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Fast forward to the present day where there are a billion users on Facebook and growing. Facebook is a public company with quarterly pressure to drive revenues.

Facebook recently made news for testing a new feature that lets anyone direct message another user for $1. While they’re only testing this feature, pay for access goes against the whole point of social media. Under that plan, people willing (or desperate enough) to pay to contact someone else not in their network are able to. While it defeats the purpose of social networks it also creates a whole slew of negative scenarios such as creepy old men contacting underage girls, verbal abusers, brands spamming consumers, etc. This can’t be a good thing.

For quite some time, Facebook has made controversial decisions that seem to go against the grain of what it stands for. At some point, the drive for additional revenue will clash with the fundamental premise of the social network.

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However, all is not well in the land of crowdfunding. Many entrepreneurs don’t have product development experience and often underestimate the wherewithal required to bring a product to life. Issues like regulatory, legal and intellectual property can plague a product launch and even mundane things like sourcing components becomes complicated when you need to buy them at scale and in a reliable manner.

I would love to see companies like Kickstarter focus a bit less on the sexy side of marketing products and expand to provide some additional services to every product that lands on their platform, like advisory services to ensure realistic product delivery dates and even helping match startups with component suppliers before funding gets approved. When startups succeed because they have the right know-how, the stronger the platform it becomes.

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The world is generating data quicker than it can consume it. The world is generating far more data at a pace much higher than ever before. This is all great, except that data is meaningless without context. I’m a big fan of using data visualization to derive new insights. And when the insights can be be basis for a strategy that leads to something new and wonderful, that’s something special and ground-breaking.

Facebook has done a nice job showcasing the relationships between countries from a friendship level, something that you won’t find in government almanacs or reports. It’s a novel way to show relative depth of connections of people between two countries, even if the two are at odds with each other. There’s something about the power of connection that supercedes political agendas.

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