12.03.07
helping liars and seriously stinky bullshit succeed
Kids,
Facebook is an example of what happens when you see the forest and miss the trees. Like eBay coughed up a billion and and half of cold hard cash for Skpe, Microsoft coughed up $240m for Facebook. eBay is now regretting Skype and even looking to sell it off, and someone from Microsoft is going to lose their job over this investment, trust me.
How does such ludicrisity get promoted? Well, as Superman’s dead uncle once said “With great power, comes great responsibility”, people like Anne Zelenka need to realize the power they hold when they work for hacks like GigaOm. The best way to help someone succeed in today’s connected world, is to constantly write about it. Remember Enron? Remember all those reports praising their antics? These valutions are ridiculous and you must know that behind them are greedy VCs and managers looking to make a quick buck. Poor you thinks that Facebook actually creates value and end up investing in it (shame on you Microsoft shareholders). Facebook has a 23 year old founder, which is not crazy on it’s own - lots of smart people are young and I applaud them, even at my age. BUT the coterie that surrounds this hype, is using Zuckerberg’s age to define Facebook as the holy grail.
Really. It is nothing more than an electronic yearbook. With the way their “Beacon” ad platform is fucking up, this is not a monetizable idea. It is a really cool idea, but you are not going to make money on it. It is also NOT revolutionizing any old shit. It is playing up on the one brief notion of “hey, wouldn’t it be cool/funny/weird/odd/horrible/awesome (you choose) to know where that old school buddy/enemy/frenemy/sonofabitch (you choose) of mine is right now”. How long is that shit going to last? In a sea of social networking websites, it is nothing fancy. Yeah, yeah, they have a feature or two that is cool; whatever.
Bullshit packaged in neatly written articles is not going to make the stink go away. In a couple of years, we’re all going to see the shakeout and I hope the bastards who do this for a living (hyping shit up) get socked where it hurts because I was just forced to see the groveling of these silly writers (I can’t escape it!!! every bloody wherever-I-go). The cacaphony is mindnumbing. Will the real Slim Shady, please stand up?
Believe me, this is not a useless post.
11.30.07
mike arrington
Kids,
I don’t know what to make of mike arrington.
Is he more of an electronic loud mouth or actually doing something valuable other than raking in the dough for his “new media company”?
All day you get these posts about what scrappy two-bit startups up in the bay area are developing. All day. Day in and day out. And not a dime is to be made by us. I wonder who he is really serving and if there is any use to his news at all. I think we’re all caught up in the hype that was the Million Dollar Homepage.
Zopa to launch in the US. You’ve gotta be kidding me. A “peer-to-peer lending startup” is what again? There is something known as good useful reporting and then there is a post about something called Zopa. All of us complain that there is information overload on the Internet. I beg to differ- I think there is a bullshit overload on the Internet; good useful-to-my-life stuff is very hard to come by and is drowned out by these bits of perfect uselessness.
I’ll tell you what is useful in life: don’t be fooled by the experts. They want you think that they know, but believe me, they don’t. Hey, that makes me an expert on experts and so don’t buy a word of what I’m saying OK? Which is exactly the point - have your own opinion by straightening up that bent backbone and listen to the crowd. And me, sometimes.
yet another outlook tool
Kids,
WTF! You need more tools for silly old Outlook? It bugs me to see joksters like “Boxbe”, “ClearContext” and “SendShield” get some serious marketing cred on a “popular” blog like GigaOM. Seriously, were the GigaOMers paid to write about this crap?
As if Outlook isn’t slow enough or courted enough by these little bastards, we continue to get hammered by these guys. Seriously, someone is actually funding email tools. All three websites look like the same, looking like they’ve just fed off each other’s energies or lack thereof. OK, let’s go through them shall we, class?
Boxbe lets you “easily create an email guest list so that you can make sure you receive email messages from people who matter to you — friends, family, co-workers and even entire domains” … duh! It also “basically creates a Boxbe-folder, which allows you to carefully sift through everything, and classify it as you deem fit” … duh again! What, you want us to actually do work? Actually create an email guest list? Like I have nothing else to do. Tell me what YOU are going to do for my inbox spam clutter. Sounds like a bunch of crap for a scrappydoo startup trying to tackle spam. Spam is not going to go away people, just like how you can never get rid of those teleannoyers.
ClearContext “has developed an “inbox management” add-on that has a more project-centric view of your inbox and automatically helps you keep track of specific projects and related items such as emails, to-dos and calendar items in a highly automated manner. There is an interesting feature in this software: colleague spam.” They think you’re stupid. Really. I already keep track of my projects, to-dos and calendar items - yeah, they’re called reminders.
I’m not going to say much about SendShield. If you’re too damn stupid or lazy, and believe me, so many clients and colleagues send me documents with embarassing crap (and tracked changes and comments too) that you first of all don’t deserve to email me or anyone else. How moronic must you be to not double check your work - and SendShield is laughing in one’s face everytime someone uses it.
Remember, there is a little too much bullshit out there and a little too many eager-beavers like GigaOm who love to market crap just because they can. I ain’t buying any of these losertools because I know I’m a little too smart to think I need this crap.
