"Text? Text is for your granddad! Everyone's kickin' it at BoomYEAH! We rock out in hot spots like SALT LAKE CITY! We look like Netflix! We are making WEB 3D! It's on your time! It's statistical! The revolution has begun! BOOMYEAH BABY!"
Three of today's stories provide a perfect lesson in recognizing a bubble. The astute reader will recognize the common themes.
If the last video clip of Hawaiian excess in New York's Silicon Alley didn't convince you there's a bubble, maybe this clip from the same party will win you over. The interviewer labels this the "least coherent business plan" — which shows he's never walked through Palo Alto. "Seriously," he says, "this kid has a startup (but no funding, yet, thank god)."
More than one Valley vet has spied the rowdy crowd of video sites, from gang leader YouTube down to the wee ClipShack, and said, "Gee, feels like Napster." Indeed, the video sharing clan resembles the mp3 file-sharing networks of the 90s, and the similarity extends beyond some ripped-off content and the pollution of porn.
PaidContent.org founder Rafat Ali threw an NYC media party last night to celebrate his blog's first investment round. The "guys in nametags making pitches" reminded media pundit Jeff Jarvis of the bashes of the dot-com boom. The Gawker Media overlords were bouncing biz-dev people back and forth like Web 2.0 ping-pong. "All the hookups had the blandness of lesbian sex," said one attendee. "Nobody has any money, so there's no penetration."
"Selling eyeballs" is a phrase so laughable that clever Valleyfolk use it ironically, to distance themselves from the first dot-com bubble. "Monetizing the eyeballs" ranked with "scaling across the enterprise" as one of the increasingly meaningless buzzwords as the Internet became more than an ad page and a catalog.
Get your game on and don't fuck with the Jesus! One of the Web 2.0 crowd forwarded this invite to the Valley's new dot-com bowling league. E-mail prefixes redacted to prevent spam.
Readers of the New York Magazine (ones who don't read Slate, the New York Times Styles, Forbes, the San Francisco Chronicle, or Wired) now know there's a boom on. Writer Kurt Andersen spends three pages (well, the last page is two lines, like the last page of a dictated-length term paper) telling the same story as the other papers, but with the cluelessness with which the New York media glitterati always approach the Internet. It's like seeing USA Today redo a trend piece, but without the humility. So spare yourself the read and use the Valleywag Lazy News Edition.
Pity the poor PR flack, pumping out press releases, subject to the hatred (and occasional alliteration) of Valley journalists and bloggers. Or just pity the people who hired him.
Days after Newsweek replaced "Web 2.0" with "Live Web" (thanks, Mary Hodder, for the new catchphrase. Thanks a lot), Slate says Web 2.0 is nothing more than "a technology upgrade." And no matter how hard desperate dot-commers try to pump it up, says writer Paul Boutin, the bubble will NOT re-inflate. Will NOT.
