On Jul 9, 2009, at 3:42 PM, Doyle Saylor wrote:
Doug,
You've got to be kidding. Facebook status updates consist mostly of
inane reports of daily life ("I need coffee!" "I just steamed some
sugar snap peas." - actual quotes from my FB friends), or reposts of
material produced by professional journalists. The amount of amateur
or "community" information production approaches zero.
Doyle;
So you down grade that as trivial. So trivial is not worth anything
to you. Community content is actually very important to people, but
the ability to use it on a more complex scale with pictures and
sound is new enough that we don't know yet how that will move
things. Still providing the service is profitable for Facebook.
I have lost Doug's response to this, but I want to quickly comment on
this before I hit the road.
Doug hints at the fact that Facebook is in reality not profitable. But
I think that is not as crushing a point as it seems. Facebook, IMHO,
has tremendous potential to be profitable (as seen in the eagerness of
those willing to invest in it, continuously), but again IMHO, they are
holding out for the "killer" model, rather than start making money
today on more advertising, more user profiling, paid access, etc.
Facebook is not an example of an information source as much as it is a
good example of an online community, in fact a better one than these
mailing lists prone to flamewars and antisocial style of communication
(absent emoticons).
I think Doyle has a point: these technologies, ways of sharing bits,
is new and how and where it goes remains to be seen. We live under
such a overbearing cloud of experts and expertise that we may forget
these things swing both ways: if blogs today borrow their raw data
from professional reportage, today's anointed professionals have built
their establishment (e.g: medicine) on the basis of appropriating
community knowledge.
I am off... more later...
--ravi
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
