71–80 of 98 posts
https://medium.com/productivity-efficiency/631ed8f466e1
Basically, this trick uses a Chrome extension that hides the newsfeed using custom CSS.
That percentage has dropped somewhat since then...
There is no particular reason to assume the peaking and decline of a socializing technology must result in its similar competitors growth in a nearly identical field. It could be home video conferencing or terminals built into vehicle seatbacks or far more likely, something we can't imagine at this time.
And no, for you youngsters, the smartphone was not the social technology replacement for CB, for basically all of the 80s and a substantial part of the 90s average people simply completely stopped technologically socializing in their cars. I see no reason to prevent future people from simply not socializing via handheld devices.
That doesn't mean the death of the industry, truck drivers still have CBs, but your grandpa probably does not (not since Carter was president, anyway)
The industry can only make money on the up slope, but investors and innovators can make money on both up and down slopes. Might be time to start thinking of money making schemes for the down slope.
Teenagers, who are looking to keep things private between them and their friends, can't have their mom popping up on their Facebook pages all the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is bad in the sense that it is an alternative, and growingly a replacement, to using our biological escape from Reality - the Imagination. Actively engaging the Imagination has a much greater potential to cross over into Reality and affect it in such a way that escape is no longer necessary. Escaping from Reality by relying on external input feeds and output sinks only passively engages the Imagination and does no…
Right. First someone says that isolation is good for adolescencents citing a comedian, you are arguing that mix of external and internal escapism is probably the best as the comic explains. I am not a subject matter expert, but comics are not an authority on psychology for me.
I have observed as I get older that teens suffer from many self caused maladies, although an excess of calm introspection has never made that top 10 list. Given observation that teens are legendary for causing enormous amounts of suffering because of a lack of even a tiny amount of thinking, that would imply the scales are likely tipped far in excess away from a healthy level of introspection. Its unlikely given an extreme situation that a return to something approaching normal would be seriously controversial.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is an important aspect, but let's consider the P/S (price/sales) ratio to gauge that savings potential: Facebook: 22.3 Google: 5.9 Amazon: 2.3 (source: money.msn.com) Of course, comparing to Amazon doesn't make sense. Retailers are always going to have very low margins and low P/S ratios. But comparing to Google does make sense. Assuming Facebook's potential margins are similar to Google's, Facebook would have t…
What was Google's P/S like 5 years ago?
Revenue: 22bn
Number of shares: 317mm
Average share price (P): $500
Revenues per share (RPS): $69.4
P/RPS = 7.2
At the peak of the CB "bubble" around 1978, roughly 10% of all cars had a CB radio installed in them as a lower bound, although claims were it was higher, like 15% to 20%. That percentage has dropped somewhat since then... There is no particular reason to assume the peaking and decline of a socializing technology must result in its similar competitors growth in a nearly identical field. It could be home video confere…
As more teenagers gravitate toward online social networks (if not Facebook, then Instagram, etc.), I'm concerned that not enough of them will feel lonely. I recently watched a Louis C.K. interview about young people and technology, which struck a chord with me. I agree that adolescents benefit from a sense of boredom and isolation because it encourages them to cultivate stronger in-person social networks: http://team…
I am flabbergasted. Adolescents benefit from isolation? And you're citing a comedian? Care to cite some serious sources?
If you would like to take the conversation in a more scientific direction, you're welcome to introduce studies.
Facebooks is priced at 240X Price to Earnings. If they start losing users or even stop growing its hard to imagine how that PE ratio continues to makes any sense. Even with an increase in mobile revenue its still less then desktop revenue and users are certainly flocking to mobile too which is a double wammy. So facebook has to transition to making more money per user if its user base stops growing. Otherwise you're…
Does a 240x P/E ever make sense? Maybe if you just patented a fix for global warming or a cure for a common cancer or something of that sort of magnitude, but for a non-essential technology company?
I know only a few very successful investors, both professional and private, and I've often asked them how they do it. Almost invariably, the answer is that they do their homework, use common sense, and play the long game rather than trying to beat the short-term markets. A recurring theme on the common sense score is that they have a personal threshold for P/E above which they will just walk away. None of these people I know would invest at 24x, other than under exceptional circumstances. At 240x, they'd be seriously considering shorting the stock.
In Facebook's case, the maths is disturbing: to justify a 240 P/E objectively, they need to double revenues year-on-year for about 7 years just to break even. Unfortunately, in less than 3 of those years, they've run out of people in the world they can sign up to advertise to, so even if they could sign up everyone in the entire world they would still need to figure out how to make about 20x as much money per user depending on how you count inflation.
Of course there is an argument that Facebook's P/E is artificially low because growth and mobile and stuff, but if you're spending 95% of your revenues just to keep things going and attract new users, and the idealised global market for your service is less than 7x your current user base, that still looks like you're doing it wrong from here.
I am genuinely curious here: Can anyone suggest a sound reason why they would buy into Facebook at the current price, other than as a speculative short-term investment? Put another way, is anything keeping FB's stock price up other than a bubble effect?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just don't share this vision. You either have -real- friends, or you have acquaintances. Facebook is not for real friends. If people are your friends and want to stay in contact with you, they will - like they did before Facebook existed.
You might as well argue that a telephone isn't for "real" friends that you see in the street every day. The truth of a modern lifestyle is that people are very mobile. I can remember losing touch with people for a few years back when your email address was from your college or employer, two moves and you were gone - until the world agreed that we'd use Facebook as a self-updating address book.
And that's a valuable function, and I suspect probably the reason Facebook has seen the longevity it has.
It seems very vulnerable to disruption, though. Given a self-updated directory that others can use to find you if you change contact details, and maybe given also a single sign-on mechanism that you can use with arbitrary, separate services like photo sharing and gaming, what is Facebook's USP?
Their biggest barrier to competition has for a long time been the "everyone is on Facebook" networking effect. If it's only the occasional dissenter who isn't, then organising stuff and communicating using Facebook is easier than many alternatives, whatever Facebook does to their UI/UX/privacy policy. As soon as a significant fraction of people you actually care about aren't on Facebook any more -- and significant in this context doesn't need to be anything like the majority -- that compelling advantage just evaporates.
(Yes, I'm a Facebook dissenter as an individual, and a sceptic about the long-term viability of their business in its current form as an investor.)