Life in the Vast Lane

摘要

Back when the O'Reilly folks were pumping up "Web 2.0" as a meme-successfully, as it turned out-I was asked for some quotage on the subject. My reply, oft-quoted since, was "It's what we'll call the next crash." I'm still sure about that prediction, in part because the Web 2.0 bubble is fed by the same kind of gas that inflated the dot-com bubble nearly a decade ago: a combination of exit-oriented venture investment and tech media fantasizing. Back in the late '90s, everybody was talking up "portals", and advertising was going to pay for everything. Now, in the getting-late '00s, everybody is talking up "social networks", and advertising is going to pay for everything. As I write this, the Facebook social network has attracted a reported 50 million faces and has just announced plans to make money by somehow "monetizing" those faces' social connections. It's wacky stuff, but not wacky enough to scare away value-inflating buzz, especially by the Big Boy media. Venture capitalists, now as then, angle their investments less toward revenues than toward get-rich IPOs or acquisitions by existing giants, such as Google and News Corp. Thanks to a complicated $250 million advertising deal with Microsoft, which also acquired a 1.6% share of Facebook-hottest of the social networks-the New York Times and CNN Money both figured that Facebook was suddenly worth $15 billion-a figure that went viral almost instantly. Never mind that Facebook's revenues were only $ 150 million.