Danah Boyd writes that she’s she is “utterly confused by the ways in which the tech industry fetishizes Facebook”.

She asks some good questions and makes some good points. Lets go through them. My answers in italics.

1. “In an effort to curb spam, they killed off legitimate uses of mass messaging, silencing those well-intentioned users that adored them.” Totally true. It’s ridiculous that I can’t add more than 5,000 contacts. Even worse is the scalability of the platform they designed. Many of the apps I’ve been using lately simply don’t work if you have more than a couple hundred of contacts.

2. “But what I don’t understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook.” Because there isn’t anything better. It’s like why we are so gaga over the iPhone. The iPhone is locked up tight and doesn’t let us play. But it is so superior to the alternatives that we’ll put up with all the walls. I’ve seen this play out before, though. Remember in 1989? Apple had the Macintosh II and was way ahead of any other platform. They ended up with, what, five percent market share because a more open platform steamrolled over them. It’s why I watch Plaxo so closely and keep cheering them on.

3. Join a City network and your profile is far more open than you realize. Ahh, the walls aren’t high enough! Heheh. One of the first things I recommend people to learn on Facebook is how to use the privacy settings to adjust who has access to your stuff.

4. The default is far beyond friends-only and locking a FB profile down to friends-only takes dozens of clicks in numerous different locations. Totally true. For many people changing their privacy settings will take too much work. Facebook would be good to come up with some scenario-based choices. “I don’t want anything available to anyone.” “I’m cool with some of my stuff, but not my private stuff available to my friends.” Etc., etc. Personally, I’m on the other end of the scale “I don’t want any walls between me and anyone who wants to see me.” I guess that’s why I have a blog along with a Facebook profile.

5. if you install an App, you give the creator access to all of your profile data (no one reads those checkboxes anyhow). Yes, true. Be careful of those apps. On the other hand that’s what makes apps work well for me.

6. I can’t wait to see how a generation of college students feel about their FB profile appearing at the top of Google searches. That outta make them feel good about socializing there. Not. Yikes. Not that evil Google! Personally I love that you can find my stuff through Google (click that and you’ll see what my Facebook profile looks like to Google). And those college students will be very happy when employers start contacting them with career opportunities (or better).

7. Is [the over-30] crowd sustainable? Is it worth it monetarily? Is it affecting the college participation? Based on my discussions with people, yes, although she does identify that not everyone gets Facebook. Enough do, though, to make it a big business concern.

I think Danah is onto something, though. Facebook has a few huge holes:

1. The app platform rocks cause it’s the first time we’ve been able to see what our friends have loaded on their machines but it sucks lately because the new kind of apps (the ones that aren’t stupid games or gifts) rely on studying your social graph. Those kinds of apps generally aren’t scalable, rarely work, and generally break if you have more than a couple hundred of friends.

2) Privacy in Facebook is frustrating. For me I just want to turn it all off. So I notice the walls. For my friends who are newbies and who don’t want to be public? The settings are too hard to figure out and the nomenclature is difficult to understand. What’s a “network” anyway? Who does that apply to? There aren’t any examples and you only learn about those by spending a bunch of time inside Facebook learning about how it works. Danah’s right to point out this stuff is way too hard and doesn’t “thrill.”

3) I want per-content privacy. Flickr gets this right by letting me click a button on photos and setting the privacy for that photo.

4) The limit on # of friends? Ridiculous. Get rid of that. Or let me pay for a “pro” account without any limits. Buzz Bruggeman has tens of thousands of people in Microsoft Outlook. It’s not impossible to get that many contacts. If Facebook really wants to be the rolodex for the modern age it needs to get rid of those limits. Everytime someone wants to add me now it makes me pissed off at Facebook. It’s pissing me off hour of every day now.

Anyway, thanks to Danah for getting a conversation going. Tomorrow’s Data Sharing Summit should be a good place to discuss all this stuff.

David Dalka brought this to my attention where the Google News blog says they are linking to original stories, from the source. This is total bull$$$$.

Google News does not always link to source articles.

Look at tonight. Search on “social web.” ZDNet is there with a story about the bill of rights that I helped author. But where’s the source document? Not there.

