Facebook's supposed hoard of cash must really be starting to get restless these days. In acquiring an overwhelming ability to do a real-time of Robert Scoble's life, otherwise known as Friendfeed, Facebook has made a major stride into defeating Twitter... um.. no.. Google..um.. well.. I don't know, defeating someone or something? Our extreme analytical perspective has gleaned it that maybe Facebook has figured it out that it is cheaper to get Friendfeed developers on-board than to copy them feature-for-feature in the longer run. Makes sense Zuck, it really does.

After the latest fracas on the tech blogs about Joshua Schahter's indignation about the Twitter-integration at Delicious, I was left wondering about how did the product get to where it is these days. In its early days, the product was widely used, it was the de-facto standard for social bookmarking and it had a growing user base. The future is not all that rosy for the product. It is one of those platforms that has languished since its acquisition by Yahoo!. What is rather interesting is that the site features almost zero Yahoo!

By now it is all over the place that Pirate Bay (or at least the four defendants) has lost its lawsuit with the authorities regarding their enablement of piracy using the website. Neither will this ensure that piracy related to entertainment will come to an end, nor will this ensure that artists will find another way to monetize their efforts beyond what the entertainment industry can offer.

The greatest price that terrorism extracts, and it does that silently, is fear. This is fear is leveraged often by authorities around the world to enforce laws that don't do much more than constrain the freedom of the majority, while presenting only a minor inconvenience for the for tiny minority who cause all the harm.

The state of broadband in India is a rather saddening affair. Any connection that is above 256 Kbps either costs over a thousand rupees per month or it involves download caps which will make the whole point of using it like how broadband is meant to be used out of the question.

For many years we have been trying very hard to unlock the potential in India's internet market. Beyond all the hype, the fact is that we have made little headway in realizing that dream. Even with the stellar growth numbers quoted year after year by IAMAI and other industry bodies, most individual internet properties seem to have a lot of trouble in growing, organically, beyond the three million page views in a day line in the sand.

There is sheer and absolute panic in the media markets these days. We have industry veterans advocating a switch in online content distribution from the free model to the subscription model like it is a panacea for all ailments and everyone is rushing about trying to increase rack rates. To all this hectic activity, there is only thing I can say: stop, take a deep breath and try and think long term than short term.

If there is one thing that has gone awfully wrong with the open APIs for pushing and pulling data into various online communities, it is the horrible practice of plugging one thought stream through the API into another in an automated manner.

I would have loved to have summed it up rather simply as that Facebook is story of accidental success. Zuck started the product to have some fun, and incredibly, five years down the line, the fun has not ended. But, it is not all fun and games and even with its astounding growth, the fact is that Facebook is struggling to find a clear direction in which it should head and it also having trouble finding enough revenues to offset its ever-increasing burn rate.