I read this.

Which lead me to this series of tweets:

• "Has the world become so blind to the basics of commerce that it needs reminding of such a basic tenet?" Yes! http://is.gd/iW7t
• I can hear it now. "No, Rob teh twitterz is worth $500 million!" "Rob, you so crazy! Facebook is worth Billions!"
• No and no. I went through this already in the late 90s, early 00s. Businesses need to make money. PERIOD. Everything else is a hobby.
• Twitter? A hobby.

I then read this quote in the latest issue of The Economist:

In one sense this turned out to be correct. YouTube went on to dominate web video as measured by the number of videos that users watch (see chart). Its social and even political importance are hard to overstate. From “Obama Girl” videos and tutorials about tying shoelaces or folding origami to Yoga and aerobics instruction, YouTube has changed lives. But there was a catch. Advertisers, by and large, will not touch user-generated content with a barge pole. Its quality is variable, to say the least; its content occasionally off-putting. No brand wants to be near it. And much of it is illegal—pirated from large media companies and uploaded by fans. Media giants, led by Viacom, were suing. So there was a threat of costs and no promise of revenues. YouTube is undoubtedly a phenomenon, but it is not a business.

And I felt like my day was complete.

Now here's the part where I add something more than what's available in 140 characters. Like The Economist speaking of YouTube, I'm happy to say that sites like Twitter and Facebook are phenomena. Anyone that follows me knows I spend enough time using the Twitter service to gather that I enjoy it and see something of value there. Still, in this economic climate, it kind of freaks me out to see people swallowing the valuations being tossed about for these companies and pointing to them as out-and-out successes. It really reminds me of the hype-fueled blinders that people had on in the late 90s. I hear softball terms like "conversation" and "social graph" tossed around in place of "revenue" and (more importantly) "profit" and all of a sudden my mind is drifting back to 'eyeballs" and "mindshare" and then onto the Lycoses, Pets.coms and Geocities of the world.

Hopefully this round will have a more successful end, but I can't say I'm confident it will. I guess I'm especially sensitive since I lived through the dot-com bubble on the front lines and really don't want to relive anything like that in the Internet sector, ever again.

I learned first-hand that it takes a lot more than the ability to raise capital to make a successful company* and saw time and time again that traffic and engagement alone are nothing more than an expense.** So it really bothers me when I see people making the same arguments 10 years later like there was nothing to gain from the painful missteps of the past.

*Trust me on that as my longest startup experience was with a company funded with a total of $140 million. All I've got left from that experience is some great memories, a network of folks I still keep in touch with and an Aeron chair. It's a great chair.

**Facebook knows this first-hand- they had to borrow $100 million for servers last year.