#Blodget and Broadcasting and Why I think TV is Over

Aside

Henry @HBlodget of Business Insider not exactly for the first time has been causing controversy – now about TV, not Facebook.And here’s a neat piece from @TerryHeaton summarizing his case and agreeing with it – to the effect that TV as we know it is falling down the same hole (my metaphor) as print journalism.

I probably agree with Blodget more than Heaton does. First thought about it seriously at a private event in London several years ago when Jeremy Hunt, who is now the UK govt minister for culture et al., and in hot water over Murdoch issues, was still in opposition. His topic was his approach, when the Conservatives got into government, to “independent” (non-BBC) television. He is a very smart fellow; it was a lively presentation. But when I got around to asking my question, which was to the effect “why do you think it has a future; everything is migrating to the web and asynchronicity, and the moreso the younger you are,” it was pretty obvious he had not thought about it.

It’s a marvel that just as the moving image bounds every further up the exponential curve of consumer demand in C21, its classic purveyors are like deer staring at that bright spot that used to sit at the center of the screen in the old days after we turned it off.

Local Media in a Postmodern World, Part CXXVIII, Henry Blodget is Right: TV is in Trouble.

via #Blodget and Broadcasting and Why I think TV is Over.

Of #Risk – as the stakes keep getting higher

Aside

Nassim Taleb, whose book The Black Swan added a term to our vocabulary, has offered a brief discussion of how we might anticipate. As we continue to reflect on the enormous damage done in 2008.

His point is basically to draw a distinction between linear and exponential factors. As well we know, with Moore’s Law driving core aspects of technological change, the impact of exponential factors may be expected to increase, exponentially (my point, not Taleb’s).

Here is his key para:

So here is something to use. And the technique, a simple heuristic, called fragility (and antifragility) detection heuristic works as follows. Let’s say you want to check if a town is overoptimized. Say you measure that when traffic increases by 10,000 cars, travel time to grows by ten minutes. But then if traffic increases by 10,000 more cars, travel time now extends by an extra thirty minutes. Such asymmetry shows that traffic is fragile and you have too many cars, and need to reduce traffic until the acceleration becomes mild (acceleration, I repeat, is acute concavity, or negative convexity effect).

A Method of Detection of Fragility: How to Detect Who Will Go Bust — Nassim Taleb.

Tech and Corporate Culture: #social #DC #Gov2.0

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Two great posts today – an interview with the “federal CTO” and a book review in Atlantic – come to a neat focus: the core problem of corporate culture, in government and business. I’ve written about it before, and I shall again. We have not quite exhausted the issue. For now, a brief comment, and a suggestion that you read these two pieces in parallel, one with each eye, and see what you see.

The book is about how our elites are failing us. Part of its argument resembles mine yesterday on the problems of the “expert” and an expertise too narrow to bring with it judgment or innovative capacities. Part is more focused, and like the reviewer Conor Friedersdorf I am more taken with his summary of the analysis than with the solutions proposed by the writer. But the book looks well worth a read, and I plan to add it to my list.

The interview draws my attention to one of the deep problems of Washington – that its assemblage of thousands of smart, hard-working people seems increasingly inadequate to the task of leading the world’s most advanced civilization through fast and cumulative change. My point is entirely bipartisan. I was interested that the panel I moderated at the Tech Policy Summit last week in Napa agreed that whoever wins the upcoming election will not make much difference to the tech/innovation agenda. There’s no question that the current administration has taken many steps in the “right” direction, including the CTO/CIO appointments. Yet (read the interview) these smart people have little strategic impact. They are some way down the totem pole. The brief campaign suggestion (did I imagine this?) of a CTO in the cabinet did not go far. (Fyi, I have argued for “under-secretaries for the future” in every department and agency; a new White House Council along the lines of NEC, NSC, DPC; and the inclusion in cabinet of the science adviser as well as these two C guys. Still waiting for a call asking me to fill in the details so the executive orders can be drawn up just right.)

Point is, and this needs to be shouted from the roofs and stuck on every bumper, DC’s core problem is a corporate culture problem. It is, as it were, the ultimate old-economy corporation, with guaranteed revenues, tenure for most of its operatives, and the most elegant blinkers that elegant minds can design.

