Riku and the beat

You might think that the logo and look of a company isn't such a big thing. I disagree. A first impression is always important, and I also think that companies should take the time to create a good and representative "front" for their company. If they don't, I expect them to be a muddle on other issues as well. 

I was thinking about this one day, that brands should take more liberty with logos and colors. A brand is of course not about logos and colors, but about what you do. However, people tend to spend a lot of time on logos and colors. Most companies have rules about what background their logo is allowed to show up on and how much space there should be around it... 

I really think that's a wast of effort and counterproductive. Forcing your brand into a mold will always, always just make it seem boring after a while. All brands stagnate, that's because they're not given the chance to evolve. Not on the business side, and definitely not on the design side. 

Burton Snowboards does it really well, each year, they have new logos. They also re-use old ones. You can sort of have a personal connection to one of the old logos. And they're not set on a couple of colors. It makes their brand much more flexible. 

Workers at Burton have more artistic freedom. You're not in this huge machine where everything has to be standardized.

I think more people should do it like Burton does it instead of focusing on their "color palette" and what background it's ok to show their logo on. You'll still be able to get your brand message out, it's just going to be more exciting...

I'm certain that G+ will be able to take some market share from Facebook. For some use-cases it's just better, and people are switching to G+ from FB. 

If now this becomes a real battle and FB is not seen as "the social network" of the future anymore, its already hyped-up 80b valuation is going to go down, a lot. We used to see FB as a future money printing machine. They just had to be able to scale up their revenues a little, and no one could ever slow their growth.

What if that's not the case? 

We've never really seen a possiblity of such a rapid decline before in these valuation classes. In just weeks, millions of people can completely switch product from FB. The switching costs can come down to zero, if for example it's easy enough to find all of the same friends on G+ as we have on FB. 

Now, if this is shown to be true, that a 80b valuation can suddenly drop down to say 10b, I think we'll see a decline in investments in web startups and valuations will go down. It's just a risk no one thought was really there. 

Just thinking that I can snap a picture and easily choose to only share it with my closest friends. And the picture stays private without anyone having the right to distribute it. It's a game-changer for me. 

It's something I know that was missing, but it's a huge thing to change, actually doing it and getting people to use it is difficult. Many startups have tried but failed. I'm really happy Google did it, they were probably the only ones who could make that happen. 

What's going to happen to diaspora now?