BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Various federal commissions are keeping tabs on companies in order to prevent them from turning into monopolies. But the onerous “web crowd” might overpower them with ease by creating de facto monopolies.

Starting with my own area of expertise – web site creation. If your web site isn’t on Google’s first couple of pages for your search terms – you’re effectively off the market. Why? Because no matter what FTC would do, we, the people, will “google it” first. Google didn’t just buy those 80% of search market – we handed it to them on our own.

If your video isn’t on YouTube – there’s hardly any substitute on that. Recent TechCrunch post on percentage shares of US video streams confirms that. I don’t remember YouTube stalking me with a bat to make me use their services.

Next – social networking. While MySpace/Facebook/Ning leave some room for competition, Twitter is the only game in town so far and so are Flickr, Last.fm and LinkedIn (to a point).

It’s not that these companies are brutal in extinguishing their competition, something Microsoft did to Netscape back in the old age of browser wars. Also, there are alternatives -  technically speaking. But there is no real competition in terms of services’ social population and  amount of interaction one would encounter. Heck, the reason Twitter crumbles every now and then because there is no competition, so there is no other place to tweet. It’s just that after we played with most social web sites out there, we tend to come back to one or two most populated, since being where the social action occurs is the whole point of exercise.

If you think the troubles with Advantage Rent-A-Car were over – you’re wrong. We lost another hour on our way back to airport when we brought the car back. Aside from numerous annoying mechanical issues with the car itself (nothing major – just annoying) it turned out that the contract on it was closed, so a new one had to be created. How these people get anything done – is just beyond me. Literally spent between 40 minutes to an hour just dropping off the car. Would have been more, but some manager type said he wants us out of there so the sales rep had to fill out some forms by hand to enter them into their system later.

I remember I was complaining about car rental companies before, but Advantage Rent-A-Car has truly beaten all the expectations of bad customer service.

Aside from that the vacation was anything short of amazing. Had a lot of fun on the beach and in parks, rested a lot and came up with new project for myself.

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Yahoo Image Search Fail

It was about 11:22 AM Eastern Time. Already fixed, but you know…