Facebook patents recommendations from contact lists

The USPTO awarded Facebook US Patent 9,338,250, titled "Associating received contact information with user profiles stored by a social networking system" (inventors: Michael Hudack, Christopher Turitzin; Edward Baker; Hao Xu). The patent covers the now standard feature in many social networks, both consumer and professional, where the system finds potential connections in your imported contact list and recommends adding a person who is currently not in your network.

From an innovation methodology perspective, the invention solves a typical problem that arises when users need to be migrated from an old technology space into a new one. In the System model, an effective solution improves scalability, by dramatically reducing costs of adding Sources and Tools during the synthesis phase.

tags: facebook, innovation, invention, patent, social, networking, synthesis

Facebook is taking over Google in sourcing the flow of news

Fortune runs an article showing Facebook's influence growing in the news segment:

...it’s clear that search has hit a kind of plateau and isn’t really growing any more as a referral source for media. Meanwhile, Facebook’s influence has “shown it’s on a continued growth trajectory."

Source: Forbes.com (click images to enlarge)

The competition for advertisers' money between Facebook and Google is heating up. We should expect that Facebook will make further inroads into information segments other than news. Although it's too early to pronounce Search dead, its dominance on the web no longer translates directly into the mobile space, especially, when users spend more and more time on social. (Based on system analysis, we anticipated this trend in Scalable Innovation, Chapters 20-22).

It is also somewhat surprising that Twitter is such a non-factor in the race. Despite the "freshness" of their links, they don't have enough users to play the game. Furthermore, unlike the Facebook's, Twitter connections don't have the strength of social relations.

tags: mobile, information, control, google, facebook, twitter, system

Facebook gets a patent for tracking user daily routines

This week the US PTO awarded Facebook US 9,094,795, titled "Routine estimation". The patent covers a technology for clustering user locations, e.g. using mobile device data, and deriving daily routine patterns related to the locations.

The technology also enables Facebook and third parties to connect location and social graph data with user activities, "likes", music played, and other personal or group information.

One can easily imagine a real-time map that shows swarms of users chugging along their daily routines and, once in a while, reminding them to do something different. Shop, for example...



In system model terms, Facebook solves a Detection problem, which is typically a precursor to solutions for Control problems, e.g. directing user activities based on detected patterns.

tags: facebook, patent, invention, distribution, control, detection

Facebook patents video messaging (again!) US 9,071,725

Facebook continues to mine successfully the AOL patent portfolio the company acquired from Microsoft. On June 30, 2015 the United States Patent Office issued US 9,071,725 titled "Methods and user interfaces for video messaging."

The patent dates back to U.S. provisional application No. 60/220,648, filed Jul. 25, 2000. (15 years in prosecution!). The application has already resulted in two good patents – US 8,087,678 and US 7,984,098. The new Facebook claims cover a concurrent video and text interactions between two computing devices, including mobiles (See claim 7).

This is a broad, strong patent that possibly reads on many existing video systems, including Skype, Google Hangouts, Snapchat, etc.

tags: patent, facebook, mobile, video, social, networking

Google's anti-trust problem: users

Many news agencies reported on a new study about Google search results, painting it in anti-trust tones, e.g.,

(BloombergBusiness, June 29, 2015) The new study, which was presented at the Antitrust Enforcement Symposium in Oxford, U.K., over the weekend, says the content Google displays at the top of many search results pages is inferior to material on competing websites. For this reason, the paper asserts, the practice has the effect of harming consumers.

-----------
In reality, Google's biggest anti-trust problem is its users who believe that Google search engine can provide them with best results. The belief still holds true for the web because Google has the ability to access, index, and rank web pages. As information and (more importantly!) user interactions shift toward the social world and proprietary mobile applications, Google gradually loses its ability to access the data and make best judgements. In Scalable Innovation (Chapter 22: Google vs Facebook) we identify at least three major consequences of this shift: no full access to social feedback, e.g. "likes"; the reactive nature of the web search itself; Google's lack of access to app-specific data. As a result, people who use search to ask questions like “What’s the best pediatrician in San Francisco?” are not going to get the best answer because Google simply doesn't have it.

