This very useful site also lets you zoom in on a specific rabbit or spot, so you can see which kind of carnal relation he or she just enjoyed. The five graphical representations of positions should cover the basics and all you have to do is tick the right box or boxes. You can also add a comment and tell us if it was indoor or outdoor.

Some users might find the 20 minutes update prevention a bit annoying, but the site is over capacitated, so I guess thats fair enough.

Currently 11,165 users has shared their moment of passion with 5 in Iran, 2 in Saudia Arabia and 10 in the North Atlantic Ocean (!?)

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Did you see those last three Twitter messages that flew by?

Did you really read all the messages posted to your Facebook timeline in the last hour?

Have you managed to get caught up with all those RSS feeds that piled into your feed reader since you logged off last night?

How close are you to screaming email bankruptcy from the highest office building in the city?

Just how many alerts have you missed in the last couple of hours from Google, your never ending beeping Blackberry, from some iPhone app you thought would make things easier?

How many of you have jokingly asked in the last half hour if someone had a few hours they could sell you because you don’t seem to have enough of your own?

Everything is clamoring for your attention and no matter how hard you try at some point you get that blank deer caught in the headlights look as you realize that there is just too much information screaming for your attention and time. As your brain begins to freeze up in a spastic firing of neurons crying out for respite you begin to realize that the majority of all that stuff clamoring for your attention is nothing more than noise.

The problem is that as we are inexorably led to a web where things really do happen in real-time, is that more and more noise is being generated. This is leading us to a point where we are having to forego any real depth to the few and far between bits of real information fight for our attention. Everything is bite size, short posts, 140 character messages, Facebook Lite, even television commercials are spoken faster so more can fit in a smaller time scale.

Documents created today will stand a good chance of being outdated by tomorrow. News that was fresh and important is almost outdated by the time you hit the publish button. Information distribution cycles are getting squeezed unmercifully and as a result the moment we take our eyes off of the screen we begin to feel the cold sweat of the fear we are going to miss something.

Never mind about daydreaming, or having a friendly conversation over coffee without a laptop or smartphone close. God forbid we should eschew undivided one on one attention in favor of zeros and ones sent to us over the Web. Even conversations are becoming some sort of universal shorthand so that we can get our thoughts across as quick as possible and move onto the next bit-size morsel of information that has been put on a diet.

There is no doubt that this is the direction our world is headed in – a world where everything comes at you all at once and where you hope that you can maintain some sort of attention long enough to catch everything so that you don’t miss those few and far between important snack bite sizes pieces of information. Chances are that being the incredibly intelligent race that we are that we will find ways to cope with the constant onslaught of information.

Coping however is not the same as learning and growing. Sure we might actually have people who thrive in this kind of environment but for the majority the assault on our ever decreasing attention spans may be a bigger cost that we might think.

Related posts:

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From a Flickr founder, new search engine Hunch is out of private beta today.

So if you’re Binged out, you’ve been Google Squared and got your kosher-search on, you might need a bit of a helping hand with your next search. Hunch promises to help you find what you’re looking for on the web in “ten questions or less.” Huh. But in a searchy world where Google Answers, Wikia Search and MSN QnA have all disappeared from the landscape, will users trust the collective opinion?

Caterina Fake thinks so. Fake co-founded Flickr and had something to do with Yahoo! Answers before moving on to create Hunch. As you use it, Hunch asks a variety of seemingly irrelevant questions about you- are alien abductions real? Who makes the best fries? Do you like bumper cars? Building on your answers, the site compiles a demographic profile to find the best search results when you need them.

Clearly the site needs more input to work as intended. Earlier today, as I answered the random questions (not geared to a specific search) it would indicate that X% of users responded with that answer. But if it was a choice of three answers, my result was always the same as 33% of respondents, with no variance.

So I took the direct approach, selecting a question from the dropdown menu at the upper right hand corner of the page. Typing in “is” lead to a bunch of questions- I chose “is my partner cheating on me?” (Sorry, honey, it’s for work!)

A series of questions followed- does he tell you where he’s going? Do you both say “I love you?” Does he let you in on his schedule? After the promised ten questions, I was awarded with this result:

I don’t think Hunch will replace Google, nor is it looking to. But it might provide a comfy home for the legions of search engine surfers seeking answers to more personal questions like should I marry my boyfriend or is my son gay?