Oh, so only “news sources” will get linked to, right? Yeah, and who makes up that fine distinction?

What’s funny is that Google’s own blog post (er, original source material) on this topic doesn’t get linked to.

But it gets worse from there. David Dalka writes that the removal of duplicate material from Google News, thanks to a new deal with the Associated Press, is causing tons of bad PR for Google. He covers the topic better than I could.

Google:

1. It’s time to include blogs in Google News. It’s ridiculous that there’s a news organization that reprints my blog, which means my words get onto Google News, but not as posted here on my blog.
2. It’s time you include MORE sources, not fewer. Yes, we know Associated Press gets reprinted all over the world but I like being able to track an AP story and see where it gets reprinted. You should still let us see that.
3. You should absolutely link to the original source material that all these journalists are talking about. ESPECIALLY if it comes off of a blog (as David demonstrates, the lack of blog inclusion really makes Google News suck).

Until then, I’d highly recommend checking out TechMeme and Memeorandum as an alternative to Google News. TechMeme already includes the original source document on the bill of rights conversation.

Any news site that doesn’t link to ALL the original source material will look really crappy, especially in comparison to TechMeme and Memeorandum.

So, last post was about me hitting back at all the personal insults and the inbalance of the blogosphere. As Len Edgerly said in my comments last night we like our junk food more than we like our broccoli, even if the broccoli is better for us.

Dave Winer this morning sent me a clear message: admit you made a mistake and move on.

Danny Sullivan continues the conversation.

First, to Dave Winer. Of COURSE I made a mistake. Anytime you open yourself up to personal attacks the kinds of which have been made on me the past few days that’s explicit evidence that I made a mistake in some kind of judgment. Even I get that. Especially punctuated when you get really smart people like Danny or you to attack.

But Dave’s right. Time to make an accounting of the mistakes and things I have learned.

The reason I’ve been quiet is to figure out what my mistakes were, and to glean some personal learning about it.

Here’s the mistakes I can see I made. I’m sure there’s at least 20 others, most of which have been pointed out in excruciating detail on the blogs I linked to on Monday:

1. Hooking my thesis to a technology that doesn’t have an obvious tie to search. TechMeme.
2. Hooking my thesis to a company that doesn’t yet have a good track record: Mahalo.
3. Attacking SEOs needlessly, which caused all sorts of people, including Danny Sullivan to get their hairs up in a fighting stance.
4. Doing too simplistic an analysis of how Google actually works.
5. Misjudging Google’s speed today. It took literally minutes for it to show up on searches.
6. Misjudging TechMeme’s ability to point at a short post and at video. Turns out if you get enough conversation going it probably will link to a one-word post. Gotta try that someday!
7. Jumping into a battlefront (SEO’s vs. Google) without really understanding how that warfront will go.
8. Not making it clear that I was making some BIG assumptions. Like that Google won’t adopt and that Facebook will open up enough to make it possible to build a new kind of search engine in public on top.
9. Using the form of video, which makes it a lot harder for some people to consume. But, then, I’m doing R&D and am going to continue to use new technologies like Kyte to see what’s good and bad about them.
10. Hooking my thesis to a guy, Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo, who has been pushing his stuff so hard lately that lots of people have turned him off. Or worse.

That’s a lot of mistakes for a 20-minute video on a Sunday morning.

But, as Tom Rolander, one of the guys who has made an even bigger mistake in his life and lived to see another day, says “every story has to have 10% fruit juice to be believed.”

So, what’s the fruit juice in my story?

1. Google is getting noisier and isn’t improving as fast as we’d like it. So, anyone who has an idea of how search is going to improve will get listened to. I think this is why Powerset and Spock got so much hype.
2. A lot of people have discovered social networks and services in the past six months. Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, Plaxo, not to mention Upcoming, Yelp, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg, etc. And we’re just starting to learn about how those are potentially going to change our life and the services we expect. So, anyone who can see a new pattern in how these will be used will get paid attention to.
3. Anything with a halfway interesting story about how an upstart like Facebook will beat Google will get listened to if for no other reason than to argue about it.
4. There’s a LOT of personal animosity against “a-listers” and anytime an a-lister gives everyone a chance to get that animosity out of their system it will be used.
5. Kyte.tv, the technology I used, is a lightening rod of its own. People either hated it or loved it. Many of you came by the chat room over the last three days and told us that. If you use a new technology to tell an interesting story that’ll increase the chances you’ll get listened to.
6. RSS has such a strong place now in how many of us consume information that when you mess with that reading behavior you’ll increase your chance of getting noticed.

