If social really did help to tip the scale in the Middle-East revolutions, that alone was worth it.
I agree completely. The question is, what factor did sites like Facebook/Twitter play? It would be nice if they were proven to be clear contributors.
This Tech Bubble Is Different
31–40 of 55 posts
Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different
#32I've been investing for a long time. I've lived thru two bubbles already- the dotcom bubble and the housing bubble. I lost money in the first and made a killing in the second. I won't say whether this is a bubble or not, but the number one thing I look for is businessweek (or newsweek) saying that "things have changed!" A mainstream publication putting the bull market on its cover is the prime indicator that it is a…
nika, good input! one insight though. I have a friend working high in hierarchy in one of the biggest precious metals trader in the world. He told me what you saying about gold (and other P.M.), but he said that White House is drafting an Executive Order for president (Obama if still?) to actually ban sell and export of P.M. you see, they know when dollar loose its green face, it will be nothing more than paper, and then P.M. will soar. In order to stop or slow it down, the government will be entitle to take ownership over your precious metals (it happened in the past!) and cruel penalties will apply if you do not submit. further to cool of the US market it will be forbidden to import/export not to create a shell in US for cheap/expensive p.m. tradeoff.
The biggest trade houses are advising clients to stash pm. or certificates in foreign countries. he also told me they lobby hard to allow IRS to tax other-than-bullion P.M. Right now, as you know, you dont need to report gold and silver coins to the IRS (bullion only).
I think you are right about the bubble, but this one will be "revert-bubble": it will grow naturally through market need, but will be artificially killed by US government and its sanctions.
I have 80% of wealth in us silver great eagle/canadian coin since $21. I think we will see $100 on it, but I may be wrong.
Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different
#33yup, and this time it's mostly about unwinding desktop/workstation motifs, as well as single app as moat, apps are now fluid points of integrated services. we're going to learn how to unwind our boxes into all kinds of things. it feels like more of a baroque bubble, emotionally we'll change ... and that leads to opportunities.
Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different
#34I've been investing for a long time. I've lived thru two bubbles already- the dotcom bubble and the housing bubble. I lost money in the first and made a killing in the second. I won't say whether this is a bubble or not, but the number one thing I look for is businessweek (or newsweek) saying that "things have changed!" A mainstream publication putting the bull market on its cover is the prime indicator that it is a…
The interesting thing about the gold market is that there is 40x more "paper" gold ownership then there is actual gold in the world.
They can do this because the rules say if someone calls in their gold, they can just give them the value of it in dollars if there is not enough metal to cover it.
Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Best minds of any generation have always thought about ways to make money. Yeah, but sometimes it comes from developing technology that sends people to the moon. Or technology that reduced a roomful of vacuum tube computer technology to a chip the size of your fingernail. Or finding ways to mass-produce cheap chip-based computers affordable my hundreds of millions of people... You know, stuff that actually kinda mat…
> You know, stuff that actually kinda matters, and can improve people's lives. Are you arguing that social networks don't improve peoples lives?
yeah, thats kind of interesting. I think we will need to define "live improvement".
I can't find much in social networks. I cannot imagine calling a person pouring through the wall of friends feeds' live is much improved.
Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different
#36I don't agree with this article. Just because a lot of time is spent working on "non-interesting" problems, technologically speaking, like Facebook and Zynga, doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of startups who are working in more technologically-impressive fields ( ). The entire article is completely anecdotal. To make things worse, it explains how Groupon's only tech innovation is "cute email". But I don't unders…
it is tech company. core of their functionality is an algorithm (no matter how simple) that lets its company to function.
Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different
#37You gotta be kidding me. Social media will leave nothing behind? How about a communications infrastructure spanning the whole world and connecting people to both friends and other people of interest in real-time, no matter where they are (in the bus, in the street, at home, at their computer), enabling the most rapid spread of information ever seen, and potentially enabling the world to start functioning as a sort of…
> How about a communications infrastructure spanning ... tcp/ip? The infrastructure has been here for a long time. The reason why people start to "connect" with everybody now is because computers and mobile IP devices are becoming really cheap. People would be still communicating in realtime without twitter, facebook, co. SMTP, IRC and IM protocols were here before Mr. Zuckerberg knew how to spell PHP.
This is the really depressing thing about the hype from this bubble. "Web scale" is decentralized open protocols over full unrestricted IP, not shitty NATed HTTP to a rack of servers in the US.
Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different
#38Different? Different?
Here's some reality surrounding certain socioeconomic fads, including the "technology bubbles" we'll see intermittently for the next 100+ years since technology is becoming the only economic force that really matters. The visible winners and value-harvesters are usually idiots who got lucky. We look at what they're doing and we say, "When the tide goes out, those lucky, no-talent assclowns will have left us with nothing." The people getting invited to the "hip" parties and the most exclusive events at SxSW are generally what you'd expect in the era of social douchebaggery: people who are too busy partying to get real work done.
Okay, okay; but something else happens, and there's a silver lining here. While all the hipster douchewizards scramble for visibility and credit and the image of "A-player" status, progress still continues. Somewhere under all that smoke are the invisible people who are the real A-players, usually taking home a "B" or "C" outcome. You rarely hear their names (sometimes you do, but there are too many of them for more than 0.1% of them to achieve real notability) but they're the ones doing actual work and building great things. And in 2025, when all the "social media" robber barons are either washed-up billionaires or washed-up and penniless, the work that the real A players are doing right now will still matter. The applications of their work may have died out, but their work will still be around and people will be putting the ideas to better use.
Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different
#39You gotta be kidding me. Social media will leave nothing behind? How about a communications infrastructure spanning the whole world and connecting people to both friends and other people of interest in real-time, no matter where they are (in the bus, in the street, at home, at their computer), enabling the most rapid spread of information ever seen, and potentially enabling the world to start functioning as a sort of…
> How about a communications infrastructure spanning ... tcp/ip? The infrastructure has been here for a long time. The reason why people start to "connect" with everybody now is because computers and mobile IP devices are becoming really cheap. People would be still communicating in realtime without twitter, facebook, co. SMTP, IRC and IM protocols were here before Mr. Zuckerberg knew how to spell PHP.
Those were computer-to-computer, not people-to-people. The only people who could use those were technical.
Facebook, Twitter, et al, built a communication infrastructure between people. That's about much more than just programming or designing computer communication protocols.
It's a common fallacy from programmers to think that the hard part of "build a system for 100 million users" is the programming.
Re: This Tech Bubble Is Different
#40I sympathize with this view, but the very example given contradicts the thesis that this bubble will leave no technology in its wake. Hadoop was developed at Yahoo, an advertising supported company. Some of the most interesting contributions (HDFS sync, RaidNode, AvatarNode) have come from Facebook, an ad supported company. Hadoop's architecture itself is inspired by the MapReduce and GFS papers from Google, another…
I agree with you, though I think we are as yet unable to point to the actual differences the supporting technologies have created in our lives. It's easy to point to the invention of the internet, microchips, battery technology, etc. etc. Telling somebody about Hadoop and how it is changing the world is more difficult for the average person to grasp.