Trader’s Narrative

Here is an interesting exercise in nostalgia. Google (GOOG) is celebrating their 10th anniversary by allowing us to rewind the hand of time and search the internet, as it appeared in their search engine back in 2001.

Click to see the results of googling for “subprime mortgage” then and now (warning this is a LARGE image):

Among the 2001 results there is only one which would ring a little warning bell: the Office of the Currency Comptroller expressing concern (I added the word concern because it was truncated in the search results).

If you want to search for other terms you can find this special edition 2001 Google search engine here. Keep in mind that Google search results are geographically targeted and I’m located in Canada so depending where you are, your results may vary slightly.

If you’ve surfed the web for any significant amount, you’ve encountered this image at least a dozen times already:

Hint: it is a major website.

I started getting invites to join social networking sites around 2000. I think the first one was from a friend who had joined Orkut. Then others followed, Hi5, myspace, friendster, facebook etc. I can’t remember the rest of them. While I politely turned each invite down, I couldn’t help but feel like a curmudgeon.

I just didn’t see the point of joining a site and then spending hours and hours each day sharing with the world what I was doing, eating, wearing, etc. or putting up pictures from parties or whatever. If I wanted to share something with friends I could just, you know, call them. Or email them. The other thing that made me think twice was the whole issue of privacy.

Anyway, here’s a guy who got sucked into the whole social networking thing big time. Apprently he is a trader working for Goldman Sachs in the UK. He spends upwards of 4 hours a day on facebook and is so gone that when he got a warning from Goldman Sachs the first thing he did was put it up on his facebook page.

“It’s a measure of how warped I’ve become that, not only am I surprisingly proud of this, but in addition, the first thing I did was to post it here, and that losing my job worries me far less than losing facebook ever could.”

Its a bit creepy that Goldman’s IT department spies on their employees. But I really wonder if this is a hoax. Goldman Sachs did not get to where it is by hiring guys like Charlie.

Via TechCrunch

For those who wanted to trade while picnicing in the park or sipping a cappucino at your favourite cafe, Toronto Hydro Telecom is offering free Wi-Fi blanketing Toronto’s downtown core. The service is free from September 6th 2006 to March 6th 2007. Afterwards you can purchase a monthly subscription for $29.

I’m glad to see such an option available but I ask myself who in their right mind would go for it when the temperature drops and the snow starts falling? I know you can use it indoors also but then what advantage does it have? Why wouldn’t you just keep your regular ISP connection?

The other concern that I have is the speed and reliability. Toronto Hydro Telecom says you can reach 7 megabits but that smacks of a theoretical. I wonder what the average user would get. Probably much, much less than that. But hey, its free so give it a try. Here are the simple instructions.

Recently, Markus Frind showed the world his income from Google Adsense. After people picked up their jaws from the floor, the congratulations started flowing in.

Everyone, however, missed that this was only possible because of the the internet’s level playing field. And that, in turn, is because of something called ‘net neutrality’ which guarantees that all data travelling on the internet is given equal priority.

Without this fundamental policy, his site would never have been able to compete with sites with deeper pockets (capable of paying for priority delivery of their data to the user). In such a world, the fact that Plenty of Fish is free would not matter since the user would be turned off by a very slow site.

If you’re confused and don’t know what I’m talking about, find out more about net neutrality by watching this short video.