Breakpoint_Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain

by Jeff Stibel

  But a network of too many individuals can also create trouble. An intimate cocktail party is terribly boring if there are only two people, but it becomes overwhelming with two thousand. In the latter case, the party becomes crowded, cluttered, and utterly impractical.

  How much socializing are we capable of? For insight, we can again turn to the brain—specifically, the concept of neocortical processing (brain math). British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that neocortical processing limits the number of meaningful social relationships a person can maintain. For humans, that number is estimated to be somewhere around 150. This means that it is difficult for you to maintain more than 150 relationships—that’s the social breakpoint of the brain. In theory, any network dependent on the social capacity of the human mind would share that limit. Interestingly, the creators of a social networking site called Path, launched in 2010, were inspired by what is now known as “Dunbar’s Number.” Path allows its users to connect to a maximum of 150 friends.

  But Facebook is already well beyond that point. The average Facebook user has 262 “friends” on the site, so it stands to reason that a significant portion of these friends are not high quality. What’s the result? Getting a notification that April Ridmoore downloaded “Call Me Maybe” on Spotify. Who’s April? Some girl who went out with your younger brother in high school and “poked” you last year.

  Facebook has tried, in some ways, to restrict the unfettered growth of its network. They make it easy to turn off notifications, and have made great strides in putting the kibosh on as many of these as possible. And the “random” people you encounter on Facebook are generally people you know, people you used to know, or people only one degree of separation from you (unlike MySpace, in which users often received dozens of completely random friend requests per week).

  Essentially, Facebook is a “network of networks,” making it a smarter and more successful social network than its predecessors. As the company notes, “Facebook is made up of many networks, each based around a workplace, region, high school or college.” Each of these networks is tightly connected in the sense that each has many users who have strong connections to one another. Across those networks, however, the user relationships are sparser (just as the brain’s neurons link mostly to those neurons within their sub-networks). This arrangement started in a controlled way for Facebook—first with Harvard, then to other schools, and finally to corporations. This network of networks approach is what led me to predict in 2007 that Facebook would overtake MySpace, which had no such tight-knit clusters.

  But it only takes a few unsolicited, valueless notifications, and the utility of Facebook goes down for its users. It is simply inefficient to spend any of your precious neocortical processing capacity finding out about the lives of people who are irrelevant to you—people who will never be one of your 150 meaningful social relationships—even if they are friends of friends.

  So what do you do, as a user, when you find yourself in a network that is too large? One might think the logical thing would be to cull your friends list, unsubscribe from updates, and block all notifications. But few people do this. Instead, individuals decrease their usage and delete their accounts, ultimately looking for the next new network to hitch on to, one with a cleaner, less distracting social structure. Having reached a breakpoint by exceeding its capacity to be useful, the old network, like all social networks before it, dies.

  But remember that there is an alternative. We’ve seen that the best way to increase the carrying capacity of the web is to make it more useful and less distracting. Such is also the case with social networks. Again, we can look to the brain as an example. After it reaches breakpoint, the brain filters out extraneous information through cellular suicide. It also deepens the important connections. In turn, we become wiser.

  What if Facebook could become wiser? Separate out the fluff and strengthen the important relationships along the lines of the brain. Eliminate weak links and automatically delete friendships that aren’t active. Make it more difficult to request a friend who doesn’t share mutual friends. Bring activity related to a user’s strongest relationships to the forefront and allow the weakest to fade away. Facebook must help its users to efficiently nurture and groom their packs of 150, their “real” social networks, while filtering everything not directly relevant. The company has made some strides on this score, but they must redouble their efforts. It is Facebook’s only chance at increasing value.

  Interestingly, this back-to-basics approach has been tried accidentally with great success. The mobile browser and the app versions of Facebook are pared-down versions of the website. Everything is stripped out except for the basics: posting to a wall, reading news feeds, sending and receiving messages. In other words, communicating with the people most important to you. Of course, it wasn’t Facebook’s intention to reduce distractions; these changes were born out of necessity. Mobile devices are just too small to have extraneous information.

  The results, nonetheless, are striking. In 2012, Facebook users spent about seven hours per month on the mobile versions of Facebook versus only six hours on their computers. Nielsen reported that, for the first time ever, Facebook had fewer unique PC users in 2012 than in the previous year. However, the mobile versions continued to demonstrate record growth. Facebook on the web is already beyond its breakpoint and declining. But on mobile devices, it is showing healthy record growth. It turns out that, paradoxically, less stuff equals more usage.

  To be sure, a big part of the reason for mobile growth is simply that users are more likely to have their smartphones within reach than their computers. The prevalence of mobile devices is certainly a factor, but the usefulness of a simpler interface should not be disregarded; it’s an important element in Facebook’s big shift to mobile. In fact, other social networks—Pinterest, Yelp, Twitter, LinkedIn, even Facebook’s Instagram—aren’t shrinking on the web. Facebook just has too much content, and it’s becoming overwhelming.

