SPEAKER 1: Our overall theme
again at Zeitgeist is the way
that new tools have allowed
people to collaborate and
connect in new forms, with new
opportunities, and
new challenges.
When it comes to the ways in
which new media affect new
marketing, we're going to begin
with a discussion of the
art of the social start.
And a panel on what's made
this whole industry go,
that is the start up.
We have people who could not be
more expert in the subject for
having participated
in themselves.
Our moderator, Esther Dyson,
has been a friend of mine
for now, nearly 40 years.
From the time when I
was a teenager and
she was not yet born.
She has inspired start ups
around the world through
her adventure conferences
and newsletter.
One of her recent ventures
is one of my personal
favorites, Flight School.
She knows the subject very well
and she'll lead our discussion.
We're going to hear from
Chris Alden, the CEO and
Chairman of Six Apart.
Formerly Co-founder and CEO of
Rojo Networks, and former CEO
of Red Herring Communications.
Michael Birch, CEO of Bebo
and of six consumer websites
over the last decade.
And Reid Hoffman, the
Chairman and President
of LinkedIn, which now
has 9 million members.
And before that, Executive
Vice President of PayPal.
Please join me in welcoming
Esther Dyson and her panel.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ESTHER DYSON: Great,
good morning everybody.
Did anyone figure out the
algorithm by which they
assigned seats at dinner
last night, the secret
Google algorithm?
What we're going to do on this
panel-- we're not quite as
quick talking as Jim Fallows.
We have 30 minutes,
which is way too small.
We are in the lucky
position of having been
a nondescribed panel.
So we're going to pretty
much do what we want.
It's called the art
of the social start.
And to some extent, I think our
thesis, or what emerges is
going to be that this
particular video you just saw
is probably more suitable for
the panel you're going to see
after us, which is the
marketing people.
We're going to set it up, but
to some extent if you look at
what happened on the web-- in
the beginning there was
nothing, then there was a lot
of content created by
institutions, and now these
start ups are taking
back the power.
Both as start ups and as the
people whom they collect
into their social networks.
We're going to be, sort
of, down and dirty.
We're the techies or the geeks
as opposed to the visionaries
you heard yesterday or
the marketers you're
going to hear later.
So we're going to talk a little
bit about how these things
actually work, and then the
kind of subtle impacts they're
going to have on people.
Whether they're consumers or
social entrepreneurs or
financial entrepreneurs
or anything else.
There are three major points
that I want to raise.
We're going to talk
about a couple of them.
We're also going to have
audience questions.
And we're going to do
all that in 30 minutes.
So the first is simply,
what is an entrepreneur?
That actually changes in a
world of social networks.
The internet made it cheaper
to do a lot of things.
Social networks even make it
cheaper to find an audience.
Probably the biggest thing
Facebook brings is not just a
platform technically, but also
a platform of users ready made
to spark a group of users for
any new app that shows up.
Most of these apps so far
haven't been terribly rich or
exciting, but they spread
very, very quickly.
There's also kind of a shift--
marketers talk about a tension
and they see that as
intention to buy.
But there's also the kind of
attention that only a person
can pay to another person, and
that, to some extent, is the
currency of these
social networks.
It's not rational or
irrational, it's just
something different.
And it's very, very strong.
I don't think it's fully
understood, but if commercial
energy made the internet go,
attention energy is what
makes social networks go.
The second issue we want to
talk about briefly is the
flexing from a platform that's
technical to a community
as a platform.
And then this notion of a user
controlling his own identity,
and creating a distributed
identity or a distributed
presence across platforms.
And then finally, there's, I
think, a see change in how
people see themselves online.
From the point of view of a
marketer, many people have
been visible through cookies,
through registration.
Their identity has been
collected from outside.
On social networks people
establish their own
identities, they establish
their own presence.
They're beginning to learn
how to control that.
It's not just a technical
learning, it's also kind of a
social or emotional learning.
