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Is Twitter in Trouble? – By Jeff Stibel

February 13, 2014 By Lennon Cole

Last week, Twitter’s stock took a big tumble after it released its first quarterly earnings report. The report showed that revenue is up (and better than expected), but user growth is slowing and engagement is down. Declining user growth is not an issue in itself, and actually can be a great thing for a network (in fact, I wrote a whole book on this topic). Lack of engagement, on the other hand, is something different.

Read the whole article where it originally appeared.

Image Credit:Matt Hamm, Flickr

The Future of Facebook and the Internet | Interview with Jeff Stibel

January 27, 2014 By Lennon Cole

Breakpoint author Jeff Stibel speaks with Rick Van Cise of KOMO radio about the how the world’s largest social network, Facebook, can take proactive measures to reach equilibrium after its breakpoint instead of following the likes of Friendster and Myspace into obscurity.

Furthermore, he notes that though the internet is not going anywhere, how we access and use it will. Our relationship with the internet has already begun to change, thanks largely to the popularity of apps, and will only continue to as technology progresses.

For reference, How Facebook Can Avoid a Slow, Painful Death is the Wired article mentioned during the interview.

Why Does Growth Stagnate for Companies? For One Thing, It’s Natural

June 27, 2013 By Divya Parameshwaran

There are countless examples of companies whose life cycles can be represented by the adjoining graph. There is the period of rapid growth, after which the company hits a peak, then settles into a plateau or state of equilibrium. At this point, shareholders start to get worried, share prices go down, and everyone begins to speculate about the future of the company.

The following article explains why this process is natural, and almost essential for a long life cycle of any company. These periodic slowdowns are inevitable, though management can and should strive to make decisions that slow down the decline and reverse it quickly. In order to make these decisions, it is crucial to understand the forces responsible for slowing down these seemingly unstoppable companies.

Read more in this article by Ron Ashkenas: Why Successful Companies Stop Growing

How vulnerable is the internet? Do we really need a plan B?

June 6, 2013 By Divya Parameshwaran

Nobody really knows what the Internet is right now because it is different than what it was an hour ago. Its constantly changing and constantly re-configuring. The problem with that is that the Internet has expanded far beyond what it was originally meant to be in a very short span. What would the consequence of a break down be? Do we have an effective plan B to tackle this when it happens?

It is only a matter of time when the current system collapses. The internet’s vulnerability is a natural consequence of the level of dependency that the world has on it for its operation. The following TED talk features Danny Hillis talking about this, the need for an alternative system, and more.