History of Farmville:

Facebook launched its application platform. Games like MobWars are created, which take online gaming and infuse your social graph. Then games like GreenPatch are born - they are super-simple graphical games that allow you to grow a garden and buy equipment for your garden. Then Farm Town is created. It rapidly goes from 12 beta tester users to 3 Million users. A few months later, Zynga rolls-out a copy of FarmTown - calling it FarmVille. Using it’s network of other games as well as deep pockets to buy Facebook ads, Zynga grows FarmVille rapidly and zooms past.

In February, FarmVille crossed 80 Million active users. At the time, Facebook had 400 Million active uers - and the vast majority of FarmVille users were accessing FarmVille via their Facebook account. Making FarmVille a potential driver of 20% of all Facebook Active Usage.

Since then, FarmVille’s numbers have begun to delcine - dropping to 69M Active Users in June - while Facebook officially crossed 500 Million active users a couple weeks ago. In this post I’ll analyze why FarmVille was successful, and in follow-up posts I’ll look at what caused it’s decline and what to expect in the social gaming space going forward, with the growing speculation about Google taking-on Facebook.

Why was FarmVille a success? Four reasons:

Broader appeal than previous online games - women, casual, and mainstream

Built-in reason to come back

Interlocking levels, points, and tiered products

Making it Social

Appeal to men & women

Unlike games like Mafia Wars that can be more violent, farmville is appealing to women. You can be creative, beautifying and accessorizing your farm with colored fences, signs, flags, topiaries, and more.

Furthermore, whereas historically online gaming has been dominated by games like Warcraft, Starcraft, and Quake, which are fast-paced, highly-competitive, and adversarial, this new brand on online gaming is more focused on the casual user, and the online components are that of collaboration - sending gifts to neighbors, fertilizing each others crops. This appeals to a demographic that might be interested in online gaming, but that was intimidated by the competitiveness of a game like Starcraft, where if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re bound to get creamed by some teenager in Korea within the first five minutes.
(Aside: after a recent conversation with a friend at Blizzard, maker of Starcraft, I learned that with the launch of Starcraft II, solving this problem so that new players have an enjoyable online / multiplayer experience was a top priority in game development.)

Finally, FarmVille is uniquely appealing because it doesn’t feel alien or cult-like to new users. The concept of farming is very relate-able. As opposed to something like Starcraft, which is science fiction, or Warcraft, which seems like a cult, or worst-of-all SecondLife - which for all its hype - is ultimately thought-of as slightly eccentric.

Built-in reason to come back

The primary function in farmville is raising livestock and growing crops. Those two things take time. So you spend ten minutes plowing the fields and planting seeds, or spending your hard-earned cash buying a cow, and then FarmVille tells you - ok, come back in eight hours and harvest the crop or milk the cow. Bye now. And so of course you now have to come-back in 8 hours for the payoff. It’s this delayed gratification that keeps users engaged and coming back day-after-day.

Never-ending levels, with satisfying and low-effort ways to level-up

FV has done an amazing job creating reward systems. Many games have points and levels, but FB translates points and levels into “tangible” assets. You can see all the crops, but FV makes sure you know that you won’t be able to plant blueberries till level 17, and won’t be able to buy a manor till you have 100,000 coins. And there’s always another, higher level to strive for. They make it easy-enough that if you play the game once per day, every day you’ll get some kind of achievement, and some kind of surprise, but they always make sure there’s something more down the road. There is a powerful inter-dependence - you grow crops to make money to buy fancy things to customize your farm to level-up so you can plant more-advanced crops so you can make more money so you can buy fancier things so you can level-up-faster and so on. And they’ve continued to layer-on more complexity over time.  Tiers of awards for farming various crops. Tiers of fancier houses. Tiers of collections of gemstones and flora and fauna. Tiers of animals. Of decorations. of tractors. And now your own market - your own small-business where other farmers can come to buy & sell.

This tiering is powerful, but there’s something much-more more elemental in how Farmville works. Very low-intensity positive-reinforcement is at work here, acting at a very basic level on our psyche. I spend some time on Farmville, I make some money. That feels good, but immediately I’m presented with a new challenge, and I soon overcome that as well. It’s just easy-enough, but not too easy, and the payoff isn’t real, its virtual dollars, and they convert to virtual goods, but somehow they start to feel tangible. Perhaps it’s that very duality that makes it work. The barn and the mansion are virtual. But the points and virtual-dollars are also virtual - but that second layer of virtuality makes the first layer seem more real.

Making it Social

At first, I was underwhelmed by the social characteristics of FarmVille. I had been playing for 3 days and had so-far experienced little or no value in having FV friends. FV encourages you to visit your friends’ farms and do chores for money or points, share your achievements with your friends, and send your friends free Gifts. However the payments for doing chores were small. And the guy who keeps sharing FV achievements on his Facebook profile just looks like an idiot, and nobody wants to be that guy. So I really dismissed that element of the game.

