"It's stupid to think that the #2 social network is worth 30 times the #1 social network, but it'd also be dumb to wholly discount the value of all of that data."
I agree. To me it seems like the data that one enters into their profile in Facebook is much more organized and uniformly formatted than the train wreck that comprises most Myspace pages. Facebook also one-ups Myspace by making users prove that certain data is true, for example using email confirmations to verify which school they go to.
The bottom line, though, is that none of us know exactly how much data is being aggregated by Facebook (ie. are they tracking things such as profile trends by logging changes in each user's likes/dislikes section?). Just like Peter Norvig explained at SS, the real value doesn't lie in the code, or in this case the application itself, but in the amount/value of data collected. The trick is just finding the right way to manipulate that data to yield the highest value/most profitable data for their investors. And something tells me that Facebook, and its investors, already know this.
I agree. To me it seems like the data that one enters into their profile in Facebook is much more organized and uniformly formatted than the train wreck that comprises most Myspace pages. Facebook also one-ups Myspace by making users prove that certain data is true, for example using email confirmations to verify which school they go to.
The bottom line, though, is that none of us know exactly how much data is being aggregated by Facebook (ie. are they tracking things such as profile trends by logging changes in each user's likes/dislikes section?). Just like Peter Norvig explained at SS, the real value doesn't lie in the code, or in this case the application itself, but in the amount/value of data collected. The trick is just finding the right way to manipulate that data to yield the highest value/most profitable data for their investors. And something tells me that Facebook, and its investors, already know this.