SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — In its day, it was the biggest of the big. Nothing on Earth like it had been seen before. The name itself was evocative of awe, success, inspiration and even envy.
It was, of course, the RMS Titanic, which sideswiped an iceberg and ended up on the bottom of the North Atlantic a century ago, on April 15, 1912. There's no one left alive from that disaster, but you would be hard-pressed to find anyone today whom, if you said the word "Titanic," wouldn't know what you were talking about.
A century later, we have a new seemingly unsinkable ship to talk about: Facebook Inc. (US:FB)
Granted, it's not a facile comparison. One was a passenger liner almost 900 feet long that sank on its maiden voyage; the other is a ubiquitous network of almost 900 million users that so far seems impervious to failure or challenges to its market position. Read about Google's last dance before Facebook goes public.
While 2,224 people took the fateful Titanic trip, Facebook's user base grows by the millions every day.
But the Titanic and Facebook are inextricably tied together in one notable way: their roles in how much communications technology has changed, and hasn't, over the last century and in how we receive information.
When it sailed out of Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, the Titanic was equipped with two state-of-the-art wireless telegraph machines. Titanic needed two of them, because it had to use one for sending and the other for receiving messages. Each had a range of up to 1,000 miles — not enough for Titanic to send a message all the way across the Atlantic, but enough to get a distress signal out to any nearby ships after it started taking on water. (No other ships made it to Titanic before it was too late.)
Fast-forward almost exactly 100 years to the day that Titanic set sail. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is no dummy: He has almost 13 million subscribers to his Facebook feed and knows his audience. Which is why on April 9, he used his own Facebook page to announce his company was buying the mobile-photo app Instagram. The deal was worth approximately $1 billion, roughly the cost of two and half Titanics in today's dollars. (Facebook may be able to build its own navy soon, as it's about to go public in an IPO that could value the company at $100 billion.) Read more about Facebook's $1 billion Instagram acquisition.
So how was Zuckerberg's posting on Instagram received? Within 11 minutes, more than 34,000 people had "liked" it, and as of Thursday it had 142,472 likes.
As quickly as Titanic could send out its SOS, it wasn't enough to save the lives of more than 1,500 passengers. As for Facebook, is there a more successful communications platform out there for getting a message out? Zuckerberg certainly doesn't think so, and about half of the 900 million users who use the service on their mobile devices seem to agree.
In the years ahead, Facebook may come across an iceberg or two. But as host of a never-ending slate of status updates, photos, likes and chats, it commands the high seas, er, the communications airwaves like nothing else before.
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