When's the last time you worked until tomorrow and had a great time? How many meetings have you had in the last week with more than four people that went nowhere and accomplished nothing? More than five people? Eight? Have you ever heard your boss say, "Well, if we run low on cash, I'll just take a salary cut, eat less, and tap my savings a little more?" Are you passionate about what your company does? Do you have enough skin in the game where you start to think, "Wow, if we really kick ass, I could buy that car/house/island" or are you kissing all the ass you can to make sure your boss and coworkers give you good reviews during bonus time so you can just pay off your credit card bill? When you tell people where you work, do they say, "Wow, that's a really cool idea" or do they mention someone who also works for the same 55,000 employee company and ask if you know them...as if the whole goddamn company goes out for a huge picnic with "hello my name is" nametags once a week. Has your company ever gone on a picnic with "hello my name is" nametags? Has your company ever done anything requiring "hello my name is" nametags? Is the whole reason for your company's existance to find a new way of doing something or do you find spreadsheets, code, and docs related to your job that date back to 1999 on the company's servers? Do you jump up excitedly when a random ass conversation with someone in a completely different field helps you figure out some problem you've been thinking about? Maybe even leave to go back home or to work to fix it right then and there? Or do you chastise friends for bringing up work? Are there companies whose products you love to hate that you're going to blow out of the water or is it your company whose products your customers love to hate? Do you get letters from customers and supporters telling you how much they love your product? Do you get hate mail telling you how much your product sucks? Do you get any feedback at all? Every actually met anyone who uses your product that you didn't sell to directly? Do you even think that half of those people use it? When you talk about what you do, do you get so infectiously excited about it that, all of the sudden, everyone around you is talking about it, too?

Why aren't you working for a startup?

FeedDemon was the first RSS reader I ever used, back in 2004.

I really liked it, but it felt so disconnected.  I moved to NewsGator because I wanted an automatic blogroll, a mobile application, and I wanted it to be all synced up. 

Then, after Newsgator acquired FeedDemon and got things all synced up, I just didn't want to pay for it. 

I did pay for NewsGator Mobile, which I love, but I wasn't willing to pay anything for synced destop software.  Despite improvements to the interface, I still didn't really love Newsgator Online, nor did I love being unable to read feeds on my laptop while offline. 

Last week, Newsgator took the pricetags off and went free.

Not surprisingly, they're also supporting APML, which means that they're going after the data.  I always felt like the feed reading folks were in a unique position to see who was paying attention to what (as is FeedBurner) and build interesting applications on top of that.  For example, I can't wait to use their list of feeds I pay the most attention to.  Going free and building up attention data: not only very Web 2.0, but also so much more useful to me. 

This is a major step in my continuing quest to bring stuff back out of the browser and onto my desktop in a way that is still synced to my phone.  First, I successfully brought all my Gmail/Gcal functionality out of the browser and enable phone syncing through a combo of Thunderbird and other apps.  Now I'll be able to read feeds offline but also sync those feeds to my phone.   That's great because the browser, thus far, doesn't seem like it's a place to efficiently run things that need applications.  I've also started using the GTalk client and never got much use out of Meebo. 

Now if I could only manage edit/upload/manage videos in a connected client.  Phanfare doesn't have editing. 

Hats off to the Newsgator team!

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Everyone uses the web quite differently, but I've noticed some strong usage patterns among social network, tagging, and blogging users that I think hold true.

The first type avoids social media altogether.  It scares them.  They say things like, "I don't want to expose my whole life on the web."  They can't be found on Google and actively attempt to clean up their digital tracks.  These people are to be avoided at all costs.  Clearly they either a) have something to hide, like a body in the trunk of their car,  b) have serious impulse control issues and if given a Flickr account or blog will immediately start posting pictures of their genitalia, or c) suffer from Usenet related alcoholism, because its all to easy to do a shot everytime someone responds to an annoying thread with "unsubscribe" in the body.

The second kind is a closet social media user.  They've secretly had a LiveJournal since the first time they heard Ani DiFranco.  (Mood: Angsty) They break into a cold sweat anytime they read stories about people fired from blogging, but secretly, they're hoping to be found...to be led to freedom by an LJ revolt where everyone goes to the window, opens it, sticks they're head out and yells, "I have an angsty LiveJournal blog, and I'm not going to keep it private anymore."

Of course, it never occurred to them that they use the same screename on their AdultFriendFinder profile.

