Andreessen and Dyson on Facebook

Really smart company research has always been hard to find, and today it's getting harder. On the one hand, many sell-side institutions are scaling back their equity-research operations, and encouraging what analysts remain to spend more time on the phone to high-value clients, and less time writing research reports for the masses. On the other hand, there are thousands of bloggers with opinions about individual companies, but it's very hard to separate out the signal from the noise.

Occasionally, however, the blogosphere comes up with the kind of analysis that any highly-paid analyst would be incredbily proud of. In the past couple of days, we've seen both Marc Andreessen and Esther Dyson publish their takes on Facebook freely on the web, without any kind of corporate firewall or conflict of interest. If you're interested in the direction that the web is going, both of these are must-read pieces.

Andreessen says that "the new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry," while Dyson is thinking even bigger:

Facebook supports the attention economy -- as opposed to the purchase intention economy. Mark Zuckerberg said to me long ago (paraphrase): "The other guys think the purpose of communication is to get information. We think the purpose of information is to foster communication."
Think of Facebook not so much as information exchange as a place where you can establish and spread your presence, and get attention back. That's the currency of the future ... and it may or may not be directly exchangeable for money.

Of course, Facebook isn't a public company (yet), so all of this analysis is hard to monetize. But if you're interested in the future of the technology space, increasingly blog entries are at the top of the required-reading list.