Writing on TechCrunch, Duncan points out how small and connected and vicarious the world has become--even those with no ontention of getting an iPhone soon got to experience the energy, vicarious thrills and humor of the release and the huge interest it generated.

D writes: "The difference on iPhone Day was that instead of turning to blogs or waiting for the mainstream media to report the facts hours later, we were all able to watch it all in first person. The promise of user generated live media was delivered. The seed of a revolution was planted."

Damn skippy!

"At times, sure, I'm bored. Who isn't? But you talk about it with your spouse and you can switch things up. People are so used to everything being disposable. They throw out diapers, lighters, coffee cups, so they can throw out a marriage.”

--Connecticut therapist (and husband) Sean Meehan, quoted in a NYTimes article on whether research exploring marital bliss lasts more then 3 years (and whether the 7-year itch is real).

"Leaving your apartment for a day in ny feels oddly like preparing for a day on the playa (especially in summer). You prepare for weather elements like heat and rain, make sure you're well equipped with money, umbrella, blackberry and charger. You find refuge (bathrooms, ac, water) in the various offices you visit and truly appreciate hotels which feel like well placed oasis's much like a cool friendly tent."

-- Burner and entrepeneur and good guy Mark Pincus, spending some time in NYC.

I was meeting a friend in downtown Palo Alto last night and saw intense commotion at the Apple store, folks waiting for iPhones and tons of press activity.

Fred Wilson writes:

• Facebook apps sell for the number of users who have installed the app. The price was $0.10 per user last week. Now its $0.25 per user.
• The CPMs that Facebook apps are getting are what you'd expect. Less than $1.
• The churn rate is high. Some apps are down as much as 60% in the past week. 20% weekly churn is pretty typical.
• You can build a Facebook app in an afternoon. Maybe the more complicated ones could take a man week. So let's just say the cost of building a Facebook app isn't that high. Certainly less than $10,000.

Fred concludes: "It's a hyperactive development platform on the web in the middle of a community of 27 million (May comScore numbers) people. "

Susan sez: Is this an example of You can't afford not to develop logic? I think so! If you are looking to drive traffic back to your site, for example, FB apps may not do the trick. But it is worth the crap shoot of throwing an app into the mix right?

Yes, if you are prepared for the risk. So, there you have it. One more risk vs. reward scenario--just like the rest of what we do every day.

"There are a total of 1,131 apps. Of the last 500 to be approved, only 5 have over 100,000 members, and none have over 200,000. And it's not as if there are a lot of apps close to 100,000 - in fact there are only 5 apps within the last 500 to have between 10,000 - 100,000 members. That means fully 489 of the last 500 apps to be approved by Facebook have fewer than 10,000 members. "

--Nick Denton, Valleywa, quoting a SV developer about the shock setting in.

(Also see Marc Andressen, Now Playing, Silicon Valley Short Attention Span Theatre)

"I bet that many of the members of the Facebook generation are secretly wishing for the old Facebook where it was more about them and their friends and less about being a social operating system."

--VC Fred Wilson, describing the explosion in Facebook usage among the digerati tribes, particularly the over 25 crowds

As I've said in the post about this that just went up on the Yodel Anecdotal blog, I have done my share of online dating--and wanting to improve that experience was definitely one factor in my joining the Y! Personals team.

So it's both as a product lead and as a dater that I'm all proud and excited about the new package of photo features and captions we released this week. I'm delighted about the brand new shiny code and souped-up back end we deployed and amazed at how the number of photos users have posted has zoomed up in just 12 hours, along with the number of searches (uprading capacity always means an increase in usage, yes?)

Tomorrow's the team BBQ to celebrate all this work--even as we watch for bugs, we're so happy to be where we are, it's going to take a lot of baby back ribs, burgers and hot dogs to express it.

