Welcome to the Sea of Echoes

 Facebook has so many ways for applications to access users - and a lot of them overlap.  I put together this handy chart to classify them based on:

• the richness of the media involved
• the amount of control facebook puts on the channel
• whether the communication is public or private

 The biggest opportunity now seems to be to increase the richness of the media available in private messages between users.  Even something as simple as some fb:photo tags might do a lot.

j

I had a really good experience yesterday in PAID.  First we watched a video on extreme honesty from This American Life.

Then we tried an exercise based on the johari window.  The basic idea is that you can classify statements about a person along two axes:

• known to self/unknown to self(blind spots)
• known to others/hidden from others(secrets)

The basic idea of the exercise was to get to know each other better by increasing awareness in both of these dimensions.

More later…

joel

Wow - oil hit $123 a barrel in trading yesterday and the slope of the trend is only accelerating.  I can only think that some Asian central governments have caught on to the Fed/Treasury’s preference for cheap dollars and have decided instead to shift their reserves to something more tangible.

Some statistics:

• Chinese central bank holdings of US Treasuries: $490M (peaking)
• Japanese central bank holdings of US Treasuries: $586M (peaking)
• Total US treasuries outstanding: $2.4trillion (increasing 15%/yr)
• Global oil production: 31billion barrels per year
• Value of global oil production today: $3.6trillion

These are comparable numbers.  If holders of treasuries were to shift 10% of their portfolios into oil stocks this year, it would account for a 7% increase in world oil demand, surely enough to swing prices.

There’s a lot of estimates that suggest that $100 oil will lead to new technologies, but these are probably years out, so the short term oil price could be much higher.

It seems safe to bet on a weak dollar, and in that context, short-term $160/barrel oil isn’t out of the question with a little panic.   I still dont get why treasuries are yielding so low.  You would think that banks would demand higher returns because of the downside risk on the dollar.