Facebook is useless to me. We’re all too connected to really connect.

Yes, I hide all the Mafia warriors and the Farmers and those people lately who are so thrilled to be breeding weird little animals. I hide as many of my inane friends as I can. I don’t join any groups and I am a fan of nothing, but it still doesn’t matter. There are people whom I’d actually like to know what they are doing and maybe they care about me, too, but we just no longer meet-up.

He doesn’t offer any proof or rigor, but it’s true for me as well.  Interesting that social networks appear to invert the network effect.

He also notes that for publications there is an optimal circulation size for an advertising base – making it quite possible to become too large to make money.  Cringely’s suggestion is for Facebook to way to weed out the least profitable customers so the value to advertisers (and CPMs) is higher.

But Facebook doesn’t want to be Time magazine, they want  to be Google – number of impressions is all.  BUT if people stop getting value from the networks they’ve built in Facebook those numbers will plummet.

The right solution isn’t booting people from Facebook – the cost per user approaches zero.  The RIGHT solution is fixing Facebook so even an incredibly large network is still compelling to the user.  And the solution is dead simple in concept (if very difficult in implementation and design).

I don’t have 487 friends – I have a dozen networks of people with only a very small number of those people being in more than one network.  Facebook’s networks help FIND people with similar interests, but do nothing to help MAINTAIN connections with those people.

The solution is personas.

If Facebook is going to kill off all the mailing lists, bulletin boards, yahoo groups, blogging networks, etc that allow me to keep my personas locked into different online spaces (which they are currently doing at a rapid pace), they are going to have to stop forcing me to lump family, friends, co-workers, long lost high-school friends, Thrashers’ fans, college alumni and neighbors into a single network.

Facebook’s list functionality sort of allows me to organize my networks and switch between them – but it’s clunky at best.  What’s more it is something that should be automated by Facebook.  They can see all those potential  interconnections when I add a friend and should be able automatically drop them into the correct network.   Furthermore it should be simple enough to figure out which persona I’m currently wearing based on my activities.

They’re not shy about ignoring privacy to sell ads, how about giving ME some of the benefits of the all seeing eye?  If I’m looking at the activities of the other parents on my kid’s soccer team the ad targeting can be scary precise (and much more valuable.

Hmmm – a massive network of people that can be sold against in very specific niche interest areas and current activities…

sort of like Google adwords.

Gist is more of cross-network aggregator that creates a profile page of all your web activities, but more useful, attempts to do the same for all of your email, linkedin, facebook, twitter contacts – so you can watch their activities in a single place.

Both include light CRM features – contact reminders and history and importance weighting for emails/activities

Meh.

I made several award winning consumer CD-ROMs back in the day, before the industry collapsed with he advent of the internet.  But that whole market was largely built on the willingness of people who’d just spent $1500 on a multimedia capable PC being willing to spend another $40 or $60 on a handful of non-game edutainment titles to justify the purchase.  In just a couple years we devolved from Passage to Vietnam, my own A.DAM The Inside Story and Faces of Conflict to selling edutainment titles by the linear foot.

Though I wish I were wrong, digital coffee table books aren’t making a comeback, no matter how pretty the iPad screen is, nor how intuitive the UI other than as a justification by early adopters for buying the device.

It’s nothing more than Apple’s hype machine plus traditional media hoping that the iPad is going to be the savior for paper publishers that iTunes has (almost) been for music.  But people aren’t turning away from newspapers and magazines just because they can get the same stuff for free online. They are doing it because they’re spending less of their free time consuming mass media and more of it collaborating and creating – posting photos to Flickr, messaging on Facebook (or God forbid Farmtowning)  and surfing through youtube videos instead.  All of which you can do all with an iPad while sitting on the couch with Dancing with the Stars on in the background.

I have come around to thinking the iPad is going to be an important device – it’s a great form factor for a lot of horizontal apps (think insurance adjusters, roofing contractors, and census takers) and for casual use where a laptop is just too much (in a book bag or on the couch).

Low subscription price episodic content might work – Apple managed to create the create the first successful microcontent venture in iTunes after all.  But how much of an upcharge can you get for The Daily Show on an iPad when I can get it on my laptop for free?

