It looks like Fred Wilson agrees with my valuation of Facebooks and not yours.

So :-P.

http://valleywag.com/336972/facebook-worth-5-billion-7-billion-tops 

http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/20071220_doubleclick.html

Personally, I have been waiting for this to finally happen.  Its exciting just to be able to compete against such a giant in the industry.

This post by Nicholas Carr is the best post I’ve seen on Knol.

Wikipedia is a very funny thing. I guess I’m actually late to the boat on it. It is a great place to find information on pretty much anything. When I was curious about a football team, Wikipedia answers my question. Video game? Wikipedia. Pretty much anytime I’ve really needed to find an answer, I have found Wikipedia to be one of the top hits. Its to the point that I now add “wiki” as an addition to my searches in order to get the wikipedia result. In many cases, Google is now just my portal to Wiki.

The more interesting question is going to be for Wikipedia, which is, what now?

So, as the end of the year is coming up, and the new year dawns, it is almost time again to come up with a new years resolution. Before that though, I thought I’d share what I have learned about these things so far:

Make it a hard resolution to keep.
What’s the point of making a resolution which is easy? You should try to figure out what part of you you dislike the most, and make it your goal to change it. Nothing that requires a New Years resolution is easy. If it was an easy resolution, you should just do it instead of making it something you have to concentrate on for a year. This leads us to…

Don’t make more than one resolution.
It is already hard enough to try and stick with a single resolution, why make it harder by having more than one. If there is more than one thing you want to improve about yourself, it can always wait for next year. A single goal makes it a lot easier to remember and always make sure that you are trying to follow it.

Make the resolution specific.
The resolution should have a pretty specific goal. If it is not something you can easily point to, you will not be able to keep it. “I will be a better person” is not going to work. “I will make a stranger smile everyday” is specific. Your goal may be “be a better person” but the resolution should be “make a stranger smile everyday”. You need a goal which, everytime you fail at, you know that you have failed at it. So, while you may on occasion fail at your resolution, when you do, you realize it, after a year, you will have hit your goal. If you won’t make the goal, you will know it well before the year is up, in fact, you will know it weeks into it. Finally…

Don’t make the same resolution twice.
If you have failed at a resolution, don’t make it twice. Maybe 4-5 years down the line, when you have changed other aspects, you can try again. Making the same resolution year after year (I will lose weight), will just mean you fail the same resolution year after year.

As promised. A whole blog post about Jeans.
What I have learned about Jeans:

There are multiple cuts of jeans, not all of them are tight.
This one everyone but me already knew. The reason I never wore jeans before was because I had thought they were very tight. Not nearly as comfortable as my good ole khaki pants. It turns out, jeans don’t have to be tight and can in fact be quite comfortable. Who knew.

Expensive jeans are good.
It would seem, people in fact do notice the type of jeans you wear. Surprisingly, they can even tell good jeans from bad. I still can’t tell the different between say Old Navy and Diesel, but clearly, others in the world can. The jeans affect your look.

Dark jeans are good.
I had always thought jeans were supposed to be this light blue color. Nope, in fact, the dark jeans actually look nicer. The wierd one is that if they look “worn” (a transition in color). That is also good. In fact, the worn type of jeans are still is okay for work.

Finally…

Button fly jeans are good.
I can guarantee there is not a single guy in existence who would not prefer zipper fly jeans to button fly jeans. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to prefer the button fly except for looks. That being said, it would also seem that they look better. Now, I have absolutely no clue why (as I cannot tell the difference), but they do. I still personally prefer the zipper fly jeans, but there is no doubt that button fly’s are what are considered better looking jeans.

It is now almost a year since I started my campaign to dress better. It has been a long road costing way too much money (compared to what i spent on clothes before). I had help though. Nicole put together a great wiki page with stuff I needed to get. Steve gave me advice (though with his purple shoes, I don’t believe a lot of it.) Amy, John, Megan, Maggie, Cara, Tvu, Josh, Candice and Alanna, all actually went shopping with me. And by “with”, I really mean “for” as I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. So, after a year, what have I actually learned?

Sweaters are your friend.
So sweaters are a little annoying in some ways. Some of them do itch. They require special treatment when you do your laundry. They are pretty expensive as far as I’m concerned. That being said, there is some very great things about them. For whatever reason, they are considered being well dressed. The best part of course, is that they require almost no upkeep. Unlike button down shirts, I do not need to iron them. Instead, if I feel lazy but also feel like i should be dressed better, I can just throw on a sweater like I’d throw on a hoodie or pullover.

Everyone but me likes Argyle.
I am pretty sure it is completely inexplicable, but for whatever reason, normal human beings actually like the look these crazy diamonds on the front of your sweater. No matter how I look at them, they still seem horrendous looking, but I have yet to have someone say it looks bad. In fact, if anything, there are compliments given for wearing argyle. Maybe it is just a mass hypnosis or something that occurred to the public.

