RE: Has Facebook’s Death Spiral Begun

I read the article that Dave posted with regards to Facebook’s Death Spiral, which reminded me of two posts I had read.

The first is by Erick Schonfeld, which talks about  how the US users of facebook has leveled off.
 
Erick predicts that the US usage of Facebook has leveled off because of “friend spam”.  This could very well be.  I know personally that my Facebook usage has decreased with becoming bored with the applications that has made Facebook popular.  They were a novelty when I first joined, however like many things people get bored.

Another post, this one by Robert Scoble,  talks about what I has just said.  Boredom.  Also, there has been many people being kicked off of facebook because of dumb reasons.  Scoble talks about a guy in France that was kicked off of facebook for simply messaging his friends.  Now I don’t know if that’s all the guy was doing but still.

In a post by Adam Ostrow, Facebook’s usage in Europe is growing very fast.
 
This could be just because Facebook is just getting caught on in Europe.  So this bags the question.  Will Facebook level off in Europe as well?  Who knows.  There are many things that different cultures embrace that other cultures do not.  The asian community has usually more technologically advanced gadgets than other continents, and then when we finally have it in North America, China/Japan/and Korea already have better gadgets.

So.  Do you think that Facebook will be a thing of the past here in North America? Or globally?

–Jerry 

Yahoo’s Bad Decisions……..

I was reading a post a couple days ago by Erick Schonfeld, talking about how after searching for The Pirate Bay (a Bittorrent search engine).  It was about how Yahoo no longer brings up The Pirate Bay, after they (The Pirate Bay) were raided by Swedish Officials.**aside**For those of you that don’t know what a Torrent is, it is a file that can be used to download media, for free, much like Kazaa or Limewire, but allows the users to post comments, view the contents of files, and see ratings from other users. (Much better than Kazaa or Limewire)**end of aside**I did the same search as Erick, but Yahoo provided me the link to this Torrent Search engine.  I don’t know if it was just a glitch by Yahoo, or if they did take it off their search result database or whatever, but still, this does not look to favorably on Yahoo.  If Yahoo wishes to remain a competitor with Google, they shouldn’t have blocked searches for certain webpages.  In my experience in the past (I use only Google now), if a search engine didn’t come up with desirable results, I would simply use a different search engine until I could find one that fitted my needs, and then I would favor the search engine over others that did not provide me with what I wanted.Even if Yahoo COULD get into trouble by “promoting” the use of free torrent search engines, they would most likely be able to get out of it in a legal case because they are not the ones providing the public with illegal movies, or music.  And on top of that, what is legal fees worth to a company that could potentially ruin they’re reputation if they try to dodge a bullet early? —Jerry  

TV and the Internet

As I was reading through TechCrunch, I stumbled upon a post by Erick Schonfeld talking about the Apple TV patent. Although if this takes off it will be most likely on an Apple TV. But still.  What an idea.  Televisions that have an interactive “Ticker”.  I would love to be able to be watching the game at home but have a video widget so I could watch the game with my cousin out in Sask.  There’s no estimate of how long this might take, and there’s thoughts that it may never take off.  I think it will.  Not in the near future but soon, and Apple has the expertise to be the major player with this kind of innovation.  Because apple already has the “widgets” idea down, it should be an easy (i would think) transition, to put it on a TV (or Apple TV).Just thought this was kind of interesting. –Jerry