Technology Futures

I just spent a few minutes clicking around trying to find the Web site of a particular business. After four or five attempts to click through on links that I *thought* would go to the actual Web site of the business, I gave up. Every link took me to another link farm or worse, actually just clicked back through to the same page I left. Of course, each time I clicked, another list of Web ads got loaded into the page I landed on, and that's what much of the Web has become--just a snarled mess of link farms. The link farm sites don't have to be well-designed or particularly useful, because it costs almost nothing to build these sites, and even if only one person out of a hundred clicks on an ad, you can make money with it.

All those ads you hear on the radio and see on TV about making money on the Internet--there are really only two scams. One scam makes you a dealer for cheap, over-priced junk that you try to get friends and relatives to buy, and the other is building link farms.

And it is not just "I hope I get rich on the Internet" link farms that are part of the problem. There are a lot of well-financed commercial ventures that engage in this circular linking as well.

Like all popular Internet services, Facebook has enjoyed rapid growth over the past three or four years, as the service added many hundreds of thousands of users a week (or more--millions in some past months). But that growth has finally stalled out, as everyone who wants to be on Facebook already is. Geometric growth is a wonderful thing, but there was always a finite limit to that growth. Even more telling, the amount of activity by registered users has also dropped.

Facebook is a handy tool for staying in contact with friends and family and for organizing groups for things as mundane as a family reunion or scout troop. The service also gets wide use for causes (Friends of Calico Cats, Save Lindsay Lohan from Herself, etc.). But I have observed this growth phenomena repeatedly with other services, dating back to the early nineties and the first "killer app," email. Eventually everyone that wanted one got an email account, and that was the end of the email boom.

Facebook is vulnerable to competitors and perhaps the biggest danger is not managing internal costs; the company must now trim costs and manage budgets closely, and this does not always happen in time following a rapid and prolonged growth phase.

Broadband Properties has published my article The Third Way for Broadband. This provides a concise description of how and why open access business models work for broadband networks. Note that the open access business model is NOT inherently one that requires a community-owned network. A private sector broadband provider, including an incumbent (e.g. Verizon, Comcast, etc.) could also adopt this model and do very well financially.

With all the hype over the new iPhone in the last couple of weeks, the iPad has fallen off the radar of the press. But the tablet computer is flying off the shelves. Apple has sold three million iPads in 80 days. Or in other words, the company is selling a million iPads every three weeks. And the product is not even available in many other parts of the world yet, so the sales curve is likely to accelerate through the end of the year. Expect to see a lot of iPads under Christmas trees this year.