There Is No Plan

The real threat that Google Plus represents for Facebook is not that it’ll outsize it anytime soon, but that it outclasses it in short order. At a billion minus users, Facebook is the internet equivalent of Shanghai (with its puny real life population of thirty million), a shiny, boosterist, creation which is mostly facade (pardon the pun). Google Plus represents something that – in the short term at least seems to have more, dare one say it, integrity. Certainly Facebook’s apparent amorality doesn’t help. It seems too bent on exploiting its users. G+ doesn’t appear to be so brazen.

Last year Myspace was the wrong side of the tracks and FB was the high-rent district. But now the tracks have shifted ever so subtly. Myspace is now the internet version of the municipal dump. FB is the formerly wealthy neighborhood that’s now getting a little seedy at the edges, and G+ is the shiny new district on the hill, full of hope, and definitely less gaudy (i.e. no ads as yet). If Google can maintain the shine on it’s brand upgrade (born of a new cohesion and better leadership), it might just solidify its long term better than anyone could have anticipated.

I'm with a bevy of hot babes. Facial Recognition rocks.

It’s your face. Don’t let Facebook tell you otherwise.

Perhaps it was always about creating a big book of people’s faces.  But it certainly seems like Facebook’s latest attempt to control the ‘social graph’ of the entire planet is the ultimate emblem of its profoundly amoral, conscience-free, pursuit-of-profit megalomania. The idea that you can post a picture and that everyone in it is tagged for future ‘sharing purposes’ crosses the line in a way none of its past transgressions has even approached. But like all the others, it’s pretty clever; incremental and insidious, rather than explosive and egregious. As with all efficiently spreading viruses, Facebook is stealthy and surreptitious in it encroachment and colonization. It feeds on that very human social impulse that we all to a greater or lesser extent share (no pun intended).  And as such, its parasitic reach is almost universal. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the marketing tricks that Wall Street likes to pull these days is that they’re “experts”. The ballooning banks, ratings agency scumbags, and hedge fun hyenas front their operations with learned economists, know-it-all analysts and other sundry eggheads who ponce around on radio and TV just to give the world the impression that their company’s greed is backed up by, you know, hard facts.

Of course, it’s all just marketing BS. 99% of them don’t know shit from shinola.

After the debacle that was the ’08 financial meltdown you’d think we’d have got the message that they’re nothing but pump and dump guys in decent suits. But we haven’t.

Now Thereisnoplan doesn’t pretend to be an expert in IPOs and all that jazz but it seems to me that there’s something decidedly fishy about all these fabulous valuations that are flying around for tech companies these days. Read the rest of this entry »

In the real world friendship is a big deal. It has meaning. It has to be earned. Losing it can be devastating.

But in the detached, bloodless world of the Social Network much of that meaning is lost. It’s almost as if the same word is used to describe two states that differ profoundly.

There’s a very good reason that social networks use the term ‘friend’. Simply put, it’s good for business. It adds value to what they do. If Facebook were to suggest we “find new acquaintances” or “make new connections” they’d still be operating out of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room. Connections work for LinkedIn, which has at its core a non-social, almost clinical networking purpose, but “Friend” is a big word, a simple, profound and potentially profitable word. It’s a critical source of Facebook’s success. But the use of the term isn’t at all convincing, and far worse, is damaging and socially corrosive. The Social Network commoditizes and verbifies friendship, appropriating its value along the way, and demeaning the very concept of friendship – which is after all part of the glue that holds humanity together.

It’s the sanitized uniformity at the core of Social Networking that is also its profound weakness. For real life friends, the social network is essentially superfluous. Real friendships don’t need the artificial landscape of Facebook. They did very nicely before it came along, for thousands of years in fact. For obscure acquaintances, and former friends one has lost touch with etc, the term “friend” invites expectations that almost certainly will not be met. The constant swirl of meaningful friendships subtly devalued by the flat-lining semantics of the social network and those meaningless ‘friendships’ overvalued by the same social network make for a rather dysfunctional, intimacy free landscape, driven by habit, marketing, and an unnatural distortion of human relationships.

In short, they are a geek’s paradise. Read the rest of this entry »