Those factors certainly play a role, however I would posit that even a well-run social networking site–with a pleasant, secure user experience and the press blowing sunshine up one’s backside all day–will still experience the dreaded user fall-off. The author of the Businessweek piece comes tantalisingly close to the truth when he writes the following:

Mismanagement, a flawed merger, and countless strategic blunders have accelerated Myspace’s fall from being one of the most popular websites on earth—one that promised to redefine music, politics, dating, and pop culture—to an afterthought. But Myspace’s fate may not be an anomaly. It turns out that fast-moving technology, fickle user behavior, and swirling public perception are an extremely volatile mix. Add in the sense of arrogance that comes when hundreds of millions of people around the world are living on your platform, and social networks appear to be a very peculiar business—one in which companies might serially rise, fall, and disappear.

– Gillette, Felix. “The Rise and Inglorious Fall of Myspace.” Bloomberg Businessweek, 22 June 2011.

The cyclical nature of social media is not accidental, and is in fact a vital clue to its lack of long-term viability. Back in June of 2006 I wrote about Myspace’s unlikely prospects due to its heavy reliance on circa-1995 models of online revenue generation, i.e. good old banner ads. That piece included the following abbreviated history of social networking, which may help one understanding its previous iterations.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL NETWORKING

In the early 80s we had telephone “party lines” where eager young teens could call up a central chat line service, create a cutesy little audible profile, and make new friends — realtime — with dozens of other like-minded teens from the same city (or across North America) talking about billowing hairspray-dos, tiger-striped pants, and Queen Street rock bars.

In the late 80s and early 90s we had multi-line bulletin board services like Metropolis and Canada Remote Systems, where angst-ridden young teens could dial in with a 1200-baud modem, create a lengthy personal profile, and make new friends — realtime — with dozens of other angst-ridden teens from the same city (or across North America) typing about unkempt hair, grunge rock and Queen Street goth bars.

In the mid-to-late 90s we had personal web pages and internet relay chat, where you could create a lengthy personal profile, link to all of your interests and pop-culture icons, and make new friends — realtime — reminiscing with people in the same city (or across the world) about the bygone days of tiger stripe pants, grunge rock, and Queen-Street-goth-bars-turned-Starbucks-outlets.

Now we’ve got MySpace, where you can create an intricate personal presence on the web (in 1995-style backgrounds and layout), link to all of your interests and pop-culture icons, and locate — realtime — new friends who share the same interests and possibly geography.

Each of those prior forms of social media have died out over the years. Technology keeps creating newer avenues of interaction, and the generation that initially adopts a tool will in a few short years mature into a different stage of life—and move on to something else that better suits it.

And that, dear readers, is why social media is always ephemeral and never quite the stable, long-term cash cow that everyone wishes it were.

Even though almost all office-dwellers have a computer at work, the working Joes and Janes are not the folks that will spend the vast bulk of their time on social media sites. Most companies require one to complete tasks in order to earn a salary; lollygagging and playing Farmville doesn’t cut it. Thus the folks with vast amounts of time to spend online are (generally) the young; teenagers, college students.

But as the young grow up they, too, get less time to spend online. Work will start eating up larger and larger slices of time, along with girlfriends/wives, children, and so on. If two or three key friends end up using and recommending a new social media vector, one might be more inclined to adopt it. But that vector (whether it is an instant messaging service, Myspace or Facebook) does not always maintain the same level of relevance to the user. As the user ages and his or her life circumstances change, the various attractions of the site will lose (or gain) relevance.

In my teens I had used BBSes (particularly the live chat) to communicate with friends, organise spur-of-the-moment social and sporting events, and so on. Although we moved from BBSes to IRC in the 90s, live chat lost all relevance after my early 20s, because I and all of my friends were working full-time—and, critically, few offices in 1995 had desktop Internet access. I still have ICQ, Yahoo! and MSN instant messaging accounts, but I never use them; they are not earning any revenue for any of those firms. Facebook, too, was interesting initially but quickly became less so. I don’t use its chat function, and the games feel too much like work. Many games want you to check in every couple hours or risk losing progress, and at that point it’s no longer fun—it’s a chore. Nor do I use the Foursquare integration, photo album or event calendar; my use of Facebook has thus declined to that of e-mail substitute. Trying to get people together for a ball game in your teens in easy; most of the people you know live nearby (or at least in the same city). And being teenagers, there are usually few duties and ample free time. But to do the same with adults is something else entirely. Few of my high school friends live in the same city anymore, and most have wives, kids, tons of responsibility, and little spare time.

