Follow the Feeling

3RESONANCE VERSUS SHARE OF VOICE: In What Direction Is Technology Propelling Us?

Technology is changing us, and Facebook signaled the inflection point.

I'm an elder millennial; I didn't grow up with a cell phone. Yes, I had one during my senior year of high school in the early 2000s, but before then, the closest I got to digital technology was a couple of desktop computers. First was my friend's clunky Hewlett-Packard, with a loud, overheating hard-drive tower, followed by my neighbor's Compaq laptop, which he gave to me to use for schoolwork. Instead, I used it to access AOL through their free CDs available everywhere from direct mail to in-store.

But when Facebook appeared, the tectonic plates of community and content were starting to rub together. They had the second-mover advantage of watching Myspace grow to 100 million users, eventually nipping at its Achilles’ heel of over-customization. While Myspace focused on individual expression, Facebook stood for the community. It was launched based on users’ interests (i.e., colleges), allowed group pages (e.g., student clubs), and the only media it focused on was photos (at a time when digital camera sales were skyrocketing and the cameraphone was newish). As Bill Gross, the founder of 500 Startups, put it, timing is the most important factor for success, over team, idea, business model, or funding.¹ And as evidenced by Kodak and Blockbuster, timing is also the reason why many industry titans can equally fail. In a traditional ...