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Fix Social Networks' Fantasy Valuation Bullshit.

11 points| imaginator | 15 years ago |buddycloud.com

24 comments

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[+] CurrentB|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
How long until the novelty of seeing your friends' "Likes" wears off?

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

[+] brown9-2|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] conjectures|15 years ago|reply
Subprime mortgages were in the set of bs fantasy valuations. Their puncture did hurt other people.

...but for the individual who spots a bs fantasy valuation - logic suggests shorting the stock.

[+] foljs|15 years ago|reply
> 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...

[+] Tycho|15 years ago|reply
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).

[+] bhousel|15 years ago|reply
The valuations will fix themselves in time. That's how company valuations work.
[+] foljs|15 years ago|reply
Or they will crash and burn taking jobs, people and national economies with them. That's also another way they work.
[+] wccrawford|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.

[+] moconnor|15 years ago|reply
The author founded http://buddycloud.com (an open, federated social network) - there was a lot of buzz around its Diaspora integration not so long ago; he already is working towards a (in his view, at least) better future.
[+] imaginator|15 years ago|reply
"...And then how we can work together to create an open platform."
[+] demind|15 years ago|reply
wccrawford, bb hi Simon)