There is supposed to be something of an Internet revolution going on right now in Egypt, but have you noticed that the Internet isn’t directly involved? Oh there’s plenty of Twittering going-on, but it is all about the demonstrations and civil unrest in Cairo — not from those crowds. The Internet was turned off, you say, along with the mobile phone networks, but that misses my point. I think the Internet component of this social movement is being overblown. While it may be easy for a reporter to say that the Internet or texting or Facebook or Twitter is at the heart of what appears to be a multinational revolutionary juggernaut, I don’t think that’s […]
2011 prediction #5: Facebook forks
Facebook now claims more than 500 million members. Facebook is too big. Already we’re seeing Facebook defections by, well, me. And others, there are other people than me who are put-off by the simple fact that this social network is becoming as ubiquitous as bad breath in dogs.
LinkedIn, at only 80 million members, is already having success with its branding as the working professional’s Facebook. Well the real Facebook can’t allow that, can they?
So expect this year a Facebook fork with the social network offering premium services to get back all those high earners over at LinkedIn. We may see several Facebook channels in fact. How else can Zuckerberg appeal to those of us who, like Groucho Marx, “refuse to join any club that […]
Change of Life
What happened to Second Life? The 3-D virtual world from Linden Lab is still very much around but I don’t spend much time there, do you? Second Life has peaked. And there is something to be learned from this transition.
Facebook is hot right now and Second Life is not, and some of that comes down to the difference between fantasy and reality. Second Life is a fantasy environment — an EverQuest without the quest — and that’s the problem. It has the heavy processing requirements of a game without the rich textural depth of a Tolkein or even of […]
Don't be a Facebook whore
Just in case you ever sue me, you should know that I have every e-mail I have ever sent or received since 1992. That’s crazy from a legal standpoint, I know, but I can’t help myself. I’m obsessive-compulsive that way. But having a clear view of 16+ years of mail amounting to more than four gigabytes of mainly ascii text gives me a sobering sense of how poorly e-mail does the job lately compared to its glory days of, say, 1999.
More than ninety percent of my mail today by volume is spam. Back in 1999 spam was about 15 percent of my mail. Of course I am in large part to […]
