Always Coming, Never Here

If Facebook ever did go the paid route, I would ditch it instantly. It's not worth it to me, I already pay for this journal and other avenues of expression... what does this say about the "value" of my social network? I think what it tells me is that the network is at any given time just a commodity - one that I can rebuild and reform anywhere. It's great when I have it up and running somewhere, and there's a new and/or interesting application I can use with it, but ultimately all that matters is that I have my network and nobody can ever take it away from me. My network is internal to me at all times.

Going to bed now. Still buzzed from pork overload.

I've noticed that most of my friends (and myself included) are much more interested in posting stuff to Facebook now. I think this is for several reasons:

1) Lots and lots of people are using it (stronger network).
2) The interface is easier to use - you can post links and photos and so forth with no HTML needed (LJ always makes you go through a couple gyrations to do stuff like that, FB makes it painless and prettier)
3) It's shorter attention span; less content, and updated much more frequently.

I don't think LJ can do anything about 1 and 3, but they could at least be trying to make their product slightly easier to use. All they have to do is replicate the Post Links and Post Photos features the way they have them set up on Facebook, and then make the Friends page smaller and more wall-like, the way Facebook does it. It's the interface, stupid!!

Someday people will learn that greed is not sustainable. The serpent can only eat so much of its own tail before it chokes.

I predict that the DJIA will settle down when it hits about 3500. I suspect it will take nearly another year to get to that point, when the markets all finally bottom out. Some time after Google's stock tanks, I think.

Why 3500? Because that's where it was 15 years ago, after more than a decade of steady growth through the 80s. That's where it was at just as the Internet first came into play - before people started going apeshit with everything, and began to believe that castles could be built on clouds. How could we possibly have created 300% more wealth out of thin air? The DJIA had barely broken 1000 for two decades prior to the 80s, and then we saw real growth with the rise of computing and software and general advancement of technology up to the early 90s. But somehow people went batty along the way and started ignoring things like "profits" and "business models" and suddenly CEOs started making exorbitant salaries, and more and more snake oil salesmen popped up to part fools and their money with made up shit they called "financial instruments", usually aided and abetted by our own government with tailor-made legislation paid for by the finest of lobbyists. And what was the result of all that?

Well we've now witnessed the implosion of finance, real estate, and car companies. Really these events are still ongoing, these prideful bastards haven't fallen all the way yet - all the bailout money in the world won't cushion their impacts either. But the real killer will be when high tech hits the skids again.

Internet bubble 2.0 is on the way. Internet advertising is going to pop it, again. Advertising revenue is just not sustainable on the Internet, because there's no way to make money from it unless you completely control the medium. It worked great for newspapers when they had regional monopolies. It worked great for TV with the network and cable monopolies. And of course the Internet killed both of those monopolies! So the Internet must be the future monopoly, right? Wrong.

Google's doing pretty well with ad revenue because they've got a search monopoly - but how long will that really last? Hint: it's already eroding, because iPhones and user generated content from social networks make Google obsolete. So wait, social networking is the new monopoly? Well, Facebook certainly won't have a monopoly on social networking for any long period of time... remember when MySpace was the monopoly? Ask yourself: is Facebook really worth billions? Was MySpace? No. That's utterly ridiculous, because people always move on to the next site, and the Internet is too big to really control.

Did Google ever advertise itself? Wikipedia? MySpace and Facebook? YouTube? Never. Because viral social networks spread word faster and more effectively than any advertising ever could. And when you actually have a piece of hardware that enables that viral action (iPhone: Google Killer) you're going to see just how ineffective ads actually are in comparison. Someone can write an iPhone app that will change a playing field overnight and render whole industries worth of web sites obsolete. You just can't beat the power of a network of millions and millions of people continuously sending the freshest live audio, video, GPS, and pure data streams. All the dead data in Google's web page index is worthless in comparison.

Maybe people will try to speculate a biotech bubble into existence, but I doubt that will succeed. People are too freaked out by biohacking, and legislation and regulation will continually muddle its development, too much so for it to really boom like the other deregulated industries all did.

This animation site is totally cool. Check out number 86.

It's a FACT:

Electricity is inherently filthy, and ferries wailing, evil spirits into your home that hate all life.