“Foursquare is fun because it makes all the meaningless shit in my life seem worth something”

Michael Kersey – Best Friend, Roommate, and WoW addict

While Facebook Places has the mainstream audience, they still don’t have the greatest aspect of the check in “experience”, which is making checking into places fun. Foursquare really does do a great job of making the most boring aspects of your life worthwhile by validating yourself through badges and by making you feel cool with features such as being a Mayor.

I think that quote from my friend sums it up quite nicely, and if Foursquare keeps making people like my friend Michael happy, they might have a shot at competing with Facebook and their 500+ million strong army.

See comment here- I laughed my ass off when I saw that comment while at work today. I am not quite sure if I laughed so much because it was truly funny, or because I was just that bored with my life, who knows. Nonetheless, that is the reason why I changed the title of my post.

Here are just a list of people I think startups will be pitching in hopes to get that big break required to succeed.

• @parent5446
• @jessieamorris
• @hunterclarke
• @grantbell
• @hunterowens
• @netspencer
• @chacha102
• @stephenou
• @jimminy

I am sure I will have more to add to the list as time goes on.

There are freelancers that are struggling for work, and then there are freelancers with too much work. Based on the little experience I have in this up and down industry, you’re either getting a lot of work requests on a very regular basis or very little work requests on a sporadic basis.

One of my favorite bloggers and respected web designer, Sam Brown, wants to solve this problem with his new project Endor.se. While I do not have access to Endor.se yet (closed beta) and cannot do a review, you can still learn a lot about the project over on Sam’s blog. The post details what Endor.se is, and what it is not. From what I am reading and seeing, I don’t think anyone will be disappointed, and I am looking forward to doing an in-depth review in the near future.

Endorse – What it is and what it is not. – Sam.Brown.tc

Fuck You, Leave Mark Alone – AlexWilhelm.com

We all need to calm the fuck down. Really, it’s getting to be a daily occurrence that some person in tech, be it a blogger, an idiot, a CEO of a company in an unrelated space, lays into Zuck for one reason or the other. Mark is too immature! Mark needs to have a Carol Bartz moment! Mark needs to step aside! Mark is melting down! Resign! Fired! Mark is, is, is, is, is blah blah blah. Shut the fuck up.

He cusses a bit more than I usually do, but I agree with every word.

Is Farmville more powerful than Facebook? | TechYell.

Mark Nielsen asks if Farmville is more powerful than Facebook.

In short, no.

Farmville is an important part of the Facebook environment, but it is only some of the glue that holds Facebook and the ever increasing engagement rates together. If Farmville were to outright leave today, I would say the effect would be minimal because someone would come along seizing the opportunity to replace them.

BUT

If Facebook were to piss off the long-tail of games on their platform, as well as Zynga, well then…

Facebook will have a problem.

It’s the long-tail that has the power IMO, and Facebook is known for pissing people off, it is just a matter of time before they tick off the dudes smaller than Zynga.

What do you think?

I know I have a handful of dedicated readers out there *waves* and I spose’ now is as good time as many to do the thing that for some reason most bloggers dread.

Disclosures.

You see, after nearly three years of blogging at random places (LostTheTech, TechGeist, TheNextWeb, Technorati… whatever), having an assortment of grammar fails, being horrifically wrong on numerous occasions, and getting tore a new one by random commenters on Digg/Reddit/Slashdot/FriendFeed/Twitter or any other social media service you can possibly imagine, it is all finally starting to pay off.

Last week, Sean O’Gwin called me and offered me a freelance job to write about each of the speakers at the Kynetx Impact Conference, specifically what my personal thoughts were on each of them.

Woah.

I have never actually been straight up paid to write blog posts before. Sure, I have earned some advertising money here or there, but to be honest, the money I earn from Cliqset doesn’t even begin to cover hosting, and let’s not bring up Adsense.

Needless to say, I took the job. Which means I now have an official conflict of interest!

My first post will go out today, and I will be cross-posting the post I wrote for the Kynetx blog to mine with links and probably a little graphic pimping Kynetx as well. There will also be the appropriate disclosure at the beginning and end of the post making it very clear I did get paid to write it. Every word written in that post, and future posts, will be 100% what I think about Kynetx and whatever other parties I mentioned. I have been blogging basically unpaid for a few years now, if I didn’t believe in Kynetx, I wouldn’t of taken the job. While the money is nice (the good lord knows I can do with it), I am not willing to compromise the hopeful trust ,and credibility, I have with you readers. I would gladly deny that paycheck if I had to, and I hope you know that…

Y’all are worth more to me.

So in short, yup, I am getting paid, and in essence, I truly believe it shouldn’t affect you at all.

BUT

If you feel it is, you know where to get a hold of me, private or public, it doesn’t matter.

Until then, I really do hope you enjoy

Note: There is a slight possibility that this job with Kynetx could turn into a more permanent position. If it does, I will write a whole new post addressing that issue. Until then, I am not concerned about it, and neither should y’all.

I have decided that I have invested enough of myself into this domain/blog that I am going to take a leap of faith and transfer my main means of communication from holdenpage@gmail.com to holdenpage@pagesaresocial.com.

I thought this would be a quick and painless process. After all, I am still going to use Google Apps for all of this, transition should be simple, right?

Wrong.

Turns out there is no nice “migrate” or “transfer” button to move your Gmail data (contacts, filters, e-mails, and all that jazz) to your Google Apps account. Instead, you need to go through all of this. So what I thought would take a max of 24 hours, mostly due to my host/Google recognizing MX record changes, the process is going to take about a week. This will also include transferring my Google Documents, Reader settings, and other data to this “new identity”.

