It’s those connections – both the personal, friend-of-a-friend connections, and the you-like-what-I-like connections based on interests – that make networks like Facebook possible in the first place.

Zuckerberg says in this interview that these connections really drive Facebook’s movement towards a decentralized network – one that behaves less like a website and more like a platform.

Facebook’s great opportunity lies in the vastness of information that people are putting out there – “Through tools like Facebook,” Zuckerberg says, “you can control that.” Facebook’s future is about privacy and having a say in what information people can see about you. He also notes that he believes that “the real thing that makes up a person’s identity is the set of people they’re connected with.”

Using tools like Facebook Connect, people can offer up selected information about themselves – and businesses can begin to tailor their products and services for the people who are coming to them, based on the information they’re recieving about the interests and identities of the people who are coming to them. The interconnectedness that this creates allows for real bonds of trust to be created between people, and softens the cold anonymity of a Web 1.0 world.

Facebook’s goals for the future have a lot to do with the concept of a “social graph” that illustrates the whole interconnectedness that Zuckerberg has been interested in. “Being able to map out all those things in one graph is going to be really valuable for understanding what all those people and things are, and what they’re doing.”

Zuckerberg says that Facebook is moving away from the old school model of value being centralized on one site, based on their experience with the application ecosystem – all of that value lies in the long tail – many applications, with small audiences, bring in far more value than one widespread application.

Having Facebook’s capability for helping users build their identities spread out over many sites will help them capitalize on the long tail of the internet. What’s fascinating about this is that Zuckerberg seems to have learned the lessons of Friendster and MySpace: rather than allow a closed ecosystem like this to suffocate and wilt over time, Facebook is looking out toward the long tail.

By making sure that the system’s vitality is not linked to one site – which may well come in and out of fashion faster than Beanie Babies – Facebook is turning its vitality into longevity. And while collecting this kind of information seems, at first glance, a little Orwellian, Zuckerberg places just such a dystopian future on the opposite end of the spectrum from Facebook.

He believes that by allowing people a say in which information they make public, we can avert the loss of control over our own identities. Facebook really just wants to make it easy for people to integrate their internet lives, thereby making themselves a truly powerful platform for brand and personal identity management. But all of that is in the longer-term future, even if the groundwork is currently being rolled out.

The immediate future, of course, is rooted in smartphones. More people are opting to pick up phones like the Palm Pre or the iPhone that function as tiny computers, and smarter, more powerful applications for those platforms will be the immediate future of social networking.

It should be noted here that Zuckerberg stops well short of calling Facebook’s future a utopia. He has a charmingly grounded sense of Facebook’s place in society – when Scoble says offhand that everyone is on Facebook, Zuckerberg corrects him. “Well, 200,000,000 of them anyway,” he says, as if to say ‘well, it’s only something like 3% of the world’s population on Facebook. We’re not that big a deal.’

Dr. Markman’s presentation focused on how society functions with technology. Her central assertion is that social technologies are nothing new. Though they use new tools to cover greater distances faster, it all essentially sums up to basic communication – Facebook, even as it nears ubiquity, is just a fancy version of cave painting communication.

Humans, she continued, simply need other humans for survival.

So we communicate as we always have, and we find brand new ways to communicate. One pattern Dr. Markman has noticed is that society is beginning to stratify naturally among those who can more readily adapt to new modes of communication.

Markman cites Pew Internet and American Life numbers that show that Americans, along with being divided along lines of behavior, can also be divided among the age groups and economic traits that allow them this behavior – but that doesn’t necessarily fall along the same lines as would be expected.

For example, podcasting is more common among the Generation X set, even though they aren’t as into things like Facebook or Massively Multiplayer Games.

Essentially, what Markman seems to be saying is that what makes online communications so interesting is that it’s so difficult to pin down the demographics of it in a general sense, because the information skews from example to example.

After the presentation, as always, we broke into smaller group discussions, including topics such as blogging, Facebook for business, Twitter, and social bookmarking. There was even some demand for information about Yahoo! Pipes – if you’ve got an interest in or knowledge of Yahoo! Pipes, (or Twitter, Facebook, or any other tools) please, by all means, join us for the next Social Media Expedition Breakfast, the first Wednesday of May.

blogpost by lunaweb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

What makes us as a species so drawn to creating these connections between one another, whether we even know one another or not? What is it, from a psychological perspective, that drives us to online meeting spaces?

Kris Markman, Ph.D., from the University of Memphis might have an answer. She has been studying the the social impacts of new media since 2001. She’ll be the guest speaker at April’s Social Media Expedition Breakfast, 7 a.m., April 1 at the U of M Holiday Inn. Her presentation will be titled “A Species Driven to Connect.”

A veteran of public radio, Markman is currently collecting research about independent podcasters – those producing programs unaffiliated with traditional media at all.

Be sure to RSVP for this breakfast at MeetUp. Admission is $20, or $15 each for you and a guest.

blogpost by lunaweb is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

What makes us as a species so drawn to creating these connections between one another, whether we even know one another or not? What is it, from a psychological perspective, that drives us to online meeting spaces?

Kris Markman, Ph.D., from the University of Memphis might have an answer. She has been studying the the social impacts of new media since 2001. She’ll be the guest speaker at April’s Social Media Expedition Breakfast, 7 a.m., April 1 at the U of M Holiday Inn. Her presentation will be titled “A Species Driven to Connect.”

A veteran of public radio, Markman is currently collecting research about independent podcasters – those producing programs unaffiliated with traditional media at all.

Be sure to RSVP for this breakfast at MeetUp. Admission is $20, or $15 each for you and a guest.

We’re always happy to see people get excited about Social Media, and at yesterday’s Small Business Chamber Quarterly Membership Luncheon we were ecstatic!   More than 80 members and visitors packed into a conference hall to hear how their business can take advantage of new Social Media tools and to see the unveiling of the Chamber’s new Social Networking site.

Small Business Chamber President/Founder, Robert Staub, was quick to get the crowd excited about the opportunities this new tool would create, not only for small business owners, but for the entire Memphis area.  Chamber members were given the opportunity to have us make brief video clips to promote their business, as well as photographs to use on their Social Networking sites.

LunaWeb’s own, Dave Barger helped the audience find “Substance in the Chaos” with a great presentation that showed the business value of several Social Networking tools, including a quick tutorial on how to make use of the Chamber’s new site.  Afterwards he was able to answer questions from an eager group and several members shared success stories they had experienced while using Social Media.

Thanks to a great crowd and a great new site, we were able to spread the good news of Social Networking and help support a great project from the Small Business Chamber.