a hyperdisciplined virtuoso performance artist or a complete lunatic, or both.

Meanwhile, sometimes artists do their most meaningful work when they go “off-brand.” Miles Davis was way outside the bebop identity he helped invent when he put on his sequined lace-up bellbottoms and made Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way, but that was the peak of his commercial (and arguably cultural) impact.

Regardless of whether musicians are supposed to be playing characters or just being themselves, social media best practices are the same as they are for any person or band. Self-promotion is follower repellent. Show the fans love! When they write to you, write them back. Wish them good luck on their math test or whatever. The panel cites Ciara as a good example of the personal and interactive approach. More surprisingly, the panel also mentions Ice-T, who loves to publicly argue with his critics. Just retweeting praise is as boring as any other kind of promotion; Ice-T’s stream is interesting because he’s real and unpredictable.

Planet Kanye

Angel Laws says that when she met Kanye, he told her, “I don’t need Twitter, I’m Kanye West!” That was then.

Kanye’s Twitter is a must-follow. One look at the grammar and spelling and you know that his feed isn’t written by a publicist. It’s constantly “on-brand,” but that brand is so eccentric and self-mocking and over the top that it couldn’t possibly be calculated. Maybe the specifics of Kanye’s life aren’t very relatable to the average hip-hop fan, like his difficulty in selecting the right marble table for his conference room. But Kanye’s Twitter voice is so idiosyncratic and heartfelt that I find it totally endearing.

The bottom line

Twitter is very amusing, but does it actually drive album and ticket sales? It certainly helps get you press attention, and attention generally. The journalists on the panel say if you want to get on their radar, at-replies work better than press releases. As for sales? No one really knows why people buy one album and not another, much less this panel. No one knows specifically whether a given social media effort will make anyone do anything. But attention can’t hurt, and a close connection to the fans can only help.

Guilty pleasures

This doesn’t have anything to do with social media per se, but it’s worth mentioning. Tamar Anitai from MTV kept invoking the concept of the “guilty pleasure.” This is funny to me. America is so puritan, even the hipsters of the pop music world. I love the idea that if I enjoy Justin Bieber, I’m being immoral, like I’m harming someone. Tamar Anitai breaks up the band gossip on her Twitter by talking about TV shows, and she “confesses” to “hating herself” for watching Dancing With The Stars and such. So I’m supposed to believe that that MTV’s marketing team and their Twitter followers are so highbrow and cultured normally, and that they’re being deliciously transgressive when they reveal the dirty secret that they watch crappy reality TV? Didn’t MTV give us Jersey Shore? So many contradictions.

Odds and ends

Facebook isn’t the only big social platform to be conspicuously absent from the presentation YouTube also doesn’t get mentioned until near the very end. It seems surprising, since YouTube is by far the biggest music search engine and discovery tool on the web. I guess no one’s talking about it because it isn’t much of a revenue stream for the music industry. Though how could the labels and music press not be capitalizing on it somehow? I don’t understand the music business. But apparently, neither does the music business.

Erykah Badu live-tweeted giving birth! No real comment there, just, wow.

At this point, artist web sites only exist to direct Google searchers to the appropriate social media profile or item for sale.

The panel doesn’t see much value in requiring people to enter email addresses to hear tracks or do other kinds of interaction. All kids have multiple email addresses now, one that they actually use and the rest to put into web sites to collect marketing messages and spam. Organic social media interactions, word of mouth and TV are the only way to actually get a kid’s attention.

The panel sees a bright future in the use of Foursquare check-ins as a celebrity marketing tool. Ugh.

Social media is all well and good, but no one is buying albums. If you want to make money from recordings, your best hope is to get something placed in a TV ad.

On a brighter note, the panel loves Soundcloud. So do I. No better music-sharing service exists on the web. The panel especially loves the within-song commenting. Show Soundcloud lots of love, internet, we want them to succeed.