When the overrwhelming topic is financial troubles, there are some who benefit.  It looks like CNBC is thriving despite Jon Stewart's attacks (which I find very funny, BTW).

Similarly, I was very impressed with Mint's numbers analyzed by SAI.  $8 – 10m in sales in 2009 is very solid.  Another company which should be thriving these days is Prosper.  Too bad that it has not been accepting new lenders since November. 

My former partner Steve Richmond is launching a new startup, GoalSpring, going after a similar opportunity.  There are opportunities in every market condition.

I came across Nielsen's social media report titled "Global Faces and Networked Places" on Çağlar's blog, and had a chance to skim through it briefly.

It's a useful summary of the state of social media today.  However, it's trying too hard to retrospectively explain the success or failure of various social media properties  It delves into the reasons w-k-w is twice as popular as Facebook in Germany, or why Orkut has succeeded in Brazil rather than other properties.

Social media is an exceedingly complex phenomenon to model.  I think all hindsight attempts to explain the behavior of a large social network's participants are examples of us being fooled by randomness.  We crave patterns and invent them where they don't exist.

Nielsen falls in the same trap.

Readers of this blog will know that I have been a Facebook bull since the botched Yahoo acquisition attempt.  I have iterated that I see Facebook as a technology company trying to own the indentity layer of the internet (AKA the social graph), and that I think it will succeed.  When it does, the $15b valuation Microsoft paid for its stake will look like a bargain.

Now comes the first serious analyst report (from RBC's Ross Sandler, via SAI) that bills Facebook as a threat to Google:

Facebook Could Surpass Google In 2011/2012: If we
assume modest deceleration in growth for both sites (an 85% CAGR for
Facebook and a 20% CAGR for Google), Facebook could surpass Google in
terms of total worldwide uniques, by late-2011 or early-2012.

The argument is based on an extrapolation of the traffic Facebook is sending Google's way, which is growing incredibly rapidly. See graph below, as well as the SAI link for further data.

I think there is a point.  Some will argue that the comparison of Facebook and Google is irrelevant and that one is a social media property while the other is a search engine.  I think it is relevant since the monetization path to both companies goes thorough attention.  Google is great at putting relevant messages in the attention span of the population.  Facebook is perhaps the only other company that can make a similar claim.

So, it's interesting to note the birth of the Facebook vs. Google meme.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of the two major newspapers in Seattle, is going web-only today, ceasing to publish its print version.  As far as I know, this is the first case of a major newspaper going web-only.

Last year, we spent quite a bit of time looking at the economics of news on the web.  It's a very important area for the Turkish Internet.  Our conclusions were in line with Clay Shirky's:

The P-I will require a staff of about 20, according to the NYTimes, so the economics benefits are significant. Plus, the P-I is already an established web property – with over 1.8m monthly AUVs.  It will be interesting to observe whether the editorial quality will suffer.

There was an interesting concentration of thoughts on social media in my blogflow this weekend, triggered by a post by Jeremy.  I want to put it out as a very brief outline.  First, from danah boyd:

This last point is especially interesting.  Kids are not using Twitter.  Kids have a different sense and sensibility on what should be "public".  The whole "we live in public in the new times" meme is more a creation of adults than what the Facebook generation experiences.

The NYT Magazine also had an article on the topic. It's a typical example of how many adults confuse the utility of Facebook with that of Classmates.com.  The author ends her article with the comment:

In my opinion, this is simply misjudged.  Facebook could not be more different than Friendster.  The investment in the creation of the social graph on FB by every member is enormous. 

Going back to the point on privacy and how Twitter and Facebook, my current thinking is that Twitter is really a feature that makes use of the social graph.  It allowed a lower transaction-cost version of thet FB status update, before FB got to it.  (Thanks, Ali for triggering the thought on this.)  There's a lot more intelligence on Facebook and from a social graph perspective, it will continue to lead. And the social graph is where it will finally convert its attention to value: as the identity layer of the internet.

All of this reminds me of the early process we went through in designing Mondus.  It is a privacy-first environment that allowed for extensive control.  My friend Batuhan Okur recently commented on this in a private conversation.  The problem we faced at Mondus was that it emphasized privacy before it had liquidity.  When Facebook was first growing, it did not have the same problem, since it was hatched in semi-private universes: the Universities.

I predict we'll be seeing more utilities for privacy control in Twitter.  I wonder if FB status and Twitter will converge or not.

Gmail's been down for about 30 minutes now and there's a storm over the internets!!  Twitter is alight (well, the link won't stay live and relevant for long so here's a screenshot
) with the news, along with all major tech blogs.

Points to how critical redundancy in the cloud has become and makes you think how did we floow stuff like this pre-twitter.

I just learned with sadness that Martin Schaedel, a recent friend I'd made on his visit to Istanbul in September, has been killed in a  plane crash.  Martin and I had been in frequent correspondence on Internet opportunities in Turkey and I will miss his unique approaches and insight.  Goodbye, Martin.