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I'm looking for concrete examples of behavioral ad network privacy violations.

Any discussion is welcome, but that's mostly what I'm digging for in this post.

... why couldn't these lower cost deals scale out? Couldn't they make more investments at lower initial valuations rather than less investments at unrealistic valuations?

Maybe it's because I live in this world nearly 24/7, but I can look at the press and the presentation of everything I get pitched by the PR flacks on a daily basis and make a snap judgement on at least 80% of what I see as to whether or not it's going to last or make money.

I'm not 100% right, but I'm right a lot more than I'm wrong.

If I'm just a pundit, a guy who blabs for a living (who, btw, isn't very expensive to employ), why can't more folks like me be employed by these VC firms to scale up these low cost investments?

Is there something completely wrong-headed about what I'm asking that I just don't get?

I think he only brought it up as a sort of "this is an example of widely accepted success that could be getting lost because of this system."

Maybe not the best lynchpin to hang it all on, though.

SiliconANGLE incubates a few startups along those lines (SALabs), and for a time we were looking to align with a larger fund to do that on a more scaled up capacity, but it seems like the establishment VC firms aren't particularly interested in that concept.

Now that I reflect on our past conversations with said parties, I imagine that it's entirely possible that they're highly interested in the idea, but the wheels of their business move so damn slowly that at some point in the next two years one of them will come back and say "let's do it." I'm not holding my breath.

I wanted to grow it past what I was capable of doing on my own, and I started talking to VCs. They were all trying to get me to write budgets for ten, twenty million. My cost was my time and my server bill. I really had no idea what to do with that much money.

I coulda used $100k-$500k to build out a sales team, hire a few developers, maybe a content manager, and be fully funded for at least two years or so...

.. oddly, I couldn't find anyone who was willing to fund me for a reasonable amount, and there was no way I could justify an insane valuation the tens of millions guys wanted.

Hi5 has been pioneering this concept for ages.

If you have any thoughts or quibbles, I'm interested in hearing them - we're trying to get a wide array of input before we do a long-ish post on it.

Unsexy is my snap judgement as to why it's not being pursued... If there's a better reason why, I'm open to being educated.

Definitely agree. Judgment should stand. Sentencing should adapt.

And trust me, if they implemented this, you'd see me do a complete 540 on Facebook. That's right - I'd do a 360 spin plus another 180 just so I'm facing firmly in line with the Facebook supporters.

I love Google, but AdSense needs some real competition on the publisher front to get them to respect publishers ... something like this that was effective and had momentum enough to seize marketshare with web publishers would be the kick in the pocketbook Google needs to shape up and fly right.

They are making impressive revenue, but impressive revenue is a relative term. Impressive compared to their pageviews? Not really. Impressive compared to what MySpace is making? It's about the same. Impressive compared to what my blog makes on a monthly basis? Hell yes.

For now, they don't need to worry about that.

If I'm an investor in any tech startup, those are the words I never want to hear from my investment. Being cavalier about squandering my success is the quickest route to being broke. Shrewd investment of time, resources, and expertise is the only way to succeed long-term.

Act like a bootstrapped startup, and you'll never be wanting for cash. Apple and Google both know this - they have money to burn, but they build up large cash reserves. This is smart.

Spending everything in the hopes of netting a couple of smarties is like paying for a superbowl ad to sell your couch.

According to Alexa...

Let me stop you right there. Alexa is as reliable for webstats as Valleywag is reliable for fact verification.

Granted, Facebook has outclassed in terms of attention and traffic every other social network out there. When you're in the number one slot, you're not looking out for number two, you're looking out for numbers two through two million.

In other words, Facebook is competing with the rest of the web.

I've been pretty anti-Facebook for quite some time, far before it was cool to be anti-Facebook, so I'm probably carrying some baggage there as well.

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To your points - I think that MySpace v. Any Other Social Network in 2005 and MySpace v. Facebook in 2009, 2008, or 2007 are two different situations entirely.

MySpace WAS Facebook in 2005. Facebook was something else entirely - some sort of exclusive social network you had to be a college student to use. I didn't fall into that demo, so I couldn't use it at the time, being far past college age.

If you compare the two networks now, it's hard to imagine that they're both supposed to be the same class of website. MySpace has let design-rot take root like a bad termite infection. It has problems going back to its inception with spammers.

Facebook doesn't have those problems, and it's working well to ingrain itself to the fabric of the web... but it's not making money, and they seem to have the same disease Twitter has, which is this lack of hunger for picking the low hanging fruits in terms of viable tried and true monetization methods.