So, to wrap this up. Did I learn my lessons? Are there others that I should have learned that I didn’t pay enough attention to?

Adario Strange, of Wired Online, jumps in with a late whipping of my Sunday videos.

It’s interesting that Wired chose to link to this and jump on the “Scoble is an idiot” pile.

It’s sad, because in the past year I’ve put up more than three hundred videos, most of which are far more deserving of your attention than the ones I put up on Sunday. Let’s just look through my videos to see which ones might have actually been more important for you to consider.

1. Dr. Eliott Soloway on how to improve education (he was one of Larry Page’s computer science professors and was very interesting to talk with about where education is falling apart and how to fix it).
2. Mark Canter on social networking. He does an interesting job of bringing us into the social networking space. Says a TON of stuff that SHOULD have gotten Wired to react, but instead they are more interested in making fun of me and piling onto the “hate Scoble” pile.
3. Scott Klemmer is an assistant professor at Stanford University and talks with me about all sorts of geeky stuff going on inside Stanford. Human interaction design, mobile development, and much more. Remember, this is the place that started Google. Wired should have been all over this. Why weren’t they?
4. IBM’s top intellectual property lawyer held an interesting conversation with me about all sorts of stuff including open source licenses, patent reform, and a whole raft of stuff that directly affects Wired’s readership. Why didn’t they link to this?
5. One of IBM’s most decorated employees had a chat with me and Larry Magid of CBS News. Talked about virtual worlds and a few other things. That sounds like the kind of thing Wired used to be interested in. But they didn’t link to that, either. Nor did they link to a separate interview where I interview the guy who runs IBM Ventures and is one of the key strategists at IBM.
6. At the iPhoneDevCamp I interview a top game designer about emotional design and why the iPhone feels so good. Wired kind of stuff, yet didn’t earn a link.
7. VMWare just went IPO, so you’d think Wired would have linked to this interesting discussion with VMWare’s top technologist. Nah, not Wired. How about this discussion of a new programming language designed to help kids learn to program? Future Wired customers, right? Nope. You won’t have seen that on Wired Online.
8. You’d think that all the SEOs and Danny Sullivan wannabees would have linked to this interview about search engine marketing. Nope. Wired didn’t either.
9. Or maybe Wired would have linked to this interview with New York Times bestseller Tim Ferriss, who tells you how to work less. Nah, no link for that one, either.

Those are the good ones from just the past month or so. I won’t go into all the company interviews in the last few months that I’ve done (including tonight’s exclusive news about Plaxo). That didn’t get a link from Wired either.

I’m not laughing anymore, Wired. Why did you take a cheap shot and not link to anything else I’ve done for balance? Are you trying to compete with Valleywag? Is that what the tech press has come to lately?

I guess so.

Oh, and lots of people on Sunday said my videos were “linkbaiting.” Which is funny. I’d far rather you link to one of these nine videos and talk about them than talk about anything I did on a Sunday morning in 25 minutes.

So, I guess this post is really linkbait. I bet I don’t get a single link to this, though. Instead I’ll probably have to do another Kyte video. At least I know Valleywag and Wired Online will link to that.

Sigh.

There’s a TON of reaction to my videos yesterday, but here’s the reactions that stood out in my searches this afternoon.

