Fix Social Networks' Fantasy Valuation Bullshit. | Hacker News Reader

Fix Social Networks' Fantasy Valuation Bullshit.

buddycloud.com

11 pointsimaginator24 comments

Facebook happens to have the best advertising product that ever existed. When I click on your company's group's ad's like button, all my friends see it. No other advertising has ever parodied word of mouth advertising so successfully, and they've hardly begun to take advantage of this fact.

In addition, Facebook has reached the mindshare of the masses in a way that no other internet company has. No other internet company has EVER had my parents and aunts and uncles talking for hours about an internet company though the holidays. It brought talking about the internet in public to the masses.

Facebook will have a 12 figure valuation by this time next year, and Google will lose its current level of dominance in the online ads sector. I'll put my money where my mouth is if someone want's to propose a safe way to go about doing it...

How long until the novelty of seeing your friends' "Likes" wears off?

If it's the ultimate advertising platform, where's the money?

The money is going to come from, and is already coming from, the fact that advertising on facebook has already been permeating other media and mediums.

On several commercials on TV this last weekend I saw name brands that I knew who, instead of listing their .com, listed simply their facebook URL instead.

This is seen in print now too.

So the scary aspect of this is that advertisers are already seeing facebook as the platform -- and this is due to the ridiculous amount of personal interest data, and further, connections between people and interests. (e.g. the number of people in your network that all like Burton Snowboards etc.)

For me, I refuse to have a facebook account for many many reasons, not the least of which is that I find advertising to be nothing more than Thought Pollution.

If you aren't an investor or otherwise involved in one of the company's with a "bullshit fantasy" valuation, how does the "bullshit fantasy" valuation hurt you at all? The article doesn't seem to answer this question.

If anything I would think that the existence of a "bullshit fantasy" valuation marks a great territory for someone to come in and innovate and steal the market, like Google did in the late 90s.

Subprime mortgages were in the set of bs fantasy valuations. Their puncture did hurt other people.

...but for the individual who spots a bs fantasy valuation - logic suggests shorting the stock.

You can't short just because you think a stock is over-valued. You can only short when you both think a stock is over-valued and will soon hit a correction. It's that second part that makes shorting dangerous because you can't just call it; you have to call it at the right time.

The same can be said for investing in a long position.

No, you can hold on to a long position forever; the most you can lose is the amount you invested.

True, and I considered hedging that phrase. Then I reconsidered, as it's pretty much implicit in the notion of shorting.

> If you aren't an investor or otherwise involved in one of the company's with a "bullshit fantasy" valuation, how does the "bullshit fantasy" valuation hurt you at all?

Gee, I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the government giving away 700 billion dollars to financial companies burned by rampant bullshit fantasy valuations...

I should have phrased my question as limited to valuations of tech/software companies only, since that seems to be what we are discussing here.

> I should have phrased my question as limited to valuations of tech/software companies only, since that seems to be what we are discussing here.

OK, then. When the web 1.0 bubble burst in 1999, a whole lot of people lost their money. Bullshit valuations make the stock exchange a snake-oil market.

TARP money wasn't "given away", it was loaned.

The banks have paid back all that money and the US treasury made a profit. The auto industry has also paid back their portion, but the government still holds some stock in the companies, so people can debate whether that portion of it is really "paid back".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program

and http://www.financialstability.gov/latest/tg_10082010.html

Hmm, maybe that's what Diaspora should have been building - an open protocol for exchanging users' 'social' data, meaning you could migrate your FaceFriend account straight onto MyBook without setting anything up, or you could add friends from completely different services into your feed just so long as the same SOA was maintained across companies.

Facebook could do this themselves to stop anyone else ever getting a large share of the market (destroy the barriers for entry).

Remember when Myspace was worth billions?

How quickly the next hot thing comes crashing down: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/01/10/myspace-to-lay-...

The valuations will fix themselves in time. That's how company valuations work.

Or they will crash and burn taking jobs, people and national economies with them. That's also another way they work.

No. The world doesn't end when overvalued companies go through corrections or failures. It may seem that way for some people and for some time, but whole economies do not just stop working. And really, we're talking about Twitter and Facebook here, not Enron and Bear Sterns.

> The world doesn't end when overvalued companies go through corrections or failures.

Nobody said anything about the "world ending".

And a few overvalued companies "getting through corrections or failures" has different effects than a whole lot of overvalued companies getting through corrections or failures. The second case is called a "bubble burst".

Sorry, but you don't 'sign up for a future' without actively working towards it. Complaining that others haven't done what you wanted doesn't work.

"...And then how we can work together to create an open platform."

Your complaint seems off base.

This is the first of a 3 part series. The third one includes this paragraph:

At buddycloud we're working to create an ecosystem of servers and clients that will enable open federated social networking. We're trying to avoid as many of the problems mentioned here by quietly doing things the right way. We are building some nice mobile clients. If you would like to help us please join buddycloud's dev team.

So it seems that they are indeed actively working towards the future that they are talking about.

The author founded http://buddycloud.com (an open, federated social network) - there was a lot of buzz around its Diaspora integration not so long ago; he already is working towards a (in his view, at least) better future.

wccrawford, bb hi Simon)

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