FarmVille encourages you to add your FB friends as your FV “neighbors,” and shows you which FB friends are also playing FV - so I started adding them. I sent 70 requests to friends who are also on FarmVille. 5 days into the game, only 8 friends had accepted my FV “neighbor requests.” I actually have over 130 Facebook friends on FarmVille, however 60 of them have so-few points that I didn’t bother sending Neighbor-requests to them since clearly they weren’t actively playing. Breaking-down those stats that means:

8 / 70  = 11% of friend-requests were accepted

8 / 130 = 6% of my friends who have tried Farmville are active FV players - playing once per week

130 / 1600 = 8% of all my friends have ever played Farmville

8 / 1600 = 0.5% of all my friends are active Farmville users

And then I decided to buy a Beehive. My initial reasoning was that if I bought buildings like a house or a barn, I would accrue points faster, level-up faster, and finally be able to buy more-advanced crops that would help me make-money faster (you’re starting to see how this whole never-ending levels thing works). And I already had a bee - which I had gotten as a free gift from - but couldn’t use until I had a beehive to store him in. I figured I’d get some points, and have a new way to make money - harvesting the honey that my free bee was making for me.

So I bought the beehive - only to discover that I couldn’t start using it until I bought a bunch of tiny parts - nails and wood and beeswax. And until I had all these materials, my beehive would remain idle. Well Shit. I looked at the prices for all these little parts - and I simply couldn’t afford them. However, these were all items that you could receive as a free gift from a friend - now all I needed was for 10 friends to send me these 10 items. And then the social piece became clear to me. Who did I know who was also on FV that I could ask to send me these gifts?

Now the social connections are starting to make sense. After establishing some solid background on FarmVille, I started to move onto a larger set of questions - how is FarmVille’s creator - Zynga - doing? Where is all that revenue really coming from? And with increasing tensions between Zynga and Facebook, a big investment in Zynga by Google, and rumors that Google will use big social-gaming investments to take-on Facebook with its own social network - what’s in Zynga’s future? Stay tuned for Part 2 on FarmVille.

Here are 2 core weight loss strategies, and 5 surprising ones, that worked for me:

1.       Write down everything you eat

a.       I had never heard of this until I started the program, and was skeptical of it. I hated writing things down. I hated interrupting my day. I would report my weekly food logs to a dietician, and I’d half-ass the whole week’s logs the night before meeting with her, trying to reconstruct my week in food. But I soon came around. I also began to know calories off the top of my head. I started taking notes on my phone and logging it properly later. And now I find this is the core of my routine. Food logs are the core of how I lost weight. Weight loss is a highly emotional issue. We eat healthy when we feel like it. We eat poorly after a bad day. We eat cake because it’s someone’s birthday at work, and somehow it’s always SOMEONE’s birthday. We binge when we are frustrated or sad. We try to make good choices most of the time, and then we get frustrated when we don’t see results.

b.      Writing down everything you eat - and most importantly how many calories are in it - takes the emotionalism out of eating, and injects some much-needed rationality and quantification into this otherwise emotional and scattershot process. You give yourself a budget - mine is 1500 calories per day - and you stick to that for a week. And if you stick to it, you WILL lose weight. And if you didn’t, you can identify a few non-quantitative factors.

i.            Did you work out 5 times that week?

ii.            Did you get enough sleep?

iii.            Did you manage stress effectively?

iv.            Is your budget is too high - perhaps we lower it to 1400 and see if that has the desired impact.

2.       Eat breakfast

a.       Ok so maybe this one doesn’t surprise you - but it’s very important. The reason I used to avoid breakfast was that I figured if I wasn’t hungry, why eat? I would be able to afford that bigger dinner later if I skipped breakfast. But your metabolism doesn’t start working till you put something in it. A small, light, fiber-rich and protein-rich breakfast can get your metabolism going so that you spend the day burning calories.

b.      Another reason not to eat breakfast was that if I ate breakfast at 7:45, I was invariably hungry again by 10:30. If I skipped breakfast, I was fine till noon. This is often because our breakfast is high in carbs and low in fat & protein. Carbs get processed first, they spike your blood sugar, you get a sugar-high, and then in an hour you’re blood sugar crashes, and you crash, and then your stomach tells you to go find more food - and what do you do? You go eat a donut or a caramel frappucino.  Instead, eat a breakfast that’s small but high in fiber and protein - like a protein shake with a banana (a low glycemic fruit), a tablespoon of peanut butter (high in protein & healthy unsaturated fat), and chocolate whey protein. Add a tablespoon of a fiber powder or perhaps a tablespoon of flaxseed oil.  Or perhaps an egg-white omelet with wheat toast.

5 Surprising Tips that Worked

1. Carbs and Fat are still important

First Atkins. Then South Beach. I steal hear people say they avoid foods high in fat - and while there is a correlation between low-fat foods, and foods that will help you lose weight, your body converts all forms of excess calories to fat, regardless of if that food started as a protein or carb. And after year’s of low fat and fat-free products, now we’re seeing low-carb and sugar-free products. I like a lot of these products - in fact I love them - but not because they are low-carb, but because the lack of carbs & sugar help make these foods low in calories. Calories - the unit that matters most.

