NBC just picked up Quarterlife - which was airing on MySpace. Why? Cause of the Writer’s strike.

One week OpenSocial is the next greastest thing since sliced bread, the next week - it’s just a widget platform. And Facebook goes from being vilified, closed eveil empire - to - raising the bar once again and changing the face of the ORIGINAL evil empire - advertising!

The extrapolation that email is the next great social networking battlefield. I point out how foolish this is, yet on second glance - this is EXACTLY what “bringing social to software” is. See! Even I can be wrong!

Everybody shies away from Porno and Adult entertainment - until of course a $1B acquisition happens. Then all of a sudden - its a great business model.

VC Fred Wilson appears to be supporting Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordan’s notions of a meta-social graph - controlled by the end-user. That’s all fine and dandy - but will Fred put his VC money behind his beliefs? That one we’ll have to wait and see. Fred acknowledges that this whole industry is like some sort of baseball game, with each subsequent move by each startup affecting the later innings - as much as the actions of the big players. But at the same time - Fred seems to only look as far as his face and flips companies for profit - cause - well cause Fred is a VC. That’s not what George Steinbrenner does.

The point of this post is that there are several ways to look at actions and movements in this industry. You can be monitor these 20 something brats who get lucky, manipulate the industry and make a bunch of older guys very jealous. Or you can try and track the evolution of innovation, our digital lifestyles, corporate behavior patterns and the relationship between customers and vendors. These notions may have something to do with each other, but rarely are they directly connected.

Its all about money - unfortunately and altruistic matters are relegated to the hell hole known as ‘non-profits’. Doing good and changing the world might be a great subject over cocktails, or get yah into heaven but it doesn’t pay the rent or feed your kids.

YouTube showed that viral, UGC vidos are fun - but also pointed out that anybody can record a TV show and put it on-line. That was great for YouTube - but once a legitimate company bought it (Google) they’ve kicked out all the recorded shows - and thus much of what made YouTube useful.)

The Music industry can bitch and moan about Apple’s monopolistic tendencies - but they cancel their deals with iTunes NOT to provide us better service or more choices -but to RAISE the prices!

The on-going rush of innovation can’t be stopped - but it seems it HAS to be monetized to be innovation. Even Wikipedia couldn’t be left alone - to ’simply’ provide a multi-language open encyclopedia. No! It’s model had to be turned into some sort of for-profit, social something or other.

So the next time you THINK something is innovative or coolio - just wait and see who exploits it and profits from it - before you KNOW that its become real innovation. Take that and put it into your visionary pipe and smoke it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 8:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.