Laughing Meme

“[New York] is the company town for money” – Richard Lefrak

You remember those dark days after the first bust?

You know the ones when all the MBAs left, and the people who loved the Web went on building it — building meaningful, crazy, artistic cool stuff, and the ethos of the social web was born, back before when that meant more then widget crazy/Facebook-tulip-bloom-madness. Yeah, that sure sucked.

Just thinking about it in the light of this week’s market silliness is enough to make me want to go back to SxSW again this year (where the torch was kept alight, like Ireland in the Dark Ages). And I’d sworn off it after this last year, but maybe budgets will be contracting again by then. And those projects that got started out in the darkness, say Flickr, and Upcoming and del.icio.us among others, wasn’t it all much better when the market got back involved and they got serious?

At least thats what reading Fred and Jason on “startup depression” reminded me of.

Having played with and thought about the costs associated with handling transactions and paying people (and we’re talking monetary|infrastructural costs, not social|spiritual, thats a different post), I’m always struck by how much overhead there is; overhead in fact swamping the value of many types of transaction.

Which is how I know I’m living in 21st century when I was able to buy David Brin’s latest work, with money I made filling in phone number information on a couple SF restaurant listing, and have enough left over to cover backing up the contents of my virtual server I just flashed.

No real insight but having just lived through it, it felt worth noting.

Why is Blizzard charging for the World of Warcraft software? Or, barring the need to cover printing and shipping, why disallow me to use a copy I manage to acquire though alternative methods? How can the $40 they collect up front possibly compare the to recurring amount they would receive if they lowered the barriers to participation? Given that a troll pidgin is quickly becoming a viable 2nd language in this house, I’d happily pay $12/month fee to have an account for the occasional play, and I’d probably go on paying even on off months, to hold on to my limited progress.

How long would I let these low level monthly payments go on? It would roll right into my cost of being online without making a ripple, and they’d have already made their money and more. Dumb, or at least short sighted.

Les is wondering how people are planning to finance and support services like Bloglines, flickr, and del.icio.us. It’s a question that can be addressed from two directions, both interesting. You can frame the question as, “What is the business model?”, or you can ask “How does a community support a resource it finds useful?”.

One line that jumped out at me at me was

I do appear to shell out at least $50 per month in internet services beyond my bandwidth bill.

That got me thinking. A few years ago this would have been an unprecedentedly large amount. The idea that we were all going to get rich selling online services was so firmly rejected that it became a commonly accepted truism that “people won’t pay for things online”, and yet, quietly, almost under the radar this seems to be changing.

So I’m having a capitalist flashback this morning.

I called my stock broker (I didn’t know I had a stock broker!) at Salomon, Smith, & Barney and closed out my money market account (I didn’t know I had a money market account!) and I’m gong to take that check and spend it on a shiny new Mac laptop. I’ve also made a resolution to read more carefully my mail which ends up at my parents house, as I’ve learned all sorts of amazing things. Including I have a little cash left other from a buy and sell stock trade from my days as a Palm wage slave. Interestingly, I think I used a chunk of that transaction to buy my last laptop 3 years ago.

I’m torn between the sensible 12in iBook, and the extravagant (we like to call it “planning for the future”) 12in aluminum Powerbook.

After all, at the stroke of midnight my little capitalist fantasy will be over, and I’ll go back to being a struggling coder/activist. Decisions, decisions.

Advice?