Startup Facebook is enabling a new concept we call “Social Sharing”

In today’s Wall Street Journal, there was an interview with Mark Zuckerberg including a picture of him wearing flip-flops and discussion centered on the announcement that Facebook would allow companies to provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. Since these companies will be able to link into Facebook users’ networks of online friends, they are transforming from a platform that uses social networking as its core to making it a function that enables what we are calling “social sharing”.

It is not specifically “social shopping” or “social news” because they are segments and the application and openness of the offering is so broad.

Social sharing is shown from the example put forth in the WSJ – “For instance, an online retailer could build a service in Facebook to let people recommend music or books to their friends, based on the relationships they’ve already established on the site. Or a media company could let groups of users share news articles with each other on a page inside Facebook.”

This is the strategy that Yahoo! should have taken a while ago but instead tried to buy Facebook for $1 billion but the investors thought it was worth more (we could all be so lucky) and Zuckerberg wanted to keep management control.

It is obvious at this point that Facebook wants to go public and what seemed to be greed was good foresight. If they are able to partner with an Amazon or even the millions of small businesses that need to leverage the power of crowds they will really take the thunder from Yahoo!.

So what is the Startup Spark angle? Well, two things. First as a startup you can see that you must be open to new business models and the flexibility to change in order to grow. Second, if you have a strong vision and a buyer comes along don’t take the offer unless it comes with the shared commitment to see the vision to fruition.