Tivo a Dinosaur? This piece in Slate suggests that TiVo is going to die. As I am one of the many fanatical TiVo fans, I find this alarming, of course. Personally, I think that TiVo is missing out on a prime network externality by not setting up a mechanism whereby I could send automatic recommendations to friends.

Imagine that I'm scheduling something on my TiVo, and I think, gee, Paul and Diana would like this. I could flag the selection to be forwarded to them at the next phone call, and then if their recorder wasn't doing anything, they'd record it. This type of system leads pretty obviously to network externalities, as I'd want to influence all my friends to buy TiVo brand instead of any upstart.