Fakin' it: The Law of Fabricated Returns
Hey, entrepreneurs! In the New Boom, anything but explosive growth is unacceptable. Take a tip from three leading dot-coms and cash in on the Law of Fabricated Returns.
- VIP-club roll-outs: Facebook was nearing its saturation point. The social site had 85% of college students on its roster, but the million-dollars-a-week revenue didn't matter if Facebook didn't grab more, more, more. So it expanded to companies yesterday, using an old trick from its first college-listing days: delayed roll-outs. For now, employees from only 10 companies and 1 non-profit can snag corporate Facebook profiles.
- The cool kids at Apple, Intel, EA, Amazon, Intuit, and Microsoft (and a few non-tech corps) can get past the velvet rope; Googlers and Yahoos are left in the cold until the next round. Now whenever Facebook needs a numbers boost, they can pop another Fortune 500 company onto the list. [Inside Facebook]
- We are the world: Dave Sifry's Technorati really is growing — the blog search index is doubling every 6 months (wait, wasn't it every 5.5 months two months ago?).
- But that story's not sexy enough for his fans and investors. The VCs want a grand metanarrative, they want to be part of something big, where they were in on the ground floor, they were pre-Singularity, man. And Sifry gives them that: "I continue to marvel at it, but the blogosphere continues to grow at a quickening pace."
- Not exactly, Dave. Just because you finally added MySpace to the Technorati index doesn't mean the blogosphere doubled — it means you stopped ignoring it. And some day, Technorati will run out of massive blog indices to discover. Hopefully for Dave, it'll be after his IPO. [State of the Blogosphere]
- Crank out the pageviews: Kids! News Corp. is cool! Honest! Look how influential and huge we are at MySpace, with our pageviews approaching Google!
Pardon? 10 cents for a thousand pageviews? A flood of useless clicks every time you visit — log on, log on again, refresh so it works, click twice to enlarge, click three times to rearrange friends? Faking traffic to seem bigger than Google? NEVER YOU MIND THAT. [Mike Industries]