If a tree is quantified in a forest

But the mined data does not contribute to CPM…

After the IPO, Facebook has been trying to prove itself to the world. It’s two most hyped efforts have been Graph Search and Home. Both have failed to ignite the excitement of the general public.

Each one is a significant technical achievement that maybe only Facebook could have executed and that maybe no one wants. I think that the general reaction to both has been similar:

“I’m sure that there is someone out there that would love this.”

Those people have turned out to be few.

All of the data

I imagine that the experience of working at Facebook must be intoxicating. Facebook is sitting on data that no one has ever collected before, in such immense quantities that few companies have any hope to catch up. It must feel like there is gold just beneath the tile floor, hidden in every suspended ceiling. Every day, they come to work in the Taj Mahal.

The task that remains before them is to extract and profit from their vast riches. The graph is the raw material. From it they must hew a service that everyone desires and only they are capable of providing.

I should add that, in general, people want them to succeed. People will willingly give up their own privacy, a scarce commodity these days, to get a peek behind the curtain.

Facebook will swing for the fences for as long as it takes because we all want to know what the graph can tell us about the human condition. Each failure or fumbled product launch is hard step on the road to inevitable success and glory.

That’s enough sports metaphors for now.

The fear

The monster under the bed is the idea that the graph contains no useful information, just noise. Sure, we have a pretty good way of targeting specific demographics with Facebook ads, but Target can already know if you’re pregnant before you do. How advanced is this technology anyway?

And if there is no grand payoff. If no new insights about humanity emerge. If the graph cannot tell me anything about myself that I did not have to manually type in. If no one can fully conceptualize that one breakthrough Facebook service that we cannot do without because it does not exist. What then?

I don’t think anyone who is really into technology wants this to be the case. It’s boring. As someone who grew up on sci-fi novels, I can almost feel it in my bones that there is something big here. There HAS to be. We just haven’t gotten to it yet.

I think.

Right now

Facebook is a successful advertising company with a well-funded R&D department. I’m not sure what they want to be, deep down in their corporate hive-mind, but it feels like they aspire to something greater.

Becoming that thing would require a breathtaking discovery.

So, they keep digging.