Twitter needs to start being more stable, or I’m going to start throwing chairs.
This afternoon, Facebook was a little spotty too.
And EDGE was down for my iPhone today.
MY WORLD IS CRASHING! AHH!
Well, at least, I’m not in the middle east. Not because of the warfare (well, that’s beside the point), but because of the Internet outage over there.
Seriously, I still don’t understand how this guy is the CEO of this company. Really. Have you seen the 60 minutes segment on this guy? His looks, his personality, his style… all doesn’t fit into the CEO idea in my head. But anyway, he ended up dropping some numbers today.
Facebook’s Revenue: $150m
Facebook’s Projected Revenue: $300 to $350m
Facebook’s Projected Expenditures: $200m
Facebook’s EBITDA: $50m
All together this means: $150m negative projected for this year.
Of course, this doesn’t count the $300m in investments from Microsoft, so they’ll still be in business… but I sure hope they figure out how to make the money soon, and in a way that doesn’t piss off the users.
Source: Chatty Zuckerberg Tells All About Facebook Finances
MySpace’s revenue (ending June 2007): $550m
MySpace’s profit (ending June 2007): $10m
Source: (MySpace revenue to top $800 million in fiscal 2008)
MySpace’s Projected Revenue (at Oct 2007):$800m
Source: (Murdoch Cuts MySpace 2008 Estimates)
Regardless of how much I hate MySpace, people use it. People click on the advertisements, and so MySpace keeps making money.
The point here is that it’s good to be #1. MySpace has more than 110m monthly active users (Social Network Stats:Facebook, MySpace, Reunion), while facebook has 68m monthly active users (The shy Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook).
If all these numbers are right, then Facebook has some serious catching up to do. Here’s my fuzzy math on revenue per user:
Revenue / Monthly Active Users of MySpace = 550/110 = 5
Revenue / Monthly Active Users of Facebook = 150/68 ~= 2.2
Does this mean a Facebook times 2 equals a MySpace in revenue?
If you’re making a free “social network”, and your single monetization strategy is advertising, you better hope you’re #1. Or freaking close to it.
Never before has Twitter being down affected my life in any way.
But now, I feel like… I’m missing my mouth. I don’t know… it’s like the power to push out updates about what sandwich I had for lunch has been taken away from me.
Sigh.
EDIT: Looks like there was a break-up between Joyent and Twitter.
I’m sure more will be uncovered as time goes on, but man, I wonder who broke up with who.
I don’t know if you’ve visited the site in the last week or so (which is perfectly fine with me, I love feeds), but I’ve been experimenting with different themes, looking at different plug-ins, and learning about the WordPress structure.
I’ve finally ended up with K2 for the theme. The less upkeep I have to do in between versions, the better, and K2 helps with a lot of the administration. Also, it comes with a lot of things built in, like a beautiful archive page system, as well as some ajax components. There are some flaws (like the ajax search sometimes doesn’t do anything), but I’m looking to fix those myself, and maybe even submit the patches.
As time passes, I’ve realized that this blog needs to become a lot less personal, but at the same time not so professional. And so, the subtitle has changed to include “Web Development & Technology”. This covers pretty much everything I would talk about… from something frivolous (I’m almost to 5K groupies with Guitar Hero 3… So close) to something more important (my company is picking up steam, and I’m having a great time managing/developing).
I’m going to have to start retagging some things, as well as moving some posts here and there to streamline the experience. I’m well on my way to bringing some of my older posts, just to keep public because they were once public. It’s a nice historical backlog of how stupid I was, and it’ll keep me in check.
The personal stuff, well, I think they might make a comeback somewhere else. Just not here. I’ll post not short posts on the links of interest, but more thought-out articles.
I hope to post on about half of these in the upcoming week. We’ll see…
I don’t know why this is happening recently (I think it started yesterday), but FireFox 3 Beta 2 seems to choke up with HTTPS.
Looking at Bugzilla (Which, by the way, is inaccessible using my version of beta…), there seems to be a few issues with HTTPS. But nothing in particular to what I was looking at.
After trying updating within the program itself (which failed), and looking for a manual update, it seems like I still have the most recent version of the beta. But then, all of a sudden, the https started to work again. Even though it was the same exact version.
I’m beginning to think all of this was in my mind.
How the heck am I going to know how the blog is doing…
Trying to connect to https://, fails. I went to google.com/analytics, and the login box doesn’t appear.
Blah.
You know what, I think it has to do with the browser. The same thing happened with panel.dreamhost.com. I’m unsure as to why the heck something like this would happen, but I’ll be on the lookout.
Finally, someone put it into words.
via my ISP: $1 via SMS: $61,356,851.20
Lovely. So think twice before you send out that text. I’m happy I have a lovely 200 text cushion before I have to start paying anything, and I tend to refrain from using if at all possible.
This really isn’t a problem with the users: this is largely a case with the big companies. It shouldn’t have to be this way… I shouldn’t have to pay extra to get the same data, when it costs the phone companies exactly the same. Or at least, very little… I’m sure the actual traffic of text messages against phone calls are nothing, and yet, they’re probably making money hand over fist on texts.
I hate you, big companies that don’t look out for their customers. Jerks.
Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
If any single human being has read this book from beginning to end and can explain to me the insanity that is “why”, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee to do so.
I have given up on this book. From the looks of it, I’ve tried three different times over the course of about a year and got to about halfway (I’ve highlighted about halfway through).
Definitely poignant, but horrendously confusing. It definitely is a work of art, but I’m kinda impatient for this type of thing. Sometimes, the really really wonky humor is lost on me, and this, my friend, is a shining example of it.
Time to go back to the Pickaxe book.
It’s eerie. I feel it. I feel it in the feed posts I should be getting.
There seems to be less and less feed items about Rails in general. I don’t know… maybe it’s just me… Obie Fernandez says otherwise:
Simply browse the ruby links on programming.reddit.com or the list of over 2000 ruby-related links on DZone to disprove that lie.
But I don’t know… just this gut feeling that I can’t shake that there’s this feeling of meh-ness in the community.
A lot of things have been leading up to this point for me. Working with PHP at work and having Java as the core for StatusFix (although I’m not actually doing Java, but just being this near to it… makes me feel a bit different) is helping me see more and more that there really is no silver bullet, no matter how much I want it.
But that’s merely just an aside. The point of this post comes from Global Nerdy.
It’s very likely that we’re in or very near the Trough of Disillusionment stage in the hype cycle when it comes to Rails. Makes a lot of sense, if you ask me. The way I see it, the hype has worn off. And thank goodness it has, because finally, the Rails community can get to work on making awesome things and stop defending or attacking other positions.
As a crazed extremist that has to have his way, I feel like I’ve still got quite a long ways to go in maturing as a developer/manager. New technologies will come and go, and picking the right ones… well, that’s the hard part. It’s almost like… the stock market.
Rap Lyrics Explained With Charts and Graphs
Yes. I think it’s a good thing that I didn’t get all of these.
EDIT:
But these: Understanding art for geeks, I feel like I should have known more of these paintings.