So, I've been mulling over an interesting question about Facebook: If the people you accept or invite into your network are your *friends*, what level of confidentiality or privacy does that imply?
In other words, if you mention something in your Facebook feed that a friend sees, is that fair game for someone in your network to blog, without checking with you?
Or to put it another way, do all of you reading this consider your FB info to be public? private? Or something inbetween?

I ask because my FB network is fairly loose and I just had the experience of someone who asked to be linked as a friend taking something I posted and blogging about it without even checking with me. I suspected this person might have this motive when I accepted their request, and decided to give them the benefit of the doubt, but when they picked up what I considered a closed-network message--in that space between public and private--and posted it on the web without even checking with me (!) I concluded a) this person has very different notions about privacy and courtsey than I do, and b) this person is not really someone I feel safe having in my friend network, so I removed'em.

What's everyone else think? Any opinions on what the right behaviors and ettiquette are for you in how you a) share info on FB and b) expect those in your network will handle what you share?

"Well ,consider what Facebook has done by opening itself up; essentially its become a mall."

--Blogger Sam Huleatt, writing about why FB is a bit--at least--of a fad right now and perhaps akin to the shopping malls of the '80s, kinda.

"Even though we were seeing eye-to-eye on what needed to be done, after the press tour and some initial conversation about where we needed to go, Rich told me that he wasn't having as much fun right now, and looking at what we needed to do, didn't see much opportunity for what he really loves to do -- architect from the metal on up and put out the 1.0 that is so far ahead of everything else - the first computer virus, one of the first MUD's, NewHoo/dmoz, Topix - that even his no good co-founders couldn't screw things up."

And

"Strap in, it's going to be fun."

--New topix CEO Chris Tolles, explaining co-founder and now ex-CEO Rich Skrenta's decision to move up to the board and put Chris in charge.

(Susan sez: Full disclosure is I am friends with these guys from waay back, so this is a totally biased post.)

My old friend and mentor Jeff Jarvis has received a MacArthur Foundation grant at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism to start the News Innovation Project, a program that will focus on exploring how citizen journalism fits into our digital world.

Jeff says that the first work will be to hold a meeting this fall to gather practitioners and best practices in networked journalism — cooperative, pro-am efforts to gather and share news--and that a web site and more info sharing will follow.

In the past 18 months, as I've worked at Yahoo Personals, I've moved farther away from citizen journalism in my daily life, but user generated content, news and information sharing tools have always been a huge part of my focus and interest. I remain particularly interested in how all these resources can fit together--along with calendars, listings, feeds, badges, widgets and so on, at the local level where--as Jeff and I learned way back in the day at New Jersey Online--user-generated content around local events and resources is one of the hardest things to commoditize.

This is a very polite way of saying that while I may not have any business reasons to attend--or be invited to--Jeff's meeting in NY this fall, I sure as hell would love to have an excuse to be there because the learnings from those sessions should carry back into everything people are doing on the Net.

Wow, what a month! I've been at work since 8 am, really busy with all the elements surrounding a big release-and then all the ongoing and new things we're working on.
Expect some blogging tonight, but today's about making the doughnuts.

Matt MacAllister likes Freebase, a structured data clearinghouse:"In some ways, it seems like the whole Web 2.0 era was merely an incubation period for breakthroughs like Freebase."
Mark Evans: 5 things that could kill Facebook.
Danah Boyd: Facebook is squewing upper-class, MySpace below.. great thoughts

Josh Porter: Facebook and relationship circles, as in how FB helps leverage them.
Sarahpr: Comments on Josh's post--and the uniqueness of each social network (Yeah, maybe...)
Robin Sloan: Snarkmarket is rocking the quotes these days.

"That better be an awfully big solar footprint you're building at the Googleplex in Silicon Valley to replace all the carbon emissions your various flying machines spew."

--Journalist Kara Swisher, writing about what she'd like to say to Google co-founder Larry Page after he landed a helicopter at foocamp this weekend.

