The Inimitable Tiff

Not many folks are trying these days. Hence, the crisis in the Internet industry, which isn’t just a credit crisis or a cash-crunch but a crisis of meaning. In social media’s hall of mirrors, we’ve lost our way not because we aren’t 100% focused on profits, but because we aren’t always solving important problems, because we aren’t murdering to create — the Internet has just begun its transformation of the real world, and we see only through a tiny pinhole the rich pageant ahead — but many entrepreneurs are flipping search-optimized middle-man sites or tweaking Twitter widgets. Startups are now desperately casting about for a revenue model when people will always pay through the nose for meaning.