Google doesn’t understand social or collaboration. There’s not much more to it than that, though for the sake of making this a an actual blog post I’ll explain a bit more.

Blogger was huge, it was the place to go if you were creating a blog. There weren’t many www.mybloghere.com, many of the largest most popular blogs on the internet were on blogger. People had accounts, people registered to post comments, people had full fledged profiles that could have easily preceded a facebook profile page. Google bought blogger and had more than enough resources to grow blogger into a sizable social community. But if you visit it looks much the same as it did 5 and almost 10 years ago.

Due to many recent events, which I’m sure I’ll disclose later, I’ve been in an interesting situation of a good bit of leverage. While leverage can of course be taken advantage of and misused, it also plays a very fair role in business. When hiring a new college graduate in most cases you take the offer you are given, some are able to negotiate for a higher salary, but most are quite unsuccessful. This is because they don’t have any leverage. If you ended up walking away from the job offer they would simply hire another college graduate. While yes you may have a lot of potential, it’s only that potential and not proven.

Twitter has finally hit mainstream, it was bound to happen and with Ashton, Oprah, Shaq, among many others it’s now going to be around for a while. This means a lot of interesting things for twitter such as scalability to handle this new massive growth which will be much more regular unlike the more sparse spikes they would see before. But as user of twitter it means something far different, it means twitter is about to run out of usefulness. Before twitter was a nice resource to be able to regularly communicate with micromessaging, now it’s quickly going to become one of the noisiest things on the web. This would be a fine case, IF there were ways to manage the noise. However with twitter you either get really focused drops or the entire firehose, there is no medium in between. Sure twitter searches can be nice, but this requires maybe 20-30 constant searches to be up to date on what you care about.

I’ve learned a great deal since being out in the valley, first, is the confirmation that I do love the atmosphere. Second that I really miss the fall, but more importantly I’ve learned a lot that I feel is useful in a startup environment. The startup environment and business model is a very unique one, especially in recent years. It seems to not require a business model to get someone just to give you $10 million and hope you come out with one at some point. And in some cases it works, I mean it did for google, but well the failure stories are a lot more abudant than the success ones.

As I watch the news and posts roll in each day with new layoffs in the valley, ranging from large corporations such as HP and EA, down to the small guys such as seesmic, imeem, searchme, and zillow to name only a few, there still seems to be a demand for certain job skills. While as I look down the list some of these I dont feel are any longer demanded skills, and others will soon be there. In part I want to call attention to facebook first. While everyone and their brother, when launching a website wants to build a facebook app to deliver some of their content on to facebook, the time and effort put into this is no where near the return. The market has become so flooded the penetration you will get is quite trivial. Futhermore cpm’s have already plummeted for advertising on facebook, ranging in some cases around .10-.15.

I recently attended part of the recent Techcrunch 50 conference, and when I wasn’t there I was watching much of it online. For probably 80% of the companies when it came time to ask about their business model, they said ads. Then they talked about cause they have all of this great information about the user they can advertise better than they used to. The problem is they’re forgetting all about user intent. This is why ads on facebook simply arent working, with some CPM’s being as low as .05. 

Forget the benchmarks, forget whether its truly faster or slower, forget whether the market share is 30% for non-IE browsers (though is this only for US or internationally). Google Chrome evolution or revolution, whatever you want to call it, it makes me actually want to stay in the browser. I just want plugins, that function as well as the browser alone does. Yeah theres rendering problems, and some oddities, but the browser as a whole is smooth. I actually feel thus far its the best of IE and safari melded together. The only problem I see right now is the lack of plugins, which my guess is will come VERY SOON. Meanwhile firefox when having the plugins I want enabled can be sluggish, if Chrome plugins are of equivilant quality then I can’t see how the browser wouldn’t be at LEAST as smooth.

As I currently work at a startup I have a small stake in the company. When talking with one friend of something I have been working with someone with on the side, the question came up over if this was a conflict of interest. I was actually quite shocked to hear the question at first, not only did I expect them to do likewise, as I know many that do. The full on conflict of interest statement just shocked me. Being at a startup it does make it slightly more of an interesting statement, but I received similar comments sometimes at my former Fortune 100 employer. I’ll start with that place and then migrate to the startup environment.

Many people criticize Wal-Mart for the way they run their business. I personally find no problems with it, as their goal is simply to make prices competitive. If you care about the other details then either A. shop else where or B. donate to those causes you feel should be supported with the money you save. While sure some of these qualms may be justified I’d like to hint at another thought, of why people don’t take advantage of the same approaches.

Live video streaming from your phone might just seem like another form of lifecasting, a video form of twitter, or even a mobile version of ustream.com or justin.tv, but it really is far more than that. A few people have taken these mobile streaming services such as Qik, Flixwagon, and Kyte and really used them to their fullest capacity. Sure you can go to an extreme like Robert Scoble, but admittedly most of his content from Qik can be pretty good.