Monthly Archives: February 2012

This headline hurts my brain, vol 1.

A pseudo-fluff piece 1 written by Jordan Crook over at TechCrunch recently jumped out to me on a recent browsing of my tech news aggregator of choice 2. And not exactly jumped out at me in a positive way.

While I am what one might call an Apple fanboy, I can’t help but feel that the whole objective of this story is to:

  • hype up their startup-hypemachine (which recently happened),
  • note that cool developers also use Android,
  • remind us (unnecessarily) that Android is still around.

I wonder what was going through the writer’s mind when she was writing this piece. It’s not as if Android really needs any sort of leg up on the competition—and that’s a discussion for another time, honestly.

The self-serving part of this article just hurts my brain more than anything. I can understand that the observation had to be made, but this could’ve been made in another article, and not masked as a writer’s experience and thoughts on the evening. We know what they think about the evening—they chose the winners of the event. They could just as easily wrap that up in a sizable review post for the event.

Then again, I generally avoid TechCrunch for reasons like these.

Then again, like most blogs that rely on advertising revenue—certainly the case with TC since the acquisition by AOL—this manner of link baiting can’t be helped anymore.

  1. Android Can No Longer Be Ignored… (Crook, TechCrunch) ↩
  2. TechMeme, because it’s awesome. ↩

The multi-billion dollar thinger.

Facebook to IPO for $5b or more? 1

I’m not sure what to think about this.

On one hand, it’s the validation that an entire industry has been looking forward to for the past three or four years. It’s the legitimacy that social media service providers have been looking for ever since the Facebook released its Beacon update to promote more advertisements on its service.

On the other hand, I don’t even really use Facebook anymore. I loathe the requirements of certain websites that ask me for my Facebook credentials. I haven’t made use of the messaging solution that made waves when Facebook.com email addresses were nothing but unconfirmed speculation.

But it’s helpful to remember that Facebook isn’t about the individual users anymore. It’s about the society of people that use the Internet in any sort of regular capacity. Even though I might not like everything that it stands for and the manner in which all of its information is used to build the perfect ad-serving system, there are hundreds of millions folks that use it everyday.

That’s why the IPO is speculatively going to be in the billions of dollars: Facebook has become the best web advertisement serving mechanism on the web. It’s not about it being the best space for a user to share their life’s particulars. It’s not about connecting with people that you haven’t talked to in years.

Facebook will ultimately become about what kills the enthusiasm behind many social networks that try to expand and grow beyond their station: the bottom line.

  1. IFR ↩