Great Article on the Silicone Valley

[Rawr]

···How to Get a Million People to Share Pictures of Themselves
YC has turned out 208 companies since it started four years ago. Like I said, they've got an incredible track record of success, and they've gained a lot of power here. In fact, a few days after I leave, Silicon Valley will be swept by the news of a kind of collusion against YC—what will become known on practically every business-journalism outlet as "Angelgate." A lunch will be held at some place called Bin 38. At this lunch will be Silicon Valley's most influential superangels. (That's a real title you can have, but remember, we're talking about a place where people call themselves—literally have printed on their business cards—"Resident Ninja.") According to some credible leaks, part of the lunch dealt with how to stem the growing power of YC. That's how good these people are at picking their entrepreneurs and honing their ideas. The other part of the discussion—and some attendees have denied this—was reportedly about how to do some old-fashioned monopolistic price-fixing.


Still, YC's success is a particular Silicon Valley kind of success. The most impressive YC companies aren't necessarily household names: Dropbox, Scribd, Bump, Posterous, Reddit, Airbnb. But YC is essentially taking educated bets about what the next Facebook, Twitter, Mint.com are, and these companies are handicapped pretty well for that. One of YC's big successes in the past year is a company called DailyBooth. It's like Twitter—it's a platform for communication, you can "follow" people, and people can "follow" you—but instead of typing 140 characters, you just take pictures of yourself. Here I am in my room in my pajamas. Here I am at Starbucks. Here I am in my new sweater. Here I am in my room again in my pajamas. (It seems like, as often as not, a DailyBooth picture is of someone in his bedroom in pajamas.) That's the whole thing. There's no pretext that you have information you need to get across or a really good joke. It's a thingy that, you might argue, reduces the psychological physics of the social layer to its simplest equation: I'm alive right now; I'm a person; look at me.


A more pessimistic way to look at it is that we're slave labor, getting lured by our desire to show off what we buy (Swipely) or our witty repartee (Twitter), by our need for affirmation (all of the above), or by our habit of looking at pictures of girls from high school all day instead of doing work (FB), and we end up not only driving traffic to these sites but filtering information so that FB and Twitter and Swipely can capitalize on it. They would say they're just trying to make it easier for us to find movies we like. That's probably true, too.




Read More The Viral Me: Devin Friedman Investigates the New World of Social Networking: Big Issues: GQ

 

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