"...while Time Warner execs are busy are torching AOL's HQ in Dulles, laying off scads of people and pretty much decimating the service to become a glorified ad network (now that's certainly cheeky of CEO Randy Falco!) and while Facebook is hard at work trying to ransack Bill Gates' wallet and while widget companies are hoovering up audiences with their zombies and superpokes, Yahoo feels preternaturally calm. Well, about as calm as you can be living in the eye of the hurricane..."

--Kara Swisher, continuing the c lose surveillance of Jerry Yang's 100 days and the media's fascination with Yahoo.

I'm creeping in on month 6 of being an active Facebook user. As someone who develops social media products, deeply enaging in Facebook has not only been personally fun, it's given me a chance to play in a living laboratory of apps, interchanges and technologies being applied to social purposes. This post is a means to share and chronicle some of what I'm observing and learning from a product and user experience perspective:

1. The parade of folks onto Facebook continues. There's a steady drip of 40 + aged-tech folks, media folks and others in my life onto the service, glimpsed via new friend invites. Reasons include "My kids told me to do it," "everyone else is there," "it's the new l inked in," and "I wanted to do something more contemporary...so I'm giving it a look."

2. Like classmates.com, but much more organically, it offers the chance to reconnect in a light, yet satisfying way. The expansion of the Facebook audience beyond college students and digerati means that I'm scraping down into the barrel of the past and finding folks from long ago online and we're connecting--and that feels great. I just found--and linked with--someone who was a huge influence, oh, 20 years ago, and we're going to meet for coffee next month--you get the drift.

3. It's the global village come to life. For those who choose to do status updates, FB is a perpetual stream of info light. Whether it's a casual friend, a colleague, or a close connection, status updates treat me to a humanizing and descriptive update of their moment by moment posts..at 20 words or less.

4. It's transparent and voyeuristic at the same time--and those qualities drive and model communication in a hugely impactful way. Facebook is genius at driving communication between users through modelling it. I am convinced that reading updates like "Jill wrote on Fons wall" not only lead more people that just me to click on the screens to see what Jill said to Fons," but leads to my leaving a message on the wall myself (especially if it's some one's birthday, conveniently listed on my home page.)

5. FB offers convenient tools to communicate within the ecocsystem--and it's easy. Events, groups, games--they're all there for anyone who wants to use them. I organized a party using FB event tools, just to see how it worked, and it was simple. Also set up a group, and that was a piece of cake, too. And of course the fact all these services have simple, coherent interfaces and user experience is something all us developers can learn from..FB tools are neat, bright, and functional, and yet have that user delight we discuss.

6. FB is infinitely entertaining because data continually changes--yet is anchored to people I know. I'm the former writer who eagerly waited for the rejection letters in the mail, the email junkie who kept checking, the woman who loves her mobile alerts and SMS, so why wouldn't FB's ever changing data stream of small news be equally absorbing? It is, even if I don't log in more than 2X a day.

Conclusions: Others can debate the valuation, my interest is the execution and build out of the concept. There's alot to savor, and alot to be learned, and I am still eager to see what next big thing the FB experience is training us for.

"After spending rosh hashana with ali's family, I hijacked her and flew to vegas instead of sf where she thought we were having a quiet dinner at jackson filmore.

Ali started seeing weird lights in the desert and realized it was vegas. She started yelling in the back. Dave and I shut the pilot doors.

I told ali we were going for a fun vegas night because the past wk was hard for her moving to sf. She didn't think we were getting engaged. She said her nails weren't done and since I didn't care she thought it was going to be mexico over her bday...."

My weekly column at Blogher's switched to Mondays. Latest here.

"So what are the politics of heartbreak? How do we go on, in this? How do all of us--even those of us who mostly do well, because we all have these times--how do we deal with living in a world that does such damage to us?

How do we scrub away at the tears and keep on going, even while the hammer falls on our hearts, over and over and over? Make important decisions, or any decisions at all? Because, by and large, somehow, we do. Somehow we're still here, and still fighting, even if it's just fighting to tread water."

--Little Light, writing very movingly at Taking Steps about challenges, struggles and keeping on.

"I honestly think my greatest strength is my willingness to hire people who are, simply, better than me. Erick fits nicely into this category, and I can't wait for him to start."

--TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington, announcing he's hired former Business 2.0 writer/editor Erik Schoenfeld as his co-editor.

I've been working with Kalyia Hamlin, Laurie Rae, Julie French, Mary Hodder and lots of others to help pull together an unconference called She's Geeky that is happening Oct 22-23 at the Computer History Museum in Santa Clara, California.

For me working on this conference is both a chance to give back and do some service for the community, and to support (other) women in tech, especially the less traditional ones who may have cross-functional roles and/or feel somewhat isolated or unique.

This is a gathering for women who self-identify as geeky (as in tech geeks) and/or work in technology; the first afternoon will be workshops and panels; the full day will be an unconference.

So, please--get involved if this is of interest--it is going to be a great, diverse, friendly and vibrant day and a half.

Vital stats------
She's Geeky (http://www.shesgeeky.org/)
A Women's Tech (un)conference
October 22-23 in Mountain View, CA.
This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self identify as geeky. Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology.

How to engage:
See who has signed up so far: http://shesgeeky.org/Who%20is%20Coming

Register for conference here: http://shesgeeky.org/Signup
P:ay after you sign up: Follow the prompt after you activate your account to pay via paypal - http://shesgeeky.org/pay.
Propose a topic: http://shesgeeky.org/Proposed%20Topics
FB group here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5010135719
-------

Sponsorship
We are still looking for sponsors and media sponsors. If you or your company would like to contribute, please contact us at mailto:Shesgeeky@gmail.com?subject=Sponsorship or post on the wiki.
This can be 200-5,000!..small amounts help.