Layering is good.
I actually still don’t really know what this means, or really how to do it, but everyone is in agreement. When you wear a lot of different clothes together, the sum is greater than the individual parts. What this means is, “dressing well” actually ends up occurring more often in the winter than the summer. In the summer, you can’t really layer, but in the winter, it is all about the layers. Its actually amazing. You can take how I used to dress (t-shirt and hoodie), and as soon as you throw a blazer on top of it, it is considered dressing well. Quite frankly, it makes no sense to me, but one day, I took my t-shirt and hoodie, threw on the blazer, and all day people thought I was going on a date. That was the point when I truly understood that “layering” is the trick to dressing well.

I have no clue about glasses.
I cannot tell the difference between various glasses. It would seem though, my old round glasses are horrendous, and my new glasses are significantly better. Everyone is in absolute agreement on this, but I have no clue the explanation of why. Glasses though aren’t even remotely as bad as …

I will never have a clue about shoes.
There is a magical part to shoes that not only eludes me. It eludes me unlike that of sweaters or blazers or pretty much anything else about dress. I believe that I can understand all of those once I have more experience and help. Shoes, on the other hand, are completely over my head. I have been told my normal shoes are complete crap, but when I am pointed to other shoes, I cannot tell the difference. I know this isn’t just a personal taste sort of thing because the reaction has been universal. Even when I have gotten seperate opinions on shoes, there is a definite correlation between the choices of the various people. Yet, I still see absolutely none of that. I still can’t understand which are good looking shoes and which are bad. I have resigned myself to never understanding shoes and instead requiring other people to always help me with them.

Jeans
Jeans requires its own post. Coming soon.

Here we have a video game company making the same classic mistake as any other internet company. That trying to keep to a closed system is better than opening up for all.

Activision Blocks Rock Band Patch, Kills GHIII Guitar Support

The thought process behind Activision is pretty obvious. Rock band is by far their biggest competitor and quite frankly, has more of the “buzz” right now. The idea is, as long as there isn’t compatibility, they will not lose users to RB, and that most will continue following the GH series, which they have already grown to love.

So here is the problem as I see it. Activision has misjudged the reason behind the mainstream success of these Rhythm games. The popularity of these two games is not due to the fact that they are selling to the mainstream public. The popularity is that they are selling to a large percentage of hardcore gamers (so that they can then play with their mainstream public friends). We are talking about 400$ ps3, or 300$ Xbox on top of the $170 for RB. That is not a main stream public price point.

The hardcore gamer though, are exactly the people who pay attention to things like compatibility and are the exact same who will get highly pissed when a company makes such a overt money grab. Essentially, Activision PR is shooting themselves in the foot. The worst part for them? We are talking about a patch that is for Rock Band which does not actually affect Guitar Hero 3 as a game in the least. There really is no reason for Sony to be holding it up, and at some point, it will be released. The end result will be a bunch of people being upset at GH3 and vowing not to buy it anymore and good PR for Harmonix with their “we just want gamers to be happy” mantra (so also: EA giving out free games due to faulty controllers). All of which is just going to make people switch to Rock Band, its just a self fulfilling prophecy.

We are seeing here the same thing we see everywhere else on the internet, Open will always beat Closed. When you make the customers happy, they will reward you with success. Harmonix is making the customers happy, Activision is going out of its way to make customers upset, if this was something you can bet on, its as close to a sure bet as you can get in gaming.

The big news today was Bebo creating their own language which mimics the facebook application FBML. The idea was essentially to allow developers to easily port from a Facebook app to a Bebo app. Everyone is talking about it in terms of the Bebo side, but I wonder whether this could be the first tentative step for Facebook to solve the Death problem.

Internet history (all 10 years of it) has shown time and time again that social networking sites do not survive very well. We have seen the coming and going of Friendster and MySpace. There was also pseudo social sites like Xanga and AsianAvenue. Users have shown time and time again that they will happily jump ship and in relatively short amounts of time. So, what is the solution to live?

The answer is, become a platform. I don’t just mean facebook apps, I mean, become the base platform in which everyone else runs. I mean a company like Ning. By allowing others to build the social network, everyone wins. As different networks become popular, Ning will be around as the backend, for users, it means no need to recreate profiles, even for individual networks, it means they have ready access to a large pool of possible users. It streamlines the process of life and death of networks. The main problem that Ning runs into right now, which is where Facebook currently has the great advantage is in sheer size. Facebook already has a large user base, one which social networking companies would give money hand over fist to build off of. If Facebooks competitors all were building their platform off of Facebook’s data, they will always have the advantage. This is in fact what Ning is hoping to build off of.

Still haven’t completely composed all my thoughts on this yet, maybe more to come.

Here is my guess though, if Facebook does not open up more, a lot more than just helping to build a mimic to FBML, you will see Ning (or competitor) begin to win in the coming years.

UPDATE: HERE is someone explaining what I’m thinking in much better words than I can.  Though from the Bebo point of view as opposed to Facebooks.

Watch this:

I don’t have much to say yet, but isn’t it interesting that in the same spaces which sometimes run ineffective, flashing ads which bother users, you can also get advertising which would provoke a user to record and upload?

So, LiveJournal is now going to be wholly owned by a Russian Company, and as I have not been updating my old blog anyways, it is time to start anew.

I haven’t figured out what it’s about, or where I will pay the most attention to, but I would definitely suggest you use an RSS reader and only subscribe to the categories you actually care about. You’ll definitely not care about all the categories.