Unlike brick-and-mortar businesses, social media isn’t selling something you might actually need. So when the early adopters find a service’s relevance fading, it can’t always count on the following generation to take up the slack. A pub can survive for hundreds of years in the same location because people in every generation will want to eat, drink and socialise. Social media can only offer the socialising, and that lasts only as long as the young find it relevant and cool. None have found a way (nor investors patient enough) to recruit successive generations.

First I made some changes to the root .htaccess file using the 4G Blacklist and 4G Referrer Blacklist provided by Perishable Press.

Then I installed the AVH First Defense Against Spam plugin, and I can’t say enough good things about it.  For the past few days,  AVH and Akismet are the only two anti-spam plugins I’ve been using and so far, nothing has snuck by AVH to make it into the Akismet queue yet.  Here’s why I think AVH is more effective than any other WP anti-spam plugin:

1) It will check the visitor’s IP against a local whitelist, blacklist, and the Stop Forum Spam and Project Honey Pot databases.  (You’ll need API keys from both, though.)  If the visitor’s IP is identified as a spammer then AVH will not serve the blog’s content and optionally display an “Access has been blocked” screen indicating that the visitor has been blacklisted.  By not loading the site for spammers, your stats are cleaner and you save a bit of bandwidth.

2)  The notification emails AVH generates to the blog owner include not only the blocked comment, but also the reason for it being blocked.  This is such an elementary feature it’s a wonder more anti-spam tools don’t include it.  You no longer have to puzzle over innocuous-looking comments in the spam queue and try to figure out why they got tagged as spam.  A reason will be provided right at the top of the message indicating the failure mode, such as ” An attempt was made to directly access wp-comment-post.php“.  Humans using a browser will never load the comment PHP script directly, so there’s no longer any ambiguity about the nature of the commenter.

3)  The blog owner has the option (either in the notification email or via the comment moderation panel), to add the spammer’s IP to the local blacklist, and—if one has the proper API key—the option to register the spammer in the Stop Forum Spam database with a single mouse-click.  If you do this you’ll be making life easier for other blog and forum owners, too.

Previously I used to blacklist spammers in WordPress’ own native blacklist, and also in the site’s root .htaccess file—which is not something you can edit quickly and easily while on the go.  With AVH, being able to blacklist and report spammers just by clicking on links in the email notifications is a major plus; it’s something you can do from a very light platform like a mobile phone or tablet device, and it doesn’t take a lot of time or typing.

My site has a relatively small audience and so I am not inundated with comments (spam or otherwise) at the best of times; but AVH First Defense Against Spam has taken all the hassle out of managing even the very small amount of spam that I get, and I highly recommend it.

It’s been my experience that most of the nerd-for-pay careers they highlight in school can be incredibly boring. The world of IT is so incredibly vast that it is hard to gain exposure to all of it in high school or university.

When I was a wee tadpole our school computing classes were light years behind the times. They taught us how to use old, blue-screened, DOS-based WordPerfect at a time when more intuitive GUIs like MS Word (at that time, Word for Windows) had already gained prominence.

Later they put us to sleep with lectures on Alan Turing and focused heavily on programming—which was fine if one wanted to be buried in code for the rest of his or her life. We were taught to program in Pascal, a language which gets almost entirely jettisoned in post-secondary education in favour of those more widely used in defense and commercial applications. It’s like being required to learn French, only to find out you really needed to learn Japanese.

Back then they didn’t even bother to teach the things I would have wanted to learn—such as network architecture and theory. Most of the interesting and commercially useful IT skills I have are a result of a company paying to send me on expensive, hundred-thousand-dollar courses which your average high school student simply will not be able to afford.

The most intellectually rewarding work I have done revolves around building and optimising server and network architectures. Taking a bunch of requirements and turning them into a working, smoothly-functioning system that has enough juice to do what the client wants today, has room to grow for tomorrow, and is as automated as possible to avoid boring, repetitive tasks for the maintainers. To see a system like that in action, the offspring of your own ingenuity and reasoning, that’s fun.

The downside of the trade is that you occasionally get hired to merely maintain (and not rebuild) somebody else’s broken-down architecture. One should stay far, far away from those kinds of engagements, even if they are extremely well-paid. It’s like being a plumber who is paid to apply a daily patch of duct-tape to a leaky pipe, but you’re not allowed to rip out the damaged pipe and replace it. It might be lucrative but it doesn’t teach you anything new, and your skills atrophy.

