

Fix Social Networks' Fantasy Valuation Bullshit. - imaginator
http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/not-future-i-signed-part-one-fixing-social-networks-fantasy-valuation-bullshit

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CurrentB
Facebook happens to have the best advertising product that ever existed. When
I click on your company's group's ad's like button, all my friends see it. No
other advertising has ever parodied word of mouth advertising so successfully,
and they've hardly begun to take advantage of this fact.

In addition, Facebook has reached the mindshare of the masses in a way that no
other internet company has. No other internet company has EVER had my parents
and aunts and uncles talking for hours about an internet company though the
holidays. It brought talking about the internet in public to the masses.

Facebook will have a 12 figure valuation by this time next year, and Google
will lose its current level of dominance in the online ads sector. I'll put my
money where my mouth is if someone want's to propose a safe way to go about
doing it...

~~~
imaginator
How long until the novelty of seeing your friends' "Likes" wears off?

If it's the ultimate advertising platform, where's the money?

~~~
phlux
The money is going to come from, and is already coming from, the fact that
advertising on facebook has already been permeating other media and mediums.

On several commercials on TV this last weekend I saw name brands that I knew
who, instead of listing their .com, listed simply their facebook URL instead.

This is seen in print now too.

So the scary aspect of this is that advertisers are already seeing facebook as
the platform -- and this is due to the ridiculous amount of personal interest
data, and further, connections between people and interests. (e.g. the number
of people in your network that all like Burton Snowboards etc.)

For me, I refuse to have a facebook account for many many reasons, not the
least of which is that I find advertising to be nothing more than Thought
Pollution.

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brown9-2
If you aren't an investor or otherwise involved in one of the company's with a
"bullshit fantasy" valuation, how does the "bullshit fantasy" valuation hurt
you at all? The article doesn't seem to answer this question.

If anything I would think that the existence of a "bullshit fantasy" valuation
marks a great territory for someone to come in and innovate and steal the
market, like Google did in the late 90s.

~~~
foljs
> If you aren't an investor or otherwise involved in one of the company's with
> a "bullshit fantasy" valuation, how does the "bullshit fantasy" valuation
> hurt you at all?

Gee, I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the government giving
away 700 billion dollars to financial companies burned by rampant bullshit
fantasy valuations...

~~~
brown9-2
I should have phrased my question as limited to valuations of tech/software
companies only, since that seems to be what we are discussing here.

~~~
foljs
> I should have phrased my question as limited to valuations of tech/software
> companies only, since that seems to be what we are discussing here.

OK, then. When the web 1.0 bubble burst in 1999, a whole lot of people lost
their money. Bullshit valuations make the stock exchange a snake-oil market.

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Tycho
Hmm, maybe that's what Diaspora should have been building - an open protocol
for exchanging users' 'social' data, meaning you could migrate your FaceFriend
account straight onto MyBook without setting anything up, or you could add
friends from completely different services into your feed just so long as the
same SOA was maintained across companies.

Facebook could do this themselves to stop anyone else ever getting a large
share of the market (destroy the barriers for entry).

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imaginator
Remember when Myspace was worth billions?

How quickly the next hot thing comes crashing down:
[http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/01/10/myspace-to-
lay-...](http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/01/10/myspace-to-lay-
off-550-to-600-employees-tomorrow/)

------
bhousel
The valuations will fix themselves in time. That's how company valuations
work.

~~~
foljs
Or they will crash and burn taking jobs, people and national economies with
them. That's also another way they work.

~~~
bhousel
No. The world doesn't end when overvalued companies go through corrections or
failures. It may seem that way for some people and for some time, but whole
economies do not just stop working. And really, we're talking about Twitter
and Facebook here, not Enron and Bear Sterns.

~~~
foljs
> The world doesn't end when overvalued companies go through corrections or
> failures.

Nobody said anything about the "world ending".

And a few overvalued companies "getting through corrections or failures" has
different effects than a whole lot of overvalued companies getting through
corrections or failures. The second case is called a "bubble burst".

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wccrawford
Sorry, but you don't 'sign up for a future' without actively working towards
it. Complaining that others haven't done what you wanted doesn't work.

~~~
btilly
Your complaint seems off base.

This is the first of a 3 part series. The third one includes this paragraph:

 _At buddycloud we're working to create an ecosystem of servers and clients
that will enable open federated social networking. We're trying to avoid as
many of the problems mentioned here by quietly doing things the right way. We
are building some nice mobile clients. If you would like to help us please
join buddycloud's dev team._

So it seems that they are indeed actively working towards the future that they
are talking about.

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demind
wccrawford, bb hi Simon)

