I have personally been twittering non stop for the last week. It gets really addicting because more and more people add you as friends. These people will make comments that you will want to reply to. There is a lot of actually very interesting bloggers on twitter who use it to link them to their new posts. These are worth wild to add as friends and are great to comment on because some of the bloggers have quite a strong following. I personally am very happy with twitter and think its a great idea and very useful and draws a lot of people to sites if something interesting appears in a twitter message.
The downside of twitter is a lot of people on there just post about nonsense like I could really careless that your status is broken toilet or dog is sick. The everyone tab is sort of useless because the information is pretty stupid but people keep adding me as friends off the everyones tab so I keep using it. Currently I have 11 followers but am only following 21 so I find this as a decent ratio since most people have about a 3 following to each 1 person who follows them. I post really whatever I feel like saying and its really enjoyable.

The site does have its limitations the 140 character limits a little hard to keep under but I understand on why they do it and do not blame them. If people wanted to post more they could blog. The problem is some of the idiots on twitter need more than a 140 character response to their idiotic completely wrong status slash view. I am using twitter almost as my new rss feed which is interesting to say the least.

Ebay bought stumbleupon in May 2007 and it was doing quite well. Now times have changed and reports are that Ebay wants to unload it as quickly as they could. Here comes the fire sale. In September 2008 it was noted that Ebay had hired Deutsch Bank to sell stumbleupon. They had a drastic decline in usage that year. Interestingly though only 2 percent of their sites are paid sites and the rest are not. Its an interesting concept because its like channel surfing but on the Internet. I am a guy who would totally use this product constantly because I love learning pointless random facts and thats what channel surfing effectively does for you. If Ebay gets desperate enough they might as well just sell stumbleupon to me because I think I could really go through and create a variation of it that would be entertaining to say the least customized to fit what I am thinking. I am not sure if they do it now but I would do celebrity stumbleupon like they do celebrity play-lists to see what celebrities are stumbling upon on the internet. I really like this company I just feel bad that the interest and usage of the site is decreasing as much as it is although the registered users count is at an all time high.

Is probably my favorite new site. The idea is genius. They sell a limited amount of items on their site and people can bid on them. The items appear to be random in what they list but stuff people want. They are very expensive items as well but the company does not make their money off of the price of the item. Instead they make their money by how much it costs to bid on the item. Each bid costs the user roughly a dollar and the bid only goes up by a one cent increment. You can get a steal for 2 dollars and some cents but the company is the one who makes out like a bandit. The 2 dollar selling price really just had made them 200 bucks. Today I saw an ipod touch go for 2.85 cents for an 8 gig ipod well some one got a steal on the ipod for 2.85 cents but the company actually made 285 dollars on that single auction. They do not take a cut of the selling price because well they do not have to. Its a system that works as follows there is 3 minutes left on an auction and each time the item gets bid on the timer gets reset to three minutes so you must be the highest bidder for three minutes in order to win the item. Its really addicting and can almost become compulsive. One has to remember that every time they bid it costs them a dollar so the item they win must be worth it. Due to this philosophy of the time getting reset an auction can go on for a long time because no one wants to bid till the very end in order to get the current highest bidders hopes up. I really like this concept and do not thing it will get huge but it has its niche and the company would not require many employees to make it work and they got to be rolling in the dough from this ideology. So if you want a 2 dollar ipod touch this is the site for you or just laugh about how insanely cheap people are buying stuff for check it out. All I know is that bids tick is laughing the whole way to the bank.

Yahoo now controls a social media network called flickr a company that allows users to share massive amounts of photo for free on line and unlimited for a fee each month. They are growing at rapid rates and say that they have over 2 billion photos hosted on their site. The problem is i do not see how they make their money. The paid accounts really do not make tons of sense to me and on their main page there is no ads so that wont make them money. It is something that I see has a purpose but if it continues to grow the way it does I am not sure how it will be able to host the site and its massiveness without extensive profitability reforms. The last thing yahoo needs is another company to financially drain them more. I did a quick Google search on line to try to see if they are profitable and the information just isn’t out there. Bandwidth is not cheap and they are definitely a big source of bandwidth usage. Its a great idea I just am not sure if it was properly implemented for how big it got. The only good thing is yahoo is a fairly smart company and they will figure out what to do with flickr and how to spin it to be more than just useful. A lot of of these types of projects started out as side projects and took off so they were not really set up using a business plan so the companies have to play catch up to turn a side project into a profitable corporation. I hope they succeed because its a really cool idea for people who are into pictures and what not just the idea has not been fully developed yet.

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Facebook started off as a on-line community for just college students. The name comes from a student directory that most called facebook. Facebook opening up to everyone takes away from the original direction that they were set on, which was connecting college students with other college students. It use to be that you had to have a university email address in order to sign up for the usage of the site. The moment they opened it up to everyone took away from its direction. If they would have been smart they would have kept it all student based and then it would have been easier to attract advertisers because they would be able to focus on just students. Facebook was different because it had a different concept than myspace and myspace is a community based on music that was open to everyone though. Facebook was a unique web based community that brought together the educated and instead it is now just another social network. It is better than myspace because it has applications and what not, but push comes to shove its direction is wrong. The company though has been known to make horrible mistakes it has not been that long ago that people were furious about the new facebook look and style. I am tired of any Joe blow being able to be on facebook because well thats what myspace had become and caused me to ultimately leave that network. Facebook is definitely a fad and all fads die just as ICQ and AOL instant messenger have in the last few years. The replacement to facebook will suffer a similar fate because well it may just be the evolution cycle of these social network type sites to start unique and then open up to everyone in order to try to capitalize but having this ultimately lead to their downfall.