Facebook was created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerburg and a pile of his friends from Harvard University. In 8 short years it grew from nothing to an over 900 million user behemoth. Not only do you use it, but your mom, dad, and grandma spend hours lurking profiles and looking at pictures from your sisters party last weekend.

It started out as a cool website where college students could connect with friends and find out who was dating whom, however over the years it has become more of a broadcast medium for everyones inner narcissist. It has also been the subject of numerous books and a Academy award winning film, not to mention an almost perpetual firestorm of media coverage.

Facebook has become one of the worlds largest web properties, falling only behind Google. Daily, millions of people spend billions of hours on the site, most of them ‘liking’ irrelevant bullshit and sharing intimate secrets with all of their ‘Friends’.

Facebook, through its ease of adding ‘Friends’ has pretty much relinquished the word of any meaning it previously held. Liking ‘Causes’ has created a brand new low for apathy. Not only can people do the least minimal effort to ‘support’ causes, but they can also tell all their friends who can then share in the nihilism of Facebook backed causes.

Before Facebook there was MySpace, before that Friendster and before that… who knows? Social media was crowning the web’s womb when Facebook happened to fall out. With a perfect product to market fit, Facebook hit the ground running.  As Facebook grew it was able to weasel its way into a whole slew of new social apps, all hopping to gain from Facebook’s Social Graph. Unfortunately for people without Facebook but great for Facebook this created a new need for a login and helped boost its already monstrous growth.

Facebook’s greatest hit and most popular feature is ‘Photos’, not only can you tag your ‘Friends’ but Facebook can use its facial recognition software to help find your friends so you don’t have to. With ‘Photos’ uploaded from a computers being such a huge selling feature, Facebook feared the competition coming from the mobile world and swept in to buy Instagram for 1 billion dollars. Interestingly, Instagram with its 50 million users has not yet made a dollar, which is the same problem Facebook has been having with the mobile web.

Facebook offered its IPO today (May 18) for $42 a share, placing the companies value at something over 100 billion dollars, making it the second largest IPO in American history only behind Visa. It will also make Facebook more valuable then Ford and Kraft Foods. In fact, with profits of around 1 billion dollars, Facebook will be valued at at-least 100 times its yearly income and more greatly valued than 99% of the stocks listed on the NYSE (relative to yearly profit).

Ironically or not so, Facebook’s growth in size and profits have apparently slowed and some advertisers including GM have claimed that Facebook Ads have not helped them acquired enough new customers to justify the cost of the advertising program. Some have even claimed that Google Ads have click-through rates 10 times higher than those achieved through Facebook.

Facebook has caught the hearts and minds of millions, created new types of relationships and helped people around the world organize events that they would not have been able to do otherwise. But it has also eroded the concept of friendship, created a new low for apathy and inspired a massive blob of similarly styled social media messes.

The real question now is: will Facebook pull a Google or a MySpace? Either way, hundreds of people will become millionaires today, while others will continue to spend hours on Facebook.

What does this all mean? We will have to let the market decide.

Earlier this week Vice President Joe Biden announced that he supported the Presidents view on gay marriage. The Vice President made the announcement during an TV interview. On one late night news shows (see Daily Show) Jon Stewart made light of this announcement and suggested that it was strange that such an announcement was made. This was the start of the fad as it brought some media attention to an upcoming issue.

A couple of days later there was an early release of an interview with the President, in it he said that he now supported gay marriage. The interview was officially released the next day on an early morning show. He then announced it a few other times during news conferences and other official statements. Interesting just a few days earlier it was announced that the President’s views were evolving on the issue.

Interestingly the Republicans have been pretty quiet on the issue, instead keeping focused on the economy. This issue over all has received a lot of press coverage and the world is engrossed in this evolving issue.

Interestingly gay marriage has been legal in Canada for well over 10 years and stopped being an issue many years before that.

Its good that this issue is being brought to the forefront, but there is much speculation that this is a political move by the President to pull in younger voters who are more sympathetic to gay rights.

This is good progress on the issue, but we will have to wait for election 2012 results to see if anything can be done, and even then it could be years before these rights are actually enforced. Meanwhile only last week one of the Carolina’s recently outlawed gay marriage making the issue something that still has a lot of work to be done.

This issue is still a work and progress and will take a while to be sorted out, but it is progress and progress is good.

Welcome to the 21st century America.

Epic meal time is a You-Tube channel made by a group of 20-something teenaged boys from Montreal Canada, although more recent episodes have been filmed in California (see visible palm trees). The first episode was released in October 2010 and was called ‘worst pizza ever’, however it doesn’t seem to be available anymore. Checking their channel now the first episode appears to be ‘Fast Food Pizza’ which was uploaded a year ago and now has over 4 million views.

