Monthly Archive for January, 2008

Is This Thing On?

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.

The Moment I’ve Been Waiting For: Facebook Financial Numbers

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.

Recap of Facebook Financial Info

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

Sidenote: MySpace

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)

User “Counts”

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?

My Takeaway/Realization From All This Math

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.

Twitter: The First Outage That’s Making Me Angry

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.

Twitter Updates for 2008-01-30

  • Testing Twitter Awesomeness #

Josh Kim dot Org: A New Direction

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.

So What Is This Blog About Now?

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.

Upcoming Post Topics

  • The Status of Status
  • FeedSt: The Death of a Project
  • Desktop vs Hybrid vs Web Applications
  • Prism: The Future of Applications?
  • MAMP + Whatever: Why Not Installable Web Applications?
  • Polling on the Internet

I hope to post on about half of these in the upcoming week. We’ll see…