Last night, we heard from two industry sources close to top Facebook execs that these days, when the company hires you, you’re told the goal is to turn Facebook into the world’s first TRILLION dollar company.
— $50 Billion? Hah! Insiders Say Facebook’s Goal Is To Be The First TRILLION Dollar Company
Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It’s the people that matter, not the venue. So when the trend leaders of one social niche or another decide the place everyone is socializing has lost its luster or, more important, its exclusivity, they move on to the next one, taking their followers with them. (Facebook’s successor will no doubt provide an easy “migration utility” through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to.)
People who haven’t managed engineers don’t understand that,” McKinnon says. “They’re not incrementally more productive when they’re sitting together – it’s 10x more. They get the foundation of things right, they don’t have to rework things, they come up with innovations. From my perspective, it’s well worth the money.
— The “War” For Top Talent In Silicon Valley - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ
When everyone has easy access to their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized and forever rebooted. We’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever
For us twitter is a great way to keep our finger on the pulse, we very quickly know what our fans think about new features + our fans are great at alerting us about things. We hear about a lot of developments on twitter first. And in our business speed is of essence.
Another mind boggling statistic about Angry Birds, and you should sit down for this one, is that there are 200 million minutes played a day on a global scale.
Part of what made the Gmail project so fun was that we had a lot of independence and could pursue ideas that other people inside Google thought were “the wrong way to do it”. Most other tech companies do not offer that kind of freedom.
Apart from a journalist sitting in the corner, no one in the room looked over 30, and apart from the journalist’s public relations escort, it was boys only.
We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic,” said Justin B. Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company, who arrived at the magazine’s offices in the Watergate complex in 2007 with a mission to stanch the red ink. “In essence, we brainstormed the question, ‘What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?’
— The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web - NYTimes.com
Some of the web’s “most successful inhabitants”, such as Facebook and large telecoms companies, have begun to “chip away” at its founding principles, Berners-Lee wrote in a Scientific American journal essay published today. Social networking sites that do not allow users to extract the information they put into them is a “problem” that could mean the web is “broken into fragmented islands”, he said.
— Tim Berners-Lee: Facebook could fragment web | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case
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quote: Chuck Close
