Among the more interesting pieces about the thrill of the grilled cheese sandwich and the Koreas making coy eyes of love to each other, we can find two articles in the NY Times today that reveal a lack of substance at the heart of some internet business models. One can detect an almost fiddle while Rome burns on YouTube ethic to much of this, with seriously brilliant minds brought down to creating the perfectly useless, and timely (as in "not timeless") widget.
In the first piece, we are given the details of how Saturday Night Live created its second comedic hit video on You Tube, with over 300,000 downloads. In mocking Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, and his statement that Iran is without homosexuals, the video managed to hit the right combination of humor and social commentary, with swipes at pop culture and its earnest yet contrived presentation of nonsense.
It is in fact a funny video, even if you are smart enough to read between Ahmadinejad's eyebrows to know that he is not stupid enough to believe that there are no homosexuals in Iran, but rather, that you will search long and hard before you find someone willing to admit they are. Thus, they don't exist.
In any case we have a laugh at the idea of the head of an oppressive regime brought down to the level of just another nice guy in love. The writers have used his own image-he of the casual jacket and "I love all the existing people" attitude- and taken it a step further, softening him up to the point of a cushion for various rhetorical pins.
Politics aside, we can't argue that with effort expended, and downloads done, this adds not a dime to NBC's bank. The article reminds us that ratings are no higher than the year before. Nobody is really laughing all the way to the bank, which, one would assume, should be the general idea with most business endeavors.
The same can be said about all those companies creating widgets and little add on features for Facebook. The whole world and their collective uncles have come to the conclusion that social networking is the apex of modern internet efforts. Some relatively smart minds are calculating that with just the right combination of luck, lightening, bridge buyers, sunny skies and general delusion, profits will roll in.
The problem is that the more that people are willing to reveal about themselves, the less they are going to want advertisers and others mucking around in their stuff. With Facebook, it offered a particular haven, combining the personal with a largely invisible advertising environment. In the case of the many companies making craplets for Facebook, they are faced with the difficulty of being unable to monetize their work. People will accept something that is free, but ultimately if you are going to make money you either have to offer them something they will gladly put a dollar value on, or convince them to look at your advertising.
To the extent Facebook allows its central interface to get cluttered up, they become just another Myspace. While that may appear to be good now, in the long run, and like every social network before, the fascination will fade. Facebook has the chance to embrace adults who stay with a product if it works, as opposed to the younger audience who will bleat their way to the next new thing out of boredom or the influence of equally bored peers.
In many ways the best minds and the managers of the biggest piles of cash are acting like a new mother spending tons of money on giving her five month old the best wardrobe ever. As if nothing changes and all the new clothes won't be outgrown. In a world with so many unsolved problems and so many possibilities, one wonders if businesses built on adding one more bauble to the crib are worth the attention they receive.
No comments:
Post a Comment