Was on a train to D.C. reading Michael Hirschorn's brilliant article in Atlantic on whether Facebook will crest, crumble, or master the social nets, then jumped over to science mag Seed and saw a sweet ad for slooh.com. Whoa. Slooh lets you really, truly control a remote deep-sky telescope in Africa by chatting with scientists, submitting requests to move the scope, and then watch images of outer space load in real time. They're building a social-media community of people in homes, trying to outsearch and outwit astrophysicists at their own game.
This means more than the fact you could get a comet named after you. Slooh reinforces Hirschorn's point that with the web now so chaotic, smaller walled gardens such as Facebook are building demand by allowing fewer people into your personal online community and setting up constraints for, ahem, crass advertisers that push too hard. Facebook doubled its visitors to 26 million recently, and shows remarkable reluctance about taking ads. We tried recently to reach media reps at Facebook and it took 10 days to get a response. MySpace, by contrast, is the wild west of advertising (and friends that may be marketers), and it seems to be wobbling.
It's fascinating to watch the reverse trend of the web getting less open, as consumers retrench and try to find a little social relevance. Advertising works online, but if it's too pushy or not relevant, we may drive consumers into outer space.
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