I wrote on this at some point when I was at Mashable - when we were all theorizing as to what Project Beacon was going to end up being. My theory, which was way off as it turns out, was that they were building an offsite behavioral ad network that webmasters could use in the same way they use AdSense. They're slowly crawling to this now, I hope, but they're a long way from it, and it's the one killer app that could strike a blow at Google's AdSense and capture a SIGNIFICANT share of the worlds web ad market.

Instead, their content to run what basically amounts to poorly targeted remnant ads INSIDE THE SITE, where they're least effective.

I'll put it this way by giving you an example from an unrelated series of posts I did way back when splogging was a majour scourge on the net. Remember those search engine results we were all getting several years ago that look like a monkey wrote the blog posts? You'd search for "underwater basket weaving" and you'd get a splog with that as the title, and nonsensical computer generated blog posts surrounded by adsense ads?

They worked and made money for the sploggers because the content wasn't what the user wanted to see, and most surfers are as likely to click a relevant link as they are to hit the back button.

Facebook content is too good for ads to work. When I log into Facebook, I'm looking at what I'm there for because it's content tailored to me. All those pageviews mean nothing for ads because I never get bored enough with the content to click on them.

The wilds of the web are much different - content on the web coming from search engine results has varying degrees of relevance to me as a searcher, and ads are much more likely to be clicked.

All this to say that Facebook may be great and all, and they may have the greatest momentum ever, but if they don't get serious and look at the BASICS of how their monetization model works, they're not going to get anywhere. I've been banging this drum since early 2007, and it's frustrating as hell to see so much squandered opportunity. Going on a hiring spree and re-arranging the UX won't fix that problem, and that problem is the crux of what makes a business... money.

I don't know where you're getting this Facebook has no competition business. Everything on the web has competition, and Facebook is no exception.

I'll simply let you have the last word on all of these threads since I'm not worth arguing on it. You're obviously much more qualified, and I unequivically accept your summary judgement that Facebook is superior to everything else ever.

Sorry.

I'd be happy if half the social networks I love could do the same, so I could quit worrying if they're doomed to shut down as soon as the VCs get bored with them.

If I can do it, so can they. Perhaps not for 16 hours a day. I tend to cut myself off at 12 or 14 (call me a slacker). A smaller dedicated staff with an ethos of accountability beats out a large supposedly genius and top notch staff that has a reputation for playing games during the majority of their shift.

"It's evolving faster as a site than any other web site that large."

Constant change does not equal success, either in UX or fiscal reward. They've yet to be decidedly in the black, they've yet to find a solid business model, and they've yet to find dedicated evangelists in the tech blogosphere at large. They're simply growing because they're growing, and that momentum won't last forever (again, ask FriendFeed, Myspace, Friendster, Six Degrees of Seperation, Orkut, Yahoo 360, and the rest of the zombies beckoning from the graveyard).

Valleywag isn't exactly the best hard news source, but when it comes to corporate culture type stuff, which is what i'm referring to, they're generally not bad, particularly in their hey-day when Boutin, Owen and the rest of the gang were still there.

... not to mention, habitual usage doesn't exactly lead to safe behavior, which is inflicted on others.

I'm not a drug regulation advocate, but it's important not to paint Meth as a victimless drug. The first target may be yourself when you use it, but the collateral damage is not insubstantial.

A better analogy than a rocket launcher might be hand grenades, if we're sticking to small armaments as the analogy.

And then, of course, you see the posts at Valleywag and ATD showing them doing little more than playing ping-pong and video games all day, and I'm left wondering if this talent grab ploy over there isn't just turning good coders into good slackers.

I'm not saying FB's a titanic, but they do an awful lot of deck-chair re-arranging there, it seems like.

(http://siliconangle.com/ver2/sabackchan/2009/08/24/why-is-fa...)

MySpace and other startups succeed because they’re small and nimble – why the heck is Zuck on a mission to hire as many people as possible? It sounds like a recipe for failure. Am I wrong?

... it's about free speech. TPB is not illegal, and it's not a source of piracy. It's a search engine. You think TPB's illegal, then so is Google, since you can use both for the same purpose.

Do you have the "guts" to pull the plug on Google? By your standard, it's just as illegal. They both point to .torrent files containing pirated material.

There's a lot more to it - particularly when you look at the roadmap for where Wordpress and Buddypress are headed.