Darren Herman

I received a few emails today about Spark Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Union Square Ventures setting up their own Facebook “friend” pages so I thought I’d join them. I have friends at each firm and thought it would advantageous to add them to my friends on Facebook. So I did.

So as you can see above, I added them to my friends list and anywhere from one hundred to a few hundred other entrepreneurs added them as well (depending on the firm). Who would have guessed Union Square Ventures has more friends than Sequoia Capital?

Anyway, this got me thinking about Second Life. A weird parallel to draw, but one I’d like to make nonetheless. Second Life is an immersive online world in which you build your own experience much like Facebook. It’s exactly what you make of it. Second Life isn’t really a game as there is no overall “point” but it does contain individual games within. Some of these games have been signed by major game developers and released for PC and potentially console platforms.

History repeats itself. The first time I met Pip Coburn, we discussed this over breakfast. You cannot predict the future without understanding the past. Very important. If you look at the Second Life hype cycle which was made popular by a few bloggers, you’ll see the following:

This is the traditional Gartner Groupe’s Hype Cycle and Second Life has been applied to it (as you can see). I think it’s interesting to compare Facebook to the Hype Cycle and then look at these Venture Capital pages (friend pages).

If we learn from Gartner Groupe’s Hype Cycle, a product or service generates quite a bit of initial buzz through the peak of inflated expectations and then drops back down until it reaches it’s slope of enlightenment.

Based on this, we’re going to see Facebook take a drop in expectations which I’d argue we’re currently experiencing with the current privacy issues. Once we work through those issues and Facebook carves out it’s real niche, we’ll reach the slope of enlightenment and plateau of productivity.

The issue here is that with Second Life, many brands (Toyota, American Apparel, Sony BMG, etc) all rushed in to create brand experiences which tended to be on their own virtual islands. These islands were not on the main grid and you needed to find out about them one way or another to be able to teleport to them. Greg Verdino and I publicly agreed that you couldn’t really show clients this because they were ghost towns. Yikes.

Lets look at the Facebook pages of the venture capital firms. These are like islands in Second Life. They are cool for the moment (peak of inflated expectations), but after 4 weeks of having the page up and running, what are the VC firms going to do to keep their pages updated? My guess is that they are going to become stale and irrelevant and essentially become ghost towns for technology entrepreneurs.

What we told clients with Second Life is just because you can build it, doesn’t you should. You may have one or two curious early adopters but what can you do to sustain the traffic? This is why I’m skeptical about brands creating their Facebook profiles. Don’t just build something and leave it there to rot; keep it current and exciting and you’ll join the conversation with your fans. If you update it once and never touch it again, you’re going to look like a poser and it’s better that you stay away from the beginning.