The Wall Street Journal is reporting, in a three-person bylined story, that GM plans to stop advertising on Facebook after its senior marketing executives decided “that paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers’ car purchases.” However, while the company won’t pay for advertising on the site, they plan on continuing their content marketing activities on Facebook.

Here are the bullet points:

• GM paid $10 million to Facebook for advertising during the past year.
• GM paid agencies and others (companies other than Facebook) $30 million for the creation of content and the management of marketing activities on GM’s pages on Facebook
• Facebook provides those pages to GM for free, the same price you or I pay.
• Just to make sure you’re following this, let me repeat this another way:  GM paid 3x their Facebook advertising budget for creating the content (articles, videos, promotions, status updates, etc.) that appears on Facebook pages that are “free” to any marketer.
• GM thinks the $10 million spent on Facebook advertising is wasted, so they are pulling it.
• GM thinks it’s still worth $30 million to create and manage content on Facebook.

As you might expect, those of us at Hammock who spend time trying to explain the value of using “content” in addition to (or, in some cases, rather than) traditional types of advertising (including traditional internet advertising) to build deeper, longterm relationships with customers, find this kind of news a validation of things we’ve been saying since Mark Zuckerberg was in elementary school.

But that’s not why this is news.

It’s news because Facebook’s IPO is expected to occur in three days and the reported pricing of the IPO (when compared to the Price/Earning ratios of companies like Apple) suggests that Facebook has the potential of soon being able to, “attract 10 percent of all advertising dollars spent on the planet ‘across all media – print, billboards, radio, television, internet,” according to a Dartmouth professor quoted in an NPR story earlier today.

So here’s the rub:

If GM, the third largest advertiser in the U.S., with an overall annual advertising budget of $1.8 billion, finds that spending .05 percent of its budget is too much, what chance does Facebook have of capturing 10 percent of GM’s total advertising budget in a few years? And what chance does it have of capturing 10 percent of all advertising?

Hint: The answer is 0 percent.

But I’ve not written this post to bury Facebook, but to praise it. What they’ve done is incredible: the creation of a platform that causes a company like GM to spend $30 million in creating content just for it is miraculous — probably right up there with how much GM spends on paying lawyers and PR professionals to issue press releases each year.

The IPO price of Facebook is probably ridiculous, and that might fail. But Facebook is a success. Just like Yahoo! was in 1999.

Later: There’s always more than one side to a story. AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka says GM was never a big believer in social media, anyway.

[Note: This post includes spoilers related to a 12-year old movie you'll probably never see, if you haven't already.]

With each new backwards somersault in the never-ending dive of Yahoo! into the abyss, I keep remembering the first movie I can recall that included an internet startup’s business success in the story line.

It was the Dennis Quaid film that came out in the year 2000, Frequency. It was a, hmm, science fiction, time travel, alternative history, kind of movie that revolved around the easily believable premise that Quaid’s son, as an adult in the year 2000, could use a ham radio to talk with his father who was living back in the year, 1970. Apparently, if you understand how sun spots work, you’ll find this premise very plausible (if you live in Hollywood).

Quaid’s son used this time-warping communication power to warn his fireman father that, unless he watched out, he would die in a fire the following night (convenient timing for that sun spot, no?) After that worked out, Quaid’s son told him how to keep his wife’s (the son’s mother) from being murdered. If you’ve read the most recent Stephen King novel, 11/22/63, you’ll understand why you shouldn’t go around messing with history next time you have the chance to travel back in time and fix something that needs fixing. But in the movie Frequency, everything works out just fine.

Indeed, things work out so fine in Frequency, that Quaid’s son not only saves the lives of his father and mother, he tells his dad to inform Gordo, the best friend of the son, to remember the word “Yahoo” when he grows up.

So Gordo, grows up and invests early in Yahoo! and in the year, 2000, Gordo’s Yahoo! stock has made him rich. So rich, that at the end of the film, there is a feel-good scene during which an old Dennis Quaid and his wife are playing softball and a foul ball busts the headlight of Gordo’s Mercedes — and we get to marvel at how rich Gordo is, as we see his New York vainty car tag enscribed with Yahoo 1.

It’s hard to believe today, but back in Bubble 1.0, the term “Yahoo!” didn’t just mean, Internet startup, it was the internet company that had become the pervasive pop-culture metaphor for “getting rich.”