On the surface, it looks as if a big monopoly is trying to hurt consumers. That's not the case. The study presented in Oxford assumes that Google is omnipotent and omnipresent. That is, the authors seem not to realize that the information world has changed and our information habits have to change accordingly. Today, consumers hurt themselves by thinking that googling will give them the right answers. Although this powerful illusion works on the web, it begins to fall apart as we enmesh ourself in social networks and mobile apps.

tags: innovation, search, google, facebook, science, technology, 3x3, world

Want to understand your own personality? Ask Facebook!

Stanford researchers have found that computers can judge personality traits more accurately than one's friends and colleagues.

The computer predictions were based on which articles, videos, artists and other items the person had liked on Facebook. The idea was to see how closely a computer prediction could match the subject's own scores on the five most basic personality dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The researchers noted, "This is an emphatic demonstration of the ability of a person's psychological traits to be discovered by an analysis of data, not requiring any person-to-person interaction.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/07/1418680112

The original idea of using Thumbs UP and Thumbs DOWN buttons in the digital world belongs to TiVo. Facebook took this idea — knowingly or unknowingly — and scaled it across the entire range of digital content, making every piece of communication "likeable."

In System Model terms, Like helps solve Detection and Control problems. We discuss it briefly in Scalable Innovation, Chapter 22, Seeing the Invisible. "Like" represents the Aboutness of an element. Once the Aboutness detected, the Control sub-system uses it to compose and channel content streams according to its policies.

Linking users and concepts - a Facebook patent

Facebook continues building up a strong patent portfolio for graph-based technologies. On January 6, 2015 the USPTO awarded the company US 8,930,378 patent on a social-like network between users and concepts. The patent is titled "Labeling samples in a similarity graph", inventors Pierre Moreels and Andrei Alexandrescu.

On the figure above, circles with Us in them mean users and circles with city names mean concepts. The dotted lines show a calculated confidence level that a particular concept is "linked" to a user who is not connected to it directly.
Since the concept can describe anything in the real as well as abstract world, Facebook patented a technology that figures out the user's connection to objects, places, and other stuff based on the user's social connections.

For completeness, here's Claim 1 (click to enlarge):

The claim looks very clever, but it's hard to believe that the idea has not been covered in the prior art. Detecting infringement of the patent would also be quite difficult because an accused piece of software would be embedded deep down in the guts of a server-based implementation.

tags: patent, facebook, graph, social, networking, internet, portfolio

Facebook patents a tech to provide socially relevant ads - US 8,924,406

On December 30, 2014 the United States Patent Office awarded Facebook a patent titled "Ranking search results using social-networking information" US 8,924,406 ( Inventors: Christopher Lunt, Nicholas Galbreath, Jeffrey Winner).

The patent covers a technology that provides a new way to determine relevant ads and/or additional content shown to the user along the search results. According to the invention, a search engine takes into account the popularity of sponsored links associated with the results. The popularity is calculated based on clicks in the user's social network and a social relevancy threshold (degrees of separation).

From a business perspective, Facebook continues strengthening its challenge to the Google "relevant ads" model created in the early 2000s. Today, some of you may already see sponsored relevant links inserted in your Facebook stream or page. The patent would be a good illustration to the brief discussion "GOOGLE VERSUS FACEBOOK: THE BATTLE FOR THE CONTROL" Max and I outlined in Chapter 22 of our book Scalable Innovation.

Another interesting aspect of the patent: it shows the brave new "Me-centric" world of social networking (see Fig 1 above). From a technical and business perspective it indicates a large-scale transition from relational (excel-like rows and columns) representations of data to a graph-based one, with nodes and edges. The patent also provides a good working definition of a social network:

the social-networking system comprising a graph that comprises a plurality of nodes and edges connecting the nodes, each edge between two nodes representing a relationship between them and establishing a single degree of separation between them, wherein the first user corresponds to a first node of the graph.

tags: patent, facebook, innovation, invention, social, networking, search, control, internet

Facebook's market power

The Facebook patent I briefly discussed yesterday points to a business and technology revolution, similar to the one that made Chicago a major commercial center in the United States in the 19th century. Back then, the proliferation of railroads helped move grain and cattle from small, scattered farms to large grain elevators and slaughterhouses. As the result, Chicago merchants benefited enormously from the new economies of scale. Similarly, Facebook enjoys enormous economies of scale by aggregating and processing huge amounts of scattered pieces of user preferences data. 

Furthermore, Chicago merchants developed a new standardization system that

...partitioned a natural material — a steer or a bushel of wheat into a multitude of standardized commodities, each with a different price, each with a different market (Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon).