In later years I got to figure out how to integrate wireless devices and applications with the corporate mail and application platforms. That too is fascinating during the conceptual and construction phases, but not so much fun if you’re merely maintaining something already built. In that field of endeavour, be prepared to be disappointed often.

Companies will buy these wonderful toys for executives, who will use them as fancy day-timers. Unless you are extremely lucky, most will not bother to put the money into the best possible investment—developing full-blown integration with mission-critical backend applications; which would allow line staff in the field to perform all the core functions of their job on a BlackBerry or an iPhone without ever having to crack open a laptop. Mobile workers in most companies would love that capability, but most companies never get out of the email-plus-day-timer mentality. Most never develop their desktop mail applications into full-blown workflow tools either, even though the framework has been there (from multiple platforms and vendors!) for at least fifteen years. They balk at spending a couple million on things that will save them hundreds of millions over the lifetime of the system.

The other fun stuff I learned as a youngster was, to be blunt, mostly a result of ill-gotten gains. Pirating software, teaching myself to use it, and then seeing what I could do with it. Most of the fun graphics you see on this webpage are there because twenty years ago I nicked copies of CorelDRAW and Adobe Photoshop using a slow modem (though it was high speed, for the time) and built pointless—but pretty—web pages on local ISPs (and, of course, GeoCities).

If you’d asked me then if I wanted to spend a career designing websites, I would have said no, because sites of the time were mostly dull, blue-hyperlink-on-grey background affairs. I was the kind of guy that wanted to cram it full of tasteful, arresting (but bandwidth-appropriate) imagery. To craft a brand, as it were.

Few companies had even heard of the World Wide Web, and those that knew of it did not consider it vital that they establish any kind of presence there. I can still remember the CIO of Canadian Tire telling me in 1995 that they saw no future in the web and no point in giving employees email addresses. They had other priorities at the time, most notably building hundreds of new stores and improving their logistics chain so as to be able to compete with Wal-Mart. Their priorities were correct, but it was only a year or two later when the Tire did actually start thinking seriously about the Web.

In the grand scheme of things, schools are going to focus on what educators and trustees feel are the most commercially viable skills. This does not necessarily correlate with what students will find interesting or appealing. And most businesses will be five to ten years behind the truly interesting trends and ideas. If you want to find out about the truly interesting junk today, you’ll probably have to do it the way we did back then; hang around in IRC and listservs where nerds congregate.

But I can guarantee you’re not going to find out about it in school.

Even—and especially—the unreligious, who will not realize they are in the throes of it because they may define religion as “believing in something for no reason at all”, rather than a rational faith that asks questions, observes data, records answers, and believes on the strength of the evidence that it has thus far.

Given that every known human civilization has objects of affection, inspiration and veneration, it is not surprising to see that religiosity extends into the secular realm and may even be actively cultivated by savvy marketing.

Just as the Genius Bar has proved to be genius, the now-classic Apple slogan “Think Different” also turns out to be more than just words: The brains of Apple fans really are different. When Martin Lindstrom, a brand consultant and author of Buyology: The Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, examined those brains under a functional magnetic-resonance-imaging scanner, he discovered that Apple devotees are indistinguishable from those committed to Jesus. “Apple’s brand is so powerful that for some people it’s just like a true religion,” Lindstrom says.

Apple cultivates religious fervor among its adherents in a number of subtle ways, including its mysteriousness and its suggestion that customers are among the chosen ones. Perhaps most important, though, is Apple’s devotion to symbology. Its most effective marketing efforts, Lindstrom says, are built into the products themselves. Think of the iPod’s white earbuds, the Mac’s startup sound, or the unmistakable shape of the MacBook’s back panel. None of these choices were accidental. Apple understands the lasting power of sensory cues, and it goes out of its way to infuse everything it makes with memorable ideas that scream its brand.

– Manjoo, Farhad. “Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere.” Fast Company, 1 July 2010.

It would be easy to go for the cheap laugh and say “See? It is a cult!” But I think the story reinforces a broader truth about human nature.

My sense is that asking humans to not indulge their religious nature is akin to asking sharks not to swim or eat seals. When people draw pleasure and inspiration from something—be it a relationship with the Creator of the universe or merely Apple Inc. of Cupertino—they will continue to seek out that experience and strengthen that bond.