But then…

Almost at the precise moment the film Frequency came out, the pop culture meaning of Yahoo! started a journey that would reposition the company’s brand to mean pretty much anything but getting rich. Or being smart. Or being anything, but “formerly important.”

If Frequency were to be remade, Dennis Quaid’s son would be telling his son to dump Yahoo! the day after the softball game.

A 2006 article I wrote about Jason Fried on why bigger isn't better. See note, links at the bottom of post.

[Note: The following post is intended for people who actually read what it says, not for those who don't read it, but feel the need to react to what they think it says.]

Obviously, I love internet-enabled technology and startups and am overly (obsessively?) fascinated by how the internet is changing our lives, jobs, relationships, culture and well, I could keep going. I’ve chronicled a lot of that fascination and interest on this blog for the past 12 years.

However, there are times when I wish Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet.

If there was no internet, I wouldn’t have to read things like this New York Times  clichéd story about startup companies that are (possibly) on the cusp of making it big financially (translation: like Instagram). They’ve rounded up some startups (some of which I like and use) that are already over-hyped, or that were created or funded by over-hyped individuals.

In my opinion, there are some bound-to-flop ringers in the list. (I call them Gertrude Steiners in reference to her quote about Oakland: There is no there there.)

And some on that list can’t lose unless the founders wait too long before cashing out. Hint: Dropbox.

But in my opinion, the entire premise of the story is wrong.

The companies they are pointing to may be the next big financial windfall for their creators and early investors. It’s about being the next financial big thing — the next big hit for venture-backed startups.

If that’s the definition of a “big thing,” then I prefer lots of small things that bring value to all of us — even financial rewards.

Moreover, there are several flaws in the obsession with the “next big thing” focus (startup porn, as some would describe it). Here are just a few: 1. Venture capitalists have a good record at choosing the next big thing. 2. Past success is an indicator of future success. 3. “Big things” are created by individuals who start for-profit companies for whom “exit strategies” define success, and 4. To be the next big thing, you need to create a solution to some banal or “first world” non-problem.

Let’s take those in order, in a lightening round:

1. Venture funds make big bucks: Let me point you over to the folks at the Kauffman Foundation who issued a major paper yesterday that says institutional investors should rethink the whole idea of investing in venture funds (and accept the blame for the previous failures of such funding strategies). It was written by the individuals at Kauffman who have been investing in venture funds for the past 20 years (e.g., not merely and academic exercise). They blame themselves (institutional investors) for believing the hype of VCs and declare on the press release, “After Fees and Expenses, Most Investors Will Do Better in Public Markets.” If you disagree, take it up with them, not me.

2. Past success is an indicator of future success: That’s right up there with past failure being an indicator of future failure. Frankly, failure is probably a better indicator. Does away with the hubris success can bring, at least.

3. “Big things” are created by individuals who start for-profit companies for whom “exit strategies” define success: Most of the companies listed have built their products using software platforms that were not created by for-profit companies that had exit strategies. Even when Al Gore created the internet itself, it was before he had a VC gig.

4. To be the next big thing, you need to create a solution to some banal or “first world” non-problem: Frankly, it’s embarrassing to look at the list of potential next “big things” and realize we’ve arrived at the place where a generation of entrepreneurs are devoting themselves to creating a means to find a taxi easier than, say, finding a cure for dementia.

I love the internet and technology and the people who create the cool things on this list, but being the next big thing financially for a few people is far less important than being the next thing that matters to us all.

After seeing an article like this, in order to get the sour taste out of my mouth, I click over to Kickstarter and see ideas that might be small to the world, but are big to an individuals and a few of his or her friends or fans. I love this stuff — and I love the heart and passion that goes into things that are proudly small.

Or, to get over the obsession with big, I kick the tires on ideas that may not become products, but will be approaches to software that can make it easy for me to do those things I want to do.

I love business. I love entreprneurship and innovation. I like it when people make money. But the next big thing will be bigger than making a billion dollars for a tiny group of individuals.

[Note: I go way back on this topic. In 2006, I wrote a cover story for MyBusiness magazine titled, "The Next Small Thing," that was the first (of many) national cover-story on Jason Fried. He wrote about it on the 37 Signals blog here.]

