It’s hard to believe, but eBay has been around for almost 15 years now. Granted, most people didn’t know about eBay until it went public in 1998, and it didn’t really become a household name until a few years ago. There’s no denying that eBay has been popular successful; it’s been called the savior of direct sales, the first major consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace, and even the future of business as we know it.
But if eBay’s so great, why is it struggling to convince everyone it’s still relevant?
I ran across an article in Business Week last month that’s got me thinking that eBay is not only starting to become irrelevant, but that it’s a sign of the changes in the way people are using the Internet. It’s bad news for eBay, honestly, because if I’m correct, there’s really no way out for them. They’re going to have to let their core business shrink and focus on other business units if they want to survive. According to the article, eBay has already realized that its side businesses, like Skype and Paypal, have the potential to be profitable on their own.
But chances are good those businesses are going to go down with the lumbering dinosaur that has become eBay unless changes happen, and fast.
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I’m a devoted fan of LOST, and have been since the first season. A lot of my friends think I’m nuts to have stuck with the show so long, and one of them even asked me the other day, “what’s it going to take for those people to just get rescued?”
I was taken aback by the question — do I really want to explain that the latest season is about those who were rescued trying to get back to the island? — but it led me to think about why this show continues to be so compelling to so many people despite the many twists and turns it’s taken into the realm of science fiction. And then suddenly, the answer hit me.
LOST is religion.
Don’t misunderstand me here — I’m not saying the show is a religion. I’m saying that it’s a metaphor, a thorough look at the ideas of mysticism and the supernatural, but through a lens that doesn’t require a Bible, a priest, or even a church.
I’m going to talk about things that may be spoilers if you haven’t been keeping up with the show, so if you want to continue to be surprised, don’t read the rest of this article until you’ve got yourself caught up. (But since you can watch the entire run for free on ABC.com, why not get started now?)
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I don’t often write about the things I’ve actually done — I tend to get bored talking about myself — but I wanted to write up a brief piece reflecting on the arcade auction I visited earlier in the month.
As a kid, I was always drawn to video arcades, and I have fond memories of standing in Aladdin’s Castle in the mall, armed with a plastic baggie full of tokens and trying out as many games as possible until my money ran out. Another place that got quite a bit of my money was the arcade just outside the B/X on the military base where we lived — a great place to hang out while my mom was shopping for boring stuff, like clothes and household supplies. These were the days when arcade machines were everywhere, when Chuck-E-Cheese and Showbiz Pizza ruled supreme, when game magazines actually covered arcade games in their regular coverage. After all, arcade machines were a much better value proposition than the home systems — they had better graphics, more satisfying games and custom-built controls. Most only cost a quarter or two to play, and they didn’t tie up your family’s lone television set. I suspect, in the long run, I spent about as much on arcade gaming as I would have spent on a Nintendo Entertainment System with a small library of games. But whereas my Nintendo would have grown outdated and would be worth very little to me today, the memories of hanging around arcades discovering new games with my friends and my brothers are still with me.
As it happens, I live about three blocks from a fairgrounds where one of the largest arcade auctions in the Midwest is held. It happens every quarter (whether or not that’s intentional, it’s hilarious), and it involves people carting in retired arcade machines, pinball machines, air hockey tables and other amusement machines and putting them up for auction.
My wife would murder me if I brought one of these things home, so I have to settle for the next-best thing: the precious hours when they turn on all the machines and let people play them.
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Yesterday, I mentioned that I’m taking a break from Internet “chatter” by avoiding commenting on large forums and ignoring my Facebook account entirely. But don’t think this is the first time I’ve waged a personal war against wasting time with Internet “chatter”. Last year, I decided to stop using Internet chat services like AIM, Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger because I realized I was wasting far too much time instant messaging people. And I’ve been avoiding Twitter like crazy, because, in my mind, it represents the absolute worst things that social networking has to offer.
Allow me to explain… though it will take me more than 140 characters, I’m afraid.
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Maybe I’m getting cranky in my old age, but I’ve been realizing lately that I waste a lot of time on the Internet engaging in “chatter”… like posting comments on peoples’ facebook updates, or writing responses to news posts on Fark.com, or commenting on message boards pertaining to skepticism.
Here’s the problem I’m having — it’s all a colossal waste of time, and it’s causing me to form a lot of shallow relationships that don’t matter instead of pursuing real ones that do. It’s also taking up a large amount of my free time that could be spent doing things I actually want to do, like contributing to my blog here, working on one of my many writing projects, or developing my relationships with others.
So, I’ve decided that I’m going to take some time off from commenting on forums and playing around on social networks and attempt to gain some sense of perspective. Even though a lot of the stuff I publish on this blog is rather trivial and unimportant, I’ve decided it’s not chatter, because its my primary purpose in posting is to keep myself writing so my skills can stay sharp. I suppose writing in a private journal would have then same effect, but I benefit from believing that people might actually learn something from whatever I say.
I also will allow myself to comment on a forum if a) the content is original and b) I am interacting with the author in a manner that is exchanging ideas, not chatter.
While I realize that this might seem preachy, it’s not intended to be; putting this down in writing is meant to keep me accountable.
Now if I could only find a way to get so fired up about the massive amounts of time I waste on online video…
Want to see a great video game get ruined? Watch its transition from your game console to the silver screen. Whether you’re talking about something recently released (Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li), something released in the last few years (Doom, Resident Evil, anything by Uwe Boll) or something released back in the days when arcade fighters and Nintendo consoles reigned supreme (Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat), it’s clear that Hollywood still has yet to figure out how to make a video game movie work. And even Japan, with its video game-based anime films like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, Tekken and Street Fighter II: The Movie, has not been able to create films that are as compelling as the source material.
I’ve seen a lot of articles that have talked about how badly video game movies have failed, but I haven’t seen any articles on why they’ve failed. Certainly, it seems to be common knowledge that these films are generally rushed through production with poor choices made when it comes to the screenwriters and directors, but there’s an even more basic reason that games don’t work as films. Simply put, it’s all about the experience… but my, how that experience plays a role in the shaping of the story.
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I graduated from high school around 11 years ago. If you’d asked me then what I was going to be by the time I turned 30, I would have told you, with the most certain of expressions, that I would be a journalist.
It’s funny how the events that occurred over the intervening decade radically altered my course. In some ways, it was a good thing — I never dreamed I’d get to write comic books, or manage a video game store, or work towards a master’s degree in marketing research. I avoided getting into a job market where paying gigs are getting increasingly rare. I avoided finding myself frustrated at the rise of blogging and Twitter. And, best of all, I was able to keep writing as a hobby rather than a full-time profession, which meant I was able to enjoy my time spent getting better at the craft.
But every now and then, I look over at the field of journalism and wonder what it’d be like if I’d stuck with it. And I also think about all of the things I learned about journalism that made me lose my passion for the occupation. Because, you see, even in 1999, when I took my first college-level journalism class, I could see the hand writing on the wall, and I knew things were going to change radically in my lifetime. And while I had no specific insight into how things would change, I knew that the Internet was going to be the death of the 20th century institution journalism had become.
And, quite honestly, I felt it was a good thing. But my reasoning why might surprise you.
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[Technology Tuesday] | SeanJJordan | 
April 23, 2009 10:42 pm | 
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