This mostly demonstrates that Twitter is a very poor medium for complicated conversations. I'm sure the conversation would have gone very differently if they had used, say, IRC.
Twitter seems to make it astonishingly easy to have a dialogue of deaf people, where each side fails to hear what the other side is saying. Throw in the fact that both sides are, to some extent, posturing to their audiences, and you have a recipe for a non-conversation.
I find it a typical conversation between someone healthily skeptical of capitalism and someone unwilling to really consider its downsides. Twitter, irc or posturing have nothing to do with it. I fully understand what DHH is trying to make clear to McClure, while the latter is channeling the naive view that has become American gospel, where downsides are continuously swept aside with a 'meh, worksforme'.
I totally get downside, but it's somewhat limited if FB is making $500m on $2b in 2010, and 100%+ growth in ann revenue, along with likely biz model improvements & increase in per-user economics.
reasonable floor is prob $20-30B, whereas upside could be $100-250b if growth & profits hold up.
downside at .5x vs upside at 2-5x seems like a reasonable bet to me.
DHH seems to ignore most of these metrics, except for saying that 100 P/E ratio is high. however that doesn't really acknowledge growth or biz model changes that will bring down P/E ratio over next few years.
to say it's high is perhaps reasonable. but to ignore that they are dominant, that multiple market participants have set a value (not just GS), and finally to call Rushkoff's recent article about Facebook "fading" a "thoughtful"... all of these strike me as more biased than not.
of course my opinions are biased as well -- I've worked with Facebook running their incubator program in 2009, and I used to work for Founders Fund, one of their early investors.
anyway I thought it was fun back & forth, given the limitations of the medium.
Twitter seems to make it astonishingly easy to have a dialogue of deaf people, where each side fails to hear what the other side is saying. Throw in the fact that both sides are, to some extent, posturing to their audiences, and you have a recipe for a non-conversation.