One hopes that those who experience their religion as a purely secular phenomena can have some understanding of what draws believers back to churches and hymns week after week.

RELATED: The Atlantic Monthly‘s interesting piece on Apple as religion, detailing the company’s creation, hero, devil and resurrection narratives.

At a town hall event following the iPad announcement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the time to kick Adobe and Google in the shins.  I get a chuckle out of his calling Google’s do-no-evil mantra “bullshit”.

I happen to think he’s correct, if only because Google has already demonstrated that it’s willing to compromise its first principles in pursuit of more moolah.  This is no surprise; individuals and companies make that tradeoff all the time.  But most are smart enough not to publicly pretend otherwise.

Jobs trying to unmask Google is particularly entertaining, though, since it’s coming from a guy whose outfit gets perverse pleasure out of locking in users with long term contracts, non-open interfaces, and overpriced peripherals using proprietary connectors.  Pot, kettle and all that.

One of those conflicts where you’d like to see both parties lose.

An iPhone app featuring text, audio and video of one hundred speeches by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini is, according to the Times of London, the best-selling app in the country.

RELATED: Early 20th century aviatrix Beryl Markham has Italy’s number.

The symbols of war—impressive desert forts, shiny planes, beetle-browed warships—all inspire the sons of Rome, if not to gallantry, then at least to histrionics, which, in the Italian mind, are synonymous anyway.  I sometimes think it must be extremely difficult for the Italian people to remain patient in the face of their armies unwavering record of defeat (they looked so resplendent on parade).  But there is little complaint.

The answer must be that the country of Caruso has lived a symbolic life for so long that the token has become indistinguishable from the fact or the deed.  If an aria can suffice for a fighting heart, a riband draped on any chest can suffice for a general—and the theory of victory, for victory itself.

– Markham, Beryl. West with the Night.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942.

"Imperialism and all reactionaries are paper tigers." c. 1965 (Source: Stefan Landsberger)

After four years of materially aiding the PRC government in its quest to divert Chinese web surfers away from dissident online content, Google has belatedly executed an about-face.

The change in attitude comes after the company’s Gmail service was subject to cyber attacks which targeted the accounts of human-rights activists around the globe.  In retaliation, Google has said it will relax its censorship regime and contemplate closing its Chinese subsidiary.

These are, in the main, good things—although even the not-very-bright could have foreseen no small amount of inevitable unpleasantness when dealing with the autocrats of Communist China.  But despite all the hoopla I do not expect Google to exit the Chinese market, even though Google is a mere bit-player in China (an also-ran next to homegrown services like Baidu and Sina).  The company’s revenues in China are estimated to be on the order of $400 million; by leaving now they would effectively cede the field—and long-term growth potential—to competitors.  As Google has already demonstrated an inconsistency with its corporate ethics while setting up its Chinese operations, I do not expect its late discovery of a spine to make much difference.

I rather expect the Chinese government will find an appropriate scapegoat; some general or senior bureaucrat who was “overzealous” in pursuit of public security.  That official and some of his underlings will be cashiered and disgraced.  The PRC will agree to a minor lessening of the censorship regime, which it will disingenuously revoke later when the furor has died down; Google gets to look like a champion of human rights, the PRC gets to look like it is making some progress on liberalising itself.  Google and the PRC will pronounce themselves satisfied—if not amicable—and business will go on as usual.

But it was intoxicating to think for a few brief hours that they might actually do the right thing, and refuse to play ball with the tyrants in Peking.

The move to try and push this discourse into video from text is ridiculously misguided.  The most compelling video isn’t watching two talking heads debate the issues of the day; if it were, the local candidates debates during elections would rival strip clubs for popularity and revenue-generating possibilities.  Compelling video is watching the events occur, unfiltered; not having a vacuous talking head try to interpret the events long after they have actually occurred.

Seems to me that the move to erect bloggers as ersatz newsmagazine talking heads is capitalising on a weakness of the medium, not its strength. The annoying thing about the major media is that they often choose to strip away most of the valuable contextual information and leave behind only the most sensational and attention-grabbing aspects, giving us a very warped interpretation of events.  Making the medium of transmission web-based rather than radio/TV broadcast-based doesn’t diminish the fact that video is always the poorer medium for imparting detailed information; it will always take twice as long for a blogger in a suit to read a piece than it does for a reader to digest that piece in its text form.

