[mdlug] Facebook was Re: Google Wave invites

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 21:55 -0500, Philip Morales wrote:
> if you can go back in time, right before social sites started becoming 
> popular, would you make one yourself? knowing already that it'll make 
> you money and give you fame at the same time?

There is [was] no guarantee of that;  there were hundreds, if not
thousands, of these sites.  Today two [FB & MySpace] have prominence
plus a few lingering strays and a couple of niche slots [linked-in].
Remember the dot-com bubble? Pop!  I did talk to a couple .com companies
about employment - to my knowledge they are gone.

> having such a mindset about famed social sites would take you nowhere, 

Having this mindset has led me to continuous employment at an
interesting job with enjoyable co-workers.  I guess if that is
nowhere....

> wouldn't it be better if you'd think about how they made money from such 
> sites and how you can apply that to what you're doing right now or even 
> what you like to do?

Hours spent pitching to venture capitalists....  while knowing what is
really a steaming pile of PHP muck with serious scalability and security
issues [which at least the early versions of FB where].  I think I'd
rather chew glass.

> jealousy is the greatest form of flattery.

Disagree,  jealousy and covetousness is a symptom of a petty and
ungenerous mind.

> Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > On Sun, 2009-12-13 at 11:19 -0500, Peter Bart wrote:
> >> On Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:06:32 -0500
> >> Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at opengroupware.us> wrote:
> >>> On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 10:44 -0500, Peter Bart wrote:
> >>>> On Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:07:50 +0100
> >>>> Rich Elswick <painbank at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>> Farmville seems popular now.
> >>>> Still Facebook. FWIW I think ranks as the most
> >>>> useless !"@#¥^~%$&*?)(/\ ever. Sorry
> >>> Yea, "popular" and "useful"/"productive" are not equivalent.  
> >> 	Now, why are the owners of such "popular" time wasters multi
> >> millionaires while so many very useful application developers
> >> languish?  Not that everything in life must be usefull and productive,
> > Same reason actors, or musicians, or all other manner of useless people
> > get paid more than actually important people.
> > People are more willing to pay for something they like over something
> > they use.  Don't even get me started. :)
> > One of the reasons I resigned myself to non-millionare status a long
> > time ago. :)  None of these things are interesting.  There is nothing
> > new or novel about FB.  What it does is nothing beyond what a BBS did
> > ages ago.  Coding FB would be *boring*!  It is just a matter of
> > right-place-right-time, there were many FBs before FB and many at the
> > same time as FB that have all been relegated to the dust-bin.  What
> > annoys me most is the founders of FB, and like sites, are heralded as
> > 'innovators'.  Bogus,  they were the equivalent of lottery ticket
> > holders.  They didn't create anything new.  Society was ready to plunge
> > into a new [to them] form of media muck and FB was in the line-up of
> > candidates (as was friendster, myspace, etc...)
> >>  but some of these things just complicate my life! If one of these so
> >> called "applications" doesn't perform as expected it's immediately the
> >> computers fault. Which then becomes my problem, even if it's at the
> >> very rock bottom of my list. I wonder sometimes whether some of the
> >> slowness; of these applications; is due to them not being able to
> >> collect the same amount of information as from a Windows system. 
> > Dunno,  I use FB only from openSUSE/GNOME/Firefox and performance seems
> > very good.  It is a rather chunky and JS heavy interface;  and rather
> > badly coded according the web devs I know [and respect, which is a small
> > subset of web devs].
> >>> Most of the social-networking hype, is just that: hype;  a passing
> >>> fad. Yep, I'm a geek who works in IT, and I mean that.