Marshall Kirkpatrick slaps down John Dvorak. Rex Dixon joins in and applies a few kicks to the groin. More discussion over at TechMeme.
We ARE in a bubble. Not just one that John is properly identifying.
We’re in a bubble of attention diffusers.
Huh? I’m getting so many things pulling me in so many directions that it’s hard to spend 60 minutes just thinking about one thing and getting deep.
When Dare Obasanjo says that A listers have no value anymore he’s touching that bubble.
Eric Rice and I had a wonderful talk yesterday where he said something like “Dare is right, the A list is turning lame.”
The thing is I’m getting reports from around the world that people are talking about Facebook in weird places like Moscow and Paris and Cape Town.
I watch TwitterVision and see Twitters happening right now around the world.
You can’t avoid that this stuff is getting adopted. This isn’t a “pet food” bubble like Bubble 1.0.
The problem is that so much is coming at us that we’re just not doing a good job of understanding it and dealing with it all.
The problem with all of this new stuff, too, is we’re wondering how it’s all going to get paid for.
Can the world’s advertising community really sustain all of the services and apps that we’re building?
I don’t think so. But the latest startups who are coming to me aren’t telling me about their fantastic advertising models anymore. The funding for that stuff has slowed down. Instead they are starting to talk about virtual goods and premium paid-for features. And as Dave McClure points out most of these companies aren’t getting huge amounts of funding. Even “expensive” Twitter (a VC who begged out of funding Twitter told me that) was reported to have gotten around $5 million in funding.
Anyway, in the valley this does feel like a bubble but nothing like the last bubble. This one has real, demonstratable, adoption curves that are outside of Silicon Valley. You only need to watch TwitterVision for more than five minutes to understand that at a deep level.