Monthly Archives: June 2011

MySpace sells for $35 Million, Facebook to follow

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So MySpace sold for $35 million, which is nice for a startup, and pretty poor for a company on which Rupert Murdoch spent a billion dollars.

I think this is the way of centralized social network software. The best of them learn from their predecessors, but inevitably end up overcrowded. Social spaces change. You don’t hang out at the same bar you hung out with in college, and you won’t use the same social networks. Specialized networks like LinkedIn will likely fare better, as long as they stay focused on a core mission.

Ezra Klein says “killer app of Google+ is the ability to start your social network over w/benefit of years of Facebook experience.” I hate to say it, but that doesn’t strike me as a killer app like Lotus 1-2-3 did.

Phil Windley says “just realized G+ is using asymmetric follow.” I think this is right and important. “Friend” relationships are rarely perfect mirrors of each other, and the software asymmetric follow pattern is closer to the human patterns of friendship, respect and fandom.

I suspect that Google has gone further, and consciously built on those patterns with friend, family, acquaintance. That’s cool, and it’s a obvious outgrowth of Flickr’s default circles of friends and family, and adds making new circles easily.

So what does this mean for you?

First, it’s time to start thinking about leavingFacebook. Get your social network back in email where it belongs. Start trying to get your data out of Facebook’s databases before everything about you sells for pennies on the dollar.

If you’re a product manager for one of these things, you’re building on the happy dopamine releases we all get when we get positive social feedback. (That’s why Facebook only has a “Like” button.) You need to realize that the dopamine-release cycle requires bigger and bigger hits of wuffie over time. And the grimaces and hesitations add up. People remember the negatives for a long time. So the bad graph builds, and over time the happy graph drops away, and with it your eyeballs, minutes, options and stock options.

So finally, enjoy it while you can, Zuck.

Goodbye, Rinderpest, we’re probably better off without you

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On Tuesday in a ceremony in Rome, the United Nations is officially declaring that for only the second time in history, a disease has been wiped off the face of the earth.

The disease is rinderpest.

Everyone has heard of smallpox. Very few have heard of the runner-up.

That’s because rinderpest is an epizootic, an animal disease. The name means “cattle plague” in German, and it is a relative of the measles virus that infects cloven-hoofed beasts, including cattle, buffaloes, large antelopes and deer, pigs and warthogs, even giraffes and wildebeests. The most virulent strains killed 95 percent of the herds they attacked.

But rinderpest is hardly irrelevant to humans. It has been blamed for speeding the fall of the Roman Empire, aiding the conquests of Genghis Khan and hindering those of Charlemagne, opening the way for the French and Russian Revolutions, and subjugating East Africa to colonization.

(“Rinderpest, Scourge of Cattle, Is Vanquished,” New York Times)

The full article is fascinating, and worth reading.