They feel that they can control
their identity, they can decide
who sees it, who doesn't.
They're doing that now
explicitly vis-a-vis
other people.
I think in the future they'll
also be doing that explicitly
vis-a-vis marketers.
So let me begin and ask, Reid--
I don't know you for 40
years, but for a while.
Each of these guys is
just going to give you a
little [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
of what he does, what his
platform does, whatever.
REID HOFFMAN: So my
name's Reid Hoffman.
I'm Chairman and
President of LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a professional
networking versus the
social networking.
Basic idea is to make every
individual professional
effective at finding the right
people and the right answers to
solve their professional
problems day by day.
I also do some angel investing
and I'm on a few of the
new media Web 2.0 boards.
ESTHER DYSON: One of the
interesting things about
LinkedIn is you're not
just about presence.
You actually help people
manage transactions.
You take what the best
networker here in this room
does automatically in terms of
introducing people to one
another, remember his contacts,
and you make it easy
for the rest of us.
REID HOFFMAN: Yes, the basic
idea is-- I mean, part of the
view of the future that the
internet is bringing is
that everyone will have a
professional presence online.
And then, how do you
essentially mange that in terms
of finding the right people
and getting to them?
Because even though, I mean, a
lot of people in this room are
quite senior established
people with networks,
careers, et cetera.
Finding the right expert to
help you, finding references on
people you're hiring, all that
sort of thing-- it's the sort
of thing that you do when you
pick up the phone and you say,
let me call someone
and ask them that.
Well, you use search instead
of-- not to replace the phone,
but as the prelude to
potentially picking
up the phone.
ESTHER DYSON: Yeah, the other
thing, it not only helps you
get favors, it helps
you do favors.
So it helps you create that
social capital that you
can then leverage for
whatever it is you want.
REID HOFFMAN: Yeah, exactly.
ESTHER DYSON:
Michael from Bebo.
MICHAEL BIRCH: My name's
Michael Birch, and I somehow
always seem to end up on
the entrepreneurs panel.
And I've always wondered what
an entrepreneur really is, and
I think I've finally worked out
that it's people who wear
blue jeans on panels.
REID HOFFMAN: We
dressed up actually.
MICHAEL BIRCH: Yeah, I actually
put a shirt on, which
is for me, a miracle.
So I'm the Founder and CEO of
Bebo.com which is a very late
entry into the social
networking space.
We thought it about two years
after Myspace and over
the year after Facebook.
It's actually in the short,
bleak history of social
networking, which as we know
today started in 2003.
This is my second
social network.
The first one was Ringo.com,
which we sold six months
after we started.
At the time it was the second
biggest next to Friendster,
which was [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
that was the king of social
networking at the time.
And so Bebo was very late entry
and everyone thought we were
crazy for doing another social
network because everyone
thought that social networking
was wrapped up by then.
And we had to come from
nowhere to somewhere.
And last month, comScore
measured us as the largest
singles site in the UK measured
by page views, the largest
in Ireland by page views.
So we actually passed Google
out, our esteemed host.
And in the UK we're the third
largest behind, obviously
Myspace and Facebook.
So we have some extreme
challenges ahead, and we've
come a long way so far, but
we still have a very
long way to go.
ESTHER DYSON: And just mention
where you are geographically.
MICHAEL BIRCH: Geographically
I'm from England, and
we're large in England.
And I started it
in San Francisco.
ESTHER DYSON: And explain why.
I mean, one of these mysteries
is how different social
networks seem to flourish in
certain places and
not in others.
MICHAEL BIRCH: We've
consciously decided, where do
we want to be successful?
And so we chose the six English
language markets that we felt
mattered, which was the U.S.,
Canada, the islands, the UK,
New Zealand, and Australia.
And 98% of our page views
were in those markets today.
And then we would actually
do things to deter traffic
from other places.
We'd turn off certain features
by [UNINTELLIGIBLE].
