Week In Review 4/26/2009

Economically things were still mixed: signs of a home sale revival were hinted at – while other places saw homes being razed.  Your humble blogger simple states DO NOT BUY A HOME RIGHT NOW and suggests you wait.  Also, there's a useful map of job losses we found.

In social media, the big news was the changes at MySpace: Co-Founder Chris DeWolfe is out.  This may sound traumatic, but MySpace has a shot at getting out of its slump and its not going to go away.  Facebook is also moving, with a potential ad network and one of its big app builders came out of Stealth mode.  I'd take DeWolfe's as an opening salvo in a new round . . . and of course this could lead to opportunites at these and other social networking companies.

If there was rumbling in the Social Media area it was a complete storm on all fronts in gaming – including the news game funding may be drying up (career thought – how much of this cash is going to social media?). There was good news:  Wii had its video service channel, EA's online sports is doing very well, and Sega's doing some strategic rethinking.  Meanwhile the PSP is looking worse all the time.  No pattern per se this week, just lots and lots of stuff in gaming.

In video our big news was "what's up with Joost": is it shopping itself to Time-Warner?  Or is it rallying for battle?  I wouldn't go sending a resume there, but I don't think they're gone – in fact whoever buys them may have plans.  We have seen video is NOT going away as a major area of interest – PBS is getting in on it.

We also saw a Google Android Notebook hit the market from China.  I'm sure this is seen as a way to be more independent of American products, we'll keep an eye on this one.  Android, if you haven't seen us say it the past few hundred times, is something to know about in any tech career – even if you don't code.

Finally Geocities, a piece of internet history, is going away.

And a roudup of our advice and analysis:

- Steve