But maybe I’m wrong.  If anybody thinks ebooks with embedded video and 3d photos is the next big thing, drop me a line – I’ve got the chops and would love to be creating beautiful edutainment titles just as long as you can find enough people willing to hand over $13 a pop to look at them.

Aka-Aki, Belysio, Bliin, Blumapia, Blummi, Brightkite, Buddy Beacon, Buddycloud, BuddyMob, BuddyWay, buzzd, Carticipate, Centrl, CitySense, ComeTogethr, Dodgeball, Dopplr, Duzine, EagleTweet, FindbyClick, FindMe, Flaik,Footprint History, FourSquare, Foyaje, Fraced, Friend Mapper, Friends on Fire, GeoMe, GeoSpot, GeoUpdater, Glympse, Google Latitude, Gowalla, gpsME, Grindr, Groovr, GyPSii,ICloseby, iPling, Ipoki, IRL, Jentro, Junaio, LightPole, Limbo, Locaccino, Locatik, Locatrix, Locr, Locle, Loki, Loopt, MapMe, Map My Tracks, Match2Blue,MeetMoi, Meet Now Live, Microsoft Vine, Mizoon, Mobilaris, MobiLuck, Mologogo, Moximiti, My Adventures, MyGeoDiary, MyGeolog, Myrimis, myWingman, NAV2US, Now Here, Nulaz, Plazes, Pocket Life, Pownce, Quiro, Qlique, Rummble, Shizzow, Skobbler, Skout, Sniff, Snikkr, Socialight, Sparrow, Spot Adventures, SpotJots, Stalqer, The Grid, Toai, Tooio, TownKing TownQueen, Trackut, Trapster, Tripit, Troovy, Twibble, Twinkle,Twittelator, Unype, weNear, WHERE™, Whereis Everyone , WhereYouGonnaBe, Whrrl, Zhiing, Zintin

from – bdnooz.com

A few things.

1) Make sure the power monitoring is right:
- When I first got my G1 it would claim that it was about to be out of power after only 6 hours or so. I eventually was out and about and let it run down instead of scrambling to recharge. It ran for 12+ hours before finally shutting down. After that it seemed to reset how quickly it would think it was running down. I’ve seen the same thing happen with 2 other G1s, so maybe there is an issue in the power management/recharge warning system for all androids. Let it run all the way down to die and see if things get better after the full recharge.

2) Install the power control widget on your desktop (touch and hold on a blank area of the home screen, pick widget and then power control. This will make it easier to monitor what’s going on and minimize your running power.

3) Turn off what you don’t need:
- turn off the GPS, use the cell system for your continuous location information – home screen, menu, settings, security and location, select use wireless networks, and turn off enable GPS. Now google maps, etc. will have your location within a couple hundred yards, but you’ve turned off a continuously running GPS radio. When you want to use google maps for driving or walking directions turn the gps back on from the power control widget.
- I turn the screen brightness all the way down and never need to brighten it unless I’m using the map in direct sunlight.
- bluetooth is always off, I don’t use it.
- wifi is almost always off – I find the 3G available almost everywhere and fast enough. I will turn it on if I am using the browser at a bar/restaurant and only have edge data.
- you could turn off your data sync from the widget – but haven’t ever needed to.

4) Install task killer
- You’ll find it in the market, it’s free. It also has a desktop widget that will show you everything running and let you kill them all or one at a time.
- Kill power using background apps. Most apps do nothing if you have them in the background, but some keep the processor running at full speed or look for data all the time (a twitter ap that is listening every couple minutes for instance). If you are having bad battery life, kill everything and watch what’s running regularly to help you find power hogging aps.

5) Install apndroid. It is a one click desktop widget that turns your data on and off. You can put it on your home screen below the power control so you can quickly power off all data connections. I never do this unless I’m down to a trickle of battery and am not going to be near a charger for a while, so I can maximize my phone availability.

LAFFO

Seriously awesome.

http://www.socialwok.com/

I did it with flavors.me inside 30 minutes. awesome. google or wordpress should snap this up instantly.

http://flavors.me/jonathanpeterson