SEOmoz (in a post where he ripped almost every opinion I had to shreds): “I used to respect Robert Scoble’s opinions.”
Ethan Stock, CEO of ZVents, points out how fast Google found my post.
Dave Winer on Twitter: “@scobleizer made me jealous. I want some of the drugs he’s taking!” He had a much longer response on his blog this morning.
Uncov: “Robert Scoble Actually Makes You Dumber.”
Danny Sullivan, search engine guru (in a lengthy post where he rips many of my opinions): “For such hype about his video, I was pretty much left with a “is that it” response?”
Dare Obasanjo (in a lengthy reply which focused on the real trouble he sees Google having): “I’m not sure I’d predict the demise of Google but I do agree that the social graph can be used to improve search and other aspects of the Internet experience, in fact I agree so much that was the topic of my second ThinkWeek paper which I submitted earlier this year.”
Karl Martino: “Scoble can’t be more wrong.”
Paul Glaszowski: “How ridiculous it is would be for anyone - anyone with a decent supply of sense, anyhow - to think Google will be divested of its crown by entities like Facebook and Mahalo simply due to a lack of the human intervention or “supplication” in its search process.”
Valleywag: “he’s just revealing what he has always been: a confused evangelist who doesn’t understand the underlying technology, doesn’t have his facts straight, and can’t keep his story consistent. But, boy, is he enthusiastic about it!”

I’ll sleep on these responses and come back to it in the morning. Whew, what a Monday! There’s still more than 500 people watching the videos as we speak, so more reactions will come soon, I’m sure.

The only reason you’ll watch these two videos is because you trust me to add value to your lives and not sell links.

I explain how SEO-resistant technologies like Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are about to upend the search industry.

Part I of Social Graph Based Search. 14:41 minutes.
Part II of Social Graph Based Search. 15 minutes.
And a bonus round III. 6 minutes.

Oh, and the only way you’ll watch these videos is if someone tells you to watch them. No Google. No TechMeme (this post is too short to show up there).

Heh, instead of going to events today I stayed home and am playing with event sites. It must have been because of my visit to Upcoming.org yesterday (that’s my photo of Upcoming.org co-founder Gordon Luk). Anyway, Webware today writes about Yelp’s new events functionality, which focused my attention even more on the event sites.

I’ve been going through the two sites (Yelp and Upcoming) comparing their approaches to event listings. If you don’t know about Yelp, it’s a site for reviewing restaurants while Upcoming is a site almost wholly focused around events and conferences.

But before we get back to the event sites we should talk about the newest Web term to be passed around: bacn.

You know, we have spam and now we have “bacon” without the “o”.

What is bacn? It’s the emails that get generated by all these social networking sites (and other sites) when you sign in, or get a notification, or when you try to add friends (that generates bacn for your friends). It’s all covered on Andy Quayle’s site. According to Chris Brogan he was the first to use it. Anyway, that term has been showing up in tons of conversations I’ve been having lately.

So, back to the events sites.

Upcoming.org definitely has the geek events down. Search for “Lunch 2.0″ and you find a ton. But what if you want to do something a bit more, say, entertaining? Say Opera in the Park (Yelp) in San Francisco? Here’s the same listing on Upcoming.org.

What do you notice?

For me, Upcoming is colder. Yelp has links to restauants and has a more pleasing design. At least to my eye.

So, why am I not switching all my event stuff off of Upcoming? Two reasons:

1. Facebook. Yeah, yeah, I know you’re getting sick of hearing me talk about Facebook but it is now the MUST HAVE portal for my digital life. If you don’t have a Facebook application I’m not going to be all that excited about you. So get one. Upcoming has it.
2. My “friends.” I have more than 200 friends that I’ve hand picked on Upcoming. I don’t have any friends on Yelp. Actually, that’s not true. I just added a couple of people I know who I trust to bring me to good restaurants and events. But, still, that’s almost zero. Truth is about these kinds of sites that they really work a lot better after you get a bunch of friends onto them. So, I’m not likely to leave a site where I’ve gotten it all setup and working well and where I have a good group of friends I trust.

Anyway, more on Yelp over on TechMeme. Which one are you going to use? And, yes, I’ll add anyone as a friend who asks me. I’m Scobleizer on Yelp and RobertScoble on Upcoming.

I’d love to know how you like these sites in comparison to Eventful which I haven’t tried much yet or Confabb? UPDATE: I forgot about ZVents, which I’ve had a good look at but forgot about over the past year. Any other event sites we should know about? Yeah, I know there’s one built into Facebook but we’ll leave that one off the table for now.