Each episode is between 3 and 6 minutes, for the most part they start off with a brief description and then dive into the cooking. Commonly fast food is used as is bacon, sometimes the bacon is for decoration. After making the epic meal, which often consists of excessive drinking and bacon flipping the group consumes their mess of a meal. For the most part it looks like the food is wasted, but it does seem to be enjoyed is a masochistic kind of way.

The show was created by Harley Morenstein and Sterling Toth, Harley is the main character and does most of the cooking and narration, Sterling films and isn’t seen very often. In one CTV interview they remarked ‘We make this look easy, but each episode takes around 40 hours to create’. I assume that comes from planning, shopping, cooking, eating and figuring out how to dispose of all the left over food.

As the videos have gained popularity the team has teamed up with affiliates to offer products to support their debauchery, most of their products are bacon based and will help make your next meal epic. They have also moved plenty of t-shirts with Epic meal time logos and references to bacon. In one video they advertised ‘an ordinary ball’, however it is hard to tell if that was a real product or not. It had a decent landing page, but I wasn’t able to put an order through.

As of May 10th 2012 they have close to 2.5 million subscribers and well over 382 million video views, impressive by any measure. It is probably unnecessary to mention, but this is only possible because of the invention of You-Tube, I doubt any ‘serious’ broadcaster would allow such a cooking show to exists. That said, Epic Meal Time has since been picked up by Revision3, an internet television channel.

It has been pointed out in various places that Epic Meal Time is a parody of cooking shows. Although this has become the case, it hardly seems like this was the intention from the beginning. The epic meals made in each episode contains an overdose of calories, fat, bacon and Jack Daniels. In a world overly concerned with health, organics and natural foods Epic Meal Time is a breath of not so fresh smog.

Epic Meal time is proof that anyone with an idea can get famous in the internet age. These guys started out with a time wasting videos that showed internet potential and turned into a million dollar epic internet meme built around horribly unhealthy food, alcohol and a twisted sense of humour. Not bad for a former substitute teacher and graphic designer.

All this said Harley seems to know his way around the kitchen and probably has a decent amount of experience putting together epic meals. The planning alone must be a job, as is all the preparation and ideation.

How long this fad will last is beyond me, but for now it is epic.

Just a note, this isn’t meant to be a criticism, these guys have done an amazing job of turning something as repulsive as a taco soda into a impressive money making venture, good on them.

As this is the first ‘fad’ the process of discovery is still a work in progress, however as the fads pile up the direction will inevitably adjust to more ‘faddy’ trends. Also, as this is an attempt at a daily blog I’m going to have to be open to different types of content.

So what is this Greek Economic Crisis anyways?

As I didn’t know I had to check Wikipedia to get some background information. Based on the Wiki it seems that Greece’s problems were cased by its ‘welfare state’ status. But being fair, Wikipedia describes that as a situation where there is government supported health care and pension plans. As a Canadian I’m used to such ‘welfare’ and think its a good thing. But then again, I’m not sure if we are a ‘welfare state’…. back to Wikipedia… The article on the ‘Economy of Canada’ doesn’t explicitly state that Canada is a ‘welfare state’ but it is probably close, as there are a lot of articles about these concerns.

How did this cause Greece to get into trouble?

Well its easy, they had a lot of social programs and spending but not enough income to support it. Apparently they spent 120% of the money they had, sounds healthy. In 2008 when the world’s economy started to fall appart Greece was hit particularly hard, apparently due to this spending problem. It also appears that the Greek government lied about how much money it had and how much it was spending, sounds like a common problem these days, welcome to the credit nation.

But this is old news, or at least that’s the way it appears, this problem isn’t new, it has been going on for the last 3 years, but something changed. For the last 28+ years the government has been consistant, the same party or parties have ruled things. In order to avoid the catastrophic potential crash, the old government agreed to loans and austerity measures set by the rest of the European Union. This money would be used to help reduce the debt and stabilized the economy, however it came at a cost. In order to get the money the government had to screw over the people, which isn’t to say they didn’t deserve it, they appear to have a pretty easy life relatively speaking. Anyhow, to get the money they had to give up some of their welfare.

If this isn’t a new problem, than why is it today’s fad?

Ok, ok, I’ll get to that. So last week they had an election and new people were put into power. These new people were from fringe parties that got their seats because they platformed on an end to the austerity measures. However there is a little problem, the European Union, particularly Germany says ‘there is no getting out of those terms’. Of course Germany has the right to say this, they are footing most of the bill and are the wealthiest nation in the Union.

Recently this story has been all over the news, at least the last two days as the rest of the world’s currencies and markets have been having a rough time as they are responding to the crisis. It has also been in the news because the rest of the Union said ‘You can’t get out of this’. There has also been talk about how the current fringe parties government can’t agree, so there will need to be another election in the coming weeks. It’s interesting to see they’re going to waste some more money.

It’s also nice to see that when the shit hits the fan, so does everything else.

Our world and by extension the internet is filled with passing fads, the goal of this website is to keep track of what is happens by having a memorandum of each days fad.

Yesterday was the day before today.