A link: "My favorite business model" - this is the model Tabulas has adopted and will continue to pursue. I think it adds the most value to both users and to me. I would also add: "License your codebase to enterprises and other businesses" as Tabulas did with MyBlog (got a huge cash infusion when they paid me a fair amount to use the old Tabulas platform). That deal with them ensured Tabulas' survival in year 2 (back when I was still a student and struggling with $$$ to support Tabulas).

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A preface: I know I've been writing a lot about social networking type stuff, and I apologize if you find it boring and redundant. The truth is my ideas are rarely polished; these posts are true ramblings to form which is why they seem vague and redundant from time to time. These "essays" are not refined on purpose - I find when they are raw ideas with flaws which people point out, it forces me to reevalute the situation more critically. In a sense, I throw these ideas out in the 'Net hoping for some feedback (basically getting you guys to think for me). One day, I'll start editing these posts more rigorously so the noise/ratio is a bit lower, but until that day ... apologies ;)

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I've stopped visiting YouTube. It's become completely unusable. The novelty of the inline loading videos via Flash is now being adopted by other sites (as it should be, Flash videos are wonderful), so basically YouTube's only value is its vast repository of videos.

Except now I can't find anything worthwhile. When I visit "Top viewed," more than half the films on any page are anime, a Korean/Chinese/Japanese drama video, or a video of some 15-year old girl from MySpace (with a ton of views/comments/ratings because 15-year old boys are the bane of the Internet, horny bastards).

Have you seen the tagging on YouTube? It's horrific. I don't think I've found a remotely useful video via tagging yet, and the UI for YouTube is horrible. I oftentimes want to load videos in the background while I watch one video, except you can't do that without loading multiple windows. Why not let people navigate with iframes or something while viewing one video? And has related videos ever turned up anything useful?

Enough griping. This made me think in a broader sense over this obsession with providing overly-broad social networking sites.

Although it may seem this way, I actually like Facebook quite a bit (as an idea). Their implementation is getting better (showing that it's more important to release something than releasing something good), and the idea is focused enough to a demographic that I think Facebook will have success for many years to come (although I don't think it's worth $200million). I like Facebook because they tier the groups in demographics that are manageable; you don't have a flood of fringe users coming in and destroying communities.

I don't mean to sound xenophobic, but I've noticed a tendency for communities to sharply divide into one specific demographic group once it reaches a certain tipping point. Orkut is predominantly Brazilian. (There was another photo site that this phenomena occured). Although I think it's fantastic that a large number of people from Malaysia/Phillipines/SE Asia use Tabulas, I don't want people to assume that this community caters to one demographics. Livejournal's done a fantastic job of making the site not "seem" Russian, although there is a HUGE population of Russians (almost the same number as users from Russia as from the US!^*). This is a gross generalization (and filled with fallacies on many levels), but social networks tend to be associated with their largest demographic group, which drives away the valuable minority.

Social networks in which this phenomena can be tracked and viewed by the end users are doomed to fail. Once people see a certain tipping point, they'll move somewhere else, and that site will become a homogeneous culture.

So how do you fight this? I think there is some value in obfuscating the whole "battlefield" view of a social networking site. Livejournal's success has been in allowing users to create their own user influence clouds (communities, their friends), so people can stay within their own sphere of influence.

But wait! This goes against the whole point of social networking, which is to find different and new viewpoints on a daily basis. Probably true. When I was an active member on Livejournal, I noticed that people very rarely ventured from their own spheres; people stayed within the confines of their friends and communities. Maybe they didn't want to meet new people (probably true). So maybe there's a tradeoff in obfuscating the whole social networking (pros: you don't get turned off by the majority, because you can't see them!) versus transparency (pro: you can find different people, assuming there are enough different types of people).

More generally, I've been watching with some amusement this whole obsession with Writely/Porting MS Office to the web. How do people expect this to actually hurt Microsoft?

The technological barriers to providing even a remotely related tool to MS Office on the web are huge. Browser support, memory support (try editing a large document in *any* Ajax application - you simply can't), the prerequisites for such a program (you need an internet connection always) makes me question the wisdom of people trying to build an Office suite on the web.

It seems to me Google's acquisition of Writely is much more basic - they want to purchase the small team that can execute well in developing and delivering an application. Furthermore, having a WYSIWYG editor is much more valuable when you look at stuff Google is doing with Google Pages, Blogger, and Gmail; having one primary WYSIWYG JS library is gonna save them time in deploying further projects and maintaining their existing projects.

This brings up my next point - collaboration. Collaboration simply isn't at a place where it's going to get people to switch their daily habits. Writely is not only be touted as the "free" MS Office on the web (by the way, why wouldn't you just download OpenOffice, isn't that free without the the requirement for being online?), but a great collaboration tool.

The biggest benefactors from collaboration tools are companies (and organizations). But a *huge* problem with these collaboration tools is that companies cannot afford to have a third party host their product somewhere else. It may be cost-effective in the short-term, but if you're a business in need of a collaboration tools, you're asking for a world of hurt if you're being hosted elsewhere. What happens with network latency issues? What happens when that service goes down? Who owns it? What about security as data is sent from your extranet to the service? Companies like Joyent, SocialText, and JotSpot are obsessed over delivering products over the web, when there are serious privacy concerns that need to be addressed.

This is partially why I'm sure MS isn't so concerned with these MS Office ports - the ability to collaborate and cheaply deploy these types of systems isn't a huge market (yet). I'm sure MS, for their next Office release, will work on developing a more collaboration-friendly version of Word. However, I'm sure it's going to be based more on private clouds rather than an open "anybody can edit" democratic wiki-type product.