After all, success in the social networking world isn’t really about features, interface or technology — take Twitter, for example, which outsources its interface to third party clients and could repopulate the cetaceans of the world on its own if only the fail whale could be taught to swim. For all the talk of a revolution, news feeds are just a hybrid of email with instant messaging. The new idea was making it multicast – email all of your friends at once with a semi-personal message rather than each one individually with a personal one.

Facebook seems to see the way the wind is blowing and has leaked that it is introducing email to supplement its still-flakey IM service. Google countered by adding social media feeds to email. But what it all comes down to is that these are just messaging platforms and will ultimately follow the same paths as email and IM companies of yore.

In the email world, all of the services integrate so a Gmail user can communicate with a Yahoo user or, likely, a CornerStoreEmail user if such a service existed (and in this great Internet world of ours it almost certainly does). The result of this is that email companies remain somewhat distinct – people select their email provider for the interface, convenience and tools and stay with them to avoid having to distribute a new address. While advertising may not be what it used to be, email remains a good business for site owners though there is no big email company that’s made it as a stand-alone company.

In the IM world, each service elected to keep a walled garden. AIM doesn’t talk to Yahoo which doen’t talk to MSN. If you have friends on multiple networks (and you almost certainly do), you create accounts on each but then you use a third-party client to administer it all (like Adium) or create your own private network with something like Jabber. The IM networks no longer have any contact with their users. Indexable, real-time content, yes, but no opportunity to brand, advertise or sell stuff to their “customers”.

Social media is no different. In the short term, companies will cash in on content and on hopes that they can aggregate and engage massive audiences, but over time the industry will fragment. Those that lower the walls and let in the barbarians should keep a piece of their businesses while those that keep up the walls will likely delegate their businesses to intermediaries. In a few years, will any of them be standalone companies? Not if the model of email or IM is a guide. The barriers to entry are low – companies with established audiences like Google can step in easily (you can imagine Yahoo and MSN are just a few steps behind).

It’s possible that social media is truly a new thing, but it feels perilously like we’ve seen this movie before.

While Twitter feeds may be great for allowing people at home in the US to get a sense for the magnitude of the disaster, they don’t  provide organizations like American Red Cross or Project KID with the information they need to support their operations.  They need to know if a road is passable, if a well is operational or if a gang has set up a roadblock.  They need to know if an area is safe for relief workers and if supplies have reached their intended destinations.  And they need this information in a timely, accessible format.

That’s what this project is supposed to help with.  Instedd was active in revealing election issues in Afghanistan and Jason’s mobile software significantly enhances what they already have.  They can put smart phones into the hands of Haitians so they can take pictures and record audio messages which are uploaded to a server along with a timestamp and location information from the built in GPS.  The software stores the information until it finds a signal and can upload.  The server then feeds it directly into the data systems of active relief organizations.

With a few tweaks, the software can be translated into Creole and even made pictographic to be operated by people who aren’t literate (like more than 50% of Haitians).

However, to make it work, they need some funds – approximately $10,000.  Instedd is a registered 501(c)(3) and will collect the money to support the effort.  If you want to contribute, you can go to their web site, but you won’t be able to specify that the money is for Jason’s operation.  To do that, just fill in the form below after you contribute and tell me your name and how much you gave.  Instedd will then credit your donation to this operation.

For those of you in Chicago, there will be a fund-raiser on Wednesday, January 27 at English Bar & Restaurant in River North.  The event starts at 5:30PM and we have the space until approximately 7:30PM.  Jason will tell us more about the mission and we’ll be collecting donations – cash, checks, whatever you can do would be appreciated. Sorry for the short notice, but Jason hopes to deploy by the end of the week.

If you can’t make it or are considering a more significant donation, you can go to Instedd.org/donate and make a tax-deducible donation.  If you do that, please fill out the form below and let us know how much you gave so this project is allocated the funds.  You can also donate via check to:

inSTEDD

480 S California Ave, Suite 104

Palo Alto, CA 94306

If you do that, be sure to write “TODD-JASON-HAITI” on the comment line of the check and fill in the form below to let us know.

Here’s a little more information about the project:

Haiti Response Proposal

Why do these companies have such goofy names? Can you tell anything about them from their names? What happens if these names become common verbs like “to google”? I’m going home to myxer and sobees my friends tonight…

Chilling.

The reason for it is that corporate branding is now done by what domain names (and, in particular, what .com domain names) are available rather than by choosing something that moves, informs or resonates with an audience and premium domains still cost a fortune.  You can take it for granted that all common nouns and combinations of 1-5 letters and numbers were gone years ago and no little startup can afford them.  And most aren’t owned by companies – they are owned by speculators or those in dubious businesses of typo squatting or arbitrage.

While many recognize this problem, most of the calls to action surround either center around creating more TLDs (Top Level Domains – .com, .net, .org, .us, etc.) or in getting companies to spread out of the virtual class-A office space represented by a .com.  (Think del.icio.us or bit.ly, but I’m not sure either of those made things less confusing.)