Over the weekend, the smart and successful VC Fred Wilson used the metaphor of TV shows vs. TV networks to suggest that investors (and the rest of us) sometime (often?) confuse the significance of various kinds of web-based startups.

Anyone who has used the internet for more than five years should immediately recognize what he’s suggesting. Some things we believe will define the future — that are so disruptive they will do away with institutions that have been in place for centuries — turn out to be I Love Lucy or MySpace.

If I were to debate this topic (and I’m not), my position would be this: In this metaphor TV is “the internet.” Everything else is a TV show.

In 2008, I wrote a post that applied the TV vs. TV show metaphor to magazines.  Magazines start, magazines die, was my point. Don’t confuse a magazine’s death with the death of magazines. (I have reposted it in full at the bottom of this page.)

It’s a part of a continuous theme of this blog: There is technology (or a communications medium) and there are things that one can do with that technology (or medium). When we start suggesting that a business model is the same as the technology that enables it, we head down a path of confusing TV shows with TV networks.

As Fred knows, there is lots of money to be made from investing in internet companies that seem like TV networks, but are merely TV shows. They can be massively successful as investments (again, as he has repeatedly demonstrated). But only time will tell us if Google, or Facebook, or Twitter are today’s I Love Lucy.

But come to think of it, TV as it was when I Love Lucy first aired, is hardly around anymore.

Here is what I wrote, in full, on that post dated November 2, 2008 and titled, “Magazines start, magazines die.”:

In this week’s Advertising Age, there is an article with the headline, “Will Print Survive the Next Five Years? ” And while the author of the piece provides either/or scenarios of how the current down-market will play out, the most graphic scenario (as the headline suggests) is a Print Apocalypse where advertisers leave magazines for the web, and never return.

I have a suggestion for the author of the article.

Get Advertising Age’s president and editor-in-chief Rance Crain to tell you the story of how Advertising Age got started. He’s told me the story — and I was spellbound.

Make sure you get the specifics of the dates, times and context of its creation. You will hear about a trade publication that was created a few months after the stock market crash of 1929. That’s right, after . You’ll hear about a trade publication startup whose formative years occurred during an economic Depression in which one-out-of-four Americans was unemployed.

It is a story of audacity and passion — and creative financing.

It is a story set in a time when economists and writers were suggesting capitalism itself could soon be dead. But despite that context and those fears, it’s a story about a man who started a publication about the ball-bearings of capitalism — advertising.

But yes, magazines do die

As much Kool-Ade as I drink and serve about social media and web marketing, I am less-and-less convinced by the death-of-print crowd. Again, listen: certain publications will die. I’ve pulled the plug on some, myself. No doubt, I will again in the future.

But I’m talking about the medium , not a specific magazine title — or even category.

You know how every season on network and cable TV, there are new shows premiered and other shows cancelled. Of course you know that. That’s because you’ve experienced it every year of your entire life. On TV, they even celebrate the new (without mentioning the death of the show it replaces). Just because series get cancelled, would you ever see an article suggesting network and cable TV are going to die in five years? Even if a network dies or — as they do — a cable network bombs, would you see an article suggesting the entire medium of TV is going to soon be dead? Heck, what will we do with all those flat screen TVs we’re buying if that happens?

As I have written on this blog continuously for the past eight years, the same thing happens with magazines. Magazines get started. Magazines die. It’s the whole circle of life thing. But for some reason, those who should know better confuse the closure of a magazine with the end of an entire medium.

As much as I personally do not include print newspapers in my life, even I don’t think they’re going to completely die. Become something else, yes. But die? As for magazines, I’ve said here for a long time, news weeklies and a great number of mass-marketed magazines will die — as they have done since the beginning of magazine time. And magazines like TV Guide (the listings part) will die. And trade publications that focus on breaking news and the transactions of their industry — like Advertising Age, for example — will find that the web is a better medium than print. Some day — and I think it will be a long time from now — Advertising Age may even be a web-based only product. But I’ll bet it won’t be in the next five years.

But even as those magazines die, new, tightly focused and well produced magazines will fill the vacuum created by the departure of such publications. Next season, there will be new titles on the newsstand — or sent to you by your association, employer, favorite cause, etc.

Don’t believe me?

The Advertising Age piece was inspired by lay-offs in the print media world last week. (Note to writer: There were layoffs in every industry last week.) But guess what? In the past few weeks, 52 new magazines have been started according to Samir Husni, Mr. Magazine. And that’s up from 36 starts during the same period last year.

