$0 is No Longer an Innovation

“I wish there were a for-pay service I could switch to which would be easy and fast and nothing would break. I think the free email has killed off all the good for-pay email.” – Dave Winer

From Opt Out’s ‘Free as in Lunch’ chapter:

“An email client that can handle today’s daily onslaught of email hasn’t been released. The $0 price tag has effectively killed any re-thinking of the email and the email application as a whole. This means our understanding and experience with one of the most mature, open, and decentralized communications technology is frozen in a time before any of my, and perhaps your, children were born.” – Garrick van Buren, Opt Out

I’ve Got a Theory…

My hypothesis suggests that social media engagement and macroeconomic conditions are inversely related.

Meaning: as people become more professionally engaged they will naturally engage less with social media.

Yes, this means the boom in Facebook and Twitter activiy etc over the past 4 years was more about people coping with interesting times than anything else.

How can we test my hypothesis?
– U.S. underemployment drops below 18%?
– Other options?

Like Eternal September

“Facebook became uncool when it opened up the site to people who weren’t in your same college.” – jshintaku

While I dislike Facebook, I find the possibility that, it’s popular because it once was cool, very amusing.

“Eternal September is a Usenet slang expression, coined by Dave Fischer, for the period beginning September 1993. The expression encapsulates the belief that an endless influx of new users (newbies) since that date has continuously degraded standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet and the wider Internet.”

P.S. Get off my lawn.

Two Prices

“This is, after all, the way of our new product-based civilization — in order to participate as a citizen of the social web, you must yourself manufacture content. Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor.” – Paul Ford, New York Magazine

Elsewhere:
A brilliant comic from Jen Sorensen:

(thanks for the pointer Darrin).