But new TLDs are issued seldom and when they are, they are cherry-picked quickly and we’re right back where we started.  So how about an economic solution that might also do the government a bit of good? Tax ‘em.

Domain names and IP addresses are, for all intents and purposes, the real estate of the web.  We even call web sites “properties”.  So why not have a tax? Right now it costs just a couple of dollars a year to register or maintain a .com domain name so people save them for a rainy day or stick up a couple of ads on a portfolio of hundreds of thousands of domains earning just enough random clicks to support the registration cost.

But what if the government imposed a tax on .coms? Even if the proceeds were shared among several governments, the potential revenue is enormous as is the benefit to the internet.   While it’s recognized that we’re running out of IP addresses, it’s less widely recognized that .coms represent a limited asset.  There are only so many and when they are gone they don’t come back to the pool.  If a tax of, say, $100 / year was applied to every .com domain it would not have any appreciable effect on any real business out there, but it would force those in the business of speculation or squatting to release at least their less profitible domains and add to the pool.

I don’t know the precise number of .com domains that have been issued, but it is likely in the hundreds of millions.  Even if you assume that each business in the US has only one (there are some 28 million businesses in the US) and no one in any other country had one (clearly a silly assumption), you end up with more than $2.8 billion in tax revenue and do the world (or, at least, our language skills) a bit of good at the same time.

Which is curious.  While gold has traditionally been used as a medium of exchange, it’s not because of some intrinsic “worth”.  It’s primarily due to scarcity – the same thing that makes it impractical as an industrial material in most cases.  We used gold because it’s pretty, shiny and reasonably rare like a clean, attentive college student.  But while clean, attentive college students may actually do work, gold just sits in a vault somewhere.  It has value only because it’s been used as a medium of exchange for perhaps 5,000 years of human history unlike the relative newcomers of paper or virtual money.

But this isn’t about slamming gold.  Others have done that far more eloquently that I ever shall, such as William Jennings Bryan in his seminal 1896 Cross of Gold speech advocating bimetalism.  It’s about the idea of a commodity as an intrinsic store of long-term worth and my personal favorite example – the diamond.

My grandfather grew up in eastern Europe during the pogroms, lived through the great depression and came out with the idea that having a store of valuables is a good idea.  He bought jewelry both as gifts for the ladies in the family, but also as a bit of a backstop in case something went seriously wrong.  Gold and diamonds will always command some value even when currency fails, right?

Perhaps.  But if a commodity’s value comes substantially from scarcity, what happens when that scarcity is undermined? A case and point happened in 1916 when the first harvest of cultured pearls was made.  Pearls went from being among the most valuable gems, often comparable in price to rubies or diamonds (Kublai Khan, among others, preferred pearls) to selling for a few hundred to a few thousands dollars for a nice strand.  Some people still seek out natural pearls with their orders-of-magnitude premium price, but they are few and far between.  The Mikimoto process essentially used oysters as bio-reactors and reliably replicated in industrial quantities a complex reaction that happens only occasionally in nature.  And, in the process, saved the lives of countless innocent pearl-less oysters.

The same change may be coming to diamonds.  It’s very hard to transmute one element into another (lead to gold, for example) since the reaction required is nuclear.  It’s relatively easy, however, to get atoms to form the stable molecular configuration of your choice, especially  the relatively simple pyramidal matrix we like to call diamond.  And the feed stock, pure carbon, costs very little.  One company, Apollo Diamond, can already make gem stones indistinguishable from mine diamonds.  Another, Advanced Diamond Technologies, is making industrial artificial diamonds for about the price of other less-exotic industrial coatings.

Apollo voluntarily laser-etches their diamonds so you know they aren’t mine diamonds.  Somehow, this makes old-fashioned diamonds companies breath more easily.  After all, if someone has to pick between natural diamonds and artificial diamonds, they’ll pick natural every time, right? Not so fast.  Pearls had a relatively light association with human and animal suffering in the process of harvesting them, but that was enough, along with price, to make cultured diamonds into a totally acceptable alternative.  Diamonds, however, have more blood on their metaphorical hands than anything other than gold.  They finance wars, dictatorships and mass exploitation.  Most men I know really struggle with the idea of buying diamond engagement rings for this reason.  Two of my best friends got over this by buying them from Apollo.

It’s a mantra of mine to never bet against technology.  With cheap feedstock and rapidly improving technology, companies like ADT and Apollo are poised to be disruptive in the diamond industry.  And while the same techniques don’t precisely apply to other gemstones, all of them are made from relatively cheap base materials stacked up in not-terribly-complex molecular arrangements.  They are still pretty, but the concept of intrinsic worth and scarcity will soon need another look.

You heard it here first – within 50 years and perhaps a lot less, diamonds will be as inexpensive as pearls.

Diamonds may be a girl’s best friend, but they may prove to be a fickle one.  Let’s Hope so anyway.