Yuri Milner is a 48-year-old Muscovite, post-Glastnost billionaire, and Putin clone has become one of the largest investors in digital media in the U.S. this past year, investing a huge sum in the new social platform we all know as Facebook. Milner is one very smart cookie: he has an advanced degree in theoretical physics and was doing research at the Institute of physics in the Russian Academy of Sciences before attending the Wharton School of Business and joining the World Bank where he was involved in the development of the financial sector in Russia. Milner, reports Michael Wolfe in Vanity Fair , “says he’s betting on personalities—Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook…which is something investors often say: it’s all about talent and drive. But a platform bet suggests a view beyond just gifted management. It’s a control-the-universe play.” In the same that Google is a control-the universe play in search, Microsoft Windows for the corporate and consumer desktop, and Apple’s iPhone for communications and entertainment. “Having a platform, in this geopolitical theory, makes you a superpower,” Wolfe adds. “Microsoft achieved world domination with Windows when operating systems were the ultimate platforms. But a platform is now a more metaphorical construct, suggesting not just functionality but a framework of behavior, and even a point of view, that habituates users and fosters their dependence, with an eye toward subsuming the rest of the digital world. Like Google.”. Which is why the emergence of a platform that acts as our social graph is so compelling to an investors like Milner and PayPal founder Peter Thiel, another major early investor in Facebook. Wolfe says that Facebook’s move at the end of last year to revise its privacy settings, was “really part of an ongoing attempt to make more user data public, shareable, and searchable—meaning Facebook has the opportunity to become the platform through which we search, not just public information but individual information, ever growing masses of it (including pictures). Search moves from the Web into people’s lives.” This prospect leads,to an I.P.O. for Facebook this year, which will transform the industry much as Netscape’s IPO did back in 1996 launching the Internet Era. A Facebook IPO could trigger a flood of dammed-up quality Web 2.0 IPOS and provoke the ultimate superpower platform war that far exceeds the old Microsoft Explorer/Netscape faceoff: a war between Google’s dominance over Web-page-based search and Facebook’s (and soon, Twitter’s) command of the “social graph.” Casey Kazan via Vanity Fair

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Is Social Trumping Search – Will Facebook Become Bigger Than Google?