The third kind of social media user is the happy medium most social users hope to achieve.  They don't know how many RSS subscribers they have to their Tumblog-- and its mostly people they know anyway.  They read Perez Hilton just as often, if not more, than TechCrunch and edited Wikipedia just once--to erase one benign sentence just to see if it would work.  They like the idea of Twitter, but they only know 2 people who use it and fail to see the value of following Scoble or Calcanis, because they've never met either of them.

The fourth kind of social media user uses social networks to reflect and leverage their real life with worldclass efficiency.  When their cable goes out, they LinkedIn their way to the night shift operations manager at Cablevision, who also happens to share the same music tastes (Wow, you like Radiohead, too!)... Cable back on in 4 minutes.  Everything gets delivered, and expenses get tracked by both their social expense tracking community and Najesh, the Skype enabled personal assistant from Mumbai.  Never alone, this user is always a Twitter or Dopplr notification from meeting up with someone they know, even snorkling in Fiji.

The last kind of social media maintains social media as their one and only form of social.  "What do you mean offline?"  They live in places with the lowest population density to downstream rate ratio in the country--not another man made structure for 22 miles, but they've got fiber to the home.  All of their profile photos have that grainy blue glow of a webcam shot and they don't get it when people decline their friend invites because they're not friends.  "Yeah...duh... that's why you click accept... to become friends!"

Any of these too close to home?

• Education‽Blog List
  (tags: education path101)

• Emotion Without Thought in New Hampshire - Judith Warner - Domestic Disturbances - Opinion - New York Times Blog
  A take on the Hillary crying episode
  (tags: election2008 politics)

I don't often need to blow my nose, because I never get sick. If I get the sniffles once every two years, its a lot. I'm pretty sure I didn't get sick in 2007, so when I found myself a little congested last night I figured I was due. I feel just fine, though.

Anyway, anytime I blow my nose, I think of my grandfather. He got Lou Gerhig's disease (ALS) when I was in high school and had very quickly lost the ability to lift his arms at all. That meant that noseblowing was out of the question....so when I went over to his house to help out, I always had to help him blow his nose. He'd yell at me because, instead of just putting the tissue to his nose, I'd squeeze it, like most of us do. Of course, squeezing makes no sense because if you're trying to clear your nose, closing off your nostrils only impedes the process.

Anyway, I don't squeeze my nose when I blow, or at least, try not to... but everytime I do, I think of my grandfather.

Don Mattingly: The people who want you to vote for him say he was great before he hurt his back. Well let me tell you something: My cousin used to be a math whiz until he fell out of a pickup truck when he was 12 and hit his head on the curb. He couldn't count his fingers after that. Did they let him into MIT anyway? No, they did not. End of parable.

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Don't mind me... I just wanted to say "I told you so..."

Remind  us not to sell Path 101 too early, before it's achieved enough scale to weather big company neglect.

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As of this moment, they're predicting Hillary winning New Hampshire by 3% over Obama.

I don't call that a comeback.

John Edwards took 17% of the vote.  If Edwards doesn't win, who do you think most of those people are going to back?  Certainly not Hillary after his unrelenting attack on her special interest ties.

Not to mention the fact that, to get the nomination, you need to win delegates, not votes.  Clinton and Obama tied at 9 pledged delegates a piece.  There are 5 superdelegates from NH and who the heck knows how that works, but either way, it's not totally clear that Obama will not sill win the vote of the delegates from NH come convention time.

I think Edwards should just quit now, campaign for Obama, beat Hillary, and be VP and run again after.  He's certainly young enough.  Both him and Obama are both about change and they're going to need to combine forces to win.

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• Complexities of Career Development, The Eagle Feather
  (tags: careers path101)
• Power 150 - Ranking the top blogs and bloggers in advertising, marketing and media. - Advertising Age
  Ranking the top blogs and bloggers in advertising, marketing and media.
  (tags: advertising bloggers list marketing path101)

This morning, my local R train arrived at 59th Street in Brooklyn just as an N train sat waiting on the express side. As the R train slowed to open its doors, the N train started up and took off, much to the shagrin of all of the R train passengers who wanted to transfer to the express. The N was not full and this is the second time this has happened to me in a week. I've been riding the subway almost everyday since I was 14 and if I had a dollar for everytime this happened to me, across multiple lines, I wouldn't be concerned about another fare hike.