Hunch currently has a user satisfaction rate of 80%, and Fake believes with more users, it can go as high as 90-95%. So, what do you think? Will you be using Hunch?

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What happens when you get a bunch of rich old pricks gathering together for yet another conference and the talk turns to how poor they are and how it’s the Internet’s fault?

Well you get people like Barry Diller (who looks surprising like a older version of Steve Ballmer) pontification about how the web will return to its glory days of when you paid for stuff – and all within five years. Yes folks by the time five years rolls by we will be forking over cash for all that stuff we are getting for free today.

“I absolutely believe the Internet is passing from its free days into a paid system. Inevitably, I promise you, it will be paid,” Diller said in a keynote discussion opening up the Advertising 2.0 conference held at his company’s futuristic glass building alongside the Hudson River in Manhattan. “Not every single thing, but anything of value. “

The fact that content and services on the Internet so far have been largely supplied for no charge is “an accident of historical moment that will be corrected,” he said, in an era of “creative chaos” that will span the next three to five years.

Source: Between The Lines

It’s not a matter that businesses are going to have to find new ways to be profitable in the era of Web 2.0 (or if you prefer Web 3.0 or Scoble’s favorite 2010Web). No it will be us suddenly realize that out of the goodness of our hearts that we should be paying companies for the privilege of being able to keep on doing business as usual. Even though those business models are proving all on their own that they don’t work.

Diller goes on to add

The entire Internet, in effect, would become an app – or content – store.

“That little thing – that in fact that you scroll it, you do it, it comes, everything else is taken care of, is the answer to what’s going to happen on the Internet, when in fact, you get the applicability of that broadly across the Internet,” Diller said. “It’s absolutely going to happen.”

So in effect the Web becomes nothing more than a gigantic iTunes store with the old guard once again charging what they think is a fair price and walking away with all the profits.

Okay Barry, what ever you say. How about you and I getting back together in five years and see exactly how wrong you were.

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An American language monitoring group has named Web 2.0 as the one millionth word or phrase in the English language.

The Global Language Monitor claims to track the English language through a formula that considers the frequency of words and phrases in print and electronic media. Web 2.0 got the prize after it appeared 25,000 times in searches and was widely accepted.

According to Reuters, other linguists are not surprisingly calling the finding a publicity stunt, saying it is impossible to count English words in use or to agree on how many times a word must be used before it is officially accepted.

As Adam Ostrow at Mashable also rightly points out, the award comes as the term Web 2.0 is starting to slip from regular use.

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I ran across this in one of my feeds just now and it is tying in nicely with another post I am working on for later but I couldn’t resist the urge to share this with you right now. Set to the music of Don McLean’s “The Day That the Music Died” it is a great take on why advertising as we know it is nothing but a big FAIL.

Enjoy

A big hat tip to Eric Friedman at Marketing.FM

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Yelp, which bills itself as a Web 2.0 review site powered by real people giving real reviews, recently faced charges by San Francisco businesses that Yelp employees were strong arming them for better review placement in exchanges for goods and sponsorship deals. It would seem according to a story today at the Chicago Tribune that the practice isn’t just restricted to San Francisco. Apparently some Chicago businesses are accusing Yelp representatives of approaching them to re-arrange the company’s positive and negative reviews in exchange for those same type of advertising and sponsorship deals.

Ina Pinkney of Ina’s restaurant in the West Loop said that last summer a Yelp salesperson offered to "move up my good reviews if I sponsored one of their events. They called it rearranging my reviews."

The owner of More Cupcakes, Patty Rothman, said that last fall a Yelp Chicago staffer walked into her Gold Coast shop and "guaranteed us good reviews on the site if we catered one of their parties for free." Offended but resigned, Rothman complied. And just as promised, positive reviews bloomed for the business right after the party, Rothman said.

Source: Chicago Tribune

Gee…. I wonder what happened to the whole Web 2.0 and social media ethos of warm and fuzzy we’re in this altogether for the consumer ideology. As usual money trumps ethos I guess.

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If there is one thing you can say about the whole Web 2.0 thing it would be that it definitely hasn’t been boring. Every time you turn around some new service being announce, some new idea is being touted as the next game changer and everybody is yakking about how hot the social media stuff is. Yup – Web 2.0 is full of bustling activity.

