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My 2 cents on the post: "Facebook IPO Post Mortem - Killer - but not for the reasons you think!"

Context: Facebook IPO Post Mortem – Killer – but not for the reasons you think ! I won't speculate at the reasons for Facebook's low IPO, I just wanted to add some positivism to reason number 4 stated in the blog post; the fact that more users are going mobile.

Yes I believe it is a fact, but I also believe that screen real estate will stay king for a while. Some environment settings require screen real-estate, e.g. at your office. Its difficult for me to imagine that in the near future you would do all your work on a small screen. Research shows that smaller screens lead to low productivity and conversely bigger screens to more productivity -> Productivity and Screen Size.

What can be worrisome are new interfaces that promise the same productivity gain as bigger screens but aren't screens at all. Think in this case of interfaces that uses your brain, haptic (pressure) feedback and other inputs that puts less strain on your visual cortex thereby relieving you of the need to focus with your eyes. Nevertheless, websites have the property that they are text and image based products and so unless this property changes, it will be difficult to come up with new technology that replaces reading and seeing images for users, something that we do so naturally. If man succeeds in changing this and adopting new ways to interface with tech that is more effective than reading, then still there is the option of changing the ad-based business model.

In any case, to earn the last 1 cent, I think the fact that everything is going mobile is positive. It will change the way we design websites, not only adapting them to cope better with different devices and screens, but also into making them more effective at providing us information because of the increasing pressure of a generation of users that are more impatient than the previous generation, and this is partly due to the fast on/off information access that we get from using mobile devices. In addition, it will challenge the current ad-based business model that came from (at least I think it did) from traditional print-based media.

Two cents added into the blog communal pot.

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