This is not a blog.

Heh. I’m SO enjoying the blog break. I think I’ll keep it going for a few more days cause I’m not ready to come back. More on that when I get back.

Tonight, though, I dropped by BarCamp Block and got some historical video so wanted to point that out. Historical in that I aimed my Mac’s camera at a few of the people who started the BarCamp movement. Tantek Celik, Jeff Lindsay, and Ross Mayfield, among others. If you don’t know about Kyte.tv it lets me turn on my Mac’s camera and record conversations without special equipment and without getting people to be TOO goofy. Although Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText (where the first BarCamp was held) gets a bit goofy for my Mac. Yes, this was AFTER the BarCamp party where free drinks were liberally handed out.

If you are missing the BarCampBlock that’s going on now you really are missing something special. I didn’t attend Saturday’s sessions because Maryam and I were at a birthing class having our own educational experience. When I arrived tons of people told me I had missed the best BarCamp ever. That’s saying something because there’s been more than 200 BarCamps all over the world and it all started here. Read Brian Solis’ account to see just how special it is. He writes “The second anniversary of Barcamp was nothing short of extraordinary.”

Speaking of BarCamp, thank you to HP. HP really tried to come through and open up the garage but they have agreements with the neighbors that they can’t break. I know that my blog earlier last week was sent all over the company. That said, watch my Kyte channel tomorrow for more news about the HP garage. I’m quite honored by what they did — they got 12 of my Facebook friends into see the garage, which, of course, we’ll film and share with you.

Oh, and don’t miss the video we put up last week on ScobleShow.

Scott Klemmer, assistant professor in the computer science department at Stanford. Could you get into Stanford and have a chat with a professor who works across the hall from where Google was started. 48 minutes with tons of info on the latest computer science research.

Marc Canter, founder of Macromedia. Among other things. An hour with Marc. Marc links to the things we talk about which are as varied as Jewish food to digital lifestyle aggregation. Don’t miss this one.

New companies: Palore and Magnify and more over on ScobleShow.com too.

Anyway, keep watching my Kyte.tv channel cause I’m having a lot of fun putting stuff up there.

More on BarCamp on Google Blog Search — there are several BarCamps going on right now around the world.

Anyway, see you in a few more days.

Oh, and tomorrow come and join us in Alameda for a Photowalking. Thomas Hawk has more details on that.

Well, I’ve been taking a lot of shots in the past few weeks for always covering the latest shiny social object. You know, first it was Twitter. Then Jaiku. Then Facebook. Pownce. On and on.

The critics say that either I’m late to the game, like with Facebook, or that I’m just too scattered and not looking for real value. Or that I don’t stay on one thing long enough to learn it well and add real value to my writings.

Fair enough. Although one thing I’d like to clear up. When I yammer on endlessly about Facebook that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped using any of the others. Twitter, for instance, is just a constant part of my life now.

Anyway, last night I was at the Facebook party aka “Lunch 2.0.” I met Mark Zuckerberg and his sister, Randi, and a ton of Facebook employees and executives. It is one of those parties that in about five years we’ll all be looking back on as a major inflection point in the valley. I stayed until the very end. In fact, even after the party ended a small group of us hang outside of Facebook’s offices and kept talking about what is going to happen in social networking.

One of the guys was John McCrea, vice president of marketing for Plaxo.

He told me that on Monday Plaxo i sgoing to turn on a new version. Ahh, a new “shiny social object.”

But then he explained why we should care: Plaxo is going to open up a new social network that’s both open as well as controllable. Translation: Plaxo is making a play for Facebook.

First, let’s go back to Facebook. Why does everyone say it’s a “walled garden?” Because you can’t get to data stored on Facebook unless you’re a Facebook member. Two days ago I did a video for Chris Pirillo on Facebook. Chris instantly got excited and wanted to share that with his blog’s readers. But he couldn’t. That video is locked inside Facebook’s walled garden. If you don’t have a key (a Facebook account) you can’t see it.

John told me that on Monday Plaxo will come out with a social network that gets rid of the walled garden.