I don’t understand why anyone would want to trade one variety of newsreader or puff-headed pundit for another; the newsreading—having another human being decide what issues and concerns ought to be put in front of you with the mass-media focus—is the problem, not the solution.  Surely the first, best destiny of the blogger is not to replicate the tired forms and functions of the old mass medium, but to capitalise on the strengths of the new.  To fill out stories and background that are ill-served and under-exposed; to do it at length and in a thoughtful way, as befits a subject matter expert.  To engage author and reader in dialogue—not have us revert to watching somebody else have that dialogue, and then commenting after the fact.

Reznor has some truly outstanding insights into the risk-averse nature of music and game studio management, and how it materially affects the quality of the gaming and music experience we have today.  (I have previously discussed the shortcomings of modern games here.)  It’s no coincidence that all the dreck being churned out by the major labels is highly reminiscent of songs and games we’ve seen before.

You previously mentioned that you came up with a video game idea and pitched it to big publishers. Tell us about that game.

Trent: Rob and I have some things on the side that we’ve been working on and one of the things we’ve been talking about doing is publishing or developing video games. A few years ago we took that idea to a few of the main publishers, Midway, Activision, etc. And as first time people in a pitch meeting, it was kind of depressing. Depressing to see that the people in control of those studios and publishers are much the same as the people sitting at record companies.

In a record company, they aren’t musicians or people who love music, they’re people who want to sell plastic discs. They think they have a formula where if they can eliminate the artist from that equation, even better. You see that in the case of the Pussycat Dolls and some of the other fabricated crap that’s out there. What we tended to notice in the video game meetings was that it didn’t seem that there were gamers there. It’s business guys who want to turn the company into a profit making machine. They look at it in terms of numbers, like a Hollywood studio. If it costs “X” amount to make a game, to compete, then it has to be a proven franchise or it has to be similar enough to something they know is going to sell. They don’t want to take the risk.

Do you see any similarities between the indie video game and indie music industries? If so, what advice could you give to those who want to get noticed in the market?

Trent: …The success of the industry as an art form and a form of entertainment will be if it can rediscover itself and to allow for the redefining of what a video game is. Not necessarily targeting it towards just kids or grandparents or whatever. The goal is always to keep a level of entertainment, excitement and innovation.

Again, it seems like games have gone from the golden age — like Robotron, which was only a few kilobytes — to the era of Wolfenstein and Doom, where a boutique shop of just ten guys could create an in-depth, quality game in six months to a year. Now we’re at an era of needing hundreds of guys and millions of dollars and several years to compete with other A-list titles to attract the big publisher that wasn’t as big of a deal years ago. The publisher equates to the record label and now you have an ecosystem where, if you want to compete with EA or Activision, you have to have a mainstream enough title, which turns into a blockbuster movie scenario.

This, again, is the same thing you see with films where a lot of generic, big films come out of Hollywood. Things like G.I. Joe and Transformers, where you know what you’re getting, they aren’t redefining anything, but they’ll make “X” amount of money, because “X” amount of people — including us — will see it. But every once in a while, something different comes along, like a Quentin Tarantino who’ll blow the doors off things and turns the industry on its head. All because it was exciting, innovative and it came from way over there.

– Burg, Dustin.  ”Interview: Trent Reznor.”  Joystiq, 24 September 2009.

This man is a genius.  Trent Reznor should be appointed Gaming Czar, given enough stimulus money to purchase a couple sets of high-quality brass knuckles, and sent off with a directive to start bringing Hopenchange to the studios.

Reznor also has some kind words for Nintendo, who have tended to shy away from incorporating hyper-real 3D graphics into every franchise title, and instead stuck with more stylised 3D graphics rooted in the look and feel of the company’s 2D platform-scroller heritage.  That was a conscious decision on Nintendo’s part, targeting the Wii at a broader spectrum of people who like to have fun but aren’t hardcore FPS gamers.  The other console manufacturers have tended to specialise their platforms for the narrower but more techncially demanding subset of people who want games with x number of frames-per-second at resolution y, with anistrophic filtering, antialiasing and so on.

The whole interview is really quite fascinating, and it is to Mr. Reznor’s credit that he is able to see the fundamental dysfunction at the heart of the music and gaming industries.  Another interesting sidebar is provided by interviewer Burg, who includes some of the excised portions of the interview (where Reznor discusses Twitter, smartphones and application development) on his own blog.  Both pieces are well worth reading.