Wow, this post by Brad Feld articulated some of the questions I've been asking. Brad says:
"As of today, Facebook is deriving massive benefit in all the application development that they've enabled. They've brilliantly created an open community that allows developers to quickly create applications that can rapidly acquire hundreds of thousands of users. This dramatically extends the functionality of Facebook by offloading the R&D and feature development to the apps developers. (How about all of them there adverbs – I sound like a press release.) However, as far as I can tell, none of these Facebook apps developers are deriving any real benefits (if you are a Facebook apps developer and ARE deriving a tangible benefit, other than customer acquisition within the Facebook infrastructure, please weigh in.) "

There you have it in a nutshell, folks--if you're a small start-up or a hack and you can cover your hosting costs and/or want to register people and acquire names, then I get the value--Or if you're a CPC player bringing listings into their ecosystem--Or if you *just* want branding--but if you're looking for ad revenue, paid content revenue, or anything else--well, it looks kinda tough.

Bonus quote/comment from Andrew Weissman on Brad's blog: "F8 reminds me so much of late 90s AOL."

Update: Weird synergy question: What if Andrew Weissman and quote of the day guy Adam Weissman are related? Egads!

I'm planning to go to several of the Stanford Jazz Festival concerts, as time and budget permit, but don't have much of a social group at the moment that includes jazz lovers.

No problem going solo--but wondering if any friends who read this blog have interests in live jazz (or hanging out) that I am not aware of?

Considering whether to go see Nicholas Payton tomorrow night--he's a horn player and supposed to be quite good.

If you're interested, send me an email.

PS Also looking at the (free) Palo Alto twilight concert series on Tuesday nights...less stellar, but most likely fun.

My 18 months at Yahoo! Personals has given me an appreciation for how product development teams are closely interconnected organisms that I didn't quite have before.

I've started to think of our team as more of a hive than a factory--The planning for the applications we build is quite detailed in terms of the business case, and then the execution process is intricate and complex, with multiple pieces happening at one time, and yet everything is eventually orchestrated into a coherent sequence that ends up with the release committee, ready to ship--but what makes things really work is the shared sense of purpose, the committment and group mind, the determination to build and execute for a specific user value, a hoped-for business result.

We're in the middle of our busiest quarter ever, where we've launched, or are launching new platforms and infrastructure, with features to follow(of course), and the scope of work we're doing is large enough I keep joking we're having twins. And yet, despite all the challenges to the schedule, our team keeps humming, focused on one result we all want to achieve (and that we all own and can be proud of.)

This might be the best group I've ever worked with; they are surely one of the best, and I keep learning from their passion and focus.

And I can't wait till all this new stuff--at a time I can't tell you yet--goes out the door!

If a person chooses to live an ethical lifestyle it's not enough to be vegan, they need to absent themselves from capitalism."

--NYC freegan Adam Weissman, 29, a proponent of what might be described as ultimate recycling, quoted in a NY Times story on anti-consumerism, a topic Judith Levine covers in Not Buying It (which I just read and enjoyed).

My friend Rich Skrenta has a typically cogent post up, only this time it's not about the Google OS, it's about the me-too and I don't wanna be left out network effects of digerati flocking to Facebook. In particular, Rich notes how the switching cost is pretty low for most SN services.

Some quotes:
"In an environment where travel is free and instantaneous, you get flash mobs.
If a place is cool, or new, or interesting, you go there to check it out.
A place might be interesting simply because there are a lot of other people there at the moment. "

and

"It's easier than ever to move from one service to another. Blog reader? No problem. Photo site? I have accounts on all of them anyway. Social networks? Yeah I'm signed up on all of them. I use the ones everyone else is using, at the moment. Just like we all do. The rest have a stub profile for me, but don't see much activity."

