Heheh, a little cross-company smack talk going on over on the Virtual Earth blog. They link to all their competitors and say they have better imagery. Actually, what they are demonstrating is their new collections feature where you can gather together a collection of interesting places and put a link to that on your blog. Very useful! By the way, that and more are explained on other posts on the Virtual Earth blog.

Of course the Google Earth bloggers aren’t lying down in this competition. They just added a new layer feature which is very cool.

And, Ze Frank even gets into this fun too. He uses Google Earth today to show where all his “little yellow duckies” are (his viewers). Can you find me? My little Yellow Duckie is in Half Moon Bay, right by the Ritz. Ze told me I was the first member of his “ORG” and, looking at this now I see 10s of thousands of members who watch Ze Frank’s Show.

Jeremiah shot this picture yesterday. I told someone “the one who dies with the most stickers wins.” according to Flickr I’m far from winning, though.

Hey, I had the best job at Microsoft and gave it all up so I could attend Lunch 2.0. But, Jeff Sandquist is hiring people for Channel 9. So, if you wanna walk around the best company with a camcorder (or work on the dev team) drop Jeff a line. I hear he has some new Channel 9 stickers coming next week so you could be the first to have that on your laptop! (Hey, Jeff, can you send me one? I’ll add it to my collection).

Last night after speaking at San Jose State University, Maryam and I wrote a new talk that we’ll give at Converge South next month in Greensboro North Carolina. Titled “10 ways to a killer blog” I think it’ll be fun.

Speaking of SJSU, last night I talked with about 30 students at the journalism department there. That brought back memories. Anyway, Steve Sloan took me to dinner last night and turned on the recorder so you can listen as we have dinner. I’m getting more used to being recorded almost constantly now. It’s sort of weird having almost everything I do on Flickr or other photo sharing sites, along with even dinner conversations.

One thing I like about speaking at Universities is you learn about how students are perceiving the world and what they are using. For instance, both the instructors and students told me that MySpace is very popular among high schoolers but loses a lot of its appeal in the college crowd. This remains true even among people who used MySpace like crazy in high school. They say they switched to Facebook when they move to college.

These social programs are part of the identity of who they are at those specific times in their lives. The unsophisticated nature of MySpace is attractive in high school, but that doesn’t carry over into college, it seems.

Facebook is trying to get outside of just the college world, it seems. But, that might be a bad thing to do. I’ve had several college students write me and say they are pissed about this decision. They want a program that’s only for college students, and don’t want to see high school students (or adults like me) in Facebook. It’ll be interesting to watch that one play out.

Will Facebook’s attempt to grow its business backfire? The university students I talked with say it could.