So we know it's important
to succeed where we
want to succeed.
And the problem sometimes is if
you succeed in a market, which
is culturally very different to
other markets that the network
becomes dominated by people
from that market, and then it
feels a very alien environment
when people from the U.S. or
the UK come to the network.
We felt it was important to
kind of control that growth.
ESTHER DYSON: Right,
at least for now.
MICHAEL BIRCH: At
least for now, yeah.
ESTHER DYSON: Someday China
may be your biggest market.
MICHAEL BIRCH: China.
Yeah, we've consciously kept
out of China and probably will
for the foreseeable future.
Because again, culture is so
different, and then you're
competing with homegrown
networks, which we
don't think that we're
necessarily able to do.
So we're not sure whether
it's worth focusing
too strongly on that.
ESTHER DYSON: So Chris, you
have quite a presence in China.
That wasn't your main point,
but it's still interesting.
CHRIS ALDEN: Yeah.
Well, I'm Chris Alden, Chairman
and CEO of Six Apart, and we're
the big blogging company.
We've got about 20 million
bloggers worldwide that we
serve and they in turn reach an
audience of anywhere between 50
and 100 million depending
on how you count it.
It's actually a tough
number to count.
We're big worldwide.
We're actually huge in
Japan, for example.
And we do have a lot
of chinese bloggers.
With the number one English
language blogger, for example,
in China's been blogging
on Movable Type.
We have four products I should
mention-- Movable Type,
TypePad, Livejournal, and Vox.
People might know as better
from our brand names
than the company name.
And yeah, so he's been
blogging, as a lot of people
in China on our platform.
And I look at those 20 million
bloggers and I try to think of
all of them as social start ups
in and of their own right.
You know, they're not all
trying to be a Facebook or a
Google or LinkedIn or a Bebo,
but they've dedicated, in many
cases, a lot of their lives and
their passions and it's a big
component of who they are.
And some people are making
nice businesses actually
in sort of a microway.
So that reflects certainly how
I think of entrepreneurialism
and the services
that we provide.
It taps into what had been
talked about yesterday about
the humanity of humans and this
need for self-expression.
That's obviously something
that we take great pride
in helping to support.
ESTHER DYSON: How do your four
different services operate as
platforms for entrepreneurs?
And now you guys can come
in, and we're in the
discussion part.
And then, pretty soon we'll
do the audience part.
CHRIS ALDEN: Yeah, so our
four platforms are kind of
geared towards different
types of segments.
So for example, Movable Type
is used by a lot of large
organizations, large
publishers, but also earlier,
more start up publishers.
So for example, I saw Arianna
Huffington around here.
Their site is powered, at least
in part, by Movable Type.
TypePad powers a lot.
There's a lot of incredible
blogs-- you may not
know, Celebrity Babies.
But just these sites, Celebrity
Babies, millions and millions
of people visit these sites,
and it's really compelling.
Livejournal is a site that's
got 14 million people
registered worldwide.
And again, people spent
significant-- in some ways I
think of it as the social
oxygen for a lot
of these people.
And we not only of course,
allow the tools for people to
create, and to build
communities, but also,
increasing allowing advertisers
and marketers to reach that
and try to work on all
sides of that cycle.
ESTHER DYSON: And that, of
course, enables people to
support themselves by blogging.
Or at least, supplement
their incomes.
CHRIS ALDEN: And in some cases
it's support themselves
100% by blogging.
But in a lot of cases, they're
people who have a business, and
the blogging or their website
component is becoming an
increasingly important
part of it.
It may not be 100% of your
revenues, but we have a lot
of a small to medium
businesses selling wine or
glassware or beans--
ESTHER DYSON: Bean?
CHRIS ALDEN: Beans.
We have a great company on
TypePad called Gordo beans.
