Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure. On Facebook, there is one kind of relationship: friendship, and you have it with everybody. You’re friends with your spouse, and you’re friends with your plumber.
Lev Grossman, on Mark Zuckerberg for TIME
The JooJoo
Too many people think they can build a product, keep it quiet until launch day, send out a press release, and gain as much attention as Apple can.
I learned this after our first “launch” of the GoSquared site. People don’t care. Some people care for a fraction of their day. Some people care for a few months. But to most of your audience it’s old news tomorrow.
For 90% of the sites and companies out there, it seems that every major announcement they make should assume most of their audience has never heard of them before.
To gain a reputation of Apple’s strength? The worst thing you can do is believe you are even close.
