Microsoft’s Live.com just relaunched as a social network. It was very easy, all they had to do was copy Friendfeed badly.

Commenter Edwin Khodabakchian summed it up when he wrote: Interesting move. At least they are trying.

But Live.com’s reinvention has given me a great idea! What if I took my favourite animal – the goat – and relaunched them as a social network. After all, if Microsoft can do it with it’s dead fish Live.com then curious, rectangular-pupiled goats are a shoe-in.

From farming goats I learned that they are natural aggregators. They collect everything they see with their mouths, with no discrimination. On the other hand, for four years Live.com has aggregated nothing. So this feature would be much easier to implement with goats.

Goats are extremely useful and efficient machines. As revealed in this Wired video, goats can clear land quickly and without pollution. They even have tidy droppings. Live.com is a useless and inefficient machine because it does nothing and no one uses it. Microsoft in general has built it’s reputation entirely around it’s aggravating messy shit. Once again goats win out.

Finally, if worse comes to worse, you can eat a goat. An edible social network could really take over the world, I should think. And just now I tried to eat Live.com and nearly puked. If it weren’t for the new rounded corners on the unibody Macbook Pro I would have.

Final socialnet probability tally: Goats=100, Live.com=0.

Prove to me that goats aren’t by far the better choice to be relaunched as a social network. Go ahead – I dare you!

If you are in Los Angeles on a Monday, climb to the deepest recesses of The Comedy Store (aka The Belly Room). You will likely be the only one in the audience of The Ding Dong Show but you will laugh until you cry.

Let me explain the show to you:

The host, Simply Don, is trapped in an eternity of rehearsing his cast of social outcasts (drug addicts, alcoholics, the mentally ill, the physically atrocious). His pretend goal is to break them, and the show, into the big time. Broadway. The Academy Awards. The comic gold is feeding lines to people who can never ever get them right. Then to interrupt and insult them for it. And then to try again and repeat the process over and over. Pointlessly and hilariously.

The goal isn’t really a Tony Award but to point out the futility of the process of making nothing into something. In this case, because society will never embrace social deviants — people who are not part of any stylish or cool rebellion but rather just unacceptable and unattractive. The unpredictable and unproductive humans can never become respected and rewarded for their talents no matter how hard they practice.

Web2.0 tech bloggers are not social deviants in the least. Or hilarious like dingdongers. But they do futilely try to make nothing into something every day. Pointlessly. This is their whole deal. (more…)