This is where the power of “social” to transform institutional culture is potentially vast, since it opens the doors to fresh and powerful forces that will if unimpeded force the (re)alignment of the organization with its customer/citizen base. We tend to call this “social” when it comes to biz, and “Gov2.0/3.0” when it comes to democracy and its systems of governance. Point is: This is the strategic rather than the tactical significance of social media. It’s a huge challenge to take this in, especially as so many of the leaders in government and biz are, ahem, decidedly old-economy in their thinking. And talk is not enough. I keep referring to the bizarre fact that hardly any of our top 250 corporate CIOs use key social media (Google Mark Fidelman’s HBR piece or search this blog for my discussion of it). Here’s another (sorry, enthusiasts for the present administration). In a revealing speech in 2010, the President shared the fact that he does “not know how to work” the iPod, iPad, XBox, or PlayStation – the whole speech is worth reading for the decidedly negative context in which these technologies are viewed. Point here is simply this: Like the aforementioned CIOs, the President hires good people and tells them, at a certain level, to get on with it. Until corporate culture fundamentally shifts, that is going to make only a tactical difference. Strategic shift is awaited and will depend on two things: The appointment of leaders at the highest levels who are intuitively in sync with radical innovative approaches and can lead from the top; and the co-ordinate opening of the organizational boundaries to unstoppable pressures from the customer/citizen base.

There is much more to be said, not least in that the mitigation of the ill-effects that can also flow from these technologies (from uber-surveillance to killer drones to job destruction to fundamental dehumanization) will only ever be addressed in the context of an embrace of the pace and scope of change that is implied in the Moore’s law-driven digital revolution.

The Obama speech:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hcoyG-Ck3-VwZB7fqpUFXbffoObg

Atlantic book review:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/why-our-elites-are-failing-us-and-how-to-fix-it/258492/

CNN Interview with the US CTO:

Obama’s chief tech officer: Let’s unleash ingenuity of the public – CNN.com.

Specialism, Generalism, and the Meta Option: Death to Silos

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

I was struck by this HBR post last week and reminded of it this evening by conversation on Twitter. Not everything I learn comes through that hose, but a good bit of it . . . .

Vikram Mansharamani tackles head-on the triumph of the expert – and the coming death of expertise as the core skill-set in C21 (I hope that is a fair summary; link below – and do read it; neat piece and not long). Generalism is set for a come-back.

It’s important to see it as a come-back, since while “expertise” has always been deep, it is rather recently that narrowly focused specialism was regarded as key – not simply to the detailed study of X (plainly, it is key) but to managing people who study X, and managing them, and discoursing on the wider significance of X, and on and on.

I endorse @Mansharamani’s analysis, but I’m not sure whether the term “generalism” quite gets us there. Partly of course because it has become a term of reproach, but partly because what I am after is something perhaps more dynamic and future-oriented than it implies.

I’m pasting below also a longer post I wrote two years ago, “Hanging Together Lest we Hang Separately.” Feel free to browse. It’s about the other side of expertise, which is silos, and the problem of silo’d thinking (which as Mansharamani notes is not resolved just by getting people out of their silos and into work groups; not least because of the problem of salience and other well-known group dynamics issues).

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, DC, hosted a distinguished panel some months back to address the subset issue of “convergence” between disciplines in science and technology, and the need to find ways to address cross-cutting questions and questions that required scientists to cross their disciplinary borders. We began with a panel from MIT, and then leading policy people (including the FDA Commissioner) made their comments. The most memorable observation was that perhaps we now need a new discipline of inter-disciplinarity. I had to stifle a guffaw at this point, as I could just see this fresh silo being built and yet another problem specialism being added to the pile.

But there was also something to be noted in that generally silly suggestion, in that while mere deep expertise is less and less relevant to fast-shifting, innovative, cross-cutting questions, shallow jack-of-all-tradesness is not quite the alternative. We need people who can hold their head up high in one silo, or two, or three. But also, whether scientists or technologists or marketers or lawyers or accountants (yes, even accountants), they need to have high-level second-language skills in a series of other silos and an ability to flip to Esperanto when needed to communicate, raise questions, and shape vision, across the whole. Let’s feel after a word. What about meta-expert?

