Thursday, November 01, 2012

Facebook bubble

The era of the dot com bubble isn't over it seems. Like inventions everywhere, the existence of a purely online entity has to have value at least as great as the sum of it's parts or it will not fly. Google provides a vital and ever growing service that certainly does that. Collating, searching and filtering data must only become more important as we generate more and more of it. Google's approach to data research also provides spinoffs to real technologies such as AI, translation, mobile etc. Facebook on the other hand doesn't provide anything that cannot be duplicated by a couple of students working in a dorm room for three months and the staff at Facebook know this.
Social networking is huge but providing a place for people to post even more innane pictures of their blasted cats isn't. Despite its huge user base, facebook only provides a way for people who already know eachother to share more pictures of cats. There's no money in that.

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