Legal Commentary

One of the lessons of The Social Network is how lightining fast a new technology can feel like it's been with us forever. It's almost impossible to grasp that Facebook was launched in 2004 ? the same year Google had it's initial public offering. 2004 ? seven short years ago.

Andrew Grove, in Only the Paranoid Survive ? talks about the moments in time when there is a tsunami change to technology that isn't just a quiet evolution, it changes everything. 

We are there. I'm always cautioning new journalists to be skeptical of the declarations that a new technology is "revolutionary,"  but I am now convinced that  Twitter, text messaging, and Facebook are indeed worthy of that word. (Throw in Skype and iPhones/iPads to the mix as well). Can it really be that Facebook ? which started out as essentially a boys' club for dating ? may end up being one of the most influential technologies in the history of this planet. And I don't think I'm being hyperbolic, here.

Monday's edition of The New York Times' DealBook (Andrew Ross Sorkin) notes today that financial giant JPMorgan Chase wants a piece of Twitter. The firm, he says, has established "new fund aimed at investing in social-media companies is seeking to buy a minority stake in Twitter that could value the service at close to $4.5 billion, people briefed on the matter told DealBook on Sunday. The $1.22 billion JPMorgan fund appears to see Twitter as its beachhead in the highly popular social-media sector, much as Goldman Sachs established its presence in the category by raising $1.5 billion to invest in Facebook, an amount that included $1 billion collected from wealthy private individuals outside the United States. It is not clear whether the fund, known as the J.P. Morgan Digital Growth Fund, will invest directly in Twitter, or buy current investors' stakes with the company's consent," says Sorkin who not related to The Social Network's screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. Full story here.

Of course, the flip side of all this change is how fast technology can disappear. Just ask anyone (like me) who bought an eight-track cassette player or Beta rather than VHS.