The new partitioning system allowed the merchants to sell their commodities to those consumers who were interested in a particular grain variety or beef cut and willing to pay the right price for the right commodity.

Similarly, Facebook has the ability to partition their user social graphs (and even individual users like you and I) into a multitude of parts that can be sold to advertisers and content providers for the right price at the right time and in the right place. The only difference is that instead of the Beef Chart of the 19th century they have the User Interest Chart of the 21st century.

tags: innovation, technology, control, packaged payload, distribution, scale, facebook, social, advertisement

Facebook patents user tracking for advertisers and content providers

Today, August 19, 2014, USPTO awarded Facebook patent 8,812,591 titled Social networking system data exchange (Inventors: Kent Schoen and Gokul Rajaram)

The patent covers a technology that tracks users across multiple service providers by matching service provider ID and social network ID. The match results in an aggregated user profile that determines user eligibility for content and ad targeting. The system uses a tracking pixel instead of the web cookie, which makes it suitable for mobile applications.

The technology breaks the wall between different publishers with regard to what they know about the user. As the patent says:

...a publisher may know very limited information about a user visiting the publisher's web page or the publisher's application. Thus, a publisher is unable to effectively target content item and advertisements to the user based on the user's interests and characteristics. The exchange server aggregates a user's information from several sources, including a social networking system, publishers, retailers, content item providers, etc.
The exchange server matches advertisements to users based on whether users' characteristics as provided by the aggregated social graph match the advertisements' targeting criteria. Additionally, the exchange server selects one or more advertisements to display to the user based on expected revenue to be generated from displaying the advertisement to the user.

tags: patent, invention, innovation, facebook, social, networking, graph, content

Invention of the Day - Instant Messaging

It's hard to imagine today's life without instant messaging. The service has become one of the Dominant Designs in the Internet era. As we write in Scalable Innovation (Chapter 13):

Dominant Design is an implementation of a new functionality that the market adopts as the prototype for future implementations. Simply put, the dominant design is what everybody thinks all products or services in the new category should imitate.

US Patent 6,449,344

Today's IT giants — Google, Facebook, IBM,  Microsoft, Yahoo, Alibaba, and others provide instant messaging services as a "must have" feature. Recently, Facebook paid $19B for Whatsup, a company that built its mobile service using the instant messaging ideas. 

The original technology was developed in 1996 by an Israeli company Mirabilis and released during the same year as ICQ chat software. The service was extremely successful, even despite being characterized as the world's "ugliest website." 

In 1998, AOL bought Mirabilis for $287M - a pitiful sum by today's Internet M&A standards. Eventually, AOL rebranded the service as the AOL Messenger. 

Instant Messaging had other important implications for the world of technology. First, ICQ influenced the development of other peer-to-peer (P2P) services, such as Napster, Gnutella, Skype, and others, which revolutionized content distribution and communications in the beginning of the 21st century.

Second, the business success of Mirabilis put Israel on the global map of Internet innovation and served as a catalyst for the creation of a thriving tech entrepreneurship culture in the country. 

Third, Instant Messaging helped initiate the Internet services era that exploded with the introduction of the iPhone and other smartphones.

Arguably, the invention of Instant Messaging is as important to the world as Graham Bell's invention of the phone in 1876. 

tags: invention, innovation, facebook, google, microsoft, dominant, design, 10x

Facebook's new patent from the AOL portfolio (US 8,648,801).

Today, the US PTO awarded Facebook an interesting patent (US 8,648,801) with a funny title, "Aligned display navigation." Since the patent references one of my early patents, I've decided to check it out; and in the beginning it looked quite hot!

First, a little bit of background:

The patent belongs to the AOL portfolio that Facebook acquired from Microsoft for $550 Million. It covers user interactions with content using the touchscreen - a dominant UI solution in modern smartphones and tablets. The inventor, Luigi Lira, has a number of patents in this domain; most of them go back to 2002. For example, the original provisional application for this patent was filed in March, 2002.

The patent specification describes a touchscreen system that helps the user navigate between different sections of a web page. After 12 years of back-and-forth arguments with the US PTO, the patent lawyers for Facebook/AOL managed to generalize the notion of the page into "the content comprises a plurality of portions." The purpose of the generalization is clear: try to cover the modern multi-screen "swipe" interface for smartphones. One of the claims specifically mentions finger as the object being tracked by the system.

