Four authors at one small party. Just got back from it. Mighty weird. Of course the cell phone came out.

The highlight was meeting Christine Comaford-Lynch who wrote “Rules for Renegades.” She’s in the video I shot on my cell phone. Drat that it ran out of memory cause I didn’t delete the videos from BugLabs yet. I also give Tim Ferriss heck for “working six hours a week.” (His book is titled the Four Hour Workweek).

She worked at Microsoft back in the 1980s. They wouldn’t hire her because she’s “a chick who didn’t graduate from high school.” But she could code and she could run companies (she’s run five now so far).

The party was hosted by Teresa Rodriguez Williamson, founder of Tango Diva and author of “Fly Solo” which is a book for women who want to travel the world. She also is the founder of Tango Diva and lives about a block away from us. She always has the most amazing people over her house — and I’m not talking about me.

Hope your weekend was as interesting and as fun as ours was.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

If you like playing with electronics you’ll WANT one of these.

Introducing BugLabs.net’s BUG. Here’s BugLabs’ founder/CEO Peter Semmelhack and marketing guy Jeremy Toeman showing off the devices ind epth.

I filmed three videos there yesterday. If you want to get an idea of what BUG can do, this should about cover it.

Video one, introduction.
Video two, final shipping plastic.
Video three, open hardware.

If you’re a geek you MUST WATCH this series of videos.

By the way, these were filmed with my cell phone, a Nokia N95 (I wasn’t planning on running into Peter, so didn’t have my professional camera with me).

I was on San Francisco State University’s campus this morning to give a talk when someone came up to me and wanted to see my Kindle. I’ve now shown it to dozens of people and the reactions are all pretty similar. I have started filming these reactions so you can see how people react when they first get their hands on it.

Why was I so harsh on it? Because of conversations just like this one.

Notice that she accidentally hits the “next” button. That she tries to use it as a touch screen. That she is bugged by the refresh rate. But, she, like me, is interested enough to want to buy one (she’s the first that I’ve shown it to that has that reaction). Imagine if Amazon had designed it better? Imagine how many more people would want it.

Oh, and Slashdot.org linked to my harsh review and, boy, did that bring a lot of haters to my chat room.

I’ve read two books on it, which explains why I haven’t been on Twitter very much in the past week. But the Kindle really bugs me now. I’m hitting all sorts of little things that the Kindle team simply didn’t think through very well.

Here’s my one-week review of Amazon’s Kindle.

I focus on a few areas:

1. No ability to buy paper goods from Amazon through Kindle.
2. Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this device.
3. UI sucks. Menus? Did they hire some out-of-work Microsoft employees?
4. No ability to send electronic goods to anyone else. I know Mike Arrington has one. I wanted to send him a gift through this of Alan Greenspan’s new book. I couldn’t. That’s lame.
5. No social network. Why don’t I have a list of all my friends who also have Kindles and let them see what I’m reading?
6. No touch screen. The iPhone has taught everyone that I’ve shown this to that screens are meant to be touched. Yet we’re stuck with a silly navigation system because the screen isn’t touchable.

Would I buy it? Yes, but I’m a geek. I can’t really recommend this to other people yet. Sorry.

It’s obvious that they never had this device in their hands when they were designing it.

Whoever designed this should be fired and the team should start over.

Wow, you all like a good ship party! Me too, and what a party.

Today Thomas Hawk came and shot a bunch of photos that are really precious.

This one is my favorite photo of my dad.

Patrick has been carrying around our new Canon 5D and I predict he might give Thomas Hawk a run for the money! He’s gotten some awesome photos, we’ll get some up later so you can compare his photos with Thomas’. The kid has already started copying Thomas’ moves (machine guns the 5D, which takes up lots of memory cards very quickly. Milan has already had 8 gigabytes of photos taken of him. Damn, I remember when a gig of data storage was something only a huge corporation could afford.

Anyway, I’m beat and I had the easy job. I have a newfound respect for mothers.