2. Watch a movie while you work out

I hate cardio. I hate running. I hate the elliptical only slightly less. And I used to kill myself at the gym, keeping my heart-rate at 160 or 170, but couldn’t seem to lose weight. What I learned was that less-intense cardio, but more of it, is the way to fat loss. I’m told that you’re body doesn’t even start burning fat till 25 minutes into your workout, so if you quit after 30 minutes, you’re not really getting anything accomplished. I started with 45 minutes, and eventually worked up to 60. Furthermore, I hated the elliptical, and I found that music wasn’t enough to numb my mind. I started taking an old laptop, setting it on the elliptical, and watching action movies, or even the west wing. Anything to keep my mind engaged.

3. Drink more water

First thing when you wake up - drink a glass or two of water. I do it with my vitamins. When you’re hungry - drink a glass of water first. Oftentimes we mistake being dehydrated for being hungry, and end-up  And when you come back from the gym, you’re probably just drank water and the gym, but make sure to drink a couple more glasses for good measure.

4. I don’t believe in juice

I love the people who won’t take a calcium supplement, and prefer to get it from their Orange Juice. How do you think they got the calcium into the OJ? Look at the nutrition facts on juice versus a can of coke. Same amount of calories. Same amount of sugar. At some point in the process, I realized that if I’m only allowing myself 1500 calories in a day, do I really want to spend 150 calories on a tall glass of juice? I’ll probably eat almost the same amount of food at dinner if I have a glass of juice as if I have a glass of diet coke or water. That’s because liquids don’t fill us up in the same way. So I decided, since juice doesn’t fill me up, I can get the vitamins & minerals elsewhere without the calories, and because I just don’t absolutely have to have juice in my life - I don’t crave it -I’m going to cut it out. I’ve had OJ once in the past year - and it tasted good - but I’m ok without it. It doesn’t exist in my universe.

5. Phone a friend

Sometimes when I’m feeling an urge to order a pizza come on - especially at night when I’m alone in the apartment and no one is there to judge me - I call a friend instead. I complain to them about wanting pizza and they scold me appropriately, and then I move on and talk to them for 30 minutes. By the time I hang up, the craving is usually gone. This is part of a psychological idea of delay - if you can avoid giving into a craving by delaying it - using any strategy at your disposal - you’ll often find the craving disappears soon after.

1.       Work space and personal space.

Something that I learned all to well in college was that if I tried to study at home, I would often waste the entire day. It’s very important to change your physical environment. It’s the same reason doctors tell us not to have TVs in our bedrooms - bedrooms should be for sleeping (and perhaps other things) - but email in the bedroom and CNN in the bedroom is just not good for our mental and physiological health. The most productive days are the ones where I wake up, get out of the house early, and get to a Starbucks, or, in college, the library. The change in physical space makes a big difference. If you refuse to do this, at least chose a different space from the one where you relax. Most important here - when you enter your work-space, your personal life ends at the door. No kids, pets, or spouses allowed during work hours. Although in Don Draper fashion, I won’t fault you for the occasional vodka martini. On the other side of this statement lies the contrapositive point - when you leave your work-space - work stays behind. We live in a connected age, and research shows that people who are constantly tethered via mobile devices - the constant buzz of emails, texts, or IMs interrupting you as you focus on whatever - be it TV, significant other, or family - can damage your overall cognitive ability to focus. http://nyti.ms/cBH6mT

2.       Clothes matter

From 6th to 11th grade, I would compete to be part of the North Texas All-Region Choir. Now, we Texans take our choir music very seriously, so this was no small feat. I would spend months practicing on my own, listening to tapes, singing in my bedroom, weeknight rehearsals in the weeks leading up to the try-outs with the choir teacher at school. And then the day of the audition would arrive. That Saturday morning I would drive an hour to the audition site, usually a high school somewhere in Dallas, register, wait, sometimes for hours, until my number was called, and then go into a small room with a curtain. The curtain and number were essential, because to ensure impartiality, the 3 judges were on the other side of the curtain, and were not allowed to hear my name or see my face. This ensured that the judges - who themselves were regional choir teachers - could not favor their own students or discriminate based on a student’s race. However, this also meant that they didn’t give a damn what I was wearing - and - like on exam days later in college - a lazy teenage boy is apt to wear sweats if he can get away with it. But I will never forget what my choir teacher told me the day before the audition. She said “make sure you wear a shirt and tie to the audition - it doesn’t matter that they won’t see you in it - it matters that you see yourself.” Putting on the uniform, studies have shown, can improve a players performance. In the same way, putting on my shirt and tie that day helped remind me that this was a performance, helped to get that adrenaline flowing, helped to focus me. In the same way, it’s important to get dressed from work. We all love the idea of working in our PJs at first, but you soon realize that you feel more professional, and therefore act more professional, when you’re dressed the part.

3.       Smile when you talk.

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell states that much of how we communicate is not what we say, but how we say it. And when you’re talking on the phone, all you have is your voice. My first manager and mentor at Microsoft taught me that you really can tell when someone is smiling when they talk - and it makes a huge difference.