Susan sez:
The portal play was to embed all your apps and tools in one place as a way to hold you there(think AOL on the web).
The social network play was to have you collect all your connections to hold you there (think LinkedIn.)
The widgety-goodness way (I just can't write Web 2.0 one more time!) is to try to get the users to aggregate their tools, services, and connections in one place (think Facebook today).

That's all cool but the other thing web businesses need to think about, besides widgets, is the identity issue--the services that can figure out aggregating tools and services --like Facebook is--will grow, but the ones that can also figure out identity management--as in multiple identities and layers of privacy--can leap ahead.

"Sleep and I have broken up. Coffee and I are having an affair."

- GigaOm's Om Malik, quoted in a breathless USA Today story about how he and best buddy TechCruncher Mike Arrington woke up one day and discovered the blogs they did just for fun (yeah, right) were oh so very profitable--and well read.

Bonus quote, same story:
"We're making $200,000 a month in revenue. We're super-profitable. We don't need (venture capital) money."
--Mike A.

Susan sez: Don't ya love how breathless hard-boiled reporters can get when they reach Silicon Valley?

Bob Harris: The ultimate Sopranos exposition.
Kara Swisher: Speculations on (more) possible changes at Big Purple.
Molly Holzschlag: How do we fix the web? (Really.)
Phil Wolff: Managing the spew.

Techmeme's ablaze with posts about the changes at the top at Yahoo, but the parallel take-away in the office yesterday was how hard everyone is trying to stay focused on their work and not let sesmic plate shifts at the top distract from what needs to get done.

So much of Yahoo is about building things for customers, services, applications, platforms, tools, experiences--and leveraging between them (which the company is working hard to to do etter).

I'd like to think that bringing Sue into an even stronger leadership spot and joining her with long-time leader Jerry is a way to make the company's operating groups smaller and more aligned, to cut down issues of scale across a big organization , and to create the means to not only have a viable strategy but to focus and get it done way quicker.

Let's see if this new team can make things go faster and better at Yahoo, and get some of the speed bumps out of the way.

"I keep hearing about companies that are exercising "Option F" and launching a Facebook version of their app, only to suddenly have 500,000 users. But for how long? I'm betting, pace the Techcrunch chasm, that those people are an ephemeral crew, and that they try pretty much anything, and then drop it again. "

--Paul Kedrosky, explaining that being flavor of the moment doesn't not a sustained investment make (or, more clearly, why dropping everything to build a FB app might not be a neccessary choice).

"What is that vision? A Yahoo! that executes with speed, clarity and discipline. A Yahoo! that increases its focus on differentiating its products and investing in creativity and innovation. A Yahoo! that better monetizes its audience. A Yahoo! whose great talent is galvanized to address its challenges. And a Yahoo! that is better focused on what's important to its users, customers, and employees."

--New CEO and Y! founder Jerry Yang, describing how he and newly named President Sue Decker will create success at Yahoo and better value for shareholders.

Susan sez: My Hungarian grandma had a saying that fits this circumstance, and it went "From your mouth to God's ears." Dude, let's make it so cause this is one of those inflection points--again.

Terry Semel is now in a non-acting role; Yang and Decker to lead company--the big announcement is right here.

Susan sez: Wow!

"Anyone who thinks that old people can't come up with innovations, or new ways of looking at the world, or can't understand Facebook should go have dinner with Douglas Engelbart. He's 82 if I remember right and I'll put his brain against Mark Zuckerberg's any day of the week."

--Robert Scoble, commenting on the 'are you no longer an innovator' over 30 meme of last week.

“It's not like you go onto Amazon and think: ‘I'm a little depressed. I'll go onto this site and get transported."

--Dr. Nancy F. Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School who studies retailing and consumer habits, quoted in a NY Times story exploring how ecommerce volume has dropped as novelty wears off and retail store service adn experience improve.

According to VentureBeat's read on ComScore's May data, new(ish) network Glam.com has taken the top spot for traffic from NBC community proporty and Web 1.0 service iVillage.

