and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Dot Com, redux?

Are we seeing the beginning of the next big rise in technology companies and if so, are they doomed to repeat history?

A new company Huminity is putting a spin on social networking - or just getting a buzz off the phrase - but either way it looks like a new spin on an old trick:

The software they produce combines instant messaging, chat, and social networking

Whatever that means. I think what it means is they leveraged a few key pieces of jargon into a couple million in venture capital. Doesn't that smell an awful lot like.. oh.. I don't know.. 1998?

If you look back on the technology boom and what it brought us you won't see a whole lot that wasn't here before. It was like a flash flood that carried away the undergrowth but left little structural damage - and I'm speaking on technology terms here, not economical. But what it did do was provide an incubation period for new innovation. The economical situation was such that any old moron with a laptop and a suit could collect a couple million just by mentioning the phrase "emerging technology". Sure, most people would say this was a bad thing but what it did was create a secure and nursery-room like feel for hundreds of computer firms. For a few precious years the babes of the tech industry were left to develope and grow and flourish with nary a predator in sight.

Of course once they were all ripe and plump they were released upon the hounds and we all know what happened then.. but though the companies were laid to waste as the dotbomb spread a path of terror.. the technologies these companies created was left behind, unscathed and pristine and ready for action. Result? Large companies - IBM, HP, Microsoft, and Apple.. they snatched up these ideas and made them work. Implemented the unimplementable. Integrated the unintegratable.

Look at online music stores now - they took the ubiquitous file-sharing concept and applied a price tag. Is that so revolutionary? No, but the masses will think it is.

Look at the iPod. They took a technology (MP3) disparate from the mainstream money-making road and finally did it right - made a portable player that was slick and efficient with enough space... and they marketed.

Look at instant messaging, now making inroads to the business community.

So it's a natural cycle of birth growth death rebirth and we may now be seeing the next wave. With seemingly revenueless ventures such as friendster and now, huminity - 6-degree chat software (gee where have we heard *that* before?).

Seems all you gotta do is take two failed ideas (sixdegrees.com and icq) smack them together and *kazaam* - profit? Or at least the thought that there may be profit down the road.. which is exactly what we had in the first dot com era.

So is this era 2? If it is, did we learn anything from the first one? Are we going to make the same mistakes or different ones? Probably both I figure.

From a slashdot comment on Huminity:

The problem with 'recommend a friend' is that it's too close to 'recommend a fiend' for comfort. You really have no web of trust - it's all what X says about A says about C ... K.

And there is probably a point in that. When you have 10 "friends" in friendster but your "personal network" is 400,000 people, you know something is a little fishy. And that's the ultimate problem with social networking - it's society, and that means everyone is carrying their status stick and if you've got a bigger one they want it.. Everyone wants a bigger network because it's something to measure by. Human nature and all that.

I hate to be a curmudgeon but who needs 400,000 friends? Heck, who needs 1,000 friends? The only time that would come in handy is if you're trying to throw a rave or trying to get a petition signed and let's be honest - if there are two things mainstream americans don't like to participate in it's raves and politics.

If I have 10 friends, in a perfectly balanced world they would each get one tenth of "me". 100 friends.. one-one hundredth. Okay okay, things aren't that balanced but at some point it behooves no one to be "connected" to someone else in only the most passive and tiny way - like a tiny spider's silk bridging a gap of infinite space.

Certainly the farthest person in my "personal network" on friendster might as well be separated from me by an infinite gap. I'm not getting the least bit of social advantage being "connected" to him or her in any way.

.. but the message here is that I'm not getting hurt either, I guess. Somewhere down the road I may come to a bridge - a bridge I have never crossed before and may never cross again but may on that particular occasion have reason to cross it then. If I've burned it already then I'm screwed.. and if I've not even built it yet..

Will there be a day when I can travel to L.A. or Bangkok or Madrid or Buenos Aires and drop into a cafe, open my laptop (or my jacket or just my eye - as my computer will be me and I will be my computer) and quickly find all my "friends" in that city, call them up, and find a place to crash? Will I ever be able to gain a palpable advantage by having these "friends"? And in this day and age of always-on-always-connected, is there really six degrees of separation anymore?

What is the ultimate consequences of being thoroughly connected - not only to your email and your data but to people and companies?

What will we gain or lose by being one step away from our worst enemies?

How far away, truly, is the farthest person in this world?

If Bush was on friendster, how do you want to bet Osama Bin Laden would be in if not his first degree of friends at least his second?