Some won’t make it into their second year. Just like on TV.

Earlier today, I said on Twitter:

$1 billion for Instagram is giving me serious flashbacks of the months preceding the dot.com meltdown.

— (@R) April 9, 2012

This is what I was referring to:

Mapquest - AOL acquired Mapquest for $1.1B in December of 1999.

GeoCities - acquired by Yahoo! in May 1999 for $3.56 billion

Netscape - acquired by AOL in November 1998 for $4.2 billion.

Broadcast.com - acquired by Yahoo! in July 1999 for $5.7 billion.

Excite - acquired by @Home in January 1999 for $6.7B

Lycos - acquired by Terra Networks for $12.5B in May 2000.

I’m sure Facebook can use the technology and popularity of Instagram to shore up its mobile business. But at a price of $1 billion, I don’t believe it’s worth it. Indeed, I believe it sends a very negative message to would-be investors in Facebook about what they will be doing with the money raised in their upcoming IPO.

There are many people writing why Facebook made a good decision in purchasing a company with a dozen or so employees and no revenues for $1 billion.

I wonder if they’ll be investing their IRA funds in Facebook in a few weeks?

[Note: This post is a Rexplanation.]

Recently, I followed someone on Twitter who, upon being notified of my follow, responded to me with a tweeted reply: I’m curious: Why did you decide to follow me?

As the 12 regular readers of this blog know, I have written way too much about Twitter over the years. However, an upside to that way-to-much writing is the ability to dig out and send people who ask me such questions a link to an old post like this one from 2009. It was written to explain why I unfollowed about 1,300 people I had followed (primarily, because they followed me) and began a new method for deciding who to follow.

Re-reading that post, I think the reasons are still sound for my explanation then of why I follow, and unfollow, people on Twitter. However, as Twitter has added more “people curation” features and more people tweet, I’ve decided to write this post to update the topic.

In another post, I might explain some of those features (like how it’s not necessary to actually follow someone to track what they are saying on Twitter), but to keep this post from going way too long, I’m going to limit it to the topic of describing the kind of people I overtly follow on Twitter — the ones who appear if you click on the  Following link on my Twitter account page at Twitter.com.

I follow:

• People who tweet regularly and insightfully about a topic in which I’m interested. Typically, these topics will include: media (especially magazines and new media), technology or humor (especially ad-libbed commentary regarding breaking news).
• People who have links in at least 33% of their public tweets. (I am using the term public tweets to describe those that aren’t a reply to someone.)
• People from Nashville. I follow many people from Nashville who I don’t actually know. I do so because they serve as an “emergency radar system” and they tend to support the same sports teams I follow. I follow them overtly so they can direct-message (DM) me. I have DMs set up to come to me via text-message.
• People I know — maybe not personally, but I know who they are. (However, I’m continuously amazed to discover someone I know tweets regularly, but somehow I’ve missed following them. If you are someone I know, but I don’t follow you, email me — I have all the Twitter notifications turned off, so I have no idea who actually follows me.)
• People I’m intrigued with for reasons I can’t quite explain — as in, they’re a train wreck waiting to happen. (I find these are the people I unfollow most quickly, also.)
• People who have re-tweeted or favorited a tweet of mine, causing me to glance at their profile where I typically discover we share a common interest — thus, they re-tweeted something I may have said.
• People who have an avatar on their account and not the egg default avatar. Unless, say, they are my brother.
• People who have written enough of the “bio” field to make me know they are who I think they are.
• People who have blogged for a long time, or who used to blog but don’t anymore.
• Funny people. But not a lot of funny people, because I like to tweet funny things and I don’t want to read something funny someone else wrote that I was thinking about tweeting.

I feel certain that this list is not complete, so, like other Rexplanations, I reserve the right to tweak it (and tweet it) later.

And then, as I’ll explain later, there is this irony: The more people you follow, the less likely you are to be able to keep up with what any one person you follow has to say. This is both a technical and human bandwidth issue. You can address the challenge with becoming a power-user of Twitter Lists. But that requires another Rexplanation, so I’ll stop here.