4.       Enjoy the flexibility.

The biggest thing that working from home afforded me was flexibility. In a lot of cases, my manages was comfortable with me working not from my own home in Seattle, but from my parents’ home in Texas for sometimes a full week. This meant that I could spend real time with my family in Texas or with my girlfriend in San Francisco. Rather than arriving on a Wednesday evening, celebrating Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving with the family, and jetting-out on Sunday evening, I could fly in 5 days before, stay a few extra days after, and work remotely those days or take a few of them off and work the rest. Working from home also allowed me to live in Belltown in downtown Seattle, rather than Redmond, without worrying about a harrowing commute 5 days a week. Whereas that commute might be daunting and a huge time-waster to do 5 days a week, I knew that I would only need to do it 3-4 days a week on average.

5.       Punctuality and Professionalism.

Punctuality is probably the most important thing in the virtual-business world. In a world where we’re all over-scheduled, being 5 minutes late to a meeting is highly disrespectful, even more so considering you didn’t even have to drive over from someplace else - all you needed to do was pick up a phone on-time. But we all know that shit happens, and so professionalism comes into play. Don’t over-book yourself, leave time between meetings/calls to take notes, run to the bathroom, etc., and if you’re going to be late - send an email well-in-advance, or just schedule the meeting for 15-minutes past the hour instead. Finally, in a world where we’re all interfacing, assigning action items, and doling out deliverables, it’s very important to be clear on the outcomes and deadlines from each meeting, if for no other reason than that’s its damn hard to get someone on the phone, and you’d rather not chase them down a second time.

6.       Don’t. Just don’t work from home.

I say this in jest, but the truth is that from the point of view of the company, working from home bleeds productivity and retards communication. When I worked for the Public Sector team at Microsoft, one third of the marketing team worked from Redmond, one third from Washington D.C., and fully one-third worked remotely. And therefore, in a lot of ways, there was little downside if I wanted to work from home. But on the days that many of us would come into the office I definitely noticed that work moved faster. When Jason was in the office with me, and I had a question, I could stand-up, peer over the wall of my cube, yell his name, and, if he was free, we would chat, I would get my answer, and move on. When I worked from home, time became measured in 30-minute Outlook-scheduled chunks - I had to find 30 minutes on his calendar, he was busy and would propose a new time - perhaps next week when things calmed down. I could pick-up the phone, but in our highly-scheduled world, the only free moments were often the few moments between when his 10:30 call ended (if it ended early at all), and his 11AM call began. Certainly, when I’m the CEO of my own company, working from home is going to be something that’s highly regulated. But maybe that’s just me.

Disclaimer: I usually don’t write personal posts on this blog - I save them for the other one that no one reads. But I’m trying something new. If this isn’t your particular brand of vodka, please skip.

It recently hit me - for the first time perhaps - that the reality of marriage isn’t all that far off. Whereas for girls my age, the prospect of marriage is already weighing on them, for most gentlemen I”m friends with, it’s something we don’t discuss, something that just isn’t a concern yet. I have always thought of marriage as something that comes in the distant future, after I grow up, almost as though it’s something that’ll happen to someone else - a different Prasid. A taller, skinnier, more-mature, successful, well-dressed Prasid in a black suit and red bowtie, marrying a beautiful and equally-successful, equally-tall girl in a red saree that matches his bowtie. I think perhaps this is part of some deeper problem - some inability to see the person I want to become, my goals and ambitions, and then connect that back to the life-path I’m currently on.

In describing why I read Bill Clinton’s autobiography, I once told someone that I wanted to know more than just what he did as President, I wanted to take the goal of “being President of the United States” and then connect that ambition back to the life-path he took to get there, and trace it back to where I am now. I didn’t get the unvarnished truth - I really should read biographies rather than autobiographies.

In any case, it finally occurred to me that I’m 26, I’m done growing taller, I’ve lost the weight, and I’m not getting any smarter, so the consciousness I have today, the body that I have today, isn’t too far from the consciousness and body I’ll have when I get married. It won’t be someone else, an entirely different taller-older-wiser person - it’ll be me.

Now, facing the prospect of marriage, means also coming to terms with the real possibility of divorce. I grew up a romantic. I didn’t think I’d drink until I did. I didn’t think I’d hookup with girls, until I did. I didn’t think I’d ever hurt a girl, until I did. And I don’t think I’ll ever get a divorce, but whose to say?

I grew up thinking that I was smarter than most, more in touch with my feelings, more moral, and would find someone who truly fit me, and be with them forever. I grew up believing that family was unbreakable - that no matter how much I might hear my parents fight downstairs, in another hour it would be over, and everything would go back to normal. I was lucky enough to grow up without any doubt about the strength of their marriage, perhaps because they hid their own doubts from me. And so now I believe if I ever make that unbreakable vow to someone, it will be forever. Yet as I look around at other smart self-aware people, I see them getting divorces, I see them calling the cops on their husbands, I see married friends flirting with exes, I see them playing with their lives and marriages as though this is high school dating and there are no consequences.

And now I’ve started down the same path. I can see myself slowly doing things that the old me might now have approved of. And I justify it because I treat it like I’m still in high-school, like we’re still just having fun, because we’re not playing in the majors yet - because this isn’t my real life yet - this isn’t that other more serious Prasid yet. But perhaps the only way I’ll bridge the gap from my life-path to serious-Prasid’s life-path is by trying. By being the mature older guy.