But where do we go from here?

What will the next iteration of the web be like?

Fred Wilson had a post this morning called Looking for the Yawn in which he quotes something from a Warren Buffet blog post in which Warren said the following

Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.

I’ve been thinking about that and the other things Fred talked about in his post and it got me to wondering if Web 3.0 could actually end up being very boring. The thing about Web 2.0 is that in a lot of ways it resembles the construction of a building. There is a hubbub of activity as everyone is rushing around putting all the pieces together. The foundation, the walls, the plumbing – it all a flurry of hyper activity as people excitedly raise a whole new building up from the barren earth.

At some point though everything is in place – the building is completed and then everyone sets about to do the day by day business of working in that new building. You know the boring stuff.

The stuff that makes everyone want to *YAWN*.

What do you think? Do you think the next version number will be more building or will it be a big *YAWN*fest?

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If there is one word I really want to see run out of town it is free. It is a word that has created an extremely lopsided view of what the concept of value means in our Web 2.0 world. The idea that we would be able to feast at the table of top notch web (and to a certain point desktop) software that could be supported; and show a profit (sometimes obscene profits), by straight advertising is showing itself to be the ultimate ponzi scheme.

In turn for our flocking like headless chickens to every new web service that came along what did we really get in exchanged?

We got applications that we invested time and energy in, come to rely on, only to have them disappear with all our data or just plain disappear. We get autocratic social media fiefdoms where without any warning you can find yourself thrown outside the gates of these so-called transparent and open data farms disguised as your best friend. We get contextual advertising constantly bombarding us in these free apps that is far from being contextual. We get deluded into believing we are somehow important because we have been invited into participating in using beta software; which most of the time any real developer would be embarrassed to even call alpha quality software; but is designed to get those ad dollars rolling in as soon as possible.

While some smart bloggers are writing how venture capital money is on a straight downward decline others are suggesting that this people behind all this venture capital are starting to run scared. At the root of either of these things is the fact that the advertising model of supporting software is crashing; and in some cases crashing hard. In the process the basic fallacy of the whole Web 2.0 ethos of free is being shown to world as the newest wardrobe of the emperor that it is – empty of value.

Where this idea of free falls down on its knees is expectation. When we actually pay out our hard earned cash on something we have certain expectations. With real world products and services we expect that product to work within in certain parameters – whether those parameters be set by the manufacturer of the product / service or if they are set by government regulation. In the online Web 2.0 world however we have willingly lowered our own expectations because we are getting something for free.

We have willingly said that we will accept extended periods of product or service downtime. We have willingly accepted handing over our data on a day to day basis because we are getting something for free. We have willingly agreed to use software that is just okay because we are getting something for free. We have willingly accepted the idea being foisted upon us; consumer and producer alike, that our data, our ideas, our content aren’t worth anything more than being gist for their advertising money mill all because we are getting something for free. We have also let ourselves be conned into believing that the most precious commodity we have – our time – isn’t valuable because we are getting something for nothing.

The interesting thing here is that in this movement consumers; and to a large degree the producers, have become faceless entities whose only value is the data that they can produce and the more copious the better. The web companies behind this con job don’t care about the individual – they only care about the aggregate. Just keep quiet and keep producing all those tweet, uploading all those pictures and poking people and you’ll be fine. The moment that you raise your head above the faceless crowd though you can find your account suspended, pictures deleted forever or locked out of the Web 2.0 world. The common feeling at that point is oh well it wasn’t costing me anything so why worry about it.

What about your time?

What about your data that is still a part of that aggregated pot of gold at the end of the start-up rainbow?

It doesn’t matter, because we got all that stuff for free. However once you bring money into the equation things change and those things that we have been lead to believe don’t matter because we were getting something for nothing suddenly do matter. When you hand over your money suddenly uptime isn’t just a oh well we’ll do the best we can matter. Suddenly just arbitrarily deleting a persons data takes on a whole new meaning. Suddenly terms of service are something that can be challenged. The expectation of responsibility changes once money changes hands. Reputations mean more once you include a sense of real tangible consumer cost into the mix.