Why did I say a couple of weeks ago that Facebook is a “data roach motel?” Because I can put all sorts of information about myself into Facebook (I could, for instance, tell you that I like “Daft Punk.” But, do I own that data? Can I get it out of Facebook? No).

John told me that on Monday Plaxo will come out with a social network that lets me own my own data and take it out of Plaxo and put it on other social networks.

Finally, I’ve been getting a few complaints about what I’ve been doing with Facebook. By turning Facebook into a professional networking tool I’m causing problems for people who saw it as a social tool to keep in touch with their college friends. See, Facebook for the first three years of its existence was mostly a tool for college kids to pass photos and other funny things around. Now, if you have photos of your frat party at college do you really want your new boss and coworkers to see those? Probably not.

But Facebook isn’t controllable. You can’t really have two groups of friends. One group that sees your drunken college frat photos and another group that sees you making presentations to your board of directors.

John told me that on Monday Plaxo will come out with a social network that lets me control which groups of friends (or family) that can see certain items.

OK, sounds like Plaxo is going to kill Facebook and bring down Facebook’s value by a few billion dollars. The bubble 2.0 will end. Zuckerberg will drag his tail away from the valley defeated. Etc etc etc. Right?

It’s not going to happen. Here’s why. It’s too late and the walled garden will keep people locked in.

Huh?

Sorry, Facebook already has momentum and a coolness about it that Plaxo doesn’t exude. I don’t really know how to explain the coolness without sounding really idiotic and goofy. That’s part of the 20-something vibe that Facebook has going for it right now. Oh, here’s a photo of me looking at the artwork in the Facebook offices. That might explain a little bit about it. There’s lots of other photos from the event last night here.

But it’s there and can’t be ignored. If John could explain to me how he’s going to get the world’s college students to look away from Facebook and toward something else maybe I’d go along with this “more open and controllable” Plaxo. My head is telling me that Plaxo is the way to go but my emotion tells me that Facebook is more fun.

The other thing is that BECAUSE of Facebook’s “closed” nature I’m not likely to leave it anytime soon. Why? Because if Facebook has 10% more content than the other networks do (which it will have because of the momentum that Facebook has today) that the more “open” networks will always seem lame in comparison.

But, on Monday I’ll try out the new Plaxo. I’m into “shiny social objects” and will report to you the pros and the cons. The problem, though, is that even if I get really excited about it my email is demonstrating that many of the world won’t be listening and won’t care.

What do you think?

After I get up this morning I’ll film a video explaining more of my thoughts and I’ll put that on my Kyte channel. For now Nokia’s CTO left me a little message there. I’ll do more stuff from the Always On conference today.

So Jason “no comments” Calacanis answers me, and others, back about his increasing dislike of Facebook and other social networks.

First of all, for the record, Jason is right. Facebook sucks. Twitter sucks. Pownce sucks. Jaiku sucks. Kyte sucks. Etc and etc.

Why? Because they take time.

But then managing my Outlook contact list took time. Managing my business card collection took time. My mom took time to keep a filing cabinet and an address book and a rolodex.

Facebook is the modern day rolodex. It is the replacement for the business card.

First of all, let me attack a claim Jason made that simply is wrong: that it takes 30 minutes a day to add hundreds of new friends into Facebook or other social networks (on big days I’ve actually had hundreds of people wanting into my social network, so I timed it: I can add hundreds in less than five minutes).

Here’s how.

Let’s go to Facebook and look. Gary Chan just asked to be added to my network. I click confirm. Then “skip this step.” Done. Typing this sentence took four times longer. You don’t need to do anything more. You don’t need to explain why you know Gary Chan. Etc. Etc. I never do and I don’t feel guilty about it. If I know people I know why and how I know them and I don’t need to tell you all that. Later on I might add some value to my contact list that way.

So, why do I say it’s my new business card collection? Well, if I am looking for a contact, at, say, Yahoo, I troll through my Facebook collection. Most Yahoo employees leave their phone numbers and email addresses on their Facebook profile. Hint: they work on the iPhone. So, I visit their profile and click on their phone number and I’m instantly connected.

Plus, I know everything about them that they’ve wanted to share.