PS. If you want to follow me on Twitter, you have several flavors:

@R – My personal Twitter account
@HammockInc – Several people tweet here, but I sometimes add something
@SmallBusiness – Where I curate a few links a day of news about small business
@TitansRex – Where you’ll find me during an away-game of my favorite team
@RexSpammock - Where I try to understand what retailers are attempting to do to get people to tweet about them in exchange for incentives

A five-day old story is popular with readers, yet the "news" has lapped that story.

The website of the Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com, has a feature most news sites have, a leader board that ranks the popularity of articles on the site. The WSJ.com ranks “Most Popular” by articles Read, Emailed, and Commented on. It also has a ranking of videos that are being watched.

Sometimes, such algorithmic determinants of popularity go nuts, however. Like now, for example. A few minutes ago (Tue., Feb. 21 and 3:52 ET), I snapped the accompanying screen grab showing that the #2 most popular “read” article now on WSJ.com is one dated Feb. 16 at 12:58 ET with the headline, “Colbert Report Suspended.”

Anyone not living under a rock (which apparently a lot of WSJ.com readers do) knows that, according to the WSJ and every other news outlet on the web, Colbert’s show is back on the air.

Leader boards of trending or popular news stories can be helpful in giving you an idea of what people are interested in.

But as my favorite online “popularity tracking” algorithmist, Gabe Rivera of Techmeme, MediaGazer, Memeorandum.com, et al, discovered a long time ago, even algorithms that track popularity of content need a little editing now and then.

Illustration: Caldwell Tanner

I know it will be hard for some readers of this blog, but imagine you haven’t read anything about Pinterest during the past few weeks.

Pretend you didn’t know it raised $27 million or that it was “white hot” from catching fire. Forget that you’ve been told that it’s a web platform that’s used primarily by women (58%) or that it is doing something to get commissions on links without informing users. And most of all, ignore anything from a website that would run a story that’s pure link-trolling by suggesting Pinterest is enabling copyright theft on the scale of Megaupload. (I’ve not linked to the troll.)

For this post, forget all of that stuff and let’s try to explore what Pinterest is, is not, maybe could be, but likely won’t be.

These are my opinions based on several credentials that I have never before even  considered credentials. But after reading a massive amount of crap over the past week, I feel certain these make me more of an expert on Pinterest than most of the people who wrote that crap.

First credential:  I’ve actually used Pinterest for several weeks before writing about it. I started using it right after Christmas, because I knew this time would come and I didn’t want to write about what I think it is, but what I know it is from being a user.

The account I have used to learn about Pinterest is Pinterest.com/smallbusiness, if you’d like to check it out. It is a collection of “boards” about topics that I think are better displayed visually than with text. I chose the topic of small business for two other reasons I consider credentials. First, I host the wiki, SmallBusiness.com which means I devote lots of time to the taxonomy of web-based information designed for a specific audience, a credential that helps me understand anything related to categories and niche content. More importantly, I have actively “pinned” (although I use the more common web-word, “bookmarked,”) small business related articles for over five years, using Delicious.com/smallbusiness, a service I suggest  at the end of this post, is becoming Pinterest-like, yet in a more open-web-friendly way. On Delicious.com, I have bookmarked and categorized almost 6,000 news articles, blog posts and other information.

The genealogy of Pinterest: Bookmarking hyperlinks

First, some background.

One of the benefits and/or handicaps of participating for 20 years in activities that now have labels like social media or user-generated content is that I can’t pretend that what I see today isn’t built on foundations that were laid a long time ago.

I was there when blogging first gained popularity (this blog goes way-back) so I know that in the early days, a big part of what I did on this blog was bookmark articles that were of interest to me that I thought would be of interest of the people I worked with. What I didn’t realize was that people who I didn’t work with would find those links of interest also.

Because this blog first started on a blogging platform created by Dave Winer, a person who pioneered and evangelized and defended with great passion (and continues to) many of the conventions that have evolved into what is popularly labeled, “social media,” I learned by subscribing to his RSS feed that, over time, posting bookmarks of news articles can be some of the best blogging there is. Over the years, I’ve discovered that “link blogs” like Andy Baio’s Waxy.org/links are the key to staying aware of things I’d never know about were it not for his willingness to share things from parts of the web I’d never see. (I once asked Andy something people ask me all the time, “Where do you find that stuff?” His answer was something like, “I have a constantly edited newsreader.” Wow, I thought. That’s my answer, also.)

So why do I mention all of this?