On the surface, the patent looks really broad and strong. Nevertheless, using our train analogy*, we can easily spot a logical flaw right in the middle of a long, somewhat obfuscated series of steps:

If I were to attack the patent in court, I would point out to the judge and jury that the patent describes a scenario where the move to the next screen happens BEFORE the system determines whether the user's "swipe" has been validated. That is, according to Claim 1, we move the screen first, and think second. If the system makes a mistake, i.e. the "swipe" turns out to be invalid, we return the user to the previous screen. In essence, we jerk the interface in reaction to any object flying near the screen. Obviously, modern systems do the opposite: they validate user input first, then move to the next screen.

The verdict: after 12 years of patent prosecution, Facebook received a marginally useful patent. It's biggest value would be in threatening other companies with a lawsuit that is not obviously frivolous.

-------
* The train analogy goes as follows:

Imagine that instead of the content with multiple portions (e.g. a web page or app) that needs to be presented on a touchscreen, we have to unload a train with multiple cars. Note that each car has to be unloaded separately: one by one. To make our life easier, someone has sent us a telegram with a detailed description of each car and its relative positions in the train ( in Claim 1 they call it "data representative of content to be displayed on a touchscreen display" - typical aboutness).

Your station manager reads the telegram aloud to the workers and they do the unloading. According to the patent, as soon as the train engineer hears the manager say anything or even sneezes, he moves the next car into the unloading position. If the manager makes a mistake - Ooops! - the engineer moves the train back. Clearly, this is not the best way to organize the operations. The main reason for having a qualified crew, including the manager, is to avoid unnecessary jerking of the heavy train in response to the manager's every sneeze.

tags: patent, facebook, example

Facebook wireless wake-up patent (US 8,644,892)

Today, US Patent Office awarded Facebook a patent on a wireless device with a passive RFID tag that can trigger different power modes. In one scenario, when your iPhone is in sleep mode it receives a wake-up call from an RFID reader, powers up the main battery, and transfers the data from the tag to the device.

Again, the easiest way to explain the patent is through the train analogy we used in Scalable Innovation (Chapter 3). 

Imagine that instead of wireless devices and Radio Frequency signals you are running a train station operation. You also have a telegraph machine that allows you to receive and read telegrams from neighboring stations. It's early in the morning; no major load-unload processes are in progress; the only half-awake person in the building is one Thomas Alva Edison, your trainee telegraph operator.

Suddenly, his telegraph machine starts chattering and he receives a telegram from a neighboring station that a big train is departing toward you. Mr. Edison reads the telegram, wakes up your station crew, and reads the contents of the telegram to the station manager.

In the Facebook patent, the wireless device is your train station in wake up or sleep mode. The RFID tag is Edison with his telegraph apparatus. First, he can receive a telegram that no trains are coming and send everybody home. Then, the tag receives a wake-up signal from an RFID reader (the neighboring station) and transfers the contents of the signal (the telegram) to the main memory with a processor (the manager), which is configured to run a pre-defined program. That's it. The rest of the wording in the patent is for obfuscation purposes.

The invention fits the Telegram before the Train invention pattern we consider in detail in Chapter 25. 

tags: patent, packaged, payload, control, system, example, facebook

Amazon patents - Content Management

Amazon continues its push into content management technology. Their  US 8,639,817 patent issued on January 27, 2014) is the latest in a series that covers delivery of digital media.

The patent applies (among other things) to delivering ads based on the original content. In their terminology, a first set of users consumes the "real" content, while a second set gets [relevant] ads. For example, Claim 2 reads:

In claim 3, they continue using the anticipatory approach we found earlier in their other patents, which cover delivery of physical goods.

With physical goods, Amazon describes a scenario where the system
1) routes packages to a general geographical location in anticipation of demand;
2) re-routes packages to a specific address, based on a customer order.

With virtual goods, Amazon patents a scenario where the system
1) delivers content to a content delivery network in anticipation of content demand;
2) delivers content to a specific user device, based on user requests or targeting logic.

In system terms, Amazon creates a smart Distribution network, which sits in between the content providers and users. We model the arrangement in Scalable Innovation, Chapter 25. Anticipating Control Problems. Because Amazon collects a lot of information about both content (Packaged Payload), users (Tool), and providers (Source), it has the ability to determine and anticipate consumption patterns. The patents are a strong indication that business value migrates from the Tool -- Source axis, to the Distribution -- Control axis.