For instance, Bradley Horowitz, of Yahoo, is on my contact list. By looking at his profile page I know all sorts of stuff about him. His relationship status, his political views, who his friends are, what kind of music he likes, his favorite TV shows, his favorite movies, his favorite books.

He has the Snapvine app, so I can leave a voice mail for him. He tells his friends where he lives (has a Yahoo Map gadget that shows that, of course). Puts all his Flickr photos up. I know his mood. I know what party he’ll be at tonight. I know someone at Microsoft that he’s talking with and who visits his page, so I know some influence networking that I could do with him. I know his college experience and his past work experience.

All voluntarily turned over and when I interview him do you want to bet this stuff comes up? Damn straight it will.

If I go to the party he’s going to tonight (I might, it’s on my calendar too) I’ll have TONS of stuff to talk with him about. Music. Movies. TV shows. Politics. College experience. And other stuff.

Oh, heck, let’s go look at Jason’s Facebook. I see his religious views. Jason has put his mobile number there. His educational experience. And more. Plus I can see who wants to suck up to Jason on his wall (I’m there, so read into that what you want. By the way, so is the co-founder of Flickr, the founder of B5 Media network, and a bunch of other interesting people).

I also like that all his Twitters are there, so I can see what else Jason’s been ranting about without being forced to chase Jason all over the Net. On my profile you can see my Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Kyte, Wordpress, Google Reader, and many other things. That saves you time of figuring out everything I’m doing.

Now, can I get this info any other way? LinkedIn? Maybe. Twitter? No. Pownce? No. Jaiku? No. Following his blog? No. Kyte? No. MySpace? Don’t be ridiculous.

Could I have called him? Yeah. I have his business card and his mobile phone in my contacts. But why would you waste Jason’s time asking stupid questions when the answer is already online? Will that lead to a good result? A ride in his Corvette, for instance? Or a business partnership?

Anyway, let’s specifically answer some questions Jason asked, cause they are interesting:

1. Facebook is a multilevel marketing platform. Jason’s right. But, then, so is my rolodex from the 1980s and 90s. Some people in that rolodex are a LOT more important to me than other people. Some people in that old-school rolodex introduced me to TONS of other people and influenced my life in major ways. That rolodex is now moving to Facebook where it’s getting MUCH stronger than it was on little business cards or in Outlook where I didn’t have pictures and didn’t have an ability to see inside the networks of friends each person has (Facebook lets me see all of your friends as well, if you leave that open, which most people do).
2. Facebook is a great way for me to promote what I’m doing. Absolutely. Jason’s right there! But it’s NOT one way! Hint: great parties, great people come to you, too. I’ll have a lot more to say about that soon.
3. Are we creating a social system to communicate with each other at a distance because the reality of creating and maintaining that social networking face-to-face is, well, scary? Well, I’m sure that some people would be scared by getting a ride in Jason’s Corvette, but I’ve been there and it was one of the greatest thrills of my life. Can I experience that over Facebook? No, but Jason’s phone number is on his Facebook so you can always call and invite him out for dinner.
4. Is Facebook a more efficient, rejection-free, surrogate for the real world? Um, Nick Denton didn’t accept my friend request. So, no, it’s just like the real world where some people think you’re an asshole and other people think you’re cool. I notice that Jason has enough people who think he’s cool that there’s an entire group of people who think he’s cool on Facebook. Seriously. Do a search on Jason’s name and you’ll find the group.
5. At a certain point social networks create negative returns on your investment. Absolutely. These things get noisy the more people you add to them. So, if you want to have no noise definitely don’t have any friends. Or keep your networks down to only your “real” friends instead of anyone who wants to come in. My strategy? I’m going with the noise cause I don’t know where the gold is going to come from. I realize not everyone is a weirdo like me in that regard.
6. Are we going to hire someone to manage our social networks? I haven’t yet and I doubt I will. My friend network is too important to me and there’s all sorts of gestures that are coming to me through it that I’d miss if some intern was tending to my network.

Anyways, interesting discussion. If I were really smart I wouldn’t be engaging in this right now and, instead, testing out the new CoComment that came out yesterday. Now THAT is interesting.

Of course now that Jason has closed down comments maybe that’s not so interesting after all.