You don’t realize how much data Google has under your Gmail identity until you need to move it.

Now, don’t lecture me on how many ways I can get around this. In short, I am anal, and I want all my data under this new identity. I am completely aware of the options I have. Just so happens what I thought was the easy option, and the option I wanted, is a bit harder and more time consuming then I originally believed.

Bummer.

I just find it fascinating that Google hasn’t created a syncing tool for situations like these. After all, it doesn’t seem that uncommon to do, plenty of searches and threads are open on the matter.

It will be an interesting week transferring my data, and I am sure I will tweet all about.

Note: Ignore this post, I am wrong and did not think this through. I tried to write counter-arguments but simply couldn’t due to the fact the premise of my post is severely flawed. I will follow up on this post in the future when Google Editions actually releases in order to make a more informed (and more defensible) opinion. In the mean time, check out the comments as to why I am wrong. Good stuff.

Reports are surfacing that Google will start selling digital books this summer through a product called Google Editions. Based on reports, about 300,000+ books will be up for sale, making Amazon’s and Apple’s inventory of e-books look pitiful in comparison. Already bloggers are calling it a “war”.

Look, I am not going to go into some real deep analysis here, so I am going to lay it out bluntly.

Google Editions is going to suck, just like Google Buzz sucks.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Google, but all they are doing is hopping on yet another bandwagon without any passion. Amazon and Apple are dead serious about competing in this space. Hell, they have both released devices basically dedicated to the market. They are willing to spend the time, effort, and commit the necessary amount of failure in order to succeed.

I don’t think Google is.

Therein lies the problem with Google lately. Sure, Google can release a product allowing you to purchase books, and yes, a good number of people will probably use it, but when it comes right down to it, Amazon and Apple will be the winners of this war. They will have the majority of consumer support due to the fact they are focused on releasing what they think is the future of reading.

What I am trying to get at is that without focus and passion, Google will keep releasing new products and see semi-successes. They need to fix this in order to compete. Until then, Amazon and Apple can keep on keepin’ on while swapping away the fly that is Google.

A lot of people are really upset with Facebook. Steven Hodson of Shooting At Bubbles has written numerous posts on the matter, and so have many others.

Quite a few people have asked for my opinion on Facebook’s latest social moves, and I haven’t really given a straight answer to any of them. At first I thought this was because I haven’t had time to think it all through. Turns out (surprise!), I was wrong. It wasn’t that I didn’t have time to think it all through, it was because I simply didn’t care.

As far as I know, Facebook is not doing anything “bad” with my data, and all in all, they are actually making my web experience better. After all, it is nice having all my friend suggestions with Pandora, as Robert Scoble pointed out. Plus, I lead a rather public life anyways, and anything I want private I simply don’t publish, and IMO, more people should follow that line of logic. Still, this isn’t the real reason why I don’t care. The real reason I don’t care is because Facebook is simply the intertubes latest play thing.

Look, I haven’t been on the web for long, but I am not stupid. By tomorrow, someone could make a service that could displace Facebook’s dominance within the next two years. After all, I remember the days when many tech bloggers said that Facebook would never touch Myspace in terms of reaching us teens and displacing them as the number one social network. I also recall them saying it with such a definitive attitude, it was hard not to believe them.

Whoops.

From my perspective, Facebook’s dominance, while powerful and controversial today, will be moot by tomorrow. That isn’t to say that y’all shouldn’t care, someone needs to, or one of these days a company is truly going to cross the line. So I will let my buddy Steven make sure we all keep our eyes and ears open to Facebook’s latest “shinnagins”, while I sit here quietly, watching as some new service takes over the web while us bloggers profess that Facebook will never be beat.

Meanwhile, I will listen to some awesome songs suggested to me by my friends on Pandora, and at the very least, remain entertained.

This is why I love commenter’s. Ed Borasky, left a really insightful comment (not to mention used an awesome Latin word I plan to use whenever I can) that could be a post on its own. Here is his comment:

There are quite a few important things that neither Facebook nor Google do really well. Twitter and Wikipedia are filling important gaps for Internet users. IMHO the web is “converging” on a “triumvirate” of search (Google and Bing), networking (Facebook and LinkedIn) and news-history (Twitter and Wikipedia).

Those are the six places I visit regularly, although Facebook is coming off the list, and I use Google as little as humanly possible. If I were Google, I’d buy (and index) LinkedIn. This could be an enormous cash cow for them – they could wipe Monster and Dice out, I think.

*bold added by me to add emphasis

This “triumvirate” web idea is fascinating to me, and in all actuality, makes perfect sense.

Let’s be honest here, Google sucks at being social, but is great at organizing, letting you find, as well as create (think Google Docs), information. Bing does this almost as well.

Facebook sucks at all of that except at being social. They are great at finding and encouraging connections with friends and family. Linkedin is great at connecting people with their coworkers, and even future coworkers.

Wikipedia and Twitter suck at all of that, but they are great at news-history. Once Twitter enables public search of all tweets, it will be amazing to see the reactions of people during certain times during certain events. Then we have Wikipedia to organize the story within hours of it happening with tons of sources to refer to.

It is my belief that none of these companies can possibly be great at all these things. Sure, they can be good and do the job for some people well enough, the majority are always going to go towards the best. Right now, these companies are the best within their respective categories (information, social, and news) and each hold an equal amount of immense power.

What do you think, are we moving towards the triumvirate web?

After reading Ed’s comment, I believe we are.