Milan is spending his time in the special needs nursery because Maryam had a slight fever during birth. Turns out they are ultra paranoid about infections and so they are paying extra attention to Milan. Which means Maryam gets some very needed rest. Patrick and me are home now, back for more fun in the morning.

Another thing that has my attention on Maryam? Her epidural didn’t work very well. So, she gave birth saying it was like having a knife stuck in her and someone twisting it.

Some little known facts:

He was born at 2:24 a.m. this morning.
Weighed 9 lbs.
21 inches long.
Middle name is “William” after my dad’s name, pictured above.
We picked “Milan” because Maryam has been bugging me to take her to Italy for quite some time. When Milan showed up I told her “there goes your Italy trip for now.”

Anyway, we’re having a great time and thanks Thomas for the beautiful first-day images.

Alfred Thompson talks about what makes things cool.

Lots of PR people buy into his hype. That I alone can make things “cool” just by saying so.

This simply is not so.

What you don’t see behind the scenes is the cultural pressure that builds up through tons of people who are telling me things are cool.

Here’s a question: if I said “Quechup is cool” would you believe it?

Absolutely not.

Why? Because it wouldn’t match what you’re hearing in the conversation space.

Facebook became cool over three years.

I remember a conversation I had with Jeff Sandquist who told me that Facebook was being used by everyone at his daughter’s college.

I remember getting tons of requests from tons of you to join up.

I remember having dinner with Kevin Rose and having him begging me to join Facebook.

Aside: if Kevin Rose says something is cool it probably is simply because HE is cool.

It really bugs me when PR people assume that if I write about them or put their product on my show that it’ll “make them.”

This is NOT true.

What would I do if I wanted to make something cool?

I’d document the 10,000 news sites and blogs that get onto TechMeme.

Then I’d figure out how to get at least 100 of them to use my product and become crazy evangelists for it.

You only need 100.

Talk to Guy Kawasaki for how to turn people into evangelists. Or talk to the Church of the Customer folks.

Start at the bottom of the stack. Getting someone with five readers to use your product will be a LOT easier than trying to get through to Mike Arrington (he has 700 companies who tried to get his attention for the soon to happen TechCrunch Conference).

I watch about 880 feeds, almost all of whom have been on TechCrunch at some point or another.

So, if you have 100 people who are rabid fans of your product believe me I’ll hear about it, read about it, and be forced to share their thoughts on my link blog. Speaking of which, the video at Google of the graphing calculator story is, indeed, cool.

Anyway, it’s amazing to me how few PR people really understand how things do get to be cool.

MySpace got cool musicians in Los Angeles to use it. That’s why I heard about MySpace.

Anyway, Alfred is a lot cooler than he thinks he is. He was a teacher and helps teachers use technology. That makes him, in my book, a lot cooler than me.

danah boyd continues the conversation. danah (she doesn’t capitalize her name) is one of our industry’s top researchers about social software.

Actually now that Milan (our new son) is coming I’m finding myself a lot more in her camp than previously.

Why?

Maryam doesn’t want Milan to become a public object. She doesn’t want to see his photo taken onto some gossip or hater site and turned into a Kathy Sierra-style caricature. She keeps telling me to keep his photo only on sites where we can lock out anyone but our close personal friends and family.

It’s why I want per-item privacy that’s easy to figure out and easy to set. Facebook doesn’t have it. That’s one of the reasons why I am getting so much heat from around the blogosphere for “letting anyone in.”

Another case study? One of my friends caught his teenage son having a party because his son posted some pictures of that party to his Facebook page. Let’s just say that “dad” isn’t allowed into his Facebook profile anymore. This is yet another example of the problems that Facebook users are facing. Forget the fact that many of you believe that parents should have transparency into their kids lives. This was a case where a kid put some content up that he didn’t want someone else to find yet they did. Same thing as an employer finding a photo of you doing something that they would find to be a fireable offense.

There is going to be a lot of tension about Facebook until it adds much better privacy controls. Some things deserve to be open to the public (and to Google). Glad to see Facebook is recognizing that. But other things should only be kept for close personal friends. I wish I could set Facebook stuff to be shared with the audience I want to share that media with (whether or not I usually want to make my stuff totally public).