He sells beans used to make
chili, and had a pretty, plain
boring website and then he
start blogging about recipes
and got a lot more love from
other bloggers, and a lot more
love from Google Search Engine
and quadrupled the sales.
And I have a lot of
those anecdotes.
REID HOFFMAN: So whereas, Six
Apart and Movable Type and
TypePad are kind of media
platforms by which you can
publish yourself as a business,
LinkedIn, I think, we haven't
actually studied this yet, but
I think we're used by just
about every serious
entrepreneur that pitches VC's
in the Valley and probably most
other places because the
entrepreneurial gig is purely
the-- you need to constantly be
reaching out to people.
You need to reach out to
investors, you need to reach
out to potential customers,
advisers in the market,
experts, employees,
co-founders-- the whole set.
And so LinkedIn provides you a
way of reaching those people.
And then also, in terms of the
answers service, which we
launched early this year--
finding out the kind of
answers to questions which
entrepreneurs always have.
Because part of the way that I
describe the entrepreneur
venture usually is, you jump
off a cliff and you assemble an
airplane on the way down.
And you hope that you
have all the pieces.
Financing is just a formal
draft; otherwise, no
particular success.
ESTHER DYSON: But how does the
existence of all these social
networks even change what it
means to be an entrepreneur?
Michael, that's
especially for you.
MICHAEL BIRCH: Yeah, I think
the most interesting change,
and it's primarily happened in
the last one or two years is--
for an entrepreneur now it used
to be selling an internet space
while starting a dot-com.
And now it's not so much
about starting a dot-com.
You can start a widget or an
app and you can feed off
someone else's networks.
Whereas it used to be, how
do I reach critical mass?
How do I build a network
of people on my site?
There are certain host sites,
such as Bebo and Facebook and
Myspace where you can develop
an application, a widget, and
deploy it upon all these
networks at once, and reach
critical mass far more quickly
than you used to in the past.
I mean, in the past to reach a
million users of any product
on the internet was a
phenomenal achievement.
And now you can do that
in a matter of weeks.
There's been a big shift from
starting dot-coms to starting
applications that work off the
back of other networks
that are preexisting.
ESTHER DYSON: Yeah, but what
also intrigues me is that it
used to be if you wanted to be
an entrepreneur you needed to
be someone who wanted money
in the end because
that was the fuel.
Now you can be an environmental
entrepreneur, and you never get
rich, but you may get powerful.
So again, it's this attention.
You don't agree?
CHRIS ALDEN: No, I mean, I
don't think that the primary
motivation for a lot of
entrepreneurs are-- and
certainly some of the
more successful ones
was about money.
ESTHER DYSON: No, but they
needed money to get there.
CHRIS ALDEN: Sure, well they
needed to do something
that people would buy.
I mean we started the
magazine, Red Herring.
We didn't raise any money, the
way we got money was just
selling ads and subscriptions.
So sure, you need money, but
the thing that drove us
was an indefatigable
passion for whatever.
That's what drives
entrepreneurs, whatever
they're passionate about.
And yet, there is certain
hurdles, certain barriers.
And for us, starting a magazine
15 years ago, whatever, the
desktop publishing revolution
really helped us and made our
economics much more attractive
and feasible to do something.
Of course, blogging and other
tools have made it so that
the economics of publishing
are now close to nothing.
And I think you're going to see
that too when you talk about
more social start ups.
The economics of that are going
down to the floor, and that's
going to foster, I think,
a whole new breed of
innovative start ups.
That again, are not going to
try to be the next Google,
but are going to try to do
something much more micro,
and something that they're
really passionate about.
ESTHER DYSON: It makes it
easier to be sustainable
without necessarily being
hugely profitable.
But at the same time, it
makes it-- the whole world
becomes much more fluid.
It's easier for someone else to
start up and compete with you
as Friendster discovered.
Are we going to see
consolidation or continued
moving long tail?
Or how's this thing going
to sort itself out?
