With gasoline prices eating holes in the wallets of the world’s most vulnerable consumers – young people and single women – EnergyTechStocks.com anticipates that each of these social networking sites will be utilized in what will coalesce over time into a gigantic national (or even international) Internet-based carpooling network. Instead of reaching for the car keys, women and young people will reach first for their cell phones, blackberries or laptops to check whether someone is going where and when they need to go.
I think this is just ridiculous.
The immediate beneficiary I can see is a service like Twitter. Friends can group together into ad-hoc local networks with immediate querying capabilities. YouTube makes no frikkin sense. MySpace and Facebook are also out of the e-quation (I could not resist that pun; sue me).
The other big impact here aside from food prices and transport fees?
Printed books.
What happens when a hardcover book costs $40 to $50 because paper prices and transport costs have skyrocketed?
Sales will drop. Boy, will they drop!
This is why I constantly bang on the table for ebooks -- and especially Apple's entry into it to give it the same legitimacy Apple gave to downloaded music with the iPod.
This is why I constantly yell in a very undiplomatic way at writers to get the hell on the Net and have a real personal presence.
When most readers start buying their books via the Internet, they will begin to expect those authors to be on the Internet too!
When people attend a live play, they also expect to be able to see the performers exiting afterwards and attempt to get autographs and photos.
Writers: understand this now!
Printed books have been like movies. When a movie's finished, no one expects to see the stars in the lobby afterwards.
eBooks will be like live plays. People will expect to see you online.
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