Acquisitions by the Numbers
Andy Baio doesn’t think the $1-billion price tag on Instagram is so crazy and puts it into context.
If we look strictly at the acquisition cost per user, Facebook got a relative deal with the Instagram purchase, paying roughly $28 for each of Instagram’s 35 million users. (The median cost across all the acquisitions is about $92 per user.)
(Side note: In the table of acquisition prices, he italicizes “rumoured” amounts. Among those is Upcoming.org, which is “rumoured” at $1 million. It’s just funny because he’s the guy who sold it.)
Cross posted from http://bit.ly/HxXU3j
Social Web c. 1997
The modern social web as it would have looked in 1997. They even limit the transfer to dial-up speed, which is funny and infinitely frustrating.
With the launch of the new Delicious (and, more to the point, the elimination of several awesome features), people have started flocking to Pinboard. Again. But the real loser here is probably Magnolia. [via]
Rhapsody bought Napster. Unfortunately no one knows what those two things are anymore.
The new Delicious. It’s like web 2.0 all over again.
TIME’s 50 best websites of 2011. <Insert joke about my Tumblr not making the list.>
Some notables: 8tracks, Turntable.fm, Dear Photograph, Grantland (really?), Instapaper, Techmeme (but not Mediagazer?), Evernote, Kickstarter, Airbnb, Google+ (!!?), Klout (!!!!!!!!?) and The Escapist (but without mentioning Zero Punctuation).
How the internet transformed the rave scene.
We were using the Internet in 1994-95 to communicate to our fans in the Midwest about our events. We stopped doing flyers and were able to announce events in the mid and late ’90s one day before — even hours before — and get hundreds [or] thousands of people.
Coming soon: Dot-everything.
An idea whose time has come: .ugh.
How about a TLD for websites that can only be parody, complainy, or snarky? If you want to know about Lady Gaga’s next album, you can go to ladygaga.com, but if you’re really sick of her and want a community of like-minded haters, you can visit ladygaga.ugh and get it out of your system.
I’ve been reading this piece from the New Yorker on whether or not the internet is good for the last two days (maybe Instapaper isn’t helpful at all). I’m still not done, but other people have started linking to it, and I felt pressured to post it now instead of waiting another two days. (Sadly, I think I need to read it again. Also, it seems my New Yorker subscription ran out. Fuck.)
When the electric toaster was invented, there were, no doubt, books that said that the toaster would open up horizons for breakfast undreamed of in the days of burning bread over an open flame; books that told you that the toaster would bring an end to the days of creative breakfast, since our children, growing up with uniformly sliced bread, made to fit a single opening, would never know what a loaf of their own was like; and books that told you that sometimes the toaster would make breakfast better and sometimes it would make breakfast worse, and that the cost for finding this out would be the price of the book you’d just bought.
(Source: tumblr.com)
The rise of free porn and the decline of an industry. (The music, movie and television industries should be following this closely.)
For a decade or so, to the porn industry, the Internet looked like the best thing ever invented—a distribution chute liberating it from the trench-coat ghetto of brown paper wrappers and seedy adult bookstores, an E-Z Pass to a vast untapped bedroom audience. If it was equally apparent that the web would prove as destabilizing as it has for other media, the money was so good that the industry could ignore the warning signs. Now the reckoning has arrived.
(Source: tumblr.com)
From Thought Catalog: A brief history of my internet usage in the 90s.
What we also do is find a guy to send us his photo without expecting a trade. We need a photo of a good-looking guy. When we acquire one, we call ourselves Adam and create the screen name ‘sk8erbklyn118’. We trade pictures with girls in hopes of snagging an attractive photograph. We need one to send to boys so that they’ll chat with us.
I should do something like this. Though I never used AOL. (Was that a thing in Canada? It wasn’t in Prince Edward Island.) Remembering the names of my early chat sites would be difficult.
![Hilarious math courtesy of StopTheMeter.ca. [via]
(Fortunately, the Canadian government is taking a closer look at this ridiculousness. I’m really getting tired of writing letters to my MPs about usage-based billing and stupid copyright reforms.)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lfyosjRpL71qbonpmo1_500.png)
Hilarious math courtesy of StopTheMeter.ca. [via]
(Fortunately, the Canadian government is taking a closer look at this ridiculousness. I’m really getting tired of writing letters to my MPs about usage-based billing and stupid copyright reforms.)
