StumbleUpon visitors seem to be a lot like those heading out for a pub crawl. They’ll visit a few bars, have a few drinks (posts), maybe talk with friends, and have a good time. But by the end of the night (day), several sites later, they’re stumbling around, probably with little clue as to where they are. The details of the last few bars are hazy; but you’re having a good time.

The next morning, sure, you can recall the first few sites that you visited, but anything past that – forget about it. You’re probably not even sure how you made it back home.

StumbleUpon (like Digg) seems to be great for bursts of traffic, and stats show that Stumblers do actually read posts, but Stumblers rarely stick around or come back unless they happen to stumble by on their next day of binge-surfing.

..And while you could take a couple Tylenol and drink a glass or two of water… we reccommend subscribing to our RSS feed and avoid the websurfing hangover altogether – you’ll thank us in the morning!

Facebook now resembles the proverbial high school party to which one invites a few friends and ends up hosting the entire school and then being left with the cleanup the following morning. Gone is the neo modern facade and the clean interface, hijacked instead by a throng of applications which are nothing but glorified billboards waging a battle for eyeballs. Walls now resemble teenage bedrooms plastered with posters and littered with the remnants of countless fast food excursions. Not to mention the painstaking process of weeding through invitations to add all manner of useless applications.

While I can sympathize with Facebook’s aim to create an open and accessible platform there is still something to be said for the value of editing. Even the crassest of reality shows are shaped by countless hours of editing which gives them at least some semblance of narrative. In the same way that not all hours of reality television are made equal, not all applications are made equal. Allowing all manner of sub par applications unfettered access to Facebook has just resulted in more noise and less signal. The situation is becoming eerily reminiscent of Peguin’s ill fated wiki novel, proving the old adage yet again, that too many cooks do indeed spoil the broth.

Facebook really needs to get back to it’s core, which lies in aiding people to better engage one another. It should continue to move in the direction of being a true social OS. That, however, will require the promotion of real and valuable interactions among users. After all, Facebook is in essence simply one big conversation and the value of participating in that really depends on the signal-to-noise ratio.

It appears I’m not alone in thinking this either, David, on his blog calls this phenomenon Spamturitis.

The idea that the real world concept of these “contextual silos” which prevent information from spreading very far beyond it’s original context could be transferable to the web is flawed because digital information is ubiquitous. Anything on the web can potentially be seen by anyone, anywhere at anytime, whereas in real life a night of say, alcohol fueled revelry, would only be witnessed by people present at the event and would be known to only so many people outside those that were present. Furthermore, the internet is a repository of digital memories as opposed to human memories and so not only is nothing ever forgotten, nothing is ever romanticized either, everything is always recalled in exactly the same fashion which it was recorded.

So the notion of what happens on the Facebook staying on the Facebook is really quite unrealistic. Facebook, much like the internet itself, is designed to act like a giant database that allows other applications to interact with it and make use of it’s data repository. Furthermore, to think that Facebook could contain the information within it’s domain really misunderstands the fluidity of information on the internet. The web is a medium that excels at the reproduction and propagation of information. Nothing stays in any one place for too long, it is quickly duplicated, syndicated and diffused across the breadth of the entire world wide web.

I remember during the Gomery Inquiry (or adscam) concerning Canadian federal government advertising expenditures in Quebec that there was a publication ban. However, that didn’t stop an American blog, Captains Quarters, which by virtue of being American was not subject to the ban, from broadcasting information being passed on by a mole at the inquiry. Ultimately, over a million Canadians flocked to the blog during the ban. In the good old days of highly concentrated media such a blackout would have been very effective. Today, it’s pretty much useless. Information fundamentally doesn’t obey restrictions, borders or boundaries, it is only the means of distribution which can be controlled and since no one controls the internet, information does what’s it’s naturally inclined to do, which is to spread far and wide as quickly as the medium will allow.

The future is transparent, and the blurring and blending of the public and private will only accelerate. We are seeing and will continue to see, a startling amount of personal information being made available on the internet. Google searches dredge up more information than anyone could ever have imagined, Facebook is privy to personal information right down where to where someone is and what they are doing and how they’re feeling at a specific time, Youtube makes it such that any of us could be caught on camera anytime and broadcast to the world, zoominfo crawls the internet with it’s data aggregation engine and gathers all information it can find concerning an individual into one nice neat package, while namebase maps social connections between people even going so far as to color code the density of those connections (won’t be long before Facebook does something similar?) and overhear.us proposes to provide a forum for corporate gossip, making water cooler chat at companies everywhere potentially available for all.

People and organizations will have to pay for privacy in much the same way people pay today to keep their names out of the phone book. The velocity and the distribution of information is increasing and it will take more proactive actions to preserve privacy. I can see a burgeoning privacy protection industry in the not too distant future. Everything from educational materials and seminars on how to safeguard one’s privacy, to software packages, to whole companies devoted to actively monitoring and shaping their clientele’s image on the web. With better tagging, more intelligent searches capable of making linkages between information and virtually all information available in the digital realm, nothing will be difficult to find unless someone pays for the privilege of privacy.

