I've had a lot of ideas involving social networking floating around in my head for the past few months. They were finally crystalized into a solid conclusion this week: I don't want to work for a social networking company. There are really two distinct but related problems with social networking companies, and combined they form a deal killer for me.
I've talked about the tablet takeover several times before on this blog. I still firmly believe my previous statement:
I've heard a lot of noise recently about these new fangled smartphones and tablets not replacing 'real computers', especially since the announcement of many new tablet products, including the HP TouchPad. That they are just expensive FaceBook machines. I've also heard people say that there's no room in the market for more devices: iOS and Android will take up the market and leave nothing for anyone else. It'll be just like the PC wars again!
I finally watched Code Rush this weekend, a documentary about open sourcing mozilla and the sale of Netscape to AOL in the late 90s. There is no doubt that Netscape created the web as we know it. The web changed everything. But I wonder about Mozilla itself. Did open sourcing Mozilla really make a difference to it's success?
Over the years I've worked on a lot of open source projects. I've also worked on quite a few commercial projects. What a lot of them have in common is the need to market themselves to developers, but without any marketing budget. When I worked on JFXStudio my budget was 20$ a month from my own pocket.