Customers on the R train into Bay Ridge suffer some of the worst service the system has to offer because of the infrequency of service after rush hour. I've spent significant time waiting on that same 59th St. platform waiting for a local R to take me home after 8PM. Given that, the MTA should be doing everything it can to minimize wait times and passenger frustration on that line. I don't expect extra trains, but if a connecting express train is already in the station, it should never leave while a local is just seconds away from closing its doors.

This also leads to passenger frustration and stress, which I'm sure is positively correlated with incidence of violence, accidents, mistreatment of MTA employees. This makes what probably amounts to a 30 second tradeoff seem very worth it for all involved.

I'm asking that an express or connecting train never leave a station while another train is entering the other side with passengers waiting to connect.

Thank you for your consideration.

Charles E. O'Donnell
MTA Passenger, NYC + NYS Taxpayer

We made a set of videos to give our various perspectives on Path 101.  You should definitely check them out on the Path 101 blog.

I had a little fun, though, and decided to make Christopher Walken our Path 101 spokesman:

• The Love Mattress: Modern Sleeping Solutions for Couples | Inventor Spot
  (tags: bed cuddling dating furiniture love mattress)

• I mean it, I'm not Bloomin' running
  "I am not a candidate for President," says Mayor Bloomberg, as channeled by columnist Michael Daly. "Not that I couldn't run if I wanted to. That $50 million Obama and Clinton and Huckabee and Romney and the rest spent out in Iowa? A mere bag of shells."
  (tags: bloomberg election2008 politics)
• List of problems solved by MacGyver - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (tags: cool)

So this morning's tech news is that one person got kicked off of Facebook.

Yawn.

But, since Techmeme is the geek water cooler, I guess we should all be talking about it.  I suppose Scoble is like Desperate Housewives or Grey's Anatomy--the shows aren't even that good, but you gotta watch because it seems everyone else is talking about it.

Today, Mr. Scoble got booted from Facebook for violating their terms of service... for running some kind of script that seems to scrape social graph data off of Facebook.

People seem to forget what "I agree to the Terms of Service" means.  If you join a service, and invite all your friends to it, contribute all sorts of data, etc., don't get all pissy when you break the rules and they boot you. 

Why?

Because these are the rules that everyone else agreed to as well.

If I was your friend, I wouldn't want you using some script to scrape my data and take it off Facebook.  People seem to forget that friendships are two way relationships...  those are people on the other end, not just data... and you don't own the data on the other people.  These are people that looked at the Facebook TOS (or should have), were fine with it, and decided to set up shop.  They don't want to live in a digital place where people who violate the TOS pulling their data run amuck.  Not that I think Scoble is malintentioned, but unless he gets every single one of his friends to accept the porting of their data to another place, I don't see what kind of case he his.  I don't remember anything in the "accept friend request" thing that says, "accept it when your friend wants to run a script that yanks data about you off of Facebook and brings it to some other place who's TOS you will never see."

Does the script take into consideration the privacy preferences of Scoble's friends, or does it assume they're all as public to everyone as they are to him, because he's logged in with his account?

When are the geeks going to realize that 99.99% of the world's population doesn't need or want data portability.  Sure, it would make our lives more convenient if my I could see the restaurants my friends frequent through their credit card purchase data, but rather than try and convince Mastercard to accept open data standards, build an app with a simple hack that allows me to download it, and moreover, a reason to.  That's what Mint and Wesabe are doing with financial data.

And as for the social networks, MOST people don't care about being on 3423 social networks at once with 43,000 friends, and sharing apps and data between these friends.

In fact, I can't think of a single situation where I thought to myself, "Boy, I'd really love to be able to listen to the music that my LinkedIn contacts do."

And I have no problem keeping professional contacts on LinkedIn and real friends on Facebook, and I'm unapologetic about it. 

Last time I checked, real life was about different social spheres.  My "real" social graph isn't a completely intermingled, open flow of data, nor do I want it to be.  My digital life works best not just when it improves my real life, but also reflects it.  I'm not friends with everyone.  I don't want everyone's data.  I don't want to show everyone else my data.  There's enough of me already out there with very little effort on my part. 

So, Mr. Scoble, please stay off Facebook if you plan on running scripts that the rest of us agreed weren't cool in the TOS.  If you think the TOS needs to be changed, tell us about the app, tell Facebook, and gather support without breaking the rules first.  While they've made mistakes in the past, Facebook seems pretty responsive to users when they gather a large amount of support.

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