David Kirkpatrick is Always On

David Kirkpatrick is the former Tech Editor of Fortune Magazine who has taken a leave of absence (probably permanent) to write a book on Facebook "The Facebook Effect". Earlier today, he spoke about FB, and other industry trends, at an Always On breakfast session in NY. Here's the highlights:

FB's mission is to evolve into an infrastructure layer of identity on the net. You will use your FB account for authentication, commerce, as well as social applications.

Advertising will work on FB. With an anticipated $500mm of revenue for '09, you can argue they are already working. Moreover, targeting is improving and a host of young companies are working with, and outside of FB to improve the value proposition

MySpace and FB are forking as competitors as MySpace is in the media distribution business and FB is gravitating towards infrastructure.

Tony Perkins also spoke, using excerpts from Mary Meeker's March Internet slide deck. Of greatest import was that innovation is live and well as evidenced by 6 of the top ten sites (measuring uniques) in Q1 '09 did not exist in '05 (per Alexa).

Youtube
live.com (yes, msft, and being rebranded Bling)
wikipedia
blogger
yahoo.co.jp

As a category, Social Networks is growing nearly 60%, in terms of unique visitors, and has a penetration rate short of 40%. Compare with email, growing 12% with 70% penetration, and online gaming, growing 35% with 22% penetration.

Platforms to innovate from are also shifting from the Wintel dominated world towards iPhone, Youtube, Wiki's, Kindle, and game consoles. The IT world is disaggregating, creating wonderful opportunities.

Turn on your lights....