Perhaps I’m just not ready yet. Maybe it’ll just take me a couple more years of having fun. Or, perhaps, I don’t have someone to grow-up for. Maybe the more-serious man doesn’t emerge until he is needed, until the universe requires it from him. Or until a woman expects it of him. Finally, perhaps I’ve spent my entire life waiting for my real life to begin. I know in my heart that, at least when it comes to relationships, I’ve spent my entire life waiting to lose weight so that my real dating-life could begin. Well, I’m close enough, and we’re certainly playing with live ammo now.

Here’s another thought: I recently read an article that suggested that today we’ve bought into this fairly-tale of uncompromising, eternal love. We all want someone to find the perfect someone - the perfect soul-mate who is our complement and equal and loves us for who we are, quirks and all. We all expect so much - the fairy-tale - and we’ve forgotten that love is flawed and imperfect and messy. We’ve forgotten that the vows we take are not just to each other, but to the institution of marriage, which our culture used to revere as bulletproof, impenetrable, but which today is thin and rife with escape hatches. We’ve lost our commitment to slugging-it-out in the trenches to make it work. We are convinced we can find someone better outside the relationship, when perhaps the truth is that we can make it work with anyone, if only we are willing to stay and fight.

I wish I had a few older-brother figures to have a serious conversation with about marriage and divorce. I can only hope that somehow, as we watch on the sidelines as others play the game, we are learning something, internalizing some desire to avoid these same mistakes. I can only hope that I stop waiting for my turn, that I get off the bench, and play as though we’re in the majors. I guess we’ll see.

I borrowed the format from Secret London and Secret New York, and then proceeded to invite all my local Seattleites. Unfortunately for me, Facebook had eliminated the city “networks” - so I didn’t have an easy way to quickly invite just my Seattle friends. Instead I filtered for Microsoft friends, then Google friends, and quickly created a list of 500 to seed the group.

Whereas the Secret New York and Secret London groups had robust message boards with dozens of threads, when I started the Seattle group, I opted to disable message boards, forcing people to post on the group’s wall. My reasoning in doing this was that it would surface all the content while the group remained small.

The day after I created the group, I checked-in on it, and found about 30 members. Then life got busy. I had four friends visiting from out-of-town, and didn’t log into Facebook for nearly three days. By Sunday night - less than a week after I had started the group - I logged-in to find that the group had over 6000 members. WoW.

People were messaging me asking permission to post their businesses. A local TV anchor added me on facebook. Someone even asked to buy ownership of the Facebook group from me. At this point, based on feedback from group members, I added discussion boards.

By Wednesday, it the group had 12,000 members. By Friday - perhaps 10 days after starting the group - it was up to 20K. Today - less than 3 weeks after starting the group - it has over 35K members.

I started thinking about how we could create more value.

The first idea that a friend suggested was an event. Perhaps a meetup at a hidden-gem bar - where anyone there for the Secret Seattle mixer should come dressed in a hat, or with a red armband. Some secret symbol.

My second idea was a “Top Secret Seattle” - a closed / invisible group - invite-only - with even genuinely hidden gems. I actually went ahead and created it. The idea is that every person who joins can message me one more email address to invite, and so the group grows very slowly but entirely organically.

My final idea was too look at what other Facebook groups were doing. Secret London built a site so they could break free of Facebook’s limited funcationailty. I think the downside with this is that you loose the network effects and intrinsically social nature of actions taken on Facebook. If they were to - instead - create a custom Facebook app - that might harness the power of social networks more effectively. Secret San Francisco created a email list - so that people could access to daily “secret spots” emails - this seems like an effective idea to create a “monetizable ad product” but not particularly innovative value-add for members.

Finally, after reading the SecretCities blog where the SecretLondon team is blogging about their new site, I discovered a Secret Cities Custodians closed Facebook group, where they are sharing best practices on how to drive growth and engagement. I’ll let you know what I find out once I get accepted.

Key Learnings:

People like the idea of secrets - of an insiders club. Putting “secret” in the name gives the group an intrinsic buzz to it. I recently read a Seattle Times article about a secret dinner circle - very exclusive - and I was instantly fascinated - wanting to learn more - to start my own. I think it’s human nature.

Reinforcing external factors. I have a friend who recently did his own social media experiment. When the “Pants on the Ground” American Idol video took-off, my friend remixed the Pants on the Ground song with another song, and posted on facebook. With almost no optimization, and minimal seeding, his video rose to fifty-thousand views within a week. What propelled it is that it wasn’t a purely user-generated video - it was a hybrid - where people seeing the Pants on the Ground video on American Idol on TV would search on YouTube and find the original video, but also his remix. Similarly, Secret Seattle benefited from the news coverage that Secret London was getting, as well as the fact that across everyones Facebook newsfeeds they were watching their friends join Secret New York, Secret Chicago, and were therefore turning to look for a Secret Seattle.

Short life Spans - one more thing I noticed is that after a meteoric rise - the group has levelled-off in size around 35K members. I’ve seen similar levelling-off with Secret San Francisco at 65K. I think that’s a function of the size of community. You’ll only get so much penetration organically - unless you find a way to offer additional value. And so now I’m searching for ways to do just that.

