Spent today at Signal – Federated’s conference here in Austin. Was as good as the LA version. Like SXSW for adults. Some bloody smart start-ups coming our way. Loved the conversations around curation. Then saw this profile on Yuri in Forbes. He is right:
The amount of information people digest, says Milner, is doubling every two years, now that so much of our time is spent in front of screens. That overload leads to shorter attention spans, shorter units of communication and a dire need for curation. Our friends are filling that role on Facebook, but before long, Milner believes, the machines will be more involved, much the way Facebook now suggests new friends for you. "You need a second degree of curation.”
Milner agrees with Oxford University anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s theory that our brain can handle only 150 stable social relationships at any given time. But while the size of our circle may not change, the mix will. Someone in China who speaks no English may be a better social connection than someone you’ve known for years. In a decade or so automatic language translation will make it seamless to communicate with new friends in China. "Facebook now is mostly about people you know," he says. "In the future it could be about people you know less but are more important."
Milner also sees Facebook competing with Google to become the place you go to search for information. "Facebook can be an accumulation of different intelligences," he says. "Ask a question, [get it] translated into many languages and somebody, somewhere in the world, will have an answer."
"Facebook will get to 1 billion users" in the next couple of years, says John Lindfors, an ex-Goldman banker who joined DST Global last year. "It’s the platform for a new Internet ecosystem."