Where companies could once slough off responsibilities because the word free, or beta, or alpha, or by invitation only are in the header graphic of some web service they are finding a whole new set of rules they will have to live by. This creates a problem for anyone wanting to start up some new service or make users want to use an existing one. the first question anyone asked when wanting to use something new is – is it worth spending my money on -  and in most cases I would strongly suggest this isn’t the case. As well those beta, alpha or invitation slap together services have to hit the ground running with a much more reliable and better feature set than if they were hiding under the free moniker like they do now.

Does this mean the downfall of service like Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook?

Nope because for some folks these types of services already fill a need that is worth paying for. For other folks this won’t be the case and probably never would be the case. However for those that it does fill a need or is able to meet the expectations of they will be a lot harder to keep happy because they are going to expect a certain level of quality and respect for the money they are paying. In turn though it also means that people will finally get what they pay for because so far this getting something for free isn’t looking like it is working out to well.

Reality sucks eh.

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As Duncan reported earlier Google is shutting down; or removing any active upkeep and development, from a slew of services that they had paid out millions for. The reason why – money. The problem is that it is services like Jaiku, Notebook and Google Video that the company was using as part of their whole webification of our our world. Sure YouTube is a more popular product than Google Video but that doesn’t change the fact that these are all services that at some point people have entrusted their workflow to along with their data. Like everything else though when the money gets tight if something isn’t making a company money it’s time to shut the doors on it – that’s just Business 101.

Steve Rubel just raised an interesting point in a new post – could GReader be next on the chopping block at Google. After all like he points out GReader still hasn’t been able to be monetized in any serious fashion. As well, while in the Web 2.0 and social media world everyone might be deeply in love with the product the rest of the real mainstream world on the web still hasn’t gotten RSS feeds.

Enter Google Reader, one of my favorite products and by far the best RSS reader on the market. However, Google Reader is completely un-monetized. Further, RSS adoption aint exactly a robust growth market. It’s still for geeks. So I wonder if the economic storm intensifies what Reader’s future is. My bet is that they will either shut it down, cease development or start to monetize it the way they are doing with Google Finance. More likely it’s the latter. Even Google Maps now has ads.

If Google chooses to run ads in Google Reader, that creates an issue. Lots of publishers run ads in their feeds. If Google is competing against these with its own contextual ads in in Reader then what? It might just be easier for them to shut it down. Thank God for OPML exporting.

What does this portend for the rest of all those companies out there scratching for attention and users for their services. After all VC money will only go so far especially in these economic times regardless how some of the venture capital companies might want to spin it. So at what point do the users out there realize that these companies are starting to drop like flies taking all of our time invested in them along with our data right down the flick of a server switch.

What we could very well be seeing here is the very beginning of the snowball rolling down the hill. It might be starting out small with only a few companies; or existing services that are cash sink holes, getting shuttered. Unfortunately though with each one that disappears consumer willingness to expend any more time on exist services will decline. For new services starting out it will be even harder because they have the double whammy of the economy and consumer reluctance to deal with.

Personally I have been reluctant from the beginning to move my workflow to the web mainly because of things like this. One minute you might be using some service as part of your workflow and the next minute – Whoosh – it’s gone; usually with nothing more than a week or two notice on a blog somewhere that no-one probably reads. I may have gotten laughed at in the past whenever I questioned the long term viability of trusting our workflow to the web but over the next year I don’t think those people will be laughing quite as hard.

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Before there was Disqus, sezWho or even IntenseDebate there was a service called co.mments that allowed you to track all your comments that you left scattered around the blogosphere. Well according to a post by Steve Rubel this morning the service will be shutting down on January 11. Founder Asaf Arkin announced it in a blog post the previous night

I remember using the service for awhile back in the beginning but at some point I turned it off. It looks like a lot more people have done the same and now with funding money getting harder to get it just got to be too much.

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So one day you’re blogging away and end up writing something a little on the negative side about the US government (like that’ll never happen) or more specifically about the US Air Force only to find your post the target of some barbed comments by a USAF officers. Well, don’t take it personally because you have landed yourself in the sights of the new USAF counter-blogging policy.

Yup the US Air Force as a part of its emerging technologies division of the public affairs department has provided a 12 point flow chart for the airmen to follow when dealing with bloggers.