A lot of what makes up the informational interview, or “informational” as we call it at MSFT, is common practice for smart and experienced job-seekers. But this formalized approach gives beginners a formula to follow and, more importantly, this approach can hift the way you network, hegiving you a big edge over the competition.  

What’s Wrong with a Job Interview:

A job interview is a highly elaborate mating ritual. They have a job. You want the job. You dress up in your suit, you print a copy of your resume on fancy paper, your palms are sweaty, they take you back to their office, and you dance. It’s contrived, structured, and puts them in the drivers seat. They grill you with questions, you sit there and take the beating. Then in the last 5 minutes you get to ask them a few questions of your own, but your goal is probably to demonstrate you’ve researched them by asking insightful questions. You’re not thinking about evaluating how well they fit with your own values and goals, you’re too busy trying to get them to give you the job. 

How to conduct an Informational Interview:

Think of an informational interview not as a job interview, but more as a reporter chasing leads, in search of a story. Your goal is not just to get a job, but to share your passions with this person, learn about this person’s passions, and get this person to connect you to others that can help you pursue your passion. You start by identifying someone whose passions overlap with your own within your network, and you ask them out to coffee, or setup 20 minutes over the phone, to learn more about what they do.  You share a bit about yourself, and you pepper them with questions. You make it clear that you are indeed searching for a job, but the outcome of the meeting is that you ask this person to connect you to more people.  You ask this person to send an email to one of their contacts who is passionate about the same area you are passionate about, and may be able to help you.  Just a simple email, to someone they know, CCing you. That’s not a lot to ask for. Now you’ve got an introduction to someone even more-directly related to your passion. You send a thank-you note to the first person you interviewed. You go do an informational with this new person you’ve been introduced to. You share your passions with them. Then you get them to introduce you to someone they know. Send a thank you note to the 2nd person. Rinse and repeat.

So why is this any better than randomly getting coffee with people in your network?

First, the removal of the job interview structure allows the free-flow of opportunities, second, the conversational nature allows for the free-flow of passions and ideas, third, the focus on introductions as the outcome helps grow and operationalize your network, and, finally, in the event that you get within striking distance of a job, you’re chances of getting the job dramatically increase.

Free Flow of Opportunities & Ideas

The job interview is rigid. You only approach people who have said they have an opening. They are only prepared to discuss that one particular opening, they are the ones asking the quesitons, and they aren’t going to teach you anything, share very much about themselves, or introduce you to anyone at the end of it. What you need is something more friction-free, something more casual. Some of us are good at this by nature, but the informational interview can help break-down these casual conversations into a formula that you can use over and over, even if it doesn’t come naturally to you.

The informational removes all of the stress and structure from the interview. You’re not asking this person for a job, just for information, so the person you’re reaching out to is much more likely to accept. You’re also the one asking the questions, so the balance of power shifts in your favor. Once the “I need a job” dance is removed from the equation, almost anyone is willing to help-out a young person looking to learn, and spend 30 minutes sharing what they themselves are passionate about. Who doesn’t love talking about themselves? And almost anyone who you get referred to - say a friend of your neighbor - is willing to take out 30 minutes of their day to chat with you, as a favor to the neighbor.

Furthermore, because it’s casual, the informational allows the other person to be candid. In a job interview they would never dream of sending you to one of their competitors, but in a conversation, they might be willing to introduce you to a friend who works across the street at a rival firm.  In a job interview, you have to convince them you’re perfect for this particular job. In an informational, you aren’t trying to sell yourself, and they aren’t trying to sell you on their firm, so you can be honest about your strengths and weaknesses, and ask them to point you toward jobs that will truly make you happy, and they can be honest about their company, and where you’re more likely to find fulfillment.

Second, the informational allows for the free-flow of ideas. This person can serve as a mentor for you, giving you advice. They can suggest books to borrow, bloggers to bookmark, and tweeple to follow. They can give you insight into the hours you might be expected to work, the kind of pay you can expect, and the honest pros and cons of their chosen field and firm.

Second-Degree Friends

Some research was done that stated that people rarely find their next job from a close friend. However, they very commonly find it from a friend of a friend. So it’s visualizing, targeting, and “operationalizing” your network, and more-importantly those second-degree-friends - that drives success in networking. Visualizing is markedly easier today thanks to Facebook and LinkedIn - I can figure out who my friend knows that can help me, and ask for an introduction. That’s the visualizing. Targeting means identifying who those first-degree friends are who can make the right introductions for you. Operationalizing your network refers to a personal challenge I have, that I think will sound familiar to many people  - I feel like I know a good number of people, but I know them as friends, and I have difficulty converting that social relationship into a professional relationship that can help me land a job. I feel awkward asking them for help. I feel awkward about them using their network to help me. I feel like even if I sat them down for a chat, they might be willing to provide a shoulder to cry on, but not necessarily be willing to use their network for my benefit. The informational formula can help.

