3. I will make my status updates more interesting

Glenn is tired.
Glenn is excited for the weekend!
Glenn is @ work.

Who gives a shit?

Lie to me.

Tell me you’re frolicking in a forest with leprechauns and magicians, or you just came back from capping the asses of several thug teenagers loitering outside of a Starbucks.  I don’t care.  Just don’t bore us with reality. Nobody needs that.

WASHINGTON—Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

And therein lies the problem with these Facebook groups. On the one hand, they offer hospitable environments for hysteria to flourish, where high emotions are ramped up with multiple exclamation marks. On the other, campaigns of a more sober-minded bent become pathetically diminished when reduced to a Facebook group, not least because they're not so much preaching to the choir as preaching to the evangelicals. "Support gay marriage!!!" All those years of fighting homophobia, when all we needed was an over-punctuated Facebook group. Harvey Milk, why didn't you think of that?

According to The New York Times, the social network will incorporate location in two ways: (1) its own features for sharing location and (2) APIs to let other apps – presumably the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla – offer location services to Facebook users.

As with most families, ours occasionally has bumps. Marriages show cracks, and siblings fight, just like any other unit. When one couple was rumored to be talking of splitting, it became even more official when the in-law unfriended all of the other's siblings and relatives, making a clean break. When friend requests came from the crazy aunt who had ridiculous political leanings, it was declined. And people internally squabble about why one sibling's photos get a ton of comments, but another's don't.

Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he’s an investor in the Business Insider) are either. “”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

But people pay for apps. Wouldn’t he pay for a beautiful touchscreen version of a magazine? Maybe, if it were something genuinely new that blew him away. It would have to be more than an article with video and graphics though. (I agree, otherwise it’s no better than a CD-ROM).

Oh, and he points out, that the iPad will have a “fantastic browser.” No matter how many iPads the Apple sells, the Web will always be the bigger market. “There are 2 billion people on the Web,” he says. “The iPad will be a huge success if it sells 5 million units.”

Despite trying time and again, Andreessen’s observation is that media companies have no aptitude for technology, nor do they really understand what technology companies do. The one thing technology companies do really well is deal with constant disruption. “Microsoft is going through this right now,” he points out, “Ballmer is not complaining about it.” He’s tackling it head on. So did Intel when Andy Grove gutted it to shift from memory chips to microprocessors. So does every technology company CEO. It is ingrained in the industry Andreessen comes from, so it is just obvious to him: “You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.” Media companies need to learn that lesson fast. To the extent that their products are now delivered and consumed as digital bits, they too are becoming technology companies.

Beyond the iPad, he believes that all the talk once again from big media companies about erecting paywalls or somehow charging for news, articles and video online is shortsighted at best. He comes back to the simple fact that the open Web is where the users are. Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, “We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.” Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.” You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.

Nina Paley alerts us to a neat writeup (with illustrations) that she did, discussing the concept of originality, and why it's so often misconstrued. First, things that many people think are "original" usually aren't very original at all. They tend to be derivative in some way or another -- a point that we've made here many times. And yet, many people seem to think that there's some sort of objective standard for originality, and that something that involves a direct copy of something else as part of the process can't count as original (though, they conveniently ignore it when "the greats" like Mozart or Shakespeare did a direct cut-and-paste type of copying in their own works).

Paley then goes on to make a second point: which is that the traditional gatekeepers of culture, for all their talk of the importance of originality (whenever they talk down any kind of copying) are actually more likely to stomp on anything truly original, because there is no "proven market" for it. A movie has to fit a certain formula. A hit pop song must meet a series of pre-programmed conditions. No originality allowed.