Yes, and the weird thing is that almost everybody down there would agree.

I remember during bubble ONE I wrote a financial reporter asking why she was not making it clearer to people that the tech valuations were almost certainly inflated. Her answer: of course they are inflated, which is partly why they’ll keep going up. Yes, it was nonsensical.

FG I agree this would be great. TWINE.com claims to be this type of application but they are still beta and I have not got my “invitation” yet. I expect to review it soon.

Just as blogs are falling prey to spam (Captcha, UltraCaptcha and GetLostIfYouAin’tRegistered) so too will social networks and email hybrids. Increased spam will likely be the trigger for defections from the popular leaders such as Facebook/Twitter/Whatever. There are only so many video feeds that one can stand even if they are from a circle of acquaintances.

Wall Street and Silicon Valley may be valueing these firms a bit optimistically and ignoring the fact that defections can escalate when some more trendy fad comes down the pike.

From some blog somewhere that I found somehow:
“…I have a Pownce account and frankly don’t update it often. It competed for my attention with Twitter. Granted the scope of Pownce is more interesting with messages, events, files, music as discrete classes of information. Still, can’t get into it. I don’t see a lot of buzz around Pownce or it being used for spreading the word quickly. Could be wrong, of course. …”

This person seems to acknowledge that Pownce is the more interesting platform, more technologically advanced and more useful but that Twitter despite some noticeable service interruptions is what people use. It seems this nugget represents the real value for venture capitalists: amongst the technoratii teens ‘buzz’ predominates over everything. Does a venture capitalist want to invest in ‘buzz’? Art Linkletter made a great deal of money in Hoola Hoops, but he knew there would be competitors and he knew it was all a flash-in-the-pan fad. Are Pownce and Twitter going to be battling it out for growth and innovation driven ad revenue? Or does the “buzz set” have such fickle devotions that a venture capitalist should set his sights elsewhere entirely. A great deal of money was made in “Pet Rocks” but the guy who invested in “Pet Pebbles” didn’t do so well at all! How is a venture capitalist to know?

All industry players, from newspapers to buggywhip makers, seem to want to say ‘lets do it my way’ and all wind up with the 5-4 vote to disband at the inevitable ‘its too late to do anything at all meeting’. I wonder if venture capitalists will soon be holding similar meetings after they have invested in the fickle fads of teenyboppers or barhopping vixens who posted their escapades on social networking sites.

Perhaps the venture capitalists should focus on the less fadish and more substantial? After all, online journalism efforts don’t seem to help line any virtual birdcages. You need real value these days.

Innovation? Let us take a look at ‘twitter’ and its emulators. I think the next ‘gleam’ will come from whoever develops a Social Network Contact Manager Program that handles all your Twitter, Pownce, DarnItAll contacts … all just so that bandwith can be used to let the world know that you are watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean while you are slurping a cup of coffee.