There are many components in this discussion, some of which I take further in the commentary below, including the exponential growth of knowledge which is now exploding faster than we can create new sub-specialities. But the core questions now span our silos, and if they are going to be addressed so we can gain competitive advantage and propel our vision for the markets and culture of tomorrow, only those operating with meta-expertise will cut it.

Hiring, promotion, and education are just going to have to move along this way. But it won’t come easily. What does?

All Hail the Generalist – Vikram Mansharamani – Harvard Business Review.

https://futureofbiz.org/2010/11/21/hanging-together-lest-we-hang-one-by-one/

Hanging together, lest we hang one by one:

Posted on November 21, 2010

The C-PET Mash-up and American Leadership in Century 21

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Washington, DC

At the heart of our C-PET view of things lie two convictions. First, that knowledge networking is the way to go; and every articulate view should be round the table, not because we naively believe win-win is always possible or indeed desirable, but because a positive sum outcome is always both. Second, that while silos may be necessary (we need strong expert communities) they need to be connected – in fact, connected more deeply than ever. As the sheer quantity of knowledge explodes in giddy exponential fashion (the Petaclasm was my word for it), the knowledge bearers in their tight-knit expert communities need to engage more across and outside them. Or to put it another way, with every new petabyte of data popping from the cauldron of knowledge, the meta-community becomes more important. Of course, this is the opposite of what you would expect. It’s the opposite of what most people expect. More data needs more experts; build bigger silos; bring in bigger forklifts. Fordism in the ever vaster databank.

Yet aside from the eternally valid and inexhaustibly funny Peter Principle (younger readers may need to Google that; studies keep suggesting that Lawrence Peter was absolutely if zanily on the button – and you should read the book; flip from Google to Amazon and grab it before you forget) – the vastness of data creation is what gives the lie to the warehousing siloism we have inherited. The fixation with data threatens to engulf us in a tsunami of facts that quenches not only wisdom (now there’s a word from the past), but the capacity for innovation; like those curious and generally elderly people whose houses are stuffed with every newspaper they ever purchased. What’s leadership tomorrow? Well, let’s start with a mash-up of these two. Wise innovation? Innovative wisdom? Either of those would do us nicely. Fordism in the petaclasm offers a decent, intelligent, worthy way to decline and a suffocating, bureaucratic, death. We need to devote our energies to finding, defining, working, another approach altogether. The new leadership is light-touch, scarily flexible, focused on influencing more than ordering, vision-setting every hour of every day, framing and reframing the lives of everyone on the team, and living at the hub of a metanetwork that hums and whines and fizzes with people who know more than the leader, but who see in the beat of the leaderly baton an order that both descends from and ascends towards tomorrow.

The silos are not, of course, just those created by academic disciplines, though as we know that is bad enough; really bad. Many of our smartest minds end up in the academy, on the receiving end of the substantial federal largesse that the NIH and NSF and other agencies pour into the careers of researchers in the world of STEM. Vannevar Bush, that other Bush (no relation, apparently) whose influence looms large in the America of today – larger, surely than he or his wartime patron FDR could ever have imagined in that far-off world of the 1940s – set up the model in response to his president’s request that the wartime experience of science and government snuggling together be replicated in time of peace. So a measure of government’s commitment to S and T has become its funding of the NIH/NSF apparatus. I’m not offering a view on this conventional-wisdom measure of commitment to innovation, the future, the common good, rationality, and more. (I note my esteemed friend Dan Sarewitz’ recent questioning of this idea, in the hallowed journal Nature of all places; his bearded head, thus extended above the parapet, I am expecting soon to see displayed on a stake over the doors of the National Academies.) But it is undeniable that the billions we are pumping into STEM (well, mainly STE) are shoring up the silos (not sure if that extension of the metaphor works) and underwriting the structure of an S and T establishment in which inter-disciplinary collaboration is as rhetorically appealing as it is destructive of silo-dependent career paths. And while I’m not deliberately setting out to lose my remaining friends in the academy, I do think that academic tenure and the path thereto (there is of course no path therefrom) represent one of the nuttier ideas to have hit the west (aka, for this purpose, America). Sure, put huge pressures on young researchers to achieve A, B, C. Then give them a sabbatical and a pile of moolah. But then start over. The alternative of ensuring that inter-disciplinary efforts are lauded in the tenure process is as plausible as expecting those whom we now charmingly refer to as non-state bad actors to be good sports and kiss the opportunities of asymmetry goodbye. People tend, almost, almost always, to act in their interests.

