Hey Gio

I realized that I am not a part of Generation Y or sometimes called the Millennials. Instead I am a Gen X-er, those who were born between 1965-1979. I was only a month and a half away from the Gen Y cut but oh well.  I basically distributed a press release last week announcing the influence and power of the Millennials in this year’s presidential election. I wrote the comprehensive, yet simple to read Student’s Guide to Voting with the knowledge that I was a part of the Millennials.

I hope college kids will find the free guide useful as it was written with sincerity.

I came across this BusinessWeek article on the “missteps” of facebook and how they got a bit too ahead of themselves. I’ve been waiting for a long time for such article to be published. The article was so-so but I enjoyed the reader’s comments. Zuck’s arrogance and aloofness doesn’t bother me (what can you expect from a 23 year old paper billionaire) but the cockiness and intent of revolutionizing the advertising world with their Beacon project was a bit far off. AND, I quote from the article “The Harvard dropout has created one of the fastest-growing and arguably most innovative Internet companies since Google.”

WHAT???

How can an over-hyped, viral marketed, annoying social Rolodex be innovative and revolutionary? That statement puts Facebook behind Wordpress and the wonderful world of blogging, RSS, Wikipedia, Digg, Flickr and Youtube - Sites that actually bring value to the web!

The developer’s platform was a neat idea, I’ll give them that. But how can the small guy compete against VC backed companies like RockYou ($10M investment) and Slide? Do these 3rd party companies even have a business model?

Back to facebook - I guess people enjoy getting “poked”, graffiti on their walls and re-connecting with long lost friends they weren’t even that close with. Heck, even I have an account I visit once a month. I wish for the hype to deflate and have them focus on building a real business. Best of luck to them.

A friend asked for my advice on this matter not long ago. Well, this isn’t new to me as it happened twice already in the last year. With the popularity of RSS, blogs and growing number of plagiarists, it is almost expected to happen. The good news is that there are many ways to handle this matter.

1. Look up their whois data and send them an email requesting they remove your content. Be nice but remind them that if they don’t remove your content within 48hours you will report them to their ISP.
2. If their phone number is included in the whois data, give them a ring. This is what I usually do.
3. If you get no response, simply email the Google and report the duplicate content. There’s nothing worse than getting removed from the index.

Here’s the link - http://www.google.com/dmca.html