Yeah yeah yeah. It's been a year. I've been..... busy. Real busy. With.... important stuff. Anyway, stop judging. Here's my attempt at a new leaf:
I’ve been hearing a lot about the fiasco that is the
Facebook IPO. Apparently, our fair young leader lost something like $5 billion
in about a week. I have to say, for such a smart guy, Zuckerberg is kind of
stupid on this one. I don’t really understand why he decided to take the
Paragon of Time Suck public in the first place. Does he not know that is the
death knell of every cool thing on the Internet EVER?
Let’s check the scorecard:
- Anyone else remember when eBay was fun and cool and you wound up sitting in your jammies bidding furiously at 3 am because you simply HAD to have the Grandmother doll from the Sunshine Family that you played with as a kid in the 70s? Now? Ebay is a clearing house for cheap knockoffs from the Far East. There might still be cool things to bid on, but who can wade through the melee to find them?
- Anyone else remember getting fridge magnets and bookmarks from Amazon when you bought your latest mystery novel fix? I used to get as excited about the toy as I did about the books, and for a dork like me, that’s saying something. It was the adult equivalent of the prize in the cereal box (which has also gone by the wayside – really, General Mills? You think your average third grader wants to follow a lame maze on the back of the box to arrive at the secret surprise which is something like an encoded message telling them how much effing Fiber is in their Crispy Sweetie Bits? You guys got your finger on the pulse of a generation all right.). It was grown-ups playing with the cardboard box as much as the Christmas present that came in it, and it was glorious.
- A lesser known fiasco is Television Without Pity (formerly MightyBigTV.com). I used to spend many happy hours reading recaps of my favorite cheesy television. We got to know the writers and secretly thought they redefined lame cool. They were hip without being hipsters -- a sardonic treat at the end of the day. It was also fascinatingly smart writing. Making a link between Sex and the City and Fraggle Rock? Not an easy feat. Brilliant, covered in a Secret Sauce of sublime. Then someone in a suit somewhere decided it was a good “brand.” The result? It’s now a page that, I think, copies recaps from official network broadcasting, suffering from SERIOUS Snark Deficiency.
But now I’m sad, so back to Facebook.
It seems to me that Zuckerberg’s largest problem is that he
keeps attempting to reinvent a wheel when most people are perfectly happy with
the wheel they’ve got.
Perhaps it’s because Zuckerberg grew up in an environment
that gets a fairly regular kid in the Ivies. Maybe it’s because, since dropping
out, he surrounded himself with young Silicon Valley folk who have the
attention span of my Boston Terrier and the intensity of a ferret on meth, but
it seems the most important memo he missed was the one that says American
people are nothing if not content to be lazy, and while that is not a good
thing if you are looking for a valued employee, it can be your greatest asset when
deciding whether to spend millions to innovate and re-conceptualize a service into
which billions of people are already happy to serve up their personal data for
five more minutes on Farmville, or whether to sit on your yacht and eat
Cheetos.
Contrary to popular belief, I do believe in hard work and
the American spirit of choosing what is ambitious and difficult over what is
easy, just not where the “lazy choice” still nets you billions of dollars. I love Vegas. I believe in gambling rather
than playing the sure thing. I believe in risk and reward. I also believe that
sometimes it is time to take your jackpot winnings, walk away from the table,
and go see the naked ladies dance at the Tropicana. If you already have $10 billion, who cares if the faucet is slowing down to a smaller drip? You
have $10 billion, Mark. For the love of all that is time-sucking and
holy, let the faucet drip and go look at the boobies.
I get that we aren’t his concern. I’ve spent no small amount
of time laughing at people who think they are a customer of Zuckerberg’s and
threatening to “pull their business.” Maybe it isn’t nice to laugh at people,
but you had to miss an awful lot of classes not to figure out that when someone
gives you something as complicated as Facebook for free, you aren’t the
customer; you’re the product. Admit it. You will sit in front of Facebook
shelling out your information for ten more minutes of whatever it is that blows
your hair back, and for that I do not judge. We’re all in the same pot of
self-delusion.
That said, there ARE other options, and while it will take a
long time, eventually the tweak will come where many people will take their
marketed choices and head somewhere else no matter what he does. The point is
that it’s going to happen anyway. Something will replace Harry Potter,
something will be cooler than the iPad, and something will supplant Facebook. Such is the way of the world, and adding
Timeline to User’s walls isn’t going to change that fact.
Mark? Go have a beer. Seriously.
