Web 2.0 Summit: Sean Parker Talks Threats to Facebook, Twitter Talks Monetization

The Web 2.0 Summit, one of the most noteworthy technology conferences, began in San Francisco, CA, on Oct. 17.

Sean Parker, former Facebook President and Spotify investor, spoke at the Web 2.0 Summit and had some interesting things to say about the social network.

The threat to Facebook is that power users have gone to Twitter or Google+, said Parker, according to Mashable.

He said that users are leaving because Facebook is not giving them the means to manage an overabundance of daily information.

He does add that for Google+ to take some of the market share away from Facebook it will require systematic, consistent product execution in terms of users, and friends of users, and friends of friends of users all switching over.

Parker says that it happened with MySpace to Facebook and could happen with Facebook to another platform, but Facebook would have to royally screw up and competitors would have to do something truly smart for that to materialize.

Twitter certainly has a knack for processing an ongoing flow of data and updates with its simple 140 characters for those who need better management of glut information.

Parker (@sparker) actually recently joined Twitter himself, on Oct. 3.

His first tweet? Sorry Zuck, I had to do it eventually. (Actually @scooterbraun made me do it.)

Scooter Braun is a talent manager.

Parker also discussed the new groups Facebook has added, such as school, work, family, et cetera. There is the potential to broadcast specific information solely to those various groups, but Facebook has not reached that step yet.

He did defend Facebook when asked about the current issue of tracking with cookies.

Look: There's good creepy and there's bad creepy, he said. Today's creepy is tomorrow's necessity.

The Web 2.0 Summit is a uniting of some of the brightest minds in technology today - including Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and, of course, Mr. Parker.

Costolo revealed that Twitter's promoted tweets are working better than we ever could have hoped.

Promoted Tweets were launched to monetize the social networking platform. It will be expanding its exploratory monetization projects with other ad formats including rich media ads. Rich media ads consist of photo and video based advertising.

Mashable is broadcasting the Web 2.0 Summit live all three days.