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Why we shouldn’t trust social media startups

Started by Duncan Riley · 7 months ago

A lot of conversations having been going on since the email announcing that Pownce had been acquired by Six Apart. Of course the real news wasn’t the purchase so much but that the Pownce service was going to be shutdown in two weeks. As irritating as it might seem to have services tha ... Continue reading »

7 comments

  • Mark Bean

    7 months ago

    I get value from Gmail, Facebook, Tumblr, Google Reader, FriendFeed, Linkedin, and more recently Disqus. Only one of those services I would pay for (gmail). Big firms buy up or invest in small firms for the talent, the customer base or the features of the code in hopes they can turn a profit offering solutions to their existing customer base - who PAY for things. VC's invest in companies that they think they can flip to the same bigger players. It's up to the individual how much they decide to invest in social media or any other online service. Fair play to anybody who can persuade you to do that. That's their game. You should play your own or stop complaining.
    reply
  • StevenHodson

    7 months ago

    3 of your examples (Tumblr, FriendFeed, Disqus) have no obvious business plans to make them profitable. GReader exists only because it lives off of the Google wallet and maybe makes a few bucks from the slimline ads they run. Facebook is still living on borrowed money. LinkedIn is the only one I haven't figured out yet.

    Without a palatable income base how can any business expect long term loyalty and how can we as users not expect at some point our efforts to build them up will have been wasted,

    And who said I was complaining? Can I not formulate an opinion on something and write about that opinion based on available information?
    reply
  • Mark Bean

    7 months ago

    Steven - Linkedin got me my latest contract so I have lots of nice things to say about them. They probably make more money as a job board than a social network. I agree with you that the benefits of using a social service must outweigh the potential that you may be peppered with ads or lose your investment in the time you have spent there. If they let you export your data at the end of the experiment like Pownce did you pretty much have no real leg to stand on. Pownce was really just a Twitter clone whose business model was the resale of Amazon S3 space at a huge markup. Nobody fell for it so they shut up shop and got 'real' jobs. Sorry about the complaining comment. Had to miss lunch today due to a long meeting and I'm a little cranky.
    reply
  • StevenHodson

    7 months ago

    I was a little surprised over the export feature Pownce made available but not having looked at I'm curious what use an XML or whatever format file of your data on Pownce is going to be? As well - and this is the real cynic in me - how do we know that our data doesn't get sold off somewhere (such as you agree to in the Twitter TOS) .. after all data is what is really worth all the money isn't it? - Just curious more than anything.

    And hey .. don't worry about the cranky part :) Trust me cranky is all good LOL
    reply
  • Mark Bean

    7 months ago

    You'd be amazed how much marketing data is worth. I think that's Tumblr's business model.
    http://pflix.com/post/31268084/how-to-fill-your...
    reply
  • Henry Story

    7 months ago

    Yes, what you need are distributed decentralised secure social networks. Then at the limit you can buy your own domain name, which you will be sure about, and link to your friends wherever they are. If you have, as one should, a good diversity of friends, they won't all go bankrupt at the same time - and if they do, you should be investigated :-)

    http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/building_sec...
    reply
  • Henry Story

    7 months ago

    Yes, what you need are distributed decentralised secure social networks. Then at the limit you can buy your own domain name, which you will be sure about, and link to your friends wherever they are. If you have, as one should, a good diversity of friends, they won't all go bankrupt at the same time - and if they do, you should be investigated :-)

    http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/building_sec...
    reply

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