Yet my point is broader. Little by little academics are collaborating across traditional boundaries; hurrah! It will undoubtedly happen more, partly since academics themselves are developing new mangled disciplines like bioinformatics and of course nanoscale science and engineering, in which the trad distinctions just don’t work.

But the silos in Washington are on another scale, reflecting of course fundamental assumptions within the culture at large but, as tends to happen in the world of policy, drawing them out into an exaggerated and deeply contrasted form. Business. S and T. Policy-in-general. Values. Innovation. Of course, there are relationships. But this fragmented vision is deeply, deeply flawed; and it’s at the heart of our malaise as we seek to face the future – a future exponentially rushing from the past like an express train. We in C-PET are out to put the pieces together. It is together that they will define America’s success in the years ahead. It is together that, at a more profound level, they will define the human future. It is together that they possess the potential to reshape our politics. It is together that they offer leaders, from putative presidents all the way down, an opportunity to shine even as they take up the task of refurbishing an aging policy culture.

Which is my point about hanging together. If we can’t correlate these questions and their respective knowledge communities, they will all fail. In their networked connectedness lies the last best hope of success, the kind of transcendent success that would give to America the commanding heights in century 21 that it attained in 20. Because it is precisely in the correlation of these things that leadership lies. I’ve made the point elsewhere that America must set itself to be both global competitor and global citizen – the true friend as well as the rival of the emerging economic powers. There are many reasons, though network logic is plainly one; without friendship and the affect that it brings, stability in the economic if not the political order will always be in jeopardy, and stakes of all kinds are being raised all the time. We need, if you will, a social Marshall Plan to engulf the rising nations of Asia and Latin America, so that our children truly see our peoples as sharers of one exceedingly small planet and a common human lot. Only that will free us for the kind of economic competition on which the future also depends, but without the xenophobic sense that it is a zero sum game. Remember: tech is deeply changing things. In X years, X being a finite number, we shall have realtime translation devices that enable Facebook friends (or more likely friends on the various interoperable networks that will succeed MZ’s genius creation; by then he will be playing Bill Gates and giving it all away) to span all, all, language groups, in a magnificent reversal of the curse of Babel.

My suspicion is that the technologies will then also, finally, favor the little guy. The bad news? They will instantiate asymmetry, which could lead to continuous strife as a background radiation. The good? They will make things harder not easier for both commercial and governmental control. Such developments will give globalization a whole new bite, and popular movements wholly fresh impact on the global scale. Let’s say Twitter’s successor has two billion members in eight years from now, and something starts to trend and keeps on trending – public opinion as a global force will have arrived. The current (problematic) situation, in which the United Nations treats NGOs (which are often highly partisan) as the representatives of the global public, will be over. I’m not sure the UN will then be the point (I think the UN as in Security Council and GA will be oldline; UNESCO and other elements in the UN system could become a bigger deal, but on the political/economic front groups like G-20 will have all initiative); but whatever intergovernmental organizations there are, we shall see the emergence of global publics.

The point of this seeming digression is to illustrate the kind of world into which America’s projection of leadership will increasingly take place; a world in which silos are breaking down, in which people power will make life a lot more challenging for national governments, a world in which old-style structures like the core of the UN system, with their constitutions and procedures and Robert’s Rules on steroids – in which they remain in place as they fade in significance and are supplanted by the ad-hocery of the G approach. G-whatever is just a bunch of governmental guys who get invited round for a beer. It’s a high-end tweet-up. Now: combine the tweet-up “UN” which the G system is bringing in and global people power through translation software and son-of-Facebook apps, and you can begin to understand the context within which America will be acting, and needing to look good, in just a little while.

