Say cheese

You look marvelous, darling!

Here's what Facebook and similar sites want from you: pictures.

In the online arms race between Apple, Facebook, Google, and others, control of the world’s snapshots is seen as vital – and lucrative, Quentin Fottrell writes. 

Pinterest, an online scrapbook that lets users share and comment on their favorite images, had over 20 million users in April, up from one million in July 2011. The startup just raised $100 million. Facebook, meanwhile, added to its image arsenal Monday, snapping up the London-based photo-sharing service Lightbox for an undisclosed fee. Apple too is upgrading its iCloud online service to include new photo-sharing features.

“Photos are the real currency for social networks,” says social psychologist Matt Wallaert. “We want to know, ‘What does she look like now? Who did she marry? How great is her life?’ They are much more revealing than reading a status update.” 

People share over 200 million photos on Facebook every day, or six billion per month. Larry Rosen, author of iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming Its Hold on Us, says it makes people feel like trendsetters, photo-journalists and celebrities. “We’re presenting ourselves as stars,” he says. “That’s why fan magazines and reality shows are so compelling. This is the online equivalent.”

But there are other reasons.

• Like bank accounts, photos are “sticky.” Whether they’re Facebook pictures of your Aunt Ida eating an ice-cream in Yellowstone Park or a random picture on Pinterest of patriotic candy, it’s difficult to move months or years of digital memories to a rival site. “The time and effort required to move those photos to some other type of digital storage is significant,” says Michelle Barnhart, assistant professor of marketing at Oregon State University College of Business. 
• Aside from the images themselves, the location data and other personal information embedded in the files may also be lucrative to advertisers.
• Endless photo posting by friends also keeps people trawling through albums and clicking, enabling sites to charge more to advertisers and generate revenue. 

And you thought it was just one big friendly place.

Neat hair and confident voices

Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and investor on who should run a startup:

"Sometimes the VCs want to install a new CEO of their own choosing. Usually the claim is that you need someone mature and experienced, with a business background. Maybe in some cases this is true. And yet Bill Gates was young and inexperienced and had no business background, and he seems to have done ok. Steve Jobs got booted out of his own company by someone mature and experienced, with a business background, who then proceeded to ruin the company. So I think people who are mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated. We used to call these guys "newscasters," because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn't know much more than they read on the teleprompter.

"If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don't hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA."