Quote

Twitter and Tumblr and Vine and Instagram and Facebook and Myspace, all these things are social media tools that we were all told we had to have, and what we're realizing is that, no you don't! No you don't.

Phones were created as social tools. Smartphones are especially good at being social, integrating text, voice, video and images in an endless number of apps that can serve a user's needs, and all without the need for a web-based social network.

Instagram has become one of my favorite platforms because of its simplicity.

I started hearing Snapchat in the same context as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. That got me curious.

Our role is to be a platform for making all of these apps more social, and it's kind of an extension of what we see happening on the web, with the exception of mobile, which I think will be even more important than the web in a few years - maybe even sooner.

Snapchat's ramp reminded us of another mobile app Benchmark had the good fortune to back at an early stage: Instagram.

I can't stand Snapchat, but that will be extinct before it is relevant.

'Instagram' can engage generations of people that may not be on Facebook yet. I think that's true with 'WhatsApp,' and I think that will be true with things like Oculus.

With the never-ending stream of new social technologies, apps and platforms rolling out every day, its easy to get lost in the minutiae of social media. Yet for there to be effective change, especially within large, top-down, hierarchical institutions, a company must have an over-arching understanding of the new role it has to play.

We could not have launched Causes without Facebook Platform, providing real identity and real friends. Facebook Platform was created so that experiences that are inherently social in our off-line lives could be brought online as an authentic expression of who we are; Facebook did this best in revolutionizing photo sharing.