For all the excitement about Facebook’s explosive growth, it somehow feels like a huge fad that could disappear or, at least, dissipate, if something cooler comes rumbling over the horizon. When parents and businesses start embracing Facebook, it’s probably the time for the new “bar” down the street to suddenly get “hot”.Based on posts by Brad Feld and Fred Wilson, here’s my list of why Facebook could go from fast-growing to so yesterday sooner than we think:

1. The evolution of its business model:[more]

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Microblogging platforms Twitter and especially Jaiku have got under my skin.  Gonna take a break from formal blogging for a bit to work out where everything fits once again.

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Dave Winer on the next phase of social networking

Everyone is going ga-ga over Facebook, but like the people who hold out on Twitter, I’m not ready to give my life to a service that views me as a college student. My relationships are adult relationships. Okay, I probably won’t even use Facebook when they offer me some realistic choices on labels for the arcs that connect me with people in my network, because what we really need is an architecture that allows anyone to add a tag to an arc, the same way we add tags to pictures on Flickr.

All these things point in one direction, esp Facebook. Closed systems are fine in the early stages of a new technology. They’re the training wheels for a new layer of users and uses. But, as we always see, the training wheels eventually come off, explosively, creating new systems that throw out the assumptions of the old. Oddly, I think this is what’s really behind the Fred Wilson thread, it has little to do with the age of the people, and has more to do with the age of the technology. (The personal computer was “invented” by a group of people, with wide ranging ages. Bill Gates was a teen, but many of the other people were adults. How old were Chuck Geschke, John Warnock and Paul Brainerd when Desktop Publishing came online? Tim Berners-Lee was in his 30s when he created the web.)

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself. How exactly it will happen is something the historians can argue about 25 years from now. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will, unless the rules of technology evolution have been repealed (and they haven’t, trust me).

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Just got the news that TouristR has gone live, following the completion of its recent private-beta phase. I’ve also learned that Jan Blanchard and Co have used one of my private beta-entries as a sample for the sneak preview.

Konigsee

By: Niall Larkin 14 days ago
Updated: 8 days ago

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Language: EnglishKonigsee, the second most popular tourist destination in Germany couldn’t be a more extreme counterpoint to the most popular destination (the concentration camp of Dachau near Munich). The Königssee is a fjord-like embedded emerald-green lake. Take a boat trip to St Bart’s church and along the way the boatsman will stop to play a tune on the trumpet that will be seconded by a perfect echo. Go hiking in the backwoods and you’ll find an very old pair seeling buttermilk and snacks for hungery hikers. Go a bit further and you can climb up the back of a waterfall for amazing views of the valley. The early morning fog disappears in sconds once the sun gets over the mountains.

They’ve also announced the  “Help TouristR build the ultimate trip planner tool and win a Mac Book” competition as detailed below.

Be Creative and Win a Mac Book

Help us to build the ultimate trip planner tool and win one of these cool Mac Books. Suggest an available domain name and five features you want to have in your trip planner. The winner will be announced on the 14th of July on TouristR.

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