Zuckerberg’s Law of Information Sharing

By SAUL HANSELL

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. (Credit: Craig Ruttle/AP)

On stage at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, was cheerfully unruffled.
Mr. Zuckerberg pinned his optimism on a change in behavior among Internet users: that they are ever more willing to tell others what they are doing, who their friends are, and even what they look like as they crawl home from the fraternity party.
“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.”
Call it Zuckerberg’s Law.
Mr. Zuckerberg is too low-key to compare his observation to the law first articulated by Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years.
But if it turns out to be accurate, Mr. Zuckerberg’s prediction may turn out to be just as important to society.
And if Facebook is even half as good at exploiting Zuckerberg’s Law as Intel was at exploiting Moore’s Law, Mr. Zuckerberg will be a very happy man indeed.