Glam has17.3 million unique visits during May, compared to iVillage's 17.1 ; founder Samir Arora says that Glam's network model helps advertisers reach out to female audiences in an increasingly fragmented market. Glam's rapidly growing reach has helped it keep CPM rates up; Arora says the service is now worth $500 million, a nice chunk o change for a media property less than 2 years old.

Susan sez: The women's market is increasingly fragmented, but the CPMs continue to be high; Glam's network model --in some ways not that different from Weblogs Inc--is a next generation way to deliver advertising to women accross a distributed network--the growth of this service is another sign (not that we need one) that the portal model is essentially dead and web companies need to find ways to tap into the new paradigms.

In this vein of distributed, targeted reach, it will be interesting to see how TechCrunch, BlogHer, and BabyCenter grow their universes--and their ad revenue--in 2H 2007.

"All these years later and we're still massively at it. Because we're on the road so much, there's no time to go to the dentist, the doctor, go on vacation. My daughter's graduating from high school, and I'm gonna be in [bleeping] Dubai! "

" Facebook today feels like a web-based AOL.
You log in to do anything.
You keep logging in because you get logged out if there are big periods of inactivity.
You log in to keep in touch with your friends, just like today's net natives did in AOL's chat rooms and IM sessions.
You exchange emails back and forth with them using Facebook's walled, proprietary, email system.
You select your "buddies" that you want to keep tabs of and stay in touch with through the day.
There's not much one does in the core functions of Facebook today, that you couldn't or didn't do with AOL's AIM and ICQ instant messaging systems of almost a decade ago."

--Michaekl Parakh, writing on how net natives' creations aren't all completely new.

Just did the first day of rehearsal walks for Avon Walk in July-13 miles in about 4 hours.
Hittin' another 13 tomorrow, then getting new socks, insoles, and bandages in prep for the big one in July.

It's three weeks away--and I have to raise another AT LEAST $500 to meet my goal--SO--if you're thinking about donating to this cause, contributing money for me and my team would be much appreciated.

To make a fully tax-deductible donation-- click here--and thank you.

So in early July I am going to do the 40 miles Avon Breast Cancer walk in San Francisco.
My team is the marvelous UrbanDogWalkers--and we want to raise over $100,000.

To make a fully tax-deductible donation-- click here--and thank you for your help.

Most people who work in technology have a weight problem. We sit at our desk for hours, work late and snack on junk food. It's a very sedentary lifestyle. We have a cupboard that's stocked with chips and candy... This year, instead of diving into the free food, I blog."
--Techie and blogger Bill Real, quoted in an LA Times story on weight loss, Jason Calcanis' fat blogging efforts, and the community effect of it all.

"...Have mentioned before my discovery that there is a whole subspecies of folks who only exist on the internet?

Their friends, their social and love lives, the whole thing.

I am new to the internets, so this still fascinates me.

For these folks? The internet is serious business."

--Blogger & lawyer Emerald City Esquire, writing about a gullible friend's mishaps with online--and real world-- dating.

Businessweek's Kerry Miller has a story about one of my favorite ecommerce web sites, Esty.

Part virtual shopping center, part community, Esty is home to hundreds of small business people who make jewelry, stationary, dish towels, wallets, knitware, stationary, and so on--and added more than 250,000 registered members and 50,000 sellers, and has done a great job handling both development and expansion.

For me, what is so great about Etsy is the small business, hand made goods aspect. I find myself looking for--and buying--more and more gifts on the service, instead of buying mass-produced items from the global ecomomy. At a time when not only machines--but digital bits--take up so much of my attention, the fact I can buy small-lot, artisan-produced goods from people working in their own craft businesses just feels absolutely right.

According to a to be released today ComScore report, in April 2007, nearly 177.8 million people world-wide viewed Web content in April made with online tools from companies that let people post photos, videos and music on other Web sites,--And that's based on a more limited release of the Facebook API