Because, at its core functionality and utility, Pinterest is a link blog. Moreover, it belongs to a category of link blogs we used to call bookmarking services. In presentations I’ve made for over five years, I have used a slide called, “sharing links” as a personal expression that I equate to posting photos or video or text or audio.

Indeed, I could argue (and heck, I’ll go ahead and do so) link blogging is the most valuable form of personal expression there is on the web.

Why? Because, when you break it all down, the most radical, revolutionary and disruptive thing on the web is the hyperlink.

Hyperlinks are so valuable to the web that a multi-billion dollar industry has sprung up based solely on trying to insert links into the web in ways that are, at times, ethical, and at other times, criminal.

A web without hyperlinks would be nothing more than an information Superhighway where only the big brands could afford locations next to the rest stops and exits. Without hyperlinks, the web would be the way giant media companies envisioned it back in the early 1990s — visions that flopped like Time Warner’s interactive television.

Strip Pinterest down to its underwear and you’ll discover a robust platform for creating and organizing hyperlinks that is based on the same principles that started out with early blogs (and back before we called them blogs) and that today, when packaged differently, are the basis of anything that aggregates recommended links in new ways ranging from Flipboard to whatever Twitter turns Summify into.

What makes Pinterest special?

Pinterest is a pure-play book-marking service however it has followed a brilliant plan  other successful social media platforms have followed: In describing itself to potential users, it doesn’t mention anything related to technology, social media, blogs, or especially bookmarking. Perhaps, using the “pin” metaphor instead of the “bookmark” metaphor was its most brilliant move.

Pinterest is successful, in part, because it doesn’t look like anything geeky or “link bloggish.” It’s pretty and minimal and utilizes a metaphor that’s as un-geekish as anything imaginable, a bulletin board. (On second thought, bulletin board can be a geekish metaphor.)

It is drop-dead simple to use. Wait. It’s even more simple than that.

It’s what people mean when they say, “build a better mouse trap.”

Pinterest is an incredibly better mouse trap for certain kinds of users.

It’s the kind of thing you use for the first time and wonder why this is the first time you’ve ever used something like this. Except you have, but it’s so much better, you don’t recognize it.

Why then, do I appear not as mesmerized as others about Pinterest? Nor as outraged about it as still others?

First off, if you go to that Pinterest account I’ve been maintaining, I think it will show that I believe it can be a wonderful platform for doing what I’ve done there.

Unfortunately, that’s showing off how it’s a better mousetrap. Not how it’s going to change the world — or even be the best mousetrap. To sustain the wave of micro-celebrity it has received during the past few weeks, it must continually improve its mouse-trappery.

When I first started looking at Pinterest, I thought they’d made a mistake by focusing on a narrow demographic: Women who have certain hobbies or interests that have already done scrap-booking and pinning offline. When I first saw it, I thought they should have done like Twitter and let different demographics discover what they could do with the platform. (Pinterest, by adding “sports” and other “manly” topics seems to be attempting to retrofit its image, and if 32% of its users are males, those topics might be working — or those 32% might be males who are into crafts and decorating and cooking, and me.)

After using it a couple of months, I’ve decided they were smart to focus on a defined marketplace because to become a platform for all people and all topics is going to be impossible for them. That would be a war. They are going to be too busy fighting lots of battles to win that war.

Is Pinterest a den of thieving pirates?

Without getting into it, there are some who are suggesting that a lot of the photography that’s appearing on those Pinterest boards are copyrighted images stolen from their owners. While I’m not a lawyer, I’ll pretend to know what I’m talking about for the sake of argument. I think it is silly to suggest Pinterest users are doing something equivalent to people who upload pirated movies onto Megaupload (as stated on some highly visible blog posts during the past couple of days). However, it is not silly to suggest what Pinterest is doing pushes the envelop on some previously court-blessed uses of web content that could provide more rounds of legal wrangling on the topic of photography usage on the web.

Without getting too deeply into this topic, you have to consider the Pinterest image issue in the context of legal decisions that enable Google’s “image search” to provide search-results pages filled with images it doesn’t own. However, you’ll notice on Google’s search-results pages that no Google ads appear. Why not? Because such ads would make it easier for a plaintiff to argue that Google is monetizing content being scraped from another site.

