kidmercury

Twitter launched with a new interface, one that is more search-oriented. I view this as virtually sealing the deal on Twitter, they're off in the completely wrong direction. In the end, I think Twitter will prove that without a mission statement, platforms will wander around aimlessly, only to end up ensnared in their own tentacles.

I've been a Facebook hater, I must admit. But lately I've become a bit more upbeat about them. They're getting closer to becoming a transaction processing company, which I think is an opportunity for them. But still, transaction processing, money supply, and legality are interwoven issues. It remains to be seen how well Facebook can navigate this terrain. My concerns are (1) they are too big and thus will be watched too closely by regulators; and (2) they are too big, and it is hard to experiment with stuff when you have 200 million users. The environment becomes too crucial to go playing around with all the time. Really I'd like to see Facebook develop a strong monetization source that is not dependent upon Facebook.com as the revenue source before I can be truly bullish on Facebook. Although depending on who you believe they may already be very profitable, in which case you can't argue with results.

Zynga is a company I've been studying more lately. From all I've seen they are making lots of money. They make games. Specifically, they make games that run on top of platforms (iPhone, Facebook, etc). This I think is truly revolutionary, and I wonder how big this company could really get. I think it could be huge, if they wanted it to, and is the kind of business that could successfully spiral off into a million directions -- like Google, Microsoft, etc. I'm also very curious as to the work environment, hierarchy, organizational chart, etc. Because it looks like the kind of company that is riding all the trends that I think are the right trends for the future, and I wonder if that extends to internal workings and culture as well.

Here's the Back to the Future theme song played on acoustic guitar.