Visualize your network. Target the first-degree friends who can help you. Setup a 30 minute informational with your friend to discuss your career and ask for their advice and for their help. Now, everyone likes to be asked for advice - it makes them feel important, and makes them feel like you value their opinion. During the meeting (not afterward, because afterward it’ll be difficult to pin them down via email to get them to do this for you, and it’ll never happen), you discuss, and decide upon, who your friend is going to introduce you to, so you can do an informational with that person. You ask them to send the person a short email. One sentence hello. One sentence “Can I introduce you to Prasid, he wants to spend 30 minutes with you” and one sentence “Prasid currently studies/works at blank university, and is the President of blank organization.” This email has tremendous power. Your friend has credibility with this person that they’re introducing you to, and with this “warm hand-off” introduction, that credibility is transferred to you, making this second-degree contact much more willing to meet with you and help you. You’ve essentially now pushed-out beyond the fringes of your network into your extended network, to a person who can really help you, and put yourself in front of this person not as a desperate beggar in need of a job, but as an equal, a friend of a friend, who wants to learn. And it’s people - not knowledge or experience - that matter.

Put People First

I’ve been a complete failure at dating for many, many years. The only times I’ve been successful in converting random girl into girlfriend is when we get introduced to each other through a mutual friend. When that happens, I’m no longer “random guy standing next to Robert” - I’m now “Robert’s friend from college, who Robert says is a really smart marketer and blogger.” It’s the transitive property:  which you’ll remember from 9th grade Algebra. It works like this: I’m talking to the girl, I’m cool with Robert, Robert is cool with her, therefore I’m now cool with her. By making a good introduction between me and her, Robert has implicitly vouched for me, and I’m now “inside” rather than “outside,” which in her mind makes me “safe.”  This same mentality exists in the work world. Companies get thousands of resumes from random guys on the internet, but research shows that companies much prefer employee referrals - they find better people when they hire people they already know. In fact, most big companies today offer employee referral programs, so that the money Microsoft saves by hiring my friend whose good, rather than weeding-out a hundred resumes, they pay me as a $5000 referral bonus. That’s how much more we trust people we know.

How Informationals turn into Jobs

This may all sound very well for networking and researching, but how do informationals actually land you a job?

Eventually, and usually very quickly, one of these informationals will connect you to someone who has an open position. Eureka. By then you’ll have honed-in on your passion, found the exact niche and the exact role in the exact field that you are most interested in, and you’ll be able to talk knowledgeably about not just that area, but all the neighboring areas, from all those  informationals you did along the way.

If the person in front of you has a role open, then the informational interview changes - it becomes even more powerful. Now you’re in a casual conversation, without the pressure, where you can still share ideas and passions, and you can really figure out what the hiring manager is looking for in a job candidate, before an actual interview. If they like you in the informational, they’ll be sure to put you through a formal interview. And because you were introduced to them through someone they trust, they know “you’re good people.” You’re not just some random resume that came-in through a series of tubes, so they’re much more likely to take a chance on you.

A few years back I met the CEO of Flextronics, and one of the things that he pointed out is that most companies love getting employee referrals - most companies - based on organizational behavior research - have realized they get much better quality candidates through employee referrals than through weeding-through resumes submitted online and at job fairs.

Use Informationals to Prepare for that Job Interview

Think about jobs you’ve applied to in the past. You sit their with a 1-page job description and the company’s website, studying random facts and breaking the JD down and analyzing each sentence. Now compare that to having just done 30 minutes with the hiring manager -  you can ask them what they’re looking for and tailor your resume. You can get a feel for where you may fit well, and fit poorly, and try to compensate.  You can tailor your answers and follow-up quesitons to the job more effectively.

I once got a pitch from a marketing agency who said they employed a “surround” strategy for targeting the audience of the campaign. You should surround your target. Do multiple informationals for this open job. Meet with the hiring manager,  someone on the team, someone on a related team, someone who is a customer - who uses what this team creates. It shows you care. It gives you context. You can come to the formal interview with insight about the what the hiring manager really needs, that perhaps the hiring manager doesn’t even know, about what’s making his employees or customers happy, and what’s making them frustrated.

Ultimately, I believe that the informational interview formula can help you put a structure and set of goals around the meetings you might already be having with people who can help you. Furthermore, it can help give you a mechanism to “operationalize” your network, and turn social friendships into professional relationships. Finally, it can help shift the way you network, putting you in the drivers seat, so that you always go into a formal interview with insider-information and an inside-track.

They provide a mechanism for a web develop of a mobile site like ESPN.com to easily monetize their traffic by embedding ads on the page. But this is just the beginning. AdMob has really gotten traction as the iPhone has taken off, becoming the du jour app platform for iPhone app developers. Now, with the mobile operators getting into a tizzy over Android, and the Verizon Droid the latest in a wave of phones claiming to be the iPhone killer, AdMob is ramping up activity to support and help monetize new apps written for the Android OS.

From a marketing point of view, I’m very impressed with the way AdMob has positioned themselves as a key indicator for the mobile industry. Similar to ComScore and other such trackers online, AdMob has chosen to publicly release data about the number of ads they are serving across their network, broken out by mobile platforms, which has positioned them as a key indicator, even being cited by Apple, in demonstrating the growth of the iPhone and the iPhone app ecosystem. By releasing that data, they essentially get free press every time Apple mentions AdMob on an Apple investors call or in a press release.