Similarly, Facebook, Google, Twitter, NSA, and others sit between users and content providers (e.g. other users). Remarkably, Amazon doesn't cover social networking scenarios in their patents. Vice versa, Facebook doesn't talk about content management in their patents.

tags: patent, system, aboutness, distribution, control, business, value, amazon, facebook

Facebook gets a patent on the "What's his face?" feature.

Facebook's US Patent 8,631,084, issued on January 14, 2014, covers (among other things) a user scenario where you can send one's picture or a video clip from your smartphone to a server and receive a list of people in your social network who are likely to be in the vicinity. You can also tag the picture with the name from the list.

I like the idea. If Facebook donated the patent to a privacy watchdog, unauthorized snoopers, including NSA, can be sued for patent infringement. The patent would probably cover similar Google Glass applications.

From the system point of view, the patent covers the process of matching different types of aboutness to an object. That is, textual contact information about a person (name, etc.) is complemented by a photo/video. Essentially, we create an aboutness management system, where the right item can be selected based on the context of object use/interaction. The application provides the context for the matching process. In this case, it's social networking, which is "hardwired" into the patent. I would try to push the concept into other contexts, industrial, commercial, navigational (GPS), medical, office, the internet of things, AI, etc.

A generic pattern for the invention would be something like: obtaining an aboutness of type 1, obtaining a context of use, ranking objects according to the context of use, associating the aboutness of type 1 with aboutness of type 2.

Social Networking is the new TV, only much better

A study of new mothers shows that social networking has a strong positive effect on their well-being:

On average, mothers were 27 years old (SD = 5.15) and infants were 7.90 months old (SD = 5.21). All mothers had access to the Internet in their home. New mothers spent approximately 3 hours on the computer each day, with most of this time spent on the Internet. Findings suggested that frequency of blogging predicted feelings of connection to extended family and friends which then predicted perceptions of social support. This in turn predicted maternal well-being, as measured by marital satisfaction, couple conflict, parenting stress, and depression. In sum, blogging may improve new mothers’ well-being, as they feel more connected to the world outside their home through the Internet.

Source: Brandon T. McDaniel • Sarah M. Coyne • Erin K. Holmes. New Mothers and Media Use: Associations Between Blogging, Social Networking, and Maternal Well-Being. DOI 10.1007/s10995-011-0918-2
 

Another study of random 79 undegrads shows that:

In Experiment 2, those who focused on their Facebook page scored significantly higher in general self-esteem, but not narcissism, than a control group.

Across both experiments we found consistent evidence that narcissists reported having more ‘‘friends’’ on the SNSs. Partici- pants with higher NPI scores reported having more friends and more page views on MySpace and reported having more friends on Facebook.  

 The paper also notes that the new generation of students is quite different from the general population

 A recent Pew Research Center survey found that, com- pared to 20 other countries, rates of SNSs usage in America were among the highest (Pew Research Center, 2011). Among Americans, 80% of respondents aged 18–29 used SNSs (compared to 62% of those aged 30–49 and 26% of those 50 and older) and that 61% of users had college degrees, indicating that SNSs users are dis- proportionately young, educated adults. 

Looks like SNSs provide opportunities to improve social well-being by starring in one's own show.

tags: network, social, information, graph, research, science, book, facebook

Death by partnership with Google

In 2006, Facebook (FB) decided to partner with Microsoft (MS), rather than Google, to serve ads to its US-based users. One year later, FB and MS extended this partnership worldwide. This choice may have helped FB to become dominant in the social media market. Despite multiple attempts by Google to friend its way into Facebook's business, e.g. through social search services, Zuckerberg treated them as rivals, not partners. And for a good reason.

Two other major companies that chose to partner with Google — Yahoo and Apple — ended up loosing their market share when their partner turned into a dominant competitor. In 2000, Yahoo hired Google to provide search results for its web portal. After a couple of years, most search requests ended up on Google's site, not Yahoo's. According to comScore, Google now has 2/3 of the search market in the US.

Source: comScore, August 14 Press Release.

In 2006, Steve Jobs partnered with Google to provide email, map, and youtube video services to launch the iPhone. Several years later he found himself staring in disbelief at the growing market share of Google's Android smartphones, which now account for a staggering 81% of the total.

Source: CNet, Oct 31, 2013. Android Snags Record 81 Percent of Smartphone Market.

