If you read just one magazine this summer, make it the current July-August special issue of Technology Review.
Its editor Jason Pontin writes:
As Bryant Urstadt explains in “Social Networking Is Not a Business”, last March Microsoft bought a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook for $240 million, giving the social-networking site a notional valuation of $15 billion.
Yet according to Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, Facebook will lose $150 million this year.
Similarly, Google paid $900 million in 2006 for the right to deliver ads on MySpace, the largest of the social networks, for three years–but Google says the results have been disappointing.
So far, no one has much idea what will do for Web 2.0 what keyword advertising (the source of most of Google’s 2007 revenues of $16 billion) has done for search.
Serious stuff.
Common sense.
Not bla, bla, bla.
Instead, facts.
From MIT.
Read it.
