After the election on June 12, several websites belonging to reformists were filtered. Security forces heightened their control of newspapers, reformist personalities were jailed, and those who were still free were barred from access to national televi…

Sure, it would be great if innovation leads to more Arbeitsplätze. But to how many? And how much profit shall they make?

I’d prefer to compare the web to writing systems (How great that the german word for it “Schrift” is translated to “Writing Systems“). Everyone learns it for at school. And every one can use written words for free. Shure there are people living from creating Letters (Typographers) but there are not multbillion Dollar Typography-Companies. It’s a common technology. It’s Culture.

Or compare it to gardens. Million, of millions of people have gardens. And there are also millions of gardeners I assume. But I have never heard of the 23 year old guy raising a multibillion gardening company while still college. Gardnening is a commen technology. Everyon can do it a little bit and there are professionals, but most of all … it’s a Culture.

The fact, that we can’t easily squeez millions of Dollars out of facebook or twitter, gives me hope for the potential cultural value of it. I don’t want to say, that every thank can’t be made big money with is great culture. And also I don’t want to say, that everything you make big money with is culture-less. But somehow, the things that I value as a Humanist, as a Bildungsbürger, like Education, Enlightement, the Private Domain, Culture, Grace and Benevolence have only little to do, with earning BIG money.

Andreas i understand the theory where you come from, but keep in mind that in advertising practice there is another strong effect, the technology of “frequency capping”: in display advertising with higher cpm-rates, right now a frequency cap of 3-5 displays per user is common, because you want to have a high “net-reach” of your campaign.

so if a user logs in on facebook f.e. once a week, thats just fine, a system can show them all the different ad campaigns currently running. if a heavy user logs in 5 times a day, there are not enough new campaigns the system can deliver.

the same effect will show indirect if you go for cpc-textlink-campaigns. although there is no capping, a heavy user will see the same ads over and over again every day, may a hundred times or more. and of course he will not click on it.

so maybe the monetization of a mainstream-user is better than the monetization of a heavy user if you compare how much system ressources he costs and how much ads he clicks.

But a quick survey of the activity level of my 358 Facebook friends showed similar patterns. Only 71 (=19.8%) of my friends showed any activity in the past 72 hours, with only a handful clearly dominating.

How do you define ‘activity’ level? I’m online with Facebook hours a day, however, my activity is quite invisible, i.e. not public. I use Facebook mostly as an e-mail and Jabber replacement for communications with less tech savy friends. My status reports appear at Twitter (and I don’t CC them into Facebook as you do) and for pictures, Flickr is my first choice. Plus of course my own weblog where I control my content.

The costs for accommodating a lot of mainstream users probably grew more quickly than the revenue from heavy users and ads.

An ad-based business modell like Google’s is obviously a problem during a depression. Welcome to reality, Google!