

Are You in a Bubble? - pacov
http://diegobasch.com/are-you-in-a-bubble

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davepeck
Why think about it when <http://TechBubbleForEveryoneOrJustMe.com/> has you
covered? ;-)

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peteforde
There's a lot of smoke being blown into this "bubble".

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I4VKj4d0WI>

Personally, I can't wait for the pendulum to swing. People seem to have
forgotten that it's far easier to launch a company when everyone else is
panicking and running for safety. You're competing with fewer players, it's
easier to find talent and there's more of a focus on starting actual
businesses that generate sustained, predictable revenue.

Sounds great to me.

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mephi5t0
I am not in bubble. I AM bubble. 16 yrs in IT add pounds.

On the other hand: I don't think Facebook "bubbles" will impact IT in a big
way. Theoretically, if FB drops dead tomorrow - tech won't suffer that much.
It will hurt companies that do business with FB, some marketing people like
BuddyMedia etc. But there will be something else to do. And tech market is not
based on FB, FB is a niche.

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kurtvarner
_On the other hand, the Facebook bubble could pop any day. Most of the world
would barely notice, and LinkedIn would still get business from other growing
industries. Disclosure: I own LNKD shares._

Of course he's a believer in LinkedIn and owns shares. His company was
acquired by them. I'd like to know if he actually purchased more shares than
what he was given with the acquisition.

~~~
nc17
If he can sell the shares, it makes no difference. They are public and liquid,
good as cash.

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stevenj
The price of the biggest new tech company of all, Facebook, has done nothing
but go down since its IPO.

The public has said it's overvalued at $100 billion.

That indicates to me that we're not in a bubble.

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cft
What I do not understand, is why Facebook is called a "technology company".
It's no more of a technology company than News Corp or any other media
company. The technology there is rather simple, compared to biotech or SpaceX.
I would classify it as media/entertainment (which harkens back to Zukerberg
Productions) as it used to say at the bottom of FB a few years ago.

~~~
dasil003
I take it you're a web developer of some sort, so web technology seems
trivial. But building, evolving and operating a site like Facebook is an
incredible technical challenge. Sure it's not biotech or space tech which
require hard science, and sure the penalties for failure are not as high, but
the infrastructure they're building is world class tech. Running a newspaper
site at the same scale would be orders of magnitude easier because it's much
more trivially cacheable, and I say "would be" because there is no newspaper
site that operates at that scale.

Also, speaking of News Corp, let me point out that a big part of how Facebook
killed MySpace was MySpace was not able to come anywhere near the performance,
or pace of evolution of Facebook. It's also worth noting that the previous
market leader, Friendster, failed because they couldn't fix their performance
problems when they were a tiny fraction of the size Facebook is now.

There's no need to mince words: Facebook is slinging serious scalability sauce
that could only be developed by a leading technology company.

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altrego99
Reading the title, can't help reacalling Remember Me from TNG, where Beverly
Crusher gets entrapped in a warp bubble. Oh, those were the days... watching
TNG on nights before almost every exams.

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ixacto
FB is worth approximately the same as Kraft foods (70 vs 68 BN). Take away FB
for 3 days and you get people bitching on twitter and some lost business for
their advertisers. Take away junk food for 3 days and you get riots. Here is
what wolfram-alpha thinks FB is going to do: <http://imgur.com/2c5me>

Which company will be here in 20 years...

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nc17
It's not just tech bloggers, here's an article by the Washington Post about
Facebook and traders betting against it:

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/could-facebook-
fall-a...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/could-facebook-fall-all-the-
way-to-22/2012/05/24/gJQADFuenU_story.html)

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jakejake
It does in some ways remind me of the first bubble and I'd like to think that
we're all a lot smarter now. I don't really see a massive crash happening like
before. But anytime there are huge businesses which are not actually making
the revenue to merit their stock valuation - there is potential of trouble.

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michaelochurch
My issue with this bubble is that there's no underlying. Instead of green
technology, we see Zynga employing people who work full-time trying to exploit
the same class of people that were targeted by the dreaded telemarketers of 10
years ago.

The late-90s bubble was frothier, with all the talk of a recession-proof "New
Economy" (oddly, most people now long for the Old one) and the massively
overvalued technology stocks. Even still, there was a real underlying. The
Internet really was changing the way people do business in a rather permanent
way. The reason for the bubble was that people overestimated how soon certain
changes would arrive.

This bubble doesn't have much of an underlying. I'd even argue that there
isn't one. Facebook is a decent product and has provided a lot of value to its
users, but it's not as earth-shaking as the Internet, and these "Facebook's
tapeworm" startups like Zynga are insults to the millions of people trying to
build things that are real. Also, the current climate of extreme social
openness (where people want to broadcast their careers and locations without
thought to whether they really want people to have access to that data in 5
years) is going to end, and the "cool" social startups will either be dead, or
successful and "uncool", within a few years.

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wavephorm
I bet a lot of VC and angel investors right now are looking at those FB quotes
and starting to get a knot in their stomach. The jig is up, the Social Network
Bubble that VC's have been hyping and pumping non-stop for the past couple
years is over. I bet we'll see a return to interest in companies that have
actual revenue, actual customers, and actual businesses.

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maybird
I don't think it'll be over until Twitter IPOs and fails to pop like FB.

I think we need at least these two major brands going thru the same fate for
the social networking bubble to be affected.