MICHAEL BIRCH: I think the
barriers to entry for becoming
an entrepreneur and starting a
business are lower, probably
then they have been since the
original Californian gold
rush in many ways were.
All you needed was to stand
next to a hole in the ground
and be a liar, and you were
suddenly a prospector.
And now, all you literally
need is a computer and a
lot of time on your hands.
I mean, that's certainly how
I started out in '99 when I
started doing this in the UK.
I was previously working at an
insurance company, which
was probably the least
entrepreneurial environment you
could ever be in, and luckily
some clever person invented the
internet and suddenly I
have an escape from that.
And I literally spent a lot
of time with the computer at
home, programming, trying
to build a business.
And my goal was to make as
much money as I used to
working for someone else.
I didn't have any ambitions
to be the next Google or the
next Yahoo or anything else.
It was just, well, get to that
point, and then I can devote my
life to doing what I enjoy
doing, what I love doing,
and trying to build
something even better.
It's a lot of work to reach
that point, but I think now
it's even easier to do that
because so many of these-- I
mean, there's tens of
thousands of apps and
widget developers now.
99% of them are one guy, in his
bedroom or his dorm room, and
developing a business and
trying to get to that point.
ESTHER DYSON: So now that
you've kind of got over that
point, what do you want to do?
MICHAEL BIRCH: I mean the only
thing is your goal is to get to
the point where you make as
much money as you used to, and
it took me three years
to achieve that.
And I was pretty much down
to zero bank balance
at that point.
But then when you reach it you
suddenly go far past it and
then your kind of outlook
on life changes, I guess.
I mean, now we're just trying
to build Bebo to be as
successful as it can.
It's very different than what I
set out to do, but I think most
entrepreneur don't set out to
necessarily do what
they end up doing.
ESTHER DYSON: So suddenly your
personal motivation takes
second place to some kind
of corporate motivation.
You had investors or?
CHRIS ALDEN: Yeah, whereas you
start out and the only person
you answer to is yourself.
Suddenly you're answering to
your employees, to people
below you, to people
above you, and so on.
ESTHER DYSON: Your customers.
CHRIS ALDEN: The customers.
And your freedom, in
a way, disappears.
You're never freer than you
are when you're just you and
a computer in a bedroom.
ESTHER DYSON: OK, we're
ready for questions.
Come on up to the mike.
Jim's trying to turn this into
a conference about China, which
I think will prove
to be prescient.
You were talking earlier
in the green room about
what's going on in China.
CHRIS ALDEN: Yeah,
[? Shen Chu Wan ?]
who's the largest English
language blogger in China.
And I met him about three
or four years ago.
He's been blogging
now for five years.
And you know, I asked him, do
you ever blog about politics?
And he says, no, I don't blog
about politics and neither
does-- there's just not a lot
of political blogging in China.
And I wasn't being
anti-political.
It was really being apolitical.
He was talking about
travel and food.
And I met him, recently he
came into our offices.
He was celebrating his
fifth anniversary.
And in that interim period the
Chinese government have forced
a lot of bloggers to register,
and by his estimates they
actually shut down about a
million websites,
a million blogs.
ESTHER DYSON: Out of how many?
CHRIS ALDEN: I don't
know that number.
I mean that's probably a pretty
large percentage though.
I don't know.
It's probably an
uncounted number.
But millions of blogs
in China certainly.
And so then I asked
him, are you blogging
about politics now?
And he says, yes, I'm blogging
about politics, and so are
a lot of other people.
It was a specific reaction
to the government cracking
down on them that actually
activated a lot of them.
And so now he's writing about
the one child policy and what's
going on in Burma, and why they
can't get information
about it in China.
And there's a big battle waging
right now, and the government's
shutting down, now not just
blogs but entire data centers.
It's obviously fascinating to
see that, and that's what we
love about it, obviously,
enabling people to be
passionate and let the
passions take them-
ESTHER DYSON: So he has heard
from any authorities himself?