This week Google came on board as a sponsor along with the Nonprofit Technology Network, Atlassian, Purple Tornado, and Citizen Agency. We have two great media sponsors so far DevChix and LinuxChix.

If you want to help/contribute in some other way you think might be useful let us know.

Also--today is link push day. If you want to support us--blog about this event today and link back to this post or to Kaylia's post.

"If there is anything that the grassroots, collaborative modeling of Web 2.0 has taught me it is that for anything that was once thought to be a best practice, you can find better alternatives just by looking deeper. More and more people are doing this and realizing that the old ways of doing business inherited from Web 1.0 are just not cutting it in the more community-based, connected world of social networks. The more feminine values, such as relationship building, openness, and cooperation, are growing in popularity for everyone, not just the female entrepreneurs. Many of these values come from the egalitarian outlook of open source, but I also believe they are highly influenced by the diversity of customers."

--Tara Hunt, writing Making Women in Technology Visible at O'Reilly

Susan sez: This is one of the BEST blog posts I have ever read..Tara, you're wise, brave and you rule.

"Over the last few months, I have talked with a couple of people who are working on ideas, because that's what entertains them. I don't even think they realize that they are founding businesses. Sometimes they are just playing around. Sometimes they are actively trying to solve a problem or provide a service. They walk the dog, practice their yoga, work on their idea, watch the kids. And they do all of this seamlessly. There is no work life balance, there is only life.
(snip)
What makes these situations special is a strength of vision or particular passion that motivates you to keep working, even when it is a little lonely and no one really thinks you know what you are doing.

--Ross Settles, yogi and consultant extraordinaire, writing on his blog, Exchanging Hats

At the wine and tapas party I was at last night at a friend's house, the 40-something group had a great time talking, eating, drinking and taking photos of the merriment. What interested me was that everyone there agreed that being linked on Facebook had made a huge difference to how they kept up with and communicated with friends.

This morning, I see that two of the people at the party went home and posted pictures and comments either right to their FB account, or to their blog--which shows me, yet again, how social media tools not only support community-they deepen and foster it--even in people over 30.

On Friday, I was at another friend's house, at another party (for me that's an unusually social weekend..) and there was tons of videoblogging going on, but most of this crowd, I think, was closer-knit, so there was less of a sense of chronicling new connections and more of a sense of just enjoying the togetherness and letting videography be part of the fun.

Congrats to my old friend Richard MacManus for adding a new writer to the group! Richard says " Marshall Kirkpatrick is joining Read/WriteWeb as a Lead Writer, starting this Monday. Marshall teams up with Josh Catone in this role, meaning that Read/WriteWeb now has three daily writers (including myself). "

My weekly piece is up at Blogher--this one is about writing poetry again, after a long hiatus, and what I think has made that possible.

"The headline out of General Petraeus's testimony was a prediction that the United States should be able to reduce its forces from 160,000 to 130,000 by next summer. That sounds like a big number, but it would bring American troops only to the level of troops that were in Iraq when Mr. Bush announced his “surge” last January. And it's the rough equivalent of dropping an object and taking credit for gravity. "

-- NY Times editorial board, September 11, 2007, writing about where we are with Iraq..and how much the Bush administration is stonewalling and keeping to their own agenda.

RoshHashona/MySharona
I Gotta Love You Rosh Hashona

The Day of Judgement (Jewish hip hop)

and my total favorite--the amazingly clever and funny chris crocker doing
britney this is for you
and--seen by 3.5 million people in a week or so--
Leave Britney Alone!

Brad Fitzpatrick--livejournal creator-- has a really articulate post on what FB coined as the social graph--the need/wish to see how you and your friends/community are connected around various nodes/behaviors/themes/interests and to have an easy way to access friend data across networks and services.

This is a must-read for what is probably one set of the heart of Web 3.0--the other set being structured databases across large, distributed data sets, IMHO. (More on this, later).

One great quote:
"The world won't switch en masse to anybody's "social networking interop protocol", pet XML format, etc. It simply won't happen. This must all work supporting any and all ways of data collection, change notification, etc. Cute new protocols and XML/YAML/JSON formats for cooperative sites will help (and have already started to be deployed with a few early cooperative sites), but by and large, most sites won't be cooperative at first, and some (e.g. MySpace) might not ever ever support this. This is going to happen one site at a time and without everybody speaking the same protocols. That said, this project will use open standards, microformats, etc in all data that is republished in, say, widgets (for those users who like widgets) "

1 am this morning and I was back online, checking techmeme and facebook and blogher and yahoo personals and all my email accounts.

7 am and I am writing my first blog post in 10 days.

This was the longest time I was truly off the net in years--I could check email on my treo, so I monitored my life from the cottage in the woods, but no surfing, no browsing, no posting, no reading big files, no attachments, etc.

What did I learn?
A) Going away and going truly off line in Michigan was more relaxing than hiking in Peru and checking internet cafes..it felt much farther from my usual life and concerns, even if it was geographically closer.

B) Part of me is and always will be a writer, no matter how much of a tech geek I am. I used the time I normally use for blogging to write poems and short essays and was totally absorbed.

c) When I'm not always surfing blogs, I read books more: two old sci-fi novels by Lois McMasters Bujold, the first volume of Dorothy Drunnett's Lymond Chronicles, a marvelous book of poems by Claudia Emerson called late wife, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and various magazines, poems by Neruda and so on.

d) It's hard to think about tech, social media and Silicon Valley when you're swimming, hunting for petosky stones, hiking, canoeing, rowing and eating black cherry ice cream in a little town in the Midwest.

e) It's energizing to think about tech, social media, and the Valley when you get home, refreshed, which is how I feel right about now.

See that picture? By tonight, I hope to be there. Yep, this is vacation time....see you all in a bit