So back to integration. By pumping the innovation agenda, and bringing smart and strategic business perspectives to bear on the policy community, we are working to get the long term at the core of Washington’s politics. Embracing the future in a way that is imaginative but non-naïve, we begin to address the impacts of such diverse and extraordinary developments as virtual reality, the brain-machine interface, synthetic biology, humanoid robotics. Once their potential impacts begin to be examined, we are into risk assessment; and in tandem where those impacts stand in relation to our existing notions of the good life, and the varied political traditions that seek to sustain them. In other words, consideration of risk and values issues arise directly from a future-embracing vision. Marty Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents and a member of C-PET’s Board of Directors, has raised the question of our handling of risk on a succession of occasions at our monthly roundtables. He urges a principle of caution, which assesses risk side by side with tech developments. He distinguishes this from the “precautionary principle” commonly spoken of in Europe, which seeks to resolve risk issues before developments take place. And Marty’s risk approach could be readily paralleled by a critique on the ground of human values (aka ethics). If you look ahead, you can be circumspect, and work on risk and values side by side with technology. Parallel processing is the key. This kind of embrace of innovation and future-mindedness represents the summum bonum for the tech community. By the same token, they know well that societal values just like environmental and other risk aspects are crucial to commercial success. Which is not to suggest “win-win.” I dislike the concept, not least as it demeans genuine disagreement and devalues the deep value of unresolved, conflicting vision. These are vital elements in progress as well as in the critique that ensures that “progress” really takes us forward, and does in a manner that is (in all its many senses) sustainable. Not win-win. But yes, positive sum outcome. Clarifying key issues; teasing out where agreement and disagreement lie, as all voices are invited to define the issues as well as speak to them; building consensus where possible and establishing both the nature and the weighting to respective parties of issues that remain outside the consensus circle. This process, which bridges silos and builds the knowledge network across disciplines as the context for decision-making, is future-oriented and inherently embraces innovation. But it is not naïve as to risk, it candidly acknowledges that all human conduct is driven by human values, and it recognizes that unease and disagreement in the values arena are huge questions for investors, business leaders, and policymakers alike. That is, the silos interconnect – and do so the more where future and potentially disruptive developments are concerned.

Point being: unless we hang together, we investors and values advocates and innovators and policy mavens and risk gurus, we shall surely hang separately. Build an open-textured knowledge network, draw in all articulate voices, frame and ask tomorrow’s questions. That’s how we man up for today’s decisions. And that’s the C-PET mash-up.

#Groupthink – public enemy number 1 as we face the future

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Groupthink hasn’t worked, it’s time to embrace the maverick

Giving credence to the outlier thinkers in our midst might have avoided things like the Wall Street crash. Photo: AP

As the Arab spring continues to unravel into an Arab summer, the most important lesson is that hardly anyone knew it was coming. Much like the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Wall Street could it be that as much as conventional wisdom may be conventional it is not always reliably wise?

I recently hosted a conference in Washington on the future of nanotechnology. All kinds of experts were round the table talking tech and policy and business. Then one of them made a stunning statement. She was there on behalf of a big, mainstream environmentalist group. “I have never,” she stated, “been on such a diverse panel in Washington.”

There was a brief but palpable intake of air around the room. I thanked her for the compliment before adding that I was now more concerned for Washington than I was before.

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Whom do we invite round the table when the questions are big and the stakes high? It tends to be those in the centre; the mainstream thinker whose wisdom is regarded as conventional.

When will we ever learn? We are still paying for the lesson we learned from Wall Street in 2008.

Conventional wisdom can be dead wrong, even in the hands of the smartest people because they tend to agree with each other. People with way-out views are kept at arm’s-length.

Whatever the issue, if your views deviate too far from the mean, however articulate you may be, you are unlikely to get invited, funded or promoted.

We have learned a lot this past generation about the value of diversity in age, gender, and ethnicity but we have learned little about the enormous and growing value of diversity of opinion.

Of course, we do disagree about a lot of things. With friends, and with co-workers. But we live in communities of ideas that set boundaries around acceptable diversity of thinking, and make sure we keep out those who challenge our shared assumptions.

We don’t want to rehash old issues we regard as closed. We don’t want to give room to opinions we find deeply objectionable – or threatening. Most of us find it challenging to take forward our thinking when there is someone in the room always, always asking why?

So our natural tendency is to put unconscious faith in Groupthink, the tendency for everyone’s thinking to move in the same direction to the exclusion of any serious questioning.

People in management know all about this as a problem for work groups and other teams. But it is more insidious and far more dangerous on the grand scale.