CHRIS ALDEN: Well, he's
nervous about it.
Because again, he's been
English language and focuses
mostly on things like travel
and entertainment they
haven't gone after him.
But I wouldn't be surprised
unfortunately, if I heard in
the next six months that
he was taken offline.
So a lot of what they're doing
is finding offshore ISPs and
then trying to break through
the great firewall.
ESTHER DYSON: OK, I'll
keep asking questions--
REID HOFFMAN: Well, actually
I'll answer the one while
we're waiting for this.
In terms of the way that social
networking and web 2.0 will
change the general landscape,
because I think there will
both be consolidation
and the long tail.
And I think it will tend to be
some negative properties, which
are the kind of the unifying--
meeting this particular human
need across a wide set.
ESTHER DYSON: The platforms.
REID HOFFMAN: In the platforms.
And them a bunch of very small
specific stuff that tends to
be probably more shoestring,
more idiosyncratic to that.
And I think the answer is
actually not one of the
other, but is actually both.
From a venture industry
standpoint the challenge is all
the really long tail stuff.
It's not actually going
to be tech economics.
They're trying to figure out
which are the ones that
are going to be kind of
big in the platforms.
One of the things I think is
going to be interesting comes
out of-- now it's so easy to
construct their stuff, it's
just a further elaboration
of what's already been
happening on the internet.
Bloggers, et cetera, have equal
voices and can compete with
media institutions on the web.
Now you actually have two kids
in a college dorm room can
construct an app that can get
to millions of people, and
leverage and do that and that's
going to create a really wide
variety of interesting
things ultimately.
The flip side challenge of that
is, as all that increases
the noise increases.
So breaking through the noise
in order to accomplish anything
significant, I think it's
harder, which is one of the
reasons I think it tends to be
not a long curve that kind of
goes like this, but
kind of like that.
Anyway, answer to your
earlier question.
ESTHER DYSON: Yeah, but there's
this tension between-- again,
there's the platform and then
there are the communities on
the platform, or a community of
one blog and it's community, or
five blogs that link
to each other a lot.
And then there's the
emergence of the empowered
user with open ID.
You're involved with Facebook
as an investor, even though
you've-- can you take your
Facebook social graph and
use it somewhere else?
Traditionally, platforms have
tried be roach motels as
you can imagine, but
that may not last.
REID HOFFMAN: Well, there's a
sense in which by having opened
up the platform there's an
ability to leverage that
platform in other domains.
I mean, the whole question of
taking your platform and using
it somewhere else is, will
you allow yourself to get
integrated to other places?
And I think some of the
networks will do that.
I think some of the networks
will try to be portals
or destinations.
You know, I can't speak
officially for Facebook.
That's more like a portal.
And I think ones that focus
more on utility and transaction
like LinkedIn will be more
deliberately where you're doing
your business and
integrate there.
Because I think it comes
down to a question of
what you're trying to do.
Now generally speaking, a lot
of the internet has been
about entertainment.
And there's a natural alignment
of that to a portal because the
media strategy is more time on
my site, more page views on
my site is more economics.
So keep the person here.
ESTHER DYSON: Whereas if you're
doing transactions you get
paid for the service, and--
REID HOFFMAN: Exactly.
ESTHER DYSON: --you want to
make them more effective
one way or another.
CHRIS ALDEN: I think if you
look at all these social
networks-- Livejournal, Bebo,
LinkedIn, Facebook, certainly
Myspace-- you can think of them
as countries with their own
borders and boundaries, and the
travel restrictions
back and forth.
But I think you're going
to see a lot more, if
you will, free trade.
ESTHER DYSON: And
teleportation.
CHRIS ALDEN: And
teleportation, certainly.
But you're going to see people
going towards their comparative
advantage, and I think you'll
see some enlightened-- people
thinking about their
enlightened self-interest in
terms of opening up, and maybe
they'll be sort of an anathema
among the social network groups
that will open that up.
