("...The secret of Facebook is that there is no Facebook...") To The Last Byte...

By Daniel Greenfield Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The question isn’t, “What is Facebook worth?”, the real question is what are we worth? The secret of Facebook is that there is no Facebook, just reams of user data, information voluntarily submitted by hundreds of millions of people in exchange for a free ride, which is monetized by a company that makes nothing except increasingly broken code, by selling ads to companies hoping to convince consumers to buy the products manufactured by their Chinese partners.

There is a tremendous generation gap between the old giants which made things and traded them to people for money, and a new generation of companies, which offer connectivity services for free, build a monopoly over some element of the internet, and then squeeze companies looking to connect with consumers. Everyone is out to provide value, collect user information and begin running ads.

Behind all the flash and buzzwords is the promise of smarter and better advertising. The only thing keeping companies like Google and Facebook afloat is the same thing that used to keep magazines, newspapers and networks afloat—advertising. And with users creating and promoting their own content, all the companies need to do is provide the connectivity tools, servers that stay up and an interface that people can figure out.

The products of this process have changed our lives, at least insofar as finding directions, having instant access to information and being able to interact with anyone we have ever known is life-changing. But so did the original communications revolution, which brought one standard of programming into homes across an entire nation, and made it possible to hear an event happening, even while it was going on.

The latest incarnation of the ongoing communications revolution is………..

EXCERPT

more flexible and less centralized than its predecessors because

via To The Last Byte.

Related articles

• A Kilobyte contains how many bytes? (onlinewebpage.wordpress.com)
• Beauty Byte: Rimmel Is Reamed for Its Kate Moss Ad (bellasugar.com)
• Watch: TechBytes 5.17.12 (abcnews.go.com)
• Beauty Byte: Stila Has Been Saved! (bellasugar.com)
• To The Last Byte (canadafreepress.com)
• Here’s A Tool That Gives You Control Over What Advertisers See (informationweek.com)
• New Website to Revolutionize Online Promotion Byte by Byte (prweb.com)
• joomla scaling adventures part 2 (azneita.org)
• techBASIC 2.2 Adds Powerful New Capabilities Making it the Ultimate Technical Computing Program for the iPhone/iPad (prweb.com)
• As Facebook Goes Public, Glassboard Wants All Your Data To Stay Private (informationweek.com)

About these ads