If you’ve followed the Pinterest saga over the past week, you know that Pinterest did have a model of monetizing certain links on pages where scrapped photography appears. However, once discovered, Pinterest dropped that practice. (A side geeky and legal-theory issue for anyone who has made it this far: On Google, the thumbnails are hosted on Google servers, but when you click on the image and see it enlarged, the image appears to be the one hosted on the site linked to. Logically, this would seem to be a practice that would enable Pinterest to claim it doesn’t “download” images. They could also use the type of logic the app Flipboard uses when it claims the images appearing via it service are being fed via RSS and that users are merely seeing images they have subscribed to as permitted by the blog or website on which the image originated. In other words, if Pinterest is targeted as a thief, companies like Google and Flipboard and hundreds of others might have reason to join forces in defending it.)

Bottomline, in my opinion: The Pinterest model of being a visual bookmarking service is probably legal — and is probably beneficial to the owners of the copyrighted material to whom Pinterestest users are sending traffic. But being wrong never stopped people from suing.  [Later: LLSocial.com reports that Pinterest has made some code available to any website that wants to block the site's user from pinning its photos. While I doubt too many take them up on it, this will provide Pinterest some room for defending itself against claims that it encourages piracy. I'm not sure the internet (the opinion-shaping people part) will view this opt-out approach as being much more than window dressing, however).]

Is Pinterest the next Facebook, Twitter et al?

No.

But I’m not sure it wants to be, nor needs to be, in order to be successful. There are lots of ways to be successful without being Facebook or Twitter. Pinterest has a good product for its  targeted audience. If it becomes a dominant player in that market, there’s lots of ways to make everyone associated with it very rich.

Another thing: While Pinterest is an awesome way to create a visual display of bookmarked photos, my six weeks of using it has convinced me that it is dependent 100% on its users, but it rejects lots of conventions that all of the other social media platforms its being compared to are based on. The lack of these conventions (keyword tagging, exportability of user-contributed data, only one type of RSS feed) mean that developers who could create easy extensions to the site won’t feel so inclined.

On the other hand, I look at what is taking place at a service like Delicious.com and I see a platform that is doing everything Pinterest is doing, including transforming one of the most anti-user-friendly experiences in the social media space into one of the best ones. A site like Delicious, whose current owners started YouTube, know how to create a platform that can be adapted into anything the user wants to turn it into…and know that to do that, you have to be as friendly as possible to the open web.

In the coming weeks, I’ll demonstrate what I mean when I compare Delicious to Pinterest, as there will be those who claim the two have nothing in common.

But just wait. You’ll see.

[Later: I was reminded later about a similar time in its development when I wrote a lot about what Twitter is (existentially, speaking) and recalled that I had once pointed to a post by Fred Wilson, in which he said, “Twitter has never been about technology….Twitter, like all social media, is about the people who use it.” Bottomline, Pinterest is, too.]

When I see a web-based startup hit a period of “traction” and being “it,” I think back over the past 12 or so years and realize I’ve seen this pattern before:

1. Geeky friends of the geek who created it start using it
2. Geeks in some NICHE* use it
3. It’s described as a site used by NICHE-ers to do a specific NICHE thing
4. Non-geek cool, young, influential NICHE-ers use it
5. Every NICHE-er uses it
6. A series of funding rounds
7. People in other NICHES use it and it’s redefined as something that can be used no matter what NICHE you are in.
8. More funding rounds
9. The geek who created it leaves to pursue other opportunities (in St Barts)
10. People’s parents start using it
11. People’s grandparents use it
12. Something just like it becomes a feature on Facebook, a plug-in on WordPress and aggregated by the Huffington Post.
13. The only people who use it live in Brazil.

*NICHE – Any gender, race, religion, profession, passion, nationality, sexual preference, et al.

I used to blame the vacuous nature of a pop-culture-obsessed society for why we all seem so pre-occupied with the death of celebrities. But when Michael Jackson died, even I felt a little saddened — and frankly, the guy creeped me out.

I thought about it and determined that Jackson’s era roughly matched up with my teenage years through the day he died, so what I decided I was feeling was a little mourning for my life’s playlist.

I guess that’s why, when I tweeted a similar feeling about Whitney Houston earlier this evening, so many people re-tweeted it (25+ within a few moments of it being posted). Her family and personal friends are probably the only ones who actually lost Whitney. But with her death, I lost a little piece of me.

I really, really hope she finds peace on the other side.