“What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” — Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, 1970 | You Are Not A Computer
How Much Is a User Worth? - Technology Review
“This is what bubbles do to us. Even if you’re not going to hit the jackpot, all that money floating around still makes it hard to focus on things that take time. Rush. It’s a game of musical chairs. The music will stop and you won’t have a place to sit. It’s all the more dangerous today because the employment situation, outside the bubble, is bleak. I think for most of us, the Facebook IPO is a transition, maybe to something better. A peak. It sure isn’t making us rich. And it’s not giving us much to hope either.” — Dave Winer on the Bubble (via Om Malik)
Are Facebook Credits the key to the social network’s future? -
Last year, Facebook’s non-advertising revenue — the bulk of which comes from virtual payments using Credits (an estimated 12% of which came from game developer Zynga) — was $557 million, or about 15% of the total, according to the company’s S-1 securities filing. That was more than four times what the company pulled in from payments in 2010. And since that figure represents Facebook’s 30% take of the total, that means users spent close to $2 billion in Credits last year.
In short: less than 2% of users generated $500 million in revenue.
Study shows 52% leave a site on seeing a paywall
“If you’re using anything more than binary code to interact with your pc, the computer as already met you more than halfway as far as the language barrier goes.” — From the comments | Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy
“Pivot: A nifty code word that allows startups to clothe failure in the garb of strategic change, typically bankrolled by over-eager investors.” — How to Understand Silicon Valley Speak
Here’s How Facebook Stacks Up Against Other Public Tech Firms (via thenextweb)
“Everybody should learn to code, he says, because machine/human and machine/machine interaction is becoming as ubiquitous as human/human interaction. Those who don’t know how to code soon will be in the same position as those who couldn’t read or write 200 years ago.” — Computer Programming for All: A New Standard of Literacy
“Google says that its search engine now contains 500 million objects and knows more than 3.5 billion facts ‘and relationships between these different objects.’” — ‘Information’ To ‘Knowledge Agent’: Google Changes The Way It Does Search
Facebook makes about 1/10th of Google’s revenues even though they have 2x the pageviews. Some estimates put Google’s search revenues per pageviews at 100-200x Facebook’s.
…The bad news is that, if there is one consistent theme in both online and offline advertising, it’s that ads work dramatically better when consumers have purchasing intent. Google makes the vast majority of their revenues when people search for something to buy or hire. They don’t have to stoke demand – they simply harvest it. When people use Facebook, they are generally socializing with friends. You can put billboards all over a park, and maybe sometimes you’ll happen to convert people from non-purchasing to purchasing intents. But you end up with a cluttered park, and not very effective advertising.
(via Chris Dixon)
“It would be really interesting if Facebook launched a credit card. In fact, it would be terrifying.” — The Only Way Facebook Can Justify Its Valuation
TV Viewers Carry the Conversation to Social Networks
How People Spend Their Time Online
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