With Yahoo's help, Google got themselves a ticket into the web-world, including maps and email; taking ideas from Apple propelled the company into dominance in the world of mobile media services. In both cases, Google outsmarted their business partners. Just like that was the case with Microsoft partnerships in the 1980-90s, Google's highly intelligent technologists took advantage of their close proximity to huge new markets discovered by others.

Since its early days, Google has been eager to acquire ideas and startups. The original adoption of the search-relevant ad model has brought them the bulk of today's revenues. Acquisitions of startups that developed interent-based maps, docs, videos (Youtube), social navigation (Wase) etc., provide for the bulk of the company's most popular services. Due to its dominance in search, Google is in a great position to detect early user trends and buy growth before most people recognize it. Having learned from their own industry experience, Googlers would rather acquire a potential "disruptor," than give it an opportunity to become a powerful competitor. Nobody can pull off a google-style partnership on Google itself!

It's all fair (Steve Jobs famously disagreed calling Google Android "a highway robbery") and we should probably "like" the company for being a relentless innovator. What bothers me is Google's increasing emphasis on lobbying its case in Washington. This year, Google was ranked #8 lobbyist in the US, a position that no Silicon Valley company has ever tried to attain before. The Steve Jobs' generation of innovators grew out of California counterculture. They considered it to be wrong to rely on the government to advance your business case. Obviously, the times have changed. As Bloomberg reports,

Google passed two Washington power tests when it escaped an FCC probe in 2012 of improper data collection with a $25,000 fine, and the FTC dropped an antitrust probe in January. Now lobbyists for the company are working on protecting its reputation amid revelations about U.S. spying.

When the next Google antitrust probe comes up for consideration who is going to resist the high-power lobbyists? As the ancient question goes, "Who is watching the watchman?"

P.S. The lack of checks on Google should work well for their stock price.

tags: technology, innovation, business, google, facebook, system, growth, startup

Separating self from Facebook

CNet runs a story about people getting tired of Facebook:

A majority of Facebook users, or 69 percent, say they plan to spend the same amount of time on the site this year, but more than a quarter, or 27 percent, say they will spend less time on Facebook this year.

Will Facebook follow the typical boom-to-bust pattern for all new games? Will it be different for LinkedIn and other social networking services?

tags: social, networking, creativity, trend, facebook

Facebook patents, July 2012.

	PAT. NO.		Title
1	8,230,046		Setting cookies in conjunction with phased delivery of structured documents
2	8,225,376		Dynamically generating a privacy summary
3	8,224,716		Methods and systems for facilitating the provision of opinions to a shopper from a panel of peers
4	8,219,562		Efficient storage and retrieval for large number of data objects
5	8,219,500		System and method for managing information flow between members of an online social network
6	8,214,457		Post-to-profile control
7	8,213,924		Providing distributed online services for mobile devices

#5 on the list looks most interesting. The original patent application was filed in May, 2004!
It's a good illustration that, in system terms, Facebook represents an instance of Distribution and Control.


tags: patent, facebook, example, social, networking, distribution, control

Teens flock to Instagram/Facebook. Youtube next?

(Sept. 8, 2012. CNet) According to Nielsen, Instagram is the top photography site among teens ages 12 to 17, with 1 million teens visiting the site during July.
Also, a Pew report presented over the summer about teenage online behavior found that 45 percent of online 12-year-olds use social-network sites and that the number doubles to 82 percent for 13-year-old Internet users. The most popular activity for teens on social networks is posting photos and videos, the study found.

10 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that mothers of small children were the most avid picture-takers.  Kodak, HP, and others spent billions of dollars marketing to this demographic. Furthermore, when digital cameras emerged, the old guard saw an increase in picture printing revenues because people took more pictures and, out of habit, printed them. The entire business model was based on the trade-off: the more pictures one wanted to share, the more money she had to spend on printing them.

On the other hand, social networking and cheap mobile cameras broke the trade-off. That is, taking/sharing pictures became free and teenagers could finally afford an infinite amount of sharing. As the result, Kodak went out of business and HP's printing division tanked. At the same time, Facebook and Instagram soared.

A similar situation happened in the personal video space. Sony and other consumer electronic companies lost, while Youtube and Facebook won. If Google continues its momentum with Android (driving video content to Youtube), they might capture a large portion of ad revenue associated with social interaction.

tags: s-curve, trade-off, media, facebook, social, networking, google