Welcome to the digital panopticon.

Weblo is hoping to strike it rich by staking its claim in the cyber gold rush to build and populate virtual worlds and massively multi player online games (MMOG’s). Hoping to cash in on the same trend that has turned Second Life and World of War Craft into the phenomena that they are, Weblo has created a virtual world that is essentially a carbon copy of the real world.

In Weblo, the virtual versions of states, cities, buildings, airports, celebrities and web domains can all be registered and bought. The buyers of states are crowned governors and can then turn around and sell all cities that fall under their territory and the buyers of cities can similarly sell what is in their territory. So for example, the governor of New York State has the right to sell New York City while the Mayor of New York City has he right to sell the Statue of Liberty.

Before you get too excited and start imagining a gorgeously rendered 3D affair, I’ve got to warn you that Weblo is decidedly low tech. It’s basically a series of 2D web pages that represent the various states, cities, etc. sort of like HTML Monopoly property cards. Sound a little bizarre? I thought so too but apparently it’s good enough for $2.5 million in venture capital from Richard Rosenblatt of Myspace fame. So what’s my take on it? Quite frankly the whole thing pretty much seems like a giant pyramid scheme. Basically Weblo virtualizes the whole world and then makes you pay to own it in Weblo. I think I’ll dub this the Al Capone business model, protection money anyone? I mean does it not seem a form of digital extortion to force the real owners of everything on Weblo to register or face their identity being appropriated by some random unknown party?

The Weblo model is also troubling because it is a derivative with no relationship to any of the underlying assets. Derivatives have value because they have some kind of relationship to a real assets. Changes in the value of the underlying asset affect the value of the corresponding derivative. Unlike a user created world such as Second Life where virtual property is created and therefore has intrinsic value as intellectual property, all property in Weblo is simply a poor virtual representation of something real. The only value it has is what the next person thinks it’s worth.

What is the value of owning the Weblonian version of the Empire State Building, of being the mayor of New York? The value is based purely on the speculation that there will always be someone who thinks that the virtual property has value, which is certainly not a forgone conclusion. Basically the whole think strikes me as nothing more than a glorified Wikkipedia with the structure of a pyramid scheme. Only the few who manage to snap up the best virtual properties have any shot at making money. Much a like a gold rush, once all the good claims have been staked, prospectors move elsewhere and with that Weblo implodes as the value of all virtual holdings collapses. Not to say that there is even a gold rush to speak of because as of today, out the last hundred recently closed auctions for Weblo properties, only five went to completion which is hardly indicative of a rush of any sort.

The above scenario of course assumes that Weblo can actually safeguard the franchise of those who register properties and protect their right to exclusivity, which it has thus far failed to do. As of now there are multiple listings for several properties. A cursory search turned up multiple instances of the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and Toronto’s CN Tower. If Weblo can’t even safeguard property rights within its domain contrary to its own promise, then it has a serious problem. The value of owning a virtual copy of a property is already dubious enough, when combined with the fact that one’s ownership in non-exclusive, its value is then zero because why would someone pay for something they can create for free?

One might point to the social aspect of Weblo, but despite its best efforts to bill itself as a social networking site, I’m simply not buying. A social network has to have some dynamic component to it, there must be some vector of change present that makes me want to log in on regular basis. While there would be a kind of euphoria once one acquires a Weblo property, the novelty quickly wears off. Given that the world of Weblo is a series of relatively static pages, it simply does not have the same dynamism that a virtual ecosystem like Facebook has developed. The whole concept very quickly becomes boring. One could liken it to a Monopoly marathon and we all know what happens when a Monopoly game has gone too long, someone gets bored and leaves and before you know it the game is over.

I think the key to success in building virtual worlds will be extensibility as related to what is possible in the non-virtual world. Second Life is highly extensible in that it augments what is possible in the real world. It creates possibilities and a functioning economy predicated on the creation of virtual goods and services, which are also very real in the sense that they are intellectual property. This is the source of Second Life’s competitive advantage and what makes it difficult to replicate. What prevents anyone from creating a competing web property that also mimics the real world? What is Weblo’s competitive advantage?

Eventually there will be a complete blurring between the so-called real and the virtual. To some extent this already taking place as you have product launches, lectures, events, commerce and a whole host of activities occurring in Second Life whose impact extends beyond the virtual world. Virtual worlds are really going to become a part of everyday reality and this is where Weblo completely misses the point. By attempting to be a representation of the real it can only serve as very fuzzy representation at best. Its fundamental strategic error is that aims to represent reality when it should be looking to augment reality. So is it really Monopoly with real money? Hardly, unless you count the $2.5 million in seed capital that Weblo is busy flinging around like Monopoly money.