Ugh, I feel bad for them. That is the wrong way to try to drum up interest in music. It is already free. What they need to provide is something else that hasn't already been done. Like support online communities for bands that could write the bands' lyrics and music, if those user had a subscription.

Doing nothing is not an option. I don't even know why that was mentioned. You can't sit on money like that. However, they probably will let the dust settle for a few weeks or few months before spending their cash. At least I hope so.

They aren't going to pull a Microsoft and purchase a search company. Google is not as much of a threat really. Search isn't Facebook's expertise and it isn't their market. They would be happy letting Google continue to drive people around for answers on the web, while Facebook will continue to entertain and be friendship/family/work/etc. communication/community focused.

So what should they do with it? Focus on communication, community/community needs, and gaming. They need to ensure that they keep the attention of their existing community.

As for what to do with the cash:

1. Hire some awesome user experience/interface people. And those people need to work on timeline/profile view. The only reason people aren't complaining more about it is that FB like Google does not really provide a customer support experience that makes you feel like they actually care about your opinion individually. If you've ever submitted a bug to FB, you know what I mean. As for the interface, alternating left and right updates on the timeline makes it tougher to read and find things. And the whole feed thing on the right needs to go away. There should be a single feed page and a single profile page with controls to change filtering on posts. That is so obvious and ubiquitous elsewhere, so failing to provide a good interface for status updates when that is basically the point is ridiculous.

2. Hire some better folks to lead up API development. It is a huge mess right now. Too many APIs that don't all do the same thing, and breaking Javascript API with changes. Not cool.

3. For M&A, focus on bringing resources onboard for community, ratings and reviews, e-commerce focus. They could easily compete with Amazon and/or eBay within the existing social/community framework and it is a better idea for business than simply referrals, advertising, and selling imaginary sheep for people's imaginary farms.

I agree, but the author attempted to work with Atari to license Battlezone. Also, the game has been out for a while without complaint from Atari. These both seem to make Atari seem less of a victim.

As an aside, Atari is really Infogrames. The real Atari is no more.

This article makes some great points, but the internet itself is not just a composition of the services on the net or the products that use the net. The net itself is very much NOT owned by its users. With China restricting what its population can see and hear, and U.S. threatening to do the same with SOPA, users should realize that the internet as it exists today needs work. Amateur radio is a much better model. That put the power to communicate almost solely into the hands of its users. For the net to get like that, people need to be less focused on new SAAS apps in startups and more focused on technologies that make us free to communicate.

Agreed with much of this!

However I disagree with "that's the nature of software engineering. You never stop learning and evolving."

The reason: burnout. My guess is that at least 10% of developers begin to lose enthusiasm for coding after a few years and then at some point either change jobs, become managers, or just have very little motivation to learn having seen the futility of it all. They may be forced to continue to learn, but may do so at a slow pace.

Why? You write code and after years or less, it can be thrown away or unused without much of a thought. You see that many of those driving projects really don't have some sort of higher purpose, and other than some perceived business need, must of it is just "wouldn't it be nice".

I feel that it is sick for a person to continue blindly learning new technology just for the sake of it. You need to have a reason. Jobs was not my favorite person in the world, but one thing he did right was to believe in what he was doing and why he was doing it. Without this, any evolution is worthless.

Does Twitter have a workable business model yet? If it does, I've not seen it.

By putting people's names and email addresses in his post, he's going to spur people to write more to him. Not a good idea. But like'd the pretty graphs and opinion part.

"In Citibank’s case, writing messages in that second-person conversational style forced the engineers to put themselves in the mind-set of real humans. You can’t write an 'I' statement for your ATM without also considering the logic, the terminology and the clarity of those messages. Someone writing in that frame of mind would never come up with 'The activation server determined that the specified product key has exceeded its activation count.'"

1. 'I' is first-person style, not second-person.

2. Citi having output in first-person is not worthy of this much praise. It wasn't that difficult.

3. The author is comparing apples to oranges. Error messages have a different intent than other normal user communication. The goal in an error message is to get the necessary info to the support person.

Finally, Siri is not impressive because of the way it talks, and it is only moderately impressive because it does an ok job of voice recognition- not even a great job- and it does this using an external service, which is much, much less impressive than it would have been if it were to be part of iOS without requiring an external service. But, voice recognition in devices is a positive trend, even if not novel, so hats off to Siri.