Personally, Facebook would do a lot better to listen to danah than to listen to the tech geeks like me who want more publicly-available features on Facebook.

There are a lot more people in the world who are like my wife and who want to keep things hidden than there are like me who want to have publicly-available resources.

I really wish there were a service that serves both our needs, though.

I look at the new Moveable Type and it does just this. So does Flickr.

But we don’t have a social graph that lets us really control it.

Until we have a really controllable social graph, we have “precious.” (danah’s new moniker for Facebook).

One other thing that bugs me about Facebook? The messaging (Facebook’s answer for email). I can’t forward messages. I can’t add people to a conversation there. I can’t BCC anyone. And there’s a LOT more that’s missing there. More and more people are going to get mad about the messaging system built into Facebook. But that’s a separate conversation from the privacy controls that danah and I are talking about here.

Thanks danah, I’d love to continue this on a stage at one of those Facebook conferences.

My Twitter video. An inside look. Meet the team. 37 minutes of Twitter brilliance. Watch it.

You get to see the inside of Twitter’s headquarters. Filmed last Friday, the day after they got funding. Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, talks about funding for the first few minutes — we start the interview as Biz is on the move just as they were starting to celebrate Niall Kennedy’s birthday. I’ll watch the video right now and add a list of what’s discussed.

2:50: What is Twitter? (Biz)
3:20: TwitterVision (Biz)
4:10 Niall Kennedy’s birthday and meet the Twitter team. (Biz and team)
5:27 Discussion of South Park’s role in Web world (a neighborhood in San Francisco that has a high concentration of startups). (Biz and Team)
6:08: You meet engineer Britt who talks about the infrastructure underneath Twitter and the problems scaling it and dealing with rapid growth. (Britt Selvitelle, developer).
8:02: who came up with Twitter? (Britt)
9:38: It was built in Ruby on Rails and Erlang. (Britt)
11:55: Scaling and fixing bugs. (Britt)
14:00 Were you surprised by the growth of Twitter? (Britt)
17:00 Who built the mobile Twitter? (Britt)
18:38 Meet Alex Payne. He maintains the API and works with third-party developers.
19:10 Demo of Twitter (Alex)
21:50 Using Twitter on cell phones and IM (Alex)
22:30 TwitterVision (Alex).
26:30 Discussion of TwitterFeed and LOLCats.
27:20 Answer to criticism of Twitter.
28:50 Twitter’s role during disasters.

I remember why I uninstalled Cocomment months ago. It often interfered with my ability to write comments.

Here’s what’s going on. I just tried to upload a comment over on CNET, and another one here to respond to someone. But Cocomment is giving me an error message on both and keeping my comments from uploading.

Cocomment should NEVER keep a comment from being posted. Even if the service is down. But it does. It’s very frustrating.

Until I stop seeing these kinds of error messages I can not recommend Cocomment which pains me greatly because it provides a great deal of utility when it does work.

To be fair, they are loading up version 2 today. Hopefully that fixes this bug. But for now it’s frustrating me to no end. Luckily I have a browser that doesn’t have Cocomment loaded. Praise be Parallels on the Mac!

I did a little Twittergram shortly before noon just as Facebook was coming back up off of a 1.5-hour outage. Twittergrams are 30-second audio messages that I can send to my followers on Twitter. I talked with one of the engineers inside Facebook (we were trying to get him to come down to lunch) and they said that they had a problem with a code update that they rolled up last night — the way they were talking I don’t think it was a hack, but rather an update that didn’t go well. Folks over on TechMeme are saying that Facebook might have been hacked, though. UPDATE: Facebook PR’s Brandee Barker has posted an official statement, which I’ve printed below.

By the way, the first place I go to get news is on Twitter now. The flow there is incredible and generally stories get discussed there long before they do on blogs.

Oh, and Facebook PR has a group that they’ve invited some of the press and bloggers into. Here’s an official statement that was just posted to that group:

This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today. This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”