The risk of relying on a handful of customers is not just financial. Your product also is at risk when you’re at the mercy of a few big spenders. When any one customer pays you significantly more than the others, your product inevitably ends up catering mostly to that customer’s specific needs. In other words, when GE becomes your customer, you become a consultant for GE.
Is basically Google Wave with a better UX and a little thought about actual end user needs.
In the long run, people will trust Twitter more than they do Facebook.
—
Nick Bilton
Facebook vs. Twitter - NYTimes.com
(via fred-wilson)
-In reality twitter doesn’t have any information about me that I really care about. They know who I follow, who follows me, and if I tweet (and many users only consume tweets) they might be able to infer some information about what I care about.
On the other hand if an advertiser wants to reach men over 40, married to redheads, who live in the bay area, who used to live in New England who work in technology, Facebook can deliver that audience to them.
(via bijan)
It was an insurance policy. For one billion dollars Facebook insured themselves that no one else would buy instagram in the week before their IPO.
Imagine if this week had started out with Google or Twitter buying instagram. Do you think the buzz around the FB IPO would have been different? Would the focus of the conversation this week have been about how GOOG was now well positioned to compete with Facebook in the photo space?
You bet. Would that have lowered the value of FB at IPO by more than $1B? Not a doubt in my mind.
It seems someone has gotten ahold of one of my credit card numbers. This is just as much of a PITA as I always expected it would be.
