Archive for the 'Econ & Social Software' Category

Social…

Friday, May 16th, 2008

During the 80s and 90s, the only common uses of the word “social” as an adjective in front of a noun was for “social studies” that you took in elementary school, and maybe “social security”.  Then in the middle of this decade we started to see it applied to Web 2.0 concepts (e.g. social bookmarking, social networking, […]

Profile Pic Management

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

Since there is practically a site related to every aspect of Social Networking - why isn’t there one for profile pic management (or maybe Flickr should do a feature).  I don’t particularly go out of my way to join social media sites, but even so I have more than 10 profile pics that I have […]

Hardware Always Beats Software in the End

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Reading about Mowser’s demise (I sat in on a few mobile search meetings with Russell Beattie at Yahoo! a couple years ago), it reminded me that everytime smart people try to invent ways to deal with hardware limitations with software (like Mowser tried to do by smartly converting regular web pages into mobile web pages), they are burned […]

Facebook vs. MySpace

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

There’s a lot of buzz about Facebook these days, and the stats point to a still dominant MySpace. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/11/myspace-still-the-king/
One factor in their differences that I think is critical to their product direction is that Facebook avoided getting swallowed up by Yahoo! whereas MySpace became part of the Fox-NewsCorp empire.  And I think in small but strategic ways, you see […]

Price = Marginal Cost

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

As I was buying a digital “gift” (aka icons) on Facebook for Caterina who just had her baby, I saw that the one I wanted to buy was a limited edition (100,000 only! Buy now!) and it cost $1.  I don’t know how many of these Facebook sells each month, but it is easily a side business […]