Booking a Face

The MySpace thing is kind of cool.  But all the poorly designed pages makes my (elitist and snobby) brain hurt.  Is it really worth having bad HTML to get people to learn HTML?  Plus, I don’t find it to be very network-y.  Just there for collectors of friends.

Enter Facebook, which actually makes finding friends and customization easy.  They also opened up their API so that developers could create new applications that you can use on your profile and do really cool stuff like throw food or show everyone who visits where in the world you have been. Useful? Maybe. Fun? Definitely.

The clean interface is worth a lot in my book.  Easily seeing what all of my friends are up to is even better.  There’s a lot of potential here and it’s being realized quickly.

The only drawback is not having many people I know use it yet.  So here’s a link to my profile. If you use it, stop in and say hello.

Broaden Your Horizon

Read this.

Tweeting

There’s a new service out there now called Twitter.  This thing is like IM on crack and I love it!  I’m going to try and explain it, but you can find a much better job of this at Webware.
Think of it this way.  IM let’s you talk with one person at a time on your list.  Some let you group folks together, but you have to do so each time you want to talk to everyone.  There’s also no record to look back on and hardly any relationship outside of having a list of friends.

Twitter is like sending an IM to the world.  Or to every friend on your life if that’s what you want.  Or just to one.  It’s up to you with each message and you can specify it in the message.  It’s the ultimate in Web 2.0 and it’s incredibly simple.  What’s more is you can use your phone, an IM client, or the web site to send messages and/or receive them from people you are following.  The possibilities for group communication in realtime over any distance (this is a global service, after all) is mind-boggling.  From organizing a group outing for lunch to keeping track of people at a conference for meetups or whatever, this is the tool to use.  And it’s fun.

I’ve added the RSS feed of my tweets at the top right just above my link blog. You can also see other Twitterers in your area using TwitterMap.

The Machine is Us

I better it’s even more mind-blowing with beer.

Become a Millionaire by Acting Like One

I’m big on managing my money without being a slave to it, but this guy takes the cake with a wonderfully well thought-out post that anyone who likes cash should read.

Good tips all around.  I particularly like planning millionaire days to  try out the life style you’d think you’d like to have if you were independently wealthy.  Also, the advice on giving away to get more is well said, though counter-intuitive and difficult to swallow.

Enjoy!

800 in line, 790 disappointed*

The PlayStation 3 will be released upon us poor Americans in about 30 minutes. A couple of folks got in line in San Francisco to get their system. $500 or $600 (no game included) later for the first few and the rest will go home without the prize.

Is it worth it? The system I’m getting is $250, with a game, and they made enough of the things that I don’t have to wait in line for more than an hour (and that hour will be mostly meet and greet/nerd observation time and buying an extra controller). Is that worth it?

Long Week

It’s been a very long week.  It’s also been a very good week and a strange week.

Long from the standpoint that a lot happened.  It was also my first five-day work week in about a month thanks to extended weekends, holidays, and a funeral.  That was a shock to the system.

But it was a good week.  I got a lot done, did well by a lot of people (I think), made some new friends, exercised a lot, am eating better (yup, I’m eating salad more often and less carbs, but haven’t cut out carbs 100%).

It was also a strange week, at least for this blog.  I’ve had about 60 hits per day on average, according to my stats.  Most of those for older posts regarding two elephants doing as nature intended during a Presidential motorcade in Africa a couple of years back.  The search terms leading to these posts are not fit for public consumption by any stretch, but my knowledge of what some people find “exciting” has definitely expanded.

The question now, though, is if I pull those posts down or not.  I don’t like them being my number one item, at least not for the reason people seem to be clicking here for.  Then again, they are getting “in the door” as it were, so maybe they’ll look around and find something more interesting and, hopefully, healthier.

Any ideas?

The Future of Talent

I’ve just discovered Ze Frank and The Show. This is some of the best stuff I’ve seen in a while. Daily Show level quality.

One of the most popular videos there is easily the best commentary on why social media (like blogs, myspace, digg, flickr, and many others) are as cool and exciting as they are, even if most of the people using them don’t know it. The videos aren’t safe for most work places (depending on how the workplace tolerates you watching video on the clock and swearing from said video).

Check it out.

Reunion

My ten year high school reunion is coming up in a couple of weeks.  I’ve been trolling MySpace to find classmates and do a little reconnecting before the party.  I figure I can go in cold or I can go in having talked to some folks.  I’m going with talking to folks, if I can.  I forgot one thing, though.

I go by Robert now.  But before I went to college, I was known as Robbie.  Folks I went to high school with only know me as Robbie.  I don’t think of myself as a Robbie and most of my friends probably don’t either.  It just doesn’t fit my personality.  But I’ll be going to a place where I’m likely to be called nothing but Robbie for a few hours.

That’ll be weird.

Funding the World

Kiva is a new web site that let’s you do something pretty amazing: fund an entrepreneur in the third world. I’m not entirely sure how this works yet, but I like what I see so far.

From what I can tell, Kiva has partnered with several small (micro) finance companies around the world that are local to the loan recipients. People needing a loan apply there, which get vetted and forwarded to Kiva. Kiva lets you put money towards the loan amount (as little as $25 regardless of the total load requested) and helps manage the payback process. You also get email notices about how the company you have funded is doing and how the payback is going.

This isn’t something you can make money off of. While the local finance companies charge an interest fee (which must be disclosed to Kiva for them to be a partner), Kiva doesn’t collect and none of the interest is passed on to Kiva users. You do get your original investment back, should the loan recipient pay back the loan (there is a chance they won’t, but all of the loans made through Kiva have been paid back at the time of this entry, according to their web site).

I like the idea of people pooling their relatively limited wealth to help out someone trying to get on their feet somewhere else. I’m not poor by most standards and am wildly rich compared to most of the people in the world, but I still don’t make that much compared to other Americans. But here, I can take a little bit of my wealth and help a fellow out thanks to a good use of technology and some really good thinking from a couple of passionate people.

Does it get better? Probably, but this is pretty damn good.

Kiva