Excerpts from SMW Keynote @ Google

(L-R): Erick Schonfeld - Co-Editor of TechCrunch, Josh Harris - Producer of Wired City, Douglas Rushkoff - author of Program or Be Programmed

"Facebook's days are numbered", the title itself is provocative enough to draw social media junkies to listen to Doug Rushkoff, the author of Program or be Programmed. The location - Google, the epicenter of most of the activity that goes around on the web and seemingly the antagonist in this discussion.

How do you use Facebook? Or does Facebook actually use you? You may have over 500 friends but how many of them are really your friends? Are many of them actually your business contacts? Is the "friend" word being used very off-handedly by Facebook? These were some of the rhetorical questions posed by the author.

The key takeaway from his discussion was the author's take on the centralized information flow model being used by Google, Facebook. Seamlessness, though very lucrative, has its own drawbacks. Imagine the case with Google, you have Gmail, Google Voice, Google Latitude, Google Talk. These are just four apps and they already cover almost every synchronous and asynchronous form of communication that possibly happens between two individuals. Same is the case with Facebook. Both Google and Facebook thrive on the "AdSense" model which provides them with income to fund and increase their infrastructure at the cost of users' personal information. The part which bothers author the most is that we have accepted this model and are being very passive and non-resistant to this change. We are giving complete autonomy to Google/Facebook and are happy simply to be able to share/tweet/connect without knowing how it would affect us in the long run.

The author emphasizes on the need to have a more decentralized and consumer-focused social media architecture. He believes to be sustainable in the long-run, social media would have to incorporate for a mix of both centralized and decentralized approaches. Decentralized approach means giving more importance to the consumer. He quotes the example of Apple who provide every service at a premium but are very consumer-centric in doing so. Decentralization also corresponds to growth of the open source community. In fact open source technologies are probably the final bastion in this fight to keeping it simple and peer-to-peer based.