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a public case began to be built that we really were experiencing a housing bubble. By 2006 a variety of narratives, taken together, appear to have produced a different mind-set for many people — creating a tipping point that stopped the growth in demand for homes in its tracks.
THE question now is whether a strong case has been built for a new bull market since the home-price turning point in May 2009. Though there is no way to be precise, I don’t believe it has.
—Robert Shiller, via NYT Economic View
When we launched, Twitter was incomplete, so developers rushed to fill those holes, but eventually we’re going to have to build a lot of features in because they should be there. We want to set those expectations.
—Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive: via NYT. Fred Wilson called this, “the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s ” for Apple.
I think the time for filling the holes in the Twitter service has come and gone. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.
—Fred Wilson, asking what is the equivalent to superwall and social gaming on Facebook for Twitter: via AVC. He enumerates five categories: social gaming – really?; verticals – stocktwits, but perhaps tlists; enterprise – cotweet, hootsuite, but perhaps just another hole for twitter to sell applications for managing multiple accounts to enterprises; discovery – hunch, listorious, tweetmeme, cadmus, wefollow, mrtweet, and any number of assorted efforts toward serendipity; analytics – Wilson intimates that the enterprise hole will likely be filled when he alludes to Twitter delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users, but he suggests that there might be enough room left over for bit.ly, Radian6, Hubspot, scout labs – perhaps room for an acquisition.
This whole thing has really turned the developer ecosystem upside down…I believe this is a great opening for Twitter’s competitors to woo developers over to other platforms such as Facebook. I’ve had conversations with numerous other companies and developers and the overriding theme in all of those was the need to ‘distance ourselves from Twitter.’
—Paul McDonald, the developer of UberTwitter, relating “quite a shock”: via WSJ
To be clear, we are going to work hard to improve our product, add new functionality, make acquisitions when it’s in the best interest of users and the whole ecosystem at large. Each one of those things has the potential to upset a company or developer that may have been building in that space and they then have to look for new ways to create value for users.
—Ryan Sarver, head of platform, Twitter: via Google Groups, 11 April 2010
Go back and read what people were saying in 1982 or 1975. Nobody was saying, ‘Deep recession, big recovery.’ It is quite normal to expect an abnormally weak recovery. It is also normal for that expectation to be wrong.
—Robert Barbera, the chief economist of ITG: via Floyd Norris, NYT
The notion that intellectual property rights should never expire, and works never enter the public domain — this is the truly fanatical and unconstitutional position
—Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School: via NYT, Tyranny of Copyright, 2004
We are invoking ideas that should be central to the American tradition, such as that a free society is richer than a control society. But in the cultural sphere, big media wants to build a new Soviet empire where you need permission from the central party to do anything.
—Laurence Lessig, Stanford at the time, now Harvard: via NYT, Tyranny of Copyright, 2004
I don’t think we’re going to have the credit-fueled spending we had in the past. A lot of consumers are deleveraging. They see excess borrowing as threatening.
—Gary Thayer, chief macro strategist at Wells Fargo Advisors, on the decline of $11.5b in consumer credit in February, which followed a revised $10.6b gain in January. If January’s revised figure could be two times as large as originally thought, could February’s ultimately show a similar distortion? via Bloomberg
the key is fair and reasonable compensation for content providers and moving to a permission-based economy. Newspapers don’t have an audience problem, they have a revenue problem. Legislation should be designed to address how we can adjust laws in an era where journalism needs more funding. There’s no silver bullet to solve the revenue problems, but it can make a material incremental contribution.
—Bruce Sanford: via FTC Workshop on 3/10/2010
It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriages or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches ….What the company is trying to do is to prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from travelling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich . . . . And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class passengers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.
—Jules Dupuit, On Toll and Transport. He would go on to say, observing the importance of sorting and price discrimination, “Travelers cannot be classed like merchandise by their appearance: they have to be allowed to sort themselves.”
A little Skill in Criticism would inform us, that Shadows and Realities ought not to be mix’d together in the same Piece; and that Scenes, which are designed as Representations of Nature, should be filled with Resemblances, and not with the Things themselves.
—The Spectator, No. 5
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