Facebook revamp and the tyranny of the high valuation

An argument in Venturebeat that the latest Facebook revamp is aimed more at Silicon Valley than its users (In essence Facebook is restructuring its UI to look and feel more like current SV darlings such as Twitter and Friendfeed ):

There’s a large school of thought in the Facebook application developer community that believes the majority of Facebook users actually like to do what most MySpace users also do — express themselves. And by that I mean decorate their user profiles with glittery slideshows, quizzes, lists of favorite bands, and plenty of other features that both MySpace and the old Facebook profile offered, that the new Facebook design de-emphasizes. Developer Stanislav Shalunov wrote perhaps the best thought piece on this reality, a month ago. As he puts, it there are two types of users:

Giggly 75% like pokes, quizzes, pic forwarding, fun games, selling friends, glitter on profiles. They express themselves through style and interact with friends using the mouse

Serious 25% like bookmark import, utility apps, discussions. They express themselves with text and pictures containing them and interact with friends using the keyboard. Because you’re reading this, and made it this far, you’re serious. (Giggly users tend to not read much at all, certainly not blobs of text, and quite certainly not my blog)

That’s the thing. Here in Silicon Valley, we’re minimalist snobs about decor. You don’t see many pink flamingoes in the front yards of Palo Alto Eichlers or San Francisco Victorians. I’ve personally deleted every tacky-looking application from my profile page after installing it, just so I could keep my profile looking “clean.”

This article appears at the same time as another one by Andrew Chen, arguing in essence that Web 2.0 startups who aim their service at early adopters are following the wrong path:

The general idea is to go through the typical flow:

1. Get a bunch of early adopters (aka Techcrunch readers) excited about your product
2. They blog, twitter, and promote your product to their friends
3. Eventually this process will reach the mainstream and you'll get the wider market

The issue, as Andrew notes, is that this approach while giving instant plaudits in SV and tech blogs like TechCrunch, may lock your user base firmly to the "TechCrunch 50,000" early adopter readership and almost guarantee it won't have wider appeal:

The major point I will make here is that Techcrunch and related blogs reach an audience of early adopters, but these may not be the earlier adopters that you want. After all, what's the point of launching a music startup on Techcrunch, for example, if your startup is primarily for the teen mass market?....

....if your market is moms, there are cool moms that are likely to try out the new technology. And if your market is Asian immigrants, there are cool members of that group who are trying out new technology.

In Facebook's case this is not quite the issue, as they already have a huge user base - but then they also have an unfeasibly large $15bn valuation that is not in any way attached to current value per user, but far more to "sentiment" about future potential - and that probably is driven more by Silicon Valley whims and fashions.

Ah, the tyranny of the large valuation rears its head yet again

This is not to say that Facebook is doing the wrong thing...the "Dohhh" thing about the consumer web since its inception is that people like to communicate and converse, and that is the killer app in nearly every case. Facebook in its initial inception was a display rather than communication service - it was hard to use it for communication and conversation - so making it better at this is very sensible. And of course this approach increases pageviews, whereas just allowing users to email each other didn't.....