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Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Introducing the Bubble Hotties: Boys & Girls Hot Beyond Their Means

filed under: Love & Other Glitches, Web Sex Index, Bubble Hotties by Melissa Gira

The bubble — (blogging about) it’s so hot right now.

We don’t judge if you haven’t been paying attention to the bubble, but you’ve been reaping its benefits. It’s okay, users. No, I’m sorry, content makers. We’ll still respect you even if the thing ends up bursting its unseemly tech juices in the morning. We’ll even bring you a warm towel with which to wipe up and hand you our Blackberry across the pillow so you can see if your stock is still worth a damn.

But we’re not bitter.

As the bubble (or, hopefully, not-a-bubble) grows, so too, does the collective hotness of the web and its makers. As we chart it, hotness is well and truly booming now, but for a few dips that correspond, as one might assume, to related market forces:

Yes, numbers not even Dave Winer would argue with. (This sort of crack research is, of course, why you’re here, and not reading TechCrunch, either, though you could more likely get away with invoicing those hours than the time you spend at Sexerati. So let’s change that with some punditry.)

If one is judging the health of the web by the health of Google stock, what does that mean for the growth of hotness? As our inner entrepreneurs are stroked by the media, and cash comes rushing in to support our newly developed dream-apps, are we also taking care to develop broad-based internal systems to support this sudden surge in all areas of our newfound popularity?

We might make fancy money now, and act and eat and dress to match, but can we fuck, love, and relate at the same speed?

Not likely. Not immediately.

For hotness, and one’s ability to work it to make the most of it, must be cultivated, like any other form of weatlh, if it’s going to stay with us in the long-term.

By way of quick example, look no further than the now-defunct personals empire Spring Street Networks. If you ever cruised The Onion or Nerve for sex, these folks were your right-hand men and women (or at least, they enabled your right hand better with all those hot pics). Their ubiquity, however, seems to have been their downfall. As SSN expanded, they also diluted the power of their reach, making the prospects for dating not only that much less hot, but also, cutting the paychecks of their own so close that staff ran to the bank immediately to cash in under the threat of bounce. This is not the kind of “corporate culture” that engenders hotness in their workers’ own personal lives. An anonymous deep throat operative even reports that as the bottom fell out, that staff got less attractive, to boot. Really, how can you focus on disrupting old media, getting your deconstructed jeans to the wash and fold, and finding luck in love all at the same time?

As part of tracking sex futures, it is our duty to keep a watchful eye on who we now introduce as Bubble Hotties, the emerging clutch of boys and girls who are in danger of growing, like the web, too hot to handle. Premature hotness, like an overdose of first round funding, can break you as fast as it can make you.

So what does it say for the state of web sex when even Wall Street types have optimism around the bubble and hotness?

…great entrepreneurs are the key to building valuable companies. If you invest in great people, you have a good chance of making money. In the current market there are gifted entrepreneurs that will benefit and thrive. These people will start disruptive companies that look for what will be hot rather than what is hot. They won’t be lumped into the Web 2.0 category; they will define their own categories. This is what will separate the few winners from the many losers.
“Is Web 2.0 Another Bubble?,” WSJ, 27 Dec 2006

That hotness is essentially about being ahead of the curve, but to maintain, one can’t overshoot one’s own edge. To do so is to risk losing — or perhaps, never even building — the capacity to savor, like all the other spoils, this newly minted era of what honestly boils down to delivering innovations in what brings us pleasure.

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