Work In Progress
Currently in the process of moving everything. Give me some time!
The (Dark) Age of Facebook
I believe the next decade will be the “Age of Facebook” as Michael Arrington said over the weekend. Microsoft owned the 90’s game, Google owned the 00’s, and Facebook & mobile technology will dominate the next decade. However, I have to admit, I feel quite differently about Facebook compared to Google or even Microsoft.
Personally, I rely on Google (Gmail, maps, docs, calendar, search, reader, chat, etc) on an hourly basis. Every so often I deactivate my Facebook account for a week or so at a time with absolutely no issues. My daily life would be much more challenging if I did the same for Google’s products. Google’s products increase my productivity, help me make money, to learn, to explore, and to lose myself in the wealth of the world’s knowledge and information. Also, I have a trust with Google that Facebook has yet to convince me to have for them as well. Google has a higher cause, to organize the world’s information. It seems like Facebook’s higher cause is to control the internet and make a lot of money doing it.
With all that said… is there anything we can do to stop it? I’m worried that the primary internet entity for the next decade will not offer me an amount of value on par with the amount of control and power that they wield.
Tell me what you think on Hacker News or on Twitter.
Plant the seed, write the letter, get yourself out there, and more
As I write this I am sitting in the back of a cab having just landed in Cincinnati from Chicago. It is a Friday night at midnight, and I’m a college student. Most of my friends will be out tonight relieving the stress from yet another rough week of school projects. They will be partying, drinking, dancing, and/or eating burritos, perhaps all at once. If I was still in Chicago, you could bet with good odds that I would be firm at my desk staring into a glowing computer screen. It is in this world that I often live, constantly ‘on’, consuming and producing everything I can. This incessant drive has led me to receive many lucky and exciting opportunities.
As a dear friend to me recently said, “Plant the seed, and sooner or later it will blossom”… or something like that. Nevermind that I probably butchered it and it is a cheesy statement, but she actually has a great point. My generation is the “me first” generation, and we are consistently sitting around waiting for opportunity to slap us in the face. It just doesn’t happen that way. Wake up every morning and work your ass off. Along the way, plant a few seeds, write a few letters, and do good work for the sake of doing great things. Sooner or later the right things will start happening. Then you will be laying in a buttery, comfortable bed on the top floor of the Hilton in Cincinnati thinking back to what brought you to this point. You will realize that some of the smallest and most seemingly insignificant events will be some of the defining pieces of your life that really pull things together down the road. Keep on fighting. Never stop. You will never second guess your decisions.
Spotify keeps on talking about themselves, and that’s about it
The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was last week, and the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, was there to spread some interesting facts about his streaming music startup. Mr. Ek stated that the average Spotify users has roughly 15,000 tracks in their collection, and all Spotify users together have created roughly 100 million playlists. These numbers are astonishing, I agree, but it still doesn’t detail any plans of coming to the USA or becoming a viable, profit-making business in the music industry. This is all just talk until we something significant. Check out the article on Techcrunch here.
Mobile phone subscriptions topping 5 billion in 2010
CNet ran an article touching on the absurd number of mobile devices that are out there in the world. Right now there are roughly 6.8 billion people in the world and 4.6 billion cell phone subscriptions. The subscriptions should surpass 5 billion this year, easily. What makes me excited about this is that the number of computers in the world is a fraction of this number. The number of those computers connected to the internet is even lower than that. So poverty-stricken people all across the world in Africa, Asia, South America, and even in the USA have access to the outside world via their mobile phones.
There are non-profits like FrontlineSMS who are doing an amazing job or making great open-source software to help these people increase their quality of life. They have also have software for medical purposes (FrontlineSMS:Medic) and for building credit (FrontlineSMS:Credit). Keep an eye on the projects surrounding their software because it is some of the most exciting and imagination-capturing stuff going on out there, in my opinion. Keep that in mind this summer when you are complaining about what features the new iPhone doesn’t have. The CNet article is here.
Don’t be cynical. Please.
Greg Knauss has an awesome dialogue with himself of 20-years-ago about the current state of the world. We often forget how amazing of a time we live in, even with all the detriment. This post is a few weeks old, but came out at the same time Conan was going off the air. The main thing I remember Conan saying before he signed off was this:
All I ask of you, especially young people … is one thing. Please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen.
Here is Greg’s post. Read to the end. It is beautiful.
