What is on Your Mind?

The new Timeline sucks. They have a history of making changes that their users hate. No business can continue doing that for very long and continue to remain in business.

...except Microsoft.

But Microsoft has products to sell. Back in the early 80's with the launch of MS-DOS (competing with IBM'S PC-DOS), and subsequent operating systems. Add to that their productivity series of Word-Excel-PowerPoint which have become standards.
MS products also unique in troublesome to change once buy-in to their product family. A couple years ago it was MySpace, not FaceBook. No barrier to whatever may be next.
Why Netscape died - easy to switch to another browser product.

So... still hoping Neo can respond to my question of unix.com IPO. My bank has lots of bits!

Windows 8 looks bad enough that it could cripple the bully known as Microsoft. Putting a tablet/touch screen layout in a desktop UI is just dumb. Hopefully, the users that M$ pi**es off and frustrates will migrate to Linux/Mac/tablet/anything-that's-not-M$.

It died because it was crap! Firefox is too, and is heading the same way. I surely can't be the only person who thinks that Firefox is a truly lousy browser? Although, I am speaking from a user's perspective. From a developer's perspective it's maybe the best browser. But regular users far outweigh developers.

As for Facebook, I think it's worth every penny of it's $38-per-initial-share value. It's changed the World. Thanks to "social" the World is a more informed place, and Facebook played a key role in that. It also has ~ 1 billion users to try to monetize, and it's going to find a way to do that.

To the original question: No

I tend to agree with Scott.

Facebook has changed the world. I cannot think of any place I have traveled in the past year where we do not see many people on a train, subway, standing in line ... all using FB on their mobiles. In fact, I was on a subway yesterday and counted ~50% of the users on a crowded subway car using their mobile, and most were using their FB mobile app (which is a really good app. BTW).

FB makes money now (and quite a lot of it) selling advertising and premium positioning. With a billion users, this is a huge (potential) market. Huge! ... and one of the good things about FB is that the guy at the top is a coder; Mark Z. can write code and understands what he is doing; he control FB, not a committee of bean counters (and made that clear to Wall Street before the IPO).

Editorial Comment:

Speaking of FB advertising, we ran FB ads during a coral reef conservation initiative last year and had good success. We were impressed with FB's ability to target user groups interested in scuba diving, oceans, marine conservation, etc correlated with geo-location information. I thought FB ads were more effective than Google ads, at least for our coral reef protection campaign. (OBTW, the project was a success; but the local fisherman stole most of the mooring buoys we deployed to protect the coral reefs, LOL, so the project has lost most of it's steam.)

FB currently does not run ads on the mobile app. There is huge revenue potential in mobile for FB. I think we will see ads in the mobile app later this year, or next year at the latest. One challenge for FB is making sure advertisers have FB pages so when an ad is clicked, the user goes to the FB page and not to a non-FB web page, I think; but I could be wrong.

FB is many things to many people, BTW.

Many of my "Facebook friends" are scuba divers, so it is great to see photos of oceans, fish, people and gear related to a hobby or career they are passionate about. Most of my FB posts / pictures are related to diving, which I don't consider to be private; so sharing is OK and fun. Now that i"m into tech diving, FB has been very helpful as many tech divers share info, pics, gear ideas, on FB.

For others, I see that FB is very personal. While I don't subscribe to this "bleeding hearts" way of using FB, getting personal about births, deaths, marriage, children, etc, many people seem to love FB just for that (which bores me to tears!). On the other hand, I don't mind keeping up with long lost high school or college friends on FB. (I just "unsubscribe" to the boring baby photos and personal religious updates.) Many share their very personal moments; I share my diving adventures (like my recent first dive to 60 meters).

So for me, FB is OK at it's opening at $38 a share (I did manage to get a handful of shares at that price); because I envision that FB is going to keep growing and keep have great influence on many people and businesses. I don't see FB in the same league as all the losers named earlier. FB is already a winner, IMHO, and it will be hard for a new kid on the block to unseat FB because the leadership is innovative and experimental (much like Google has been) and FB is an established global hub/marketplace now.

As far as a future unix.com IPO; unfortunately (maybe fortunately!), there are not that many people in the world interested in unix/linux day-to-day coding, scripting and sys admin; so I'm sorry to say we are not going to get financially rich on our forum bits anytime soon, LOL

... anyway, that's my 0.02 bits worth of opinion; but since I am one of the world's worst stock market investors; I advise you to sell whatever I buy.... !!

If 0.02 bits is worth 2 cents, you could buy Facebook
Now you tell me!