The flow chart lays out a range of possible responses to a blog post. Airmen can offer a "factual and well-cited response [that] is not factually erroneous, a rant or rage, bashing or negative in nature." They can "let the post stand — no response." Or they cancan "fix the facts," offering up fresh perspective. No matter what, the chart says, airmen should "disclose your Air Force connection," "respond in a tone that reflects high on the rich heritage of the Air Force," and "focus on the most-used sites related to the Air Force."

Source: Danger Room]

This is all part of a larger program within the Air Force to better utilize social media tools and be a part of the Web 2.0 community

Capt. Faggard and his Air Force Emerging Technology team is responsible for developing strategy, policy and plans for an ever-changing communication landscape for communicators worldwide. What was most interesting is that with Capt. Faggard leading the way, the Air Force employs 330,000 communicators! Their mission is to use current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public. Yes, that’s right, the goal of the program is that every single Airman is an on-line communicator.

Source: Web Ink Now

What’s interesting here is that as David Scott says in his post on Web Ink Now the US Air Force; and other branches of the military, seem to be more open to things like Twitter and blogs that the corporate world is.

Here is the full chart used by the USAF (click on it for full view)

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Jeff Atwood had a great post the other day about the pirating of software and as much as I would like to say that there was anything new that will come out of it – well – there won’t. Of course the entertainment industry loves to point to the people doing the pirating as the bad guys and RIAA has made themselves the jackboot squad of the Internet age with their sue the fucker’s into oblivion attitude; and we can see how well that has worked out for them.

What no-one really wants to talk about is why Internet piracy works in the first place. They don’t because they don’t want to ruin the illusion that people are willing to pay for stuff. Sure people will pay for their food because if they don’t they’ll starve. People will pay for their cars because if they don’t they get repo’d. People will pay for their power (if they can) because if they don’t they’ll freeze their asses off in the dark.

Yet when it comes to the Internet suddenly everyone gets the holier than thou attitude about how everything is suppose to be free. It doesn’t matter that the person who created the goods needs to feed their family or pay for their car or be able to heat their homes just as long as you and me can get it for free.

Whadda mean buy a t-shirt – forget it.

Whadda mean look at some ads – that’s why I have an ad blocker.

Whadda mean you want money – forget it … where’s my torrents .. where’s my USENET.

Piracy works for one very simple reason – people don’t want to pay for shit. Now before you self-righteous bunch gets your panties in a bunch I am not saying that everyone is out to steal someone’s hard work – only about, oh – say –  95% of the people on the web.

This attitude that everything is free on the web is being hammered into peoples heads everyday and right at the forefront of those doing the hammering is Web 2.0 and social media. Content should be free they proclaim to the masses. Well as far as the masses are concerned that means anything whether it be an MP3, a movie, a book or a bloggers content.

Governments can kiss ass for votes and Big Media support by going after those bad pirates making all these things available for free. Big media can blame all the losses on those big bad pirates stealing their gawd awful crappy movies and music. The fact is that the pirates only exist to the degree they do because the large majority of people don’t want to pay for something that they can get for free – especially when the basic premise of the web now is that content should be free.

People by their very nature are cheap – give them a reason to justify stealing and they’ll take it. So before you start yammering too much at those big bad pirates maybe we should be looking a little closer to home. As long as we keep telling people that content on the Internet should be free they’ll keep using that as a soothing reason for steal.

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From the very first time almost when people communicate with each other via some form on computer link up nicknames have been an integral part of that communication. In the beginning days with bulletin board services right though to today’s Web 2.0 and social media the old adage of on the Internet no-one knows you’re a dog has held true.

Even though one of the basic tenets of Web 2.0 and social media is transparency and openness nicknames have persevered. For a lot of people there is still that need to either be anonymous or to create some new kind of identity for themselves. With the Internet this is so easy to do as regardless of how open you may appear no-one for the large part knows who you are. Sure in the Web 2.0 world with it’s continuing onslaught of conferences that anyone wanting to be anyone in the business of Social Media identities are easy to confirm.

However anonymity still seems to be the rule rather than the exception in the larger web experience. For some it is primarily a way to protect their offline lives. For others it also seems to be a way for them to behave in ways that their mother’s would wash their mouths out with soap.

