Google is the starting point on the internet for many users, Xobni is not. And, in any case, it's not a fair comparison.

That said, Xobni is a kick-ass product as a plugin for outlook and can be extended to the web ala plaxo and integrated as an overlay with any other social network.

In a more generic sense, the next google will probably not be the one everyone talks about, it would be the one people start using -- anyone remembers how people started switching from altavista to google?

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Eh, so you skipped over the middleman, money.

Best part of story.

Some years ago I had a business doing techno raves and I hardly made any money from it. (lots of beers and girls though) Then I started doing boring stuff, and I realised something important:

The more interesting or cool a niche is, the more people will flock to fill it. Which results in lower income for each business owner. Just look at artists, musicians and DJ's. Lots of girls, fun and beer. But on average, not a lot of money.

On the contrary I know people that are in the furniture moving business that make insane amounts of money. Why? Because it is a shitty business and nobody wants to do it.

Basically it's about supply and demand - the more people that want to pursue a career in a given niche the less the average businessowner will make in that niche.

So you should all stop doing ultracool social network apps and start doing boring ERP systems. If you want to make money that is. ;-)

"During the trading game, a couple of children simply gave up, while others waited passively for someone to give them valuable pieces. Drew said, "I stopped trading because the same people were winning. I just gave up." In the game, the children could experience what they'd not been able to acknowledge in Legotown: When people are shut out of participation in the power structure, they are disenfranchised — and angry, discouraged, and hurt."

It reminds me of one of the most terrible sins that my mother inflicted on me when I was a child -- she taught me that things are supposed to be fair. She taught me the fairy tale that we have these things called "inalienable rights", such as freedom and justice and that kind of thing. She taught me that I was entitled to these "rights" and, implicitly, she taught me that I didn't have to do any work to earn these rights or to keep them.

She taught me, in very much the same way that the teachers taught these kids, that when there is injustice or inequity, I didn't have to do anything about it. All I had to do was whine about it and cry, and some higher power (like the teachers in this case) would come over and pat me on the head and fix it for me.

The truth is freedom and justice are not "rights". They are privileges, fought and earned by our ancestors, paid for by their tears and blood. We in the western world have grown so complacent in our corpulence that we just expect these things to be handed to us.

I would be much happier if, instead of making things fair for the "disenfranchised" kids, they had helped the kids see the advantages of their despair -- how having things stacked against them means that they have been given a chance to create a new way to win against greater odds, something the "rich" kids did not have and would never have.

The truth is the world does not owe us anything and we shouldn't expect otherwise. It is up to us to MAKE our place in the world, not sit and wait for it to be given to us.