I think that inevitably things
are going to move that way.
Now whether individual players
are going to want to move as
quickly, for whatever reasons,
you're going to have a
lot of those types of
countervailing interests.
But I do think that's where
it will all tend to go.
MICHAEL BIRCH: I think social
networks, at the moment,
they're proprietary and
open at the same time.
So they're trying to open
up to allow third party
developers to come into
the network, develop--
ESTHER DYSON: Add value.
MICHAEL BIRCH: Create a genuine
business off the back of the
network, but at the same time
they're very closed and
protective about their social
graph because that's where they
see the lock-in and the value.
And although they're open,
they're not providing tools
where you can take your network
from Myspace and shift it to
Bebo or Facebook or in
any other direction.
So it's kind of doing
both at the same time.
I just hope that there's
certain parallels to the kind
of operating systems of
Mac, Linux, and Windows.
And what I do hope is that in
terms of the third party
developers we don't end up with
a problem where you have to
redevelop your application
on each of these networks.
And instead these applications
can just exist on all the
networks at once and that the
industry comes up with a common
standard common APIs so we
don't end up with totally
different networks.
There is some commonality
between them.
ESTHER DYSON: Right.
And of course, every network
wants to be unique and
have the value added for
his network and not--
MICHAEL BIRCH: Right.
But it's not in the interest of
the greater community of the
businesses trying to develop
businesses off the
back of networks.
ESTHER DYSON: Precisely,
so there's this tension.
And then there's
a third tension.
I've seen three or four
different companies who are
going direct to users and
saying, we will help you
instantiate yourself
on these four or five
different networks.
To some extent, Susan was
talking yesterday about genes,
and you want to spread your
genes as widely as you can.
Now you want to spread your
presence as widely as you can,
whether it's on Twitter or--
MICHAEL BIRCH: So wherever
there's a genuine need there's
always a company trying
to satisfy that need.
And there's companies trying to
say, we'll manage your presence
on all these different
networks at once.
But that's more of a
shout out to the need of
communications between them.
REID HOFFMAN: But I actually
never think that-- is
there a meta like network
aggregating all these.
As I tend to think that that's
never been-- that'll never work
because each of these solves a
particular need that gets
close to the psychology.
And the need for managing
my multiple networks is
kind of the digerati.
Oh look, I spend five hours
online, and do that.
I think it tends to dive much
more into a kind of all class
of-- I always think of these
things in terms of
human psychology.
What's the class of need here?
For example, as a wake up-- one
of the things I frequently say,
in investing in a consumer
internet you're investing in
at least one of the
seven deadly sins.
Because the seven deadly sins
have to do with deep, human
psychological reflexes.
And if you get those things in
breadth then that's one of the
things that a lot humans share.
For example, the
self-expression tends
to tie to vanity.
Tends to tie, do I want to make
myself look good, et cetera.
I think you can kind of
typify most of the big
networks and do that.
Now it's a crude method.
ESTHER DYSON: You could also
say though, I mean, vanity--
people want to have impact.
Again, they want attention.
I'm not sure what that is, but
I still think that this whole
notion of multitasking, which
is now very well known, there's
also something-- call
it, multipersonality.
10 years ago everybody
had one e-mail address.
Now most people
have five or six.
And I think people are going to
get better at having multiple
social networks, but just as
you don't want to check all
your five e-mail accounts-- you
want to have an e-mail account
aggregator-- you want a
personality aggregator, and
then you-- this sounds
like a lot of work.
But five years from now the
kids will know how to do it.
CHRIS ALDEN: Yeah, I think
that's absolutely the case.
People have been cultivating
their online personas more and
some people have a persona of
commenting on this blog about
politics, and in the next hour
they can comment on this
blog in technology.
Those are different identities,
and they may not want those
identities to cross over.
But they may want to nurture
those identities even more
richly on each of those sites.