Interestingly enough Alan Patrick at Broadstuff had a post today where he was comparing the types of conversations around some web conference in France called Le Web. He points out that there is a big difference in the types of back channel conversations be had. On the one side there is the Twitter based conversation and then there is the IRC like conversation happening on the Le Web uStream channel.

The thing that struck Alan was the quality of the conversation on each of the channels

The difference was this – one was sharp, irreverent, funny, cruel, anarchic and a hoot to watch. The other was on Twitter.
One had a go at the piousness, pomposity, posturing , product pimping and peccadilloes of the presenters and promoters, argued the rights and wrongs of the arguments, pimped and flamed various speakers, and was the olde altnet at its best (and worst). The other was respectful, simpering, careful what it said and, well, mostly lame. Thousand, and thousands of bytes of blanc tweetmange.

In his opinion the difference between the two boiled down to a single factor – anonymity.

Now as one who started out his online communication experience being fully behind using things like nicknames I think there is a problem with this anonymity. As I have grown in this online world I gradually became more comfortable with using my real identity but I don’t believe my way of communicating has changed. For me it has always been a case of calling a spade a spade and if you didn’t like it too bad.

With anonymity though I find a lot of people talk and treat others in ways that they wouldn’t have the guts to in real life. I willingly accept the responsibility for my words – good or bad. Being anonymous removes this responsibility and I personally don’t think that is right. Regardless of where I might be having conversation – online or offline – I have always believe that you are accountable for what you say and trying to hide behind some facade belittle the worth of what you have to say.

I can understand where in some cases this anonymity is needed especially in cases like whistleblowers and should be protected with all our might but in general conversation – I don’t think so. If you aren’t willing to stand in front of your words and be willing to accept any repercussion of them then what value do those words have?

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The service isn’t a full blown analytics package, the best you get is a running total of live stats, but it fits in nicely on the flip side of Google Analytics; it’s not a full blown alternative, but it’s not half way in between like a range of other services either. It does a basic task, and in theory it should be good at it.

I know: free service, I shouldn’t complain. But this is a service with an A-list recommendations list. I don’t begrudge the fact that there are times when the service won’t work, or it has to go down for maintenance, but more and more lately its been as useless as tits on a bull.

Here’s one shot from today, I missed getting the time out shots:

The Who’s Amung Us blog hasn’t been updated since September 23, so what ever is going wrong isn’t being communicated, and that’s a sure sign that things aren’t great at any service, particularly when the problems have gotten worse over October into this month.

A couple of people have suggested alternative services on Twitter, if you have any recommendations let us know. I’m not necessarily against paying for a service, but I also don’t want load time issues for running a live script either. Free would be better again.

Who’s Amung Us = fail.

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Then along comes the whole Web 2.0 movement and its offspring; the social networks and the newer social media crew, and once again Microsoft becomes the object of ridicule. To these goody two shoes proponents of all that is goodness and light in our computing world Microsoft was old school, a monolithic leftover that needed to be put out of its misery ASAP. It doesn’t matter to these anti-MS hound dogs that much of what they are doing these days is nothing more than the re-invention; or re-working, of stuff that can be traced back to Microsoft or programs that were influenced by the company.

In this so-called new world of Web 2.0 and its spin-offs the idea that anyone would still be a fan of Microsoft or its products is cause for instant derision and howls of laughter. It doesn’t matter that this is a company that has a yearly R&D budget; currently at $7 Billion, that is more than most of these self-righteous upstart companies can hope to make with their everything for free business plans. It doesn’t matter that if it wasn’t for Microsoft the idea of personal computers; and fancy assed laptops, wouldn’t be where it is. Chances are we would still be in a mainframe world or mortgaging our homes to buy some Apple computer.

Nowhere is this better than thou attitude prevalent than on the web or more specifically social media as pointed out today by Svetlana Gladkova at Profy.com when she wrote

First of all, Microsoft does not have the right image in the web crowd to try and pretend it can offer the web population a social network that will become popular. It is simply not cool here to think Microsoft is cool in any way. I myself tend to think that there are some things in which Microsoft is pretty cool but every time I try to mention them, I get tons of criticism.

