My first spreadsheet was Visicalc on an HP 85 that was running CPM and used a cassette tape drive. That machine really made the difference, because before that era we had programmable calculators (HP's of course) and had to labor away inputting our models and calcs. That all changed with the spreadsheet. Now you can do optimizations and pivot tables and fancy statistical analysis with those rows and columns. We have certainly come far!

I humbly would say you don't quite have it correctly with your trends/expectations here. Let's take them point-by-point: 1. It isn't ownership, but a sense of belonging to some community, however ill defined it may be. It isn't about consumption or access, but about being part of something. And whether that is a collection of Tweets, Facebook wall posts, or your own email listserv, it almost doesn't matter. 2. Dead daily deals. You got that right. I try to keep my inbox deal-free. It isn't easy. Even our local newspaper tries to send 'em to me. I do think there will be a post-holiday backlash: we won't go shopping for anything, at all, online or in person. We have reached saturation with stuff. 3. It is all about the iPad. Nothing else matters or measures up. Yeah, it is over-priced. 4. There are no social networks outside of Facebook that matter. Yeah, maybe LinkedIn, but it is really, really hard to get anyone to pay attention to your Group. See Point #1. I don't want another piece of software or Web service to tell me where to belong. I agree you have to leverage the in-Facebook experience. But that just means it is still in the driver's seat. 5. Editorial design is irrelevant. It is all Google and news feeds. You are only as good as your organic search stats. Everything else is happenstance and eye candy. Glad to be part of the SAY family. Happy holidays. David Strom, ReadWriteWeb