Zuck does it again!
By: Grant Mccracken
Tags: Social Media, Facebook, Photos, Mark Zuckerberg, Culture

Zuck does it again!

Today on Medium, Michael K. Spencer noticed the rise of ByteDance. It’s given us a video app called TikTok. Kids dig it.

Designed for the new generation of creators, Tik Tok (known as Douyin in China) allows users to quickly and easily create unique 15-second short videos with unique effects for sharing with friends and the broader world. From dance to comedy, and free-style antics or performances, creators are encouraged to let their imagination run wild and set their creativity free. (from the ByteDance website)

All of this is bad news for Facebook. As Spencer puts it,

ByteDance recently overtook Uber as the most valuable startup in the world and now its proven it can make popular apps faster than Facebook can acquire them.

Here’s a glimpse of the TikTok rise to greatness.

Once more Facebook proves to be flatfooted in the face of a competitor that genuinely customer-centric.

In a sense, this is round 2.

Remember when Zuckerberg declared that all the photos people were putting on Facebook belonged to Facebook. There was outrange and incredulity. At a stroke, Zuck had demonstrated that he did not understand that photos were a precious part of the FB value proposition…from the consumers point of view. People cared about Facebook, because it was a place to share photos. (The one person at Facebook who grasped this, Chris Hughes, left early.)

I was moved to observe the larger culture significance of the photo on social.

We tend to think that photos matter because they are a record of the world. But this is only the necessary condition of their significance. The reason they really matter is that they are the single, smallest, richest, cheapest, easiest token of value and meaning online. We mint them. We trade them. We accumulate them. We treasure them. Individually, photos are content coursing through our personal “economies.” They are the single most efficient way to build and sustain our social networks. We gift people with photos. They reciprocate. Hey, presto, a social world emerges. Collectively, photos create a currency exchange. They are a secret machine for seeing, sharing, stapling, opening, sustaining and making relationships. Want to know where networks are going? See who is giving what to whom, in the photo department. Photos are in constant flight. They are a kind of complex adaptive system out of which some of our social order comes.

This was lost on Zuck.

For Zuck, it was all very “all your base are belong to us.” These photos, he appeared to say, they may be precious to you but they belong to me.

So here we go again. Someone finds a way to speak to the consumer’s deepest interest. And what is this? Especially now that our personal networks are mostly put in place?

I would argue that it’s performance. Performance is key to the way in which we now construct and present the social self.

Facebook could have enabled this and, with WhatsApp, it had something really powerful.

But, no, Facebook doesn’t really care about the consumer, or, better, Facebook doesn’t (ever seem to) really care about what the consumer really cares about.

Call it their tragic flaw. Facebook owns the market for a moment, and it has the technology of the moment, but for want of a glimpse of what is happening in culture and the lives of the consumer, it gives up this advantage, and allows someone else to come up out of nowhere and steal the lead.

Really, it’s just astounding.