  Some pundits argue that Facebook must find a way to make its mobile sites more robust. These are generally the same people who argue that Facebook needs to grow at all costs to succeed. Facebook seems to agree with this view and is unfortunately taking on the challenge with new feature-rich products. I couldn’t disagree more with this approach. Facebook will open itself up to competition if it doesn’t give users what they want without having to wade through the muck.

  Google launched Google+ in 2011 and made a strong attempt to avoid the pitfalls of previous social networks. There are no ads and no spam, and Google+ encourages people to connect only with their closest friends. Here is how Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product for Google+, places it in the context of Facebook: “It’s never fun to be late to a market, but it does afford you an opportunity to talk to users. What needs are not being met? What do they like and not like? We believe in the online world you should be able to have a conversation with your cycling buddies that stays with your cycling buddies.”

  Unlike Google+, Twitter doesn’t limit connections, yet it does excel at simplicity. While Twitter is much smaller than Facebook in terms of number of users and time spent on the platform, it is growing quickly. Twitter is particularly well suited for the mobile world, and its usage stats bear this out. Twitter users spent about two hours per month on the Twitter app or mobile website, but only about 20 minutes on twitter.com via their PCs. But both versions continue to grow.

  Twitter’s very nature minimizes distractions. With only 140 characters to share with the world, you’d better get to the point. Another way Twitter keeps your feed fluff-free is in its system of “followers” rather than friends. On Facebook, when you accept someone’s friend request, they can see your posts and you can see theirs. It’s a handshake, a mutual relationship. Not so with Twitter, which means that if April Ridmoore wants to follow you, she’s more than welcome, but you’re under no obligation to do the same. You don’t have to mak
e the awkward choice of whether to deny or perpetually ignore her friend request.

  The Twitter information model works more similarly to that of the brain. Each neuron has inbound connections and outbound connections. Sometimes one neuron is connected to another through both an inbound and an outbound link, but not always. Information travels strictly in the most useful direction, and no neuron gets her feelings hurt if another neuron doesn’t reciprocate her outbound connection. Noise and distraction are minimized; tasks are performed efficiently; everyone is happy.

  I’m not suggesting that Twitter or Google+ will overtake Facebook. On the contrary, I believe that Facebook has a future in social networking, but perhaps not as the huge beast it has become. Facebook is currently synonymous with social networking, and that’s its value proposition. In the future, social networking won’t be a destination; it will be deeply integrated into everything that we do. There will not be another giant; the future of social networking is smaller, more specific (i.e., less noisy) networks. Facebook knows this. Threadsy, Spool, Tagtile, Gowala, Strobe, Friend.ly, Push Pop, Karma, Lightbox, Glancee . . . most of these companies you probably haven’t heard of and perhaps you never will because all have been purchased by Facebook, at a cost of billions of dollars.

  One of Facebook’s most expensive acquisitions is Instagram, which it bought for a hefty $1 billion in 2012. Interestingly, Facebook made a concerted effort to keep Instagram independent. Zuckerberg explained when the acquisition was announced: “We need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.” While posting an Instagram picture to your Facebook page is seamless, you could also use Instagram alone (it’s a social network in its own right), or with Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, or foursquare. Zuckerberg was thinking like a brain scientist in allowing Instagram to continue to organically link to other networks. That is, until December 2012, when he changed his mind and severed the tie between Twitter and Instagram. It is very difficult for any company to avoid central command and control.

  The future of Instagram will be interesting to watch because it’s a combination of both the social networking revolution and a more recent visual revolution. Sharing pictures has been an important part of our social experience for decades. Children of the 1970s and 1980s grew up in the glow of a camera flash, but counted on their parents to develop the film, throw out the bad pictures, and maybe get double prints of the best shots to send to grandma. Children born in the late 1990s and beyond have an entirely different relationship with photojournalism: they expect that their every moment will be photographed, filtered to look more interesting than it actually was, tagged and posted immediately for the world’s viewing pleasure. Instagram adjusts pictures for optimal brightness and contrast and then allows users to apply filters to make the photo more beautiful and also to set the mood—maybe add drama with dark shadows or perhaps a little fading for a vintage feel. Like the internet itself, the visual revolution is already changing not only how we communicate, but also how we see ourselves.