The latest example was when I tried to mention a few things about Google’s Chrome browser that were described by media people as innovative and introduced by Google into web browsing but were in fact present in other browsers – including Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 beta. As a result of even trying to compare I got dozens of angry comments insisting that even if Microsoft was ahead of Google introducing this or that thing into web browsing experience, Microsoft still was evil while Google was the best company in the world that should never be criticized at all.

While she was commenting more on the announcement of Microsoft launching the Windows Live as a social networking site; which Duncan wrote about here at The Inquisitr, her point about Microsoft not being cool is right on the money. I have been using Microsoft products for a very long time; through the good and the bad, and I have pretty well seen all of the negative attitude about the company. It has always been an easy target for people to shoot against through the years and now is no different.

Whether it was something as inanely stupid as using the ‘$’ in place of the letter ’s’ in the company name through to the admittedly brilliant Apple ads Microsoft has attracted much criticism. Even myself I have been among the first to slap the company around if I feel they have done something wrong but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a company that is constantly innovating across a wide spectrum of software fields.

It is only recently though that I believe that the company is truly beginning to turn the battleship around. Some pundits have suggested that it either won’t be able to or that it won’t be able to do it quick enough. The problem is that these people are trying to apply a different set of companies rules to Microsoft. Admittedly the company isn’t a startup that is capable of switching gears in mid-stride but don’t be stupid; or naive, to assume that a company like Microsoft can’t turn itself around. That would be a bet I really believe you would lose.

The fact is that it doesn’t matter if Microsoft is cool or not. Being cool doesn’t pay the shareholders their dividends; especially if you are just a startup looking only to be bought up as your payout. Microsoft is all about delivering software that works for anyone that wants to use it – not just a bunch small market geeks with a book of javascript by their keyboards.

When push comes to shove I have a great respect for Microsoft because in the end this is a company that has had an immense impact on our computing lives and to me that is cool. Under its new leadership Microsoft is turning the tables and proving many a pundit fanboy wrong and that I think is cool. Not having to count the so-called Monster of Redmond down for the count is in my opinion pretty cool.

So you keep on switching the letter ’s’ for ‘$’ and poking fun at what ever the company does and you can even call me uncool as you want but I couldn’t care less. I am looking forward to where Microsoft is going and I’ll bet we will be seeing a lot of surprises coming from Redmond for years to come.

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Well actually now it is all the hot air that was holding it up that is flowing outward but that is another post for another day.

Even with that though, there is still this thought that Social Media is the bigger result of this latest boom and bust period of the web. After all everyone and their brother wants to jump on the bandwagon now and in the typical self-fulfilling prophesy those that haven’t yet are hiring social media consultants to tell them how they can save their asses. This of course is guaranteed to have these newly minted consultants proclaim that everyone must grab their piece of the social media wagon as it goes by.

But grab a piece of what? After all, social media is just a term that means having conversations with as many people as possible, as transparently as possible and if you can make them your friend. Social Media boils down to nothing more than having as many friends as possible on as many of the different social media services as you can possibly belong to; and if you can’t belong to them all join one of the services that lets you broadcast like a megaphone to everyone from one place.

At what point though does this become just a pointless exercise in sending out following notifications ad nauseam. At what point does having all these friends become just ridiculous bullshit because we really don’t know who these people are and for the most part we don’t care just as long as they follow us back. Do we know if their belief systems meshes with ours, or will something we say at some point spark a royal flamefest that everyone jumps in on if for no other reason that they can. Just because our contact lists on various services are suffering from a bad Viagra overdose does that really make our time spent online any more valuable or does it just give us bragging rights on how popular we are.

A good friend of mine; and not just because we connected on some silly ass service, recently posted about his quitting FriendFeed. I can totally understand why Mark did this given his penchant for talking about and sharing political oriented stuff. The problem is that he harboured the false belief that just because they were friends on FriendFeed people would be reasonable and thoughtful and would enjoy intelligent discourse over the things he was sharing. That unfortunately was his first mistake because no matter how many people you have in the same room – or in the case of social media services – the same friend list none of them will share exactly the same ideals. Under normal social; not online social nonsense but real life social there are two definite things people don’t talk about unless they are itching for a fight and that is politics and religion.

