There is an interesting conversation between Scoble from Microsoft and Debi/Mobile Jones that you can find here. I would recommend that you take a peek at the comments, which made me chuckle. Myspace has become a marketplace for a big chunk of kids. It's certainly not about the traffic (although they do serve something like 12% of the ads on the Internet.) it's more about it becoming a place where the youth of today hang out. See Dana Boyd.
The conversation in general reminded me of an encounter I had last summer. I walked into the office of the head of a hot indie label that has had a lot of past and current success. He looked up over a stack of CDs and papers and asked me "What's Up?"
I held up my phone and said, "Want to see my toy?"
He said sure. I walked through a quick demo of Rabble and showed him some of the other labels that are live. At then end he said, "I am not really into technology, but that's f'ing cool. Let's do it."
No Powerpoint. No khaki pants and blue shirt. Just an appreciation of what each of us do. I think that the discussion above is saying a lot of the same thing but in a less direct way. Technology is hard and technologists do amazing things to solve technical problems. Convincing a base of youth consumers to adopt your product, that's extremely hard to do as well. The key point with consumers though is to make sure that you are listening. As I said before in this post, I don't think that many in Silicon Valley are listening.
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