  Pinterest is the new social networking kid on the block, and it’s also part of this visual revolution. It has yet to be acquired by Facebook, but I’d bet they are talking. Pinterest emphasizes beautiful pictures of decorations, clothing and accessories, recipes, and the like. You can take a look at someone’s Pinterest board and tell something about them, no words required. This is interesting from a perspective of universal communication: while we will ultimately be able to communicate with only our thoughts connected to the internet (no common verbal language required), communicating via photographs—worth a thousand words, after all—is a rudimentary first step. Our photographs tell our stories, so the network of all of our photographs linked together carries a social intelligence that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

  III

  Of course, there are those who think that social sharing is beyond appalling, just as there have always been those who resist any new technology. Since the mid-1990s, there has been plenty of vocal opposition to the integration of the internet into our lives—the naysayers claim that it threatens to create an irreversible dependency, fundamentally redefining who we are. I couldn’t agree more. We are dependent: just recall the sheer panic you felt the last time you misplaced your smartphone. There’s just no way to stop it, nor should we want to. Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, puts it this way:

  We’re so dependent on [the internet] that I have now gotten to the point where I don’t even try to remember things—I’ll just Google it. It’s easier to do that. And we kind of object at first, saying, “Oh, that’s awful.” But if we think about the dependency that we have on this other technology, called the alphabet, and writing, we’re totally dependent on it, and it has transformed culture. We cannot imagine ourselves without the alphabet and writing. And so in the same way, we’re going to not imagine ourselves without this other machine being there.

  When technology becomes ubiquitous, it changes us. Will the internet in general and social networking in particular change the game as dramatically as language? My answer is yes, and they are here to stay. It is a brave new world, one that’s permanently changing individuals, politicians, corporations, and governments. It’s creating a new kind of winner and a new kind of loser.

  To be sure, we’ve had some epic social media failures. A Canadian woman lost her disability benefits when vacation pictures on Facebook contradicted her claims of debilitating depression. Divorce lawyers now frequently monitor Twitter and Facebook posts to find dirt on their clients’ exes, to be used in alimony and child custody negotiations. One mom even lost custody of her children because her Facebook profile showed she was spending too much time playing Farmville. And not a day passes without a handful of people’s poor social media judgments getting them fired (for posting party pictures on alleged sick days, for example), or simply not hired (most employers shy away from candidates whose profile picture includes a bottle of tequila in each hand, Cinco de Mayo or not).

  Even companies with stellar public relations records have made similar social media gaffes. The SEC decided to investigate Netflix for a potential violation of disclosure rules after its CEO bragged on Facebook that Netflix customers were watching a billion hours of video per month. Or consider this tweet from Kenneth Cole during the height of the revolution in Egypt: “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://www

  .bit.ly/KCairo -KC.” Unsurprisingly, the insensitive remark was re-tweeted like wildfire, drawing contempt from the company’s foes and friends alike.

  Blunders like these occur because of a failure to realize the breadth and depth of social media. Your boss, your constituents, your customers, and, yes, even your ex-wife’s divorce lawyer are all connected to you. They are removed from you not by six degrees of separation, but by one mouse click. In addition to breadth, companies and institutions must acknowledge the depth of their social media friends, followers, and subscribers. The people who choose to follow you via social media are the ones who really care. They are Malcolm Gladwell’s mavens, and the most social ones are also connectors. If you were a rock star, they would be your groupies. Ignore them or underestimate them at your peril.

  Clearly, the idea of your groupies turning against you is terrifying. But many are forging a path to successfully navigate this brave new world. Kanye West’s clan largely forgave him when he offered a tweeted apology for snatching the microphone from Taylor Swift at the Grammys. Pepsi quickly apologized via Twitter for an insensitive Pepsi Max ad that depicted “one lonely calorie” committing suicide. By using Twitter instead of traditional media, Pepsi and Kanye were able to reach out quickly and directly to those who mattered most.

  Because it is informal, personal, and immediate, social media is well suited for apologies and damage control. If you face negative publicity in new media
, there is zero chance of turning it around with old media techniques. A formal company statement just can’t compete with a 1-star rating on Yelp or the Facebook group “Boycott Your-Company-Name-Here.” In 2009, Domino’s was blindsided by a YouTube video showing two disgruntled employees contaminating the food they were about to deliver. It was a PR nightmare for the company until they fired back through social media—uploading their own YouTube video explaining what they were doing to fix the situation and creating a special Twitter account specifically to handle customer concerns about the issue. Because of their quick and appropriate responses directly to the people most concerned, Domino’s was able to diffuse what could have been a catastrophic event.

  Similarly, in 2011, Taco Bell combated a traditional attack—a class action lawsuit charging that the restaurant’s meat isn’t really beef—with new-media techniques. On Twitter, Taco Bell linked to comedian Stephen Colbert’s musings on the controversy; on Facebook, they offered free tacos, encouraging customers to make up their own minds about the meat in question. And while overall sales took a short-term hit, its seven million loyal Facebook “friends” remained as enthusiastic as ever—and the lawsuit was dropped.

  The difference between those who fail and those who succeed in the age of social media is simple. Success is no longer about fancy packaging and carefully controlled messages. When everyone can see what you’re doing, the most essential values are transparency, honesty, and credibility. Even with advanced privacy tools—like private lists, tweets, and circles—the most foolproof way to stay safe on social media is simply to be who you say you are. Pretending to be something you’re not, or attempting to conceal or manipulate the truth, is a surefire way to lose. You win by matching your image with reality, acting with integrity, and apologizing sincerely when you are wrong.