Now Rob Diana; guest posting on Louis Gray’s blog, quite rightly pointed out that this is a perfect example of how our real life social filters have not made the transition to our online social circles. As true as this might be I also believe it is because we have too many friends online and that is blinding us to the fact that there are times we need to just shut up. This incident that Mark experienced and caused to him to sign out of FriendFeed for good is something I believe we will start seeing more of. People by their very nature have close circles of friends that they are comfortable with. They know what can or cannot be discussed because those are boundaries we have learned over the time it has taken to get to know them as friends.

In our rush though to be a part of this new thing called social media; which we are all being told we must be a part of, we have forgotten that friendship doesn’t happen overnight or by the click of a submit button on some service join up form. Because it is our nature to have small groups of friends this pressure to expand those groups to enormous numbers builds up a sense of pressure to moderate out own feelings so we can belong to this larger transparent group. As with all things under any kind of pressure there comes a point of explosion or implosion and I wonder if with this suggested need to be friends with as many people as we can on all these social media services there won’t come a point when soical media collapses in on itself from the pressure of too many friendships that in most cases don’t mean a damn thing.

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It’s the tip of the iceberg, with many more job cuts to come as startups try to prepare themselves for the storm ahead, and as others flounder and fail outright as the money runs out.

We wrote a post last week about focusing blog content in a storm, where the options were to go heavy on the bad news, cover some of it, or ignore it, and instead focus on providing positive news that offers an escape from the negative stories elsewhere.

Our motto is “the better mix” and part of that is offering some fun stuff in with the tech news of the day. The thing is, very soon the tech industry is going to be swamped by bad news stories (it has already begun), and tone wise that may reflect on our mix.

So we thought we’d ask you: do you want us to regularly cover startup job cuts?

I say regularly, because I can never rule out covering the occasional story, where we think it’s important enough to share. But likewise, we could spend half the day writing stories about job cuts very soon as well, and I’m not sure we should be doing that, even if writing about those will make the writing teams jobs a lot easier.

Voting widget below, and we’ll respect any way the vote goes.

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Like Mark I don’t mean to pick on specific companies like Seesmic or Twitter but the fact is they are the poster children of this faux web business that keeps seeing larger and larger valuations. Valuations that are based on nothing more that highly questionable pageviews and possible membership counts that can supposedly be translated into eyeballs pointed towards ads. Sure there are profitable Web 2.0 companies but they are companies that came into this with their eyes wide open and a business plan in hand. These types of companies are also few and far between in a web landscape that is predominately free models supported by VC dollars.

The idea that companies like Seesmic, Twitter and countless number of Web 2.0 startups can even be considered as real viable businesses because their main source of income comes from VCs is ludicrous. The thing is even VCs expect to be paid back at some point and how can a company like Seesmic; who recently took another VC payday of $6million, expect to pay those investors back when they aren’t even concerned with having a true viable source of income. Even Facebook has said that they are not concerned about making money at this point and don’t expect to need a monetization plan for another three years. Then there is Twitter who just recently got handed $15million but still no business plan in sight.

How much more of a hot air bubble example do we need to have in order to understand Web 2.0 can’t be sustainable with this current model of VC supported free businesses. Again pointing back Mark’s post I agree when he said

Not to pull a Robert Scoble and suddenly go doom and gloom but maybe we got suckered again. All the lessons learned seven or eight years about crazy schemes, companies raising lots of capital without a plan on how sell stuff, and the hype/euphoria surrounding the Web’s Next, Great growth phase were mostly forgotten.

The interesting thing is that due to the ongoing economic problems VC are saying that things have to change if Web 2.0 business want to succeed. Even though they might be saying this there are still startups with no business plans getting funding right now so I guess we’ll see how much change actually takes place.

However one interesting I had as I thought this post through is that this currently economic instability and uncertainty could have been the saving grace of Web 2.0. With the way that Web 2.0 was going with this utter reliance of VC money and a total lack of real business plans that we were on the road to a repeat of the Web 1.0 crash and burn. This time around though it was a totally different segment of financial market that was the cause of the meltdown it could have very well been the bursting of the Web 2.0 bubble that once again sent us into a downward spiral.

Under the current sircumstances Web 2.0 has been given a chance to gently deflate and give us all a chance to re-evaluate and regroup. It has given us a chance to take a deep breath and get a grip on what basic business principals are and bring them back into the realm of Web 2.0 where they are in short supply.

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