Wednesday, July 19, 2006
A silly tale of anonymous yuppie male bonding: This morning I shut the door of my apartment and headed toward the elevators to start my commute to work. In front of me walked another man my age, also presumably heading to his job. He pressed the button, calling for the elevator while I was still half way down the hall. When I was about 20 paces away the lift arrived, and this man was nice enough to hold the door. Inside the elevator was another guy about our age, also dressed for the rat race.
The doors closed behind us and we started down from the 11th floor. All of us were something less than awake, that state where it’s only the force of routine that compels a man to move. We were three men likely all of similar means, living in the same overpriced high-rise, all likely headed to Manhattan, and probably all ending our journeys at near identical cubes.
We all looked at one another as if one of us should address our common circumstances. I was the first to break the silence.
“Another day”, I said quietly.
The man to my left raised his fists above his shoulders, and repeated “Another Day”, this time with a louder voice and with a more satirical tone. Then guy on my right repeated the phrase again this time even louder with a visible smile.
Finally the doors opened and we all filed out. Our buildings doorman tells us to all have a good day, and we walk our separate ways.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Think about the children! With the rash of stories about teenage misadventure on myspace, including this one written by my girlfriend, and legislators threatening action against social networking sites, is it time for Rupert Murdock to start worrying?
Sites like facebook, myspace and friendster, suffer from the same problem as the original napster, centralization. These companies are blamed for what users are doing on their networks because they are the one central point that facilitates the connection between all peers.
If you contacted me by leaving a comment on this blog post, and you happened to be an axe murderer, no one is going to blame my hosting provider when I’m killed. Aplus Hosting isn’t NewsCorp. They don’t have deep pockets or political enemies, and make a poor target for a family values crusade.
Kids are fickle, facebook is hot and myspace is not, and visiting friendster is like taking a date to a hospice. Being the flavor of the month is a transient state if the biggest sites bow to pressure and kids feel limited in any way, expect them to move on.
You might think I’m crazy predicting the downfall of myspace, recently ranked as the nets top destination. However this is a crowded field with many competing products, and keeping the interest of the ritalin set isn’t easy. If the current top social networking sites start limiting what users can do and who they can contact, they’ll implode.
What I imagine will replace them are many smaller more generic sites that allow you to have your own web page. They will have a social networking aspect but it will be an optional widget you add onto your page. These widgets, will allow cross-linking between networks. If all you have are smaller sites that allow people to have web pages, if the networking thing isn’t even part of your application, if everything is open, all you really have is the web itself. No centralization, no one to shake down.
