Guinea Pigs On Facebook

There's a bunch of guinea pigs on Facebook, around 689,000 of them.  You wouldn't recognize them as rodents if you just looked at their Facebook pages.  Instead, you'd probably think they were people, some younger than the age of 18.  But guinea pigs they are, used by Facebook in an experiment to manipulate users' emotions by making the news feeds these users received either more negative or positive, and then measuring the effect on posts written by the g-pigs.  Evidently, g-pigs' emotions could be changed positively or negatively by the content of the posts they received.  In other words, emotion manipulation by Facebook seems possible.

Facebook claims that its terms of service allow this kind of experimentation.  If you didn't read the terms of service, then bear in mind that the possibility of this kind of horseship (sp) is exactly is the reason why you should read them.  But it may also be the case that Facebook's terms of service were kind of general, and written in that uniquely obtuse and obstructive language called legalese.   We would guess they didn't include a guinea pig clause, which explicitly informed users that they might be selected to be subjects in experiments in emotional manipulation where they wouldn't be informed of their selection and the emotional manipulation would be conducted in quite a non-obvious way.  So even if you were among the assiduous 0.01% who actually read the terms of service, you still might not have realized that you had just registered for the guinea pig draft and could be called up for service at any time.

Of course, one suspects that Facebook might not have wanted to let the g-pigs know what was going on.  Unknowing g-pigs would likely produce more meaningful experimental results than users who knew what was going on.  And if one considers Facebook's corporate interests to be more important than the interests and dignity of its users, then all this might make sense.  But if users are thought to be deserving of fair treatment--radical notion, that--then you'd have to conclude that Facebook really stinks for having done this.

The world is full of emotional manipulation: advertisements, political campaigning, editorials, op-ed pages, robo-calls from every manner of charity you never heard of, etc.  And when it's clear that the game is to manipulate your emotions, that's okay (at least when it's directed at adults).  But when emotions are manipulated sneakily, and your participation isn't made known to you, then that's a reason to avoid Facebook and any other social networking websites that pull similar carp (sp). 

You have to wonder if the emotion manipulation experiment signals that Facebook has reached its zenith and is in decline.  Has Facebook run out of bona fide, valuable services to provide to users?  Is it now stooping to emotional manipulation to keep existing users and bring in new ones?  Do we really need Facebook, or have we been manipulated into thinking we need Facebook?

Are the Social Networking Companies Approaching a Peak?

The frenzy over LinkedIn's IPO a couple of days ago, in which its stock more than doubled in price during its first day of trading, is reminiscient of the tech stock mania of the late 1990s. In those halcyon times, companies with no profits, scant revenue and highly optimistic business plans were going public with enthusiastically received IPOs. The stock market was pushed up to levels that it hasn't, on an inflation adjusted basis, since regained. Of course, we all know the tech stock craze went the way of leisure suits, although the financial consequences from stocks were much more painful.

Leisure suits have made a comeback of sorts in the past year or so. And so have tech stocks. The craze du jour is social networking, which proponents claim to be the grand future architecture of the Internet. Maybe. Something similar was said two decades ago about Microsoft, whose MS-DOS operating system was virtually ubiquitous among personal computers. But Gates & Co. didn't get the Internet, which was then struggling to organize itself around a concept called the World Wide Web. Then, a decade ago, portals were seen as the behemoths of the 21st Century. Today, only Yahoo is left as a major albeit struggling portal. A half dozen years ago, Google was expected to be heir to the Internet throne. Today, it is a growing and prosperous company whose vision thing is flagging. Google once was going to become the library to humanity. Legal squabbling over copyright ownership of large numbers of books has bogged down that initiative. Google is a leader in cloud computing, but Amazon will offer formidable competition. Goggle had to play catch up in the browser battles against a nonprofit that puts out Firefox. Google's failed attempt last year to buy Groupon was a signal that its ascendency to the throne of the Internet is no longer seen as inevitable. If Google is a sure fire winner, why wouldn't the Groupon folks want to associate themselves with Google?

But no matter that previous innovators have matured and shrunken to mere mortal companies. Social networking is hot, and investors pant for shares. Logical analysis fell by the wayside with LinkedIn. It had $15.4 million of earnings last year yet has a current market cap of around $8.8 billion. Its 95 million shares outstanding are worth $93 or so each at current market prices. Earnings per share are about $0.16, resulting in a price-earnings ratio of 581 to 1. Considering that the p/e ratio for the S&P 500 index based on trailing earnings is around 17, it's fair to say that investors are, at a minimum, extremely optimistic about LinkedIn.

Facebook, the big prize among anticipated IPOs, has dallied in the not very private private placement market, where transactions reportedly imply a valuation of as much as $70 billion. While the absence of solid public information makes Facebook's valuations somewhat amorphous, it's clear that public investors are getting whipped into a frenzy by all the press coverage of Facebook's private offerings. Facebook has indicated it might go public in the next year or so. When it does, that's likely to be a major signal of a peak in social networking stocks. A lot of really savvy Wall Street insiders huddle around the corporate insiders at Facebook. Those folks surely won't sell until they believe they can maximize the price they get, which by definition minimizes the bargain public investors will get. It's possible for public investors to make money from an IPO (Google is one example). But the IPO is a moment when the odds may well be stacked against the little guy. Invest carefully.