“It’s heartbreaking, but somehow successful liberal activism always jumps the shark and goes in loco parentis. Hubris sucks. Today’s tragedy is MoveOn.”

I’m glad we can finally see eye-to-eye on MoveOn.  And for those that know both Scott and I that’s saying something

My buddy Dave McClure does a great writeup around initial thinking about facebook application marketing (check it out – it’s the feed, stupid!).  I’ve been playing around with Facebook like Dave these past few weeks and trying to ramp my ultra n00b status up and think Dave’s hit a lot of key points.  One thing is that the Feed has some limitations that I’ve found recently that limit some of it’s godsend ability for app marketing within Facebook.  I’ll be posting more details soon.  Also one thing I noticed is that how early stage and unpolished most of the apps – it’s early for sure.  And that’s not a bad thing.

And now another pal – Scott Rafer is up to no good again   with Lookery according to GigaOm an ad network for facebook apps – assuming it can be expanded to all widgets – all I have to say is why didn’t I think of it first.  Great idea.

Seeing an idea born out by another company later on down the road doesn’t mean you were right at the time – it just means you weren’t crazy in the first place.  If you were right, then you would have waited until the timing was right.  As the cliché goes, timing is everything.

For instance, at then encoding.com, we came up with the idea of building a web service for people to upload their home movies to share online with their friends and family called myhomemovie.net.  We came oh so close to launching the service, but could never get the economics to work – users had no bandwidth to support video, servers were expensive, storage was even more expensive and bandwidth was even more expensive than storage.  We even looped in att worldnet to see if we could make it work.  In the end, the numbers never penciled out and we rightly scraped it.  Now just because YouTube came along 7 years later to sell itself for $1.6 billion dollars doing essentially the same thing doesn’t make our idea right since the timing wasn’t right.

I even wrote a business plan in 2003 that is strikingly similar to what the Fon guys in spain are trying to do these days.  I pulled the plug on the project feeling a consumer wifi play was too early (though I had nibbles from angels so I knew I wasn’t crazy).  Scott made the counter argument that my plan wasn’t too early but that my idea and Fon’s awere and are likely just wrong.  His point is that given the rollout of 802.11n, public wifi networks, and high speed wireless broadband from WiMax to affordable 3G effectively marginalize the market potential for a personally deployed wifi network like Fon is trying to build.  Time will tell on Fon, but sometimes you’re not too early, you’re just wrong.