What brought Wall Street down, and with it threatened the entire global order? The G-word. And on smaller scales: what led Monsanto into huge losses in the late 1990s and ensured that Europe rejected genetically-modified food? What led Detroit to near-oblivion as they insisted on producing 1950s-style autos into the 21st century? What about the power company TEPCO and the nuclear disaster that the entirely predictable tsunami sparked in Japan?

Knowledge is building very fast, disciplines are converging, globalisation is changing the ground-rules of everything. Change powered by Moore’s Law, the digitisation process and the revolution in communication is driving shifts in the technical, economic and social order that most of us strain to grasp. Yet the faster change takes place and the greater its disruptive, innovative power, the harder it will be to make good choices.

So who should be party to the conversation? This is where the outliers come in; people who are articulate and serious, but outside the mainstream assumptions that generally drive conversations. Experts tend to resist the participation of thosewith unorthodox opinions. It needs to become the norm for them to sit round the table in every discussion. All articulate voices round the table; all the time.

This approach is hardly new. The century before last, US poet, essayist and journalist Walt Whitman asked the question his own way. “Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?” In the 21st century, great value lies at the extremities of opinion; and we need to harvest it as we move through change faster than we have ever known before.

First appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, June 9, 2011.

Is #Facebook Doomed?

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Perhaps the strangest feature of the Facebook Phenom is how pervasive the network has become, how much time so many people spend on it, and how little we actually talk about it. This is a taproot of the crisis in valuation that has led the stock to sink today down above the $26 mark. I’m not bearish, at least in the short-to-medium term, as Facebook is making money and may yet find ways to make a ton of money. I’m more, shall we say, weirded out by the whole situation.

I’ve touched on this before, but to sum up and move along a bit here are some key statements I would wish to defend:

1. In general, I’ve argued that social media will soon be utilities, interoperable, and therefore not capable of generating economic profit or, in consequence, justifying these very high valuations. The future is not an AOL-style walled garden named Facebook with X billion inhabitants.It is something a lot more like the USPS. Or the power grid. I don’t know how long “soon” is. But it’s soon.

2. Back to my point about lack of discussion: My suspicion is that most of the enthusiasm for the Facebook Phenom has come from two groups: Generally older people who have little first-hand experience of social media (little, not none) (Group 1); and much younger people whose entire experience has been decisively shaped by one social medium, namely Facebook (Group 2). Group 1 has generally looked to Group 2 to confirm its sense that the Facebook Phenom is a big, big deal – whether their kids or the youngest people on their staffs. This scenario offers, at the least, a rather dire approach to risk management.

3. In the article linked below, an analyst has pronounced that by 2020 Facebook will have gone the way of Yahoo – still likely a profitable enterprise, but with far lower value and in a position of strategic insignificance. He is probably correct, although his focus on the problematics of mobile may be wrong. We all know that the shift to mobile, which is more rapid than anyone expected, has proved challenging as ad revenues are much more difficult to come by in the mobile environment. My suspicion is that Facebook like the many other companies caught in the same situation will come up with some ideas that work, even if they are not obvious today. In parallel, the shift to mobile may help power the move (which I see as highly desirable and in the long term inevitable) to subscription-based social that is protective of user privacy. And, at root, while ads make a lot of sense in search, they make little in social. There are other ways in which companies can occupy social space (branded high-end content will become increasingly important, for example), but if you want to see your friends’ pics you are not ever going to be that interested in clicking links for autos.

4. Sorry, many smart people, but the idea that Mark Zuckerberg‘s very clever development of the Aol/MySpace enterprise will end up as a multi-billlion-member walled garden I find risible. Aside from the glow already fading from what was once almost (never quite) hip, as granny signs on, there are just too many reasons why barriers to entry will fall (or be knocked down by regulators) and basic social become part of the comms wallpaper.

Which draws attention to what I find enormously creative and popping with potential about Twitter. Facebook is very complex, keeps getting moreso, and has really only one core role. Twitter is very simple, has stayed that way, and has many roles. It’s the pathway to tomorrow. Which is one reason I hope it can be saved from the Facebook IPO fate by something a lot more creative in the financing/governance arena.

http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/future/why-twitter-matters/

Facebook Will Disappear by 2020, Says Analyst.