This syngergy has gone so far that there were even acquisition rumors that Apple might try to buy AdMob. This makes sense if one considers that by buying AdMob Apple would essentially be able to offer App developers two monetization vehicles. Apple has already stated that it will support in-app purchasing for developers, allowing them to sell online through the iPhone using Apple technology. By buying AdMob, Apple would be able to add to that the opportunity for iPhone developers to monetize through online advertising. The downside would be destroying a burgeoning ecosystm of mobile app advertising companies like AdMob. Furthermore, bloggers later pointed out the unlikelihood of the acquisition rumors, pointing out that Apple’s DNA is that of a high-margin hardware company, and that AdMob’s low-margin online advertising business model would not mesh well.

Competitors include MobClix, which has taken a different tack. They have positioned themselves as a clearinghouse of ad inventory, allowing Advertising.com and other partners to sell mobile ad inventory alongside traditional online banner ad inventory, in an effort to offer advertisers more scale and a one-stop-shopping experience. MobClix claims that this has driven them to become the largest, whereas AdMob still claims to be the largest as well.

Turns out I’m not the only one who has become interested in AdMob. I had signed up for their Twitter feed and mailing list, and then today I got this email from their CEO (TC has embedded it in their post as well). Turns out they announced this morning that they’re being acquired by Google. For $750 million no less. Exciting stuff for the few friends that I have over there. If they got in before Series C funding, they’re liable to make quite a pretty penny. Congratulaitons to all.

There are better places to read about finding mentors; I’m going to teach you how to take over a small South American country, and how to turn bar buddies into valuable connections. I’m going to share with you what I learned from Seattle’s finest connectors and some of my wisest friends back in Texas. So here are a few ideas, none of them mine, to help you and I both get better at networking:

1. Build Your Personal Brand

I was recently talking to a friend and recent transplant to Seattle, and he said that he had gotten really aggressive about cultivating his social brand, and that he was now going to do the same thing with his professional one. Personal brand is a lovely buzz word, but I wanted to know, what did he really mean? “You’re actually really good at this,” he told me. He had looked at some of his friends who were more established in Seattle, and had modeled his personal brand on theirs. He started with amping up his presence on Facebook - more pictures, more activity, more effort to reach out to friends. He said he wanted to start a blog - which now he has. Now he was going to move on to his professional brand, and was stepping up his efforts to connect to people on LinkedIn.

I personally am a fan of blogging because it’s healthy for me, it’s how I sort out my issues, and I enjoy writing. But one of the things that Career Distinction, a book Ahmed recommended, taught me, is that your blog also becomes an extension of your personal brand, it becomes your online portfolio, a platform from which you can demonstrate your business acumen or tech savvy. I believe that everyone should start a blog. And if you’re interested, here are some tips on getting started.

In a world where we use more plug-and-play services than ever, where we plug people in and out to solve specific problems, where there is reduced friction and companies are adaptive (see a previous post on this concept: My Vendors Have Vendors) your personal brand becomes the way people gauge your value, and how they chose who needs to get plugged-in in order to solve a particular problem.

2. Pay it Forward

Last weekend NetIP Seattle (the Network of Indian Professionals) recently hosted a networking workshop with Hoan Do, an up-and-coming speaker who talks to young people about time management, networking, and success. One of Hoan’s key points was the idea of paying-it-forward, reminding me of one of my favorite recent reads, Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi. The idea is that when you meet a new person, rather than asking all the usual dull biographical questions like where are you from and what do you do, ask them what they are passionate about. If they came to a networking event, ask them what brought them there? Then ask “how can I help you in your passion?”

Look for opportunities to use what you have, and who you know, to help other people, and in that way build a reputation for helping others and a network of people who can help. The event itself is a good example. Hoan has a gift for speaking. Taha and the NetIP board had asked Hoan to speak, and he agreed to help. He offered us some free tickets to his book signing, and even agreed to speak for free if we didn’t break-even on the event. Out of the event, he got great exposure, this blog entry and perhaps others, and an opportunity to make more inroads into the South Asian community. This week NetIP is promoting his book launch to our sizable mailing list, those who attended his talk may decide to attend the book signing, and I’ll personally be willing to help him in the future. That’s the concept of pay it forward.

3. SGI

That afternoon, after the NetIP event, I came home and started reading the Wall Street Journal, where I found the new WSJ magazine, and a fascinating article on Desiree Rogers - the Social Secretary in the Obama White House. Reading about Rodgers’ career, I was again reminded of Never Eat Alone. Both Ferrazzi and Rogers used dinner parties - his in LA and hers in Chicago - as a social tool.

After reading the article on Rogers, I began thinking about who I am. I began thinking about the person I was at Berkeley, the person I am in Seattle, trying to recapture something I felt I’d lost. The fire to start things, organize things, to love everyone, and bring people together, that made me who I am. It’s so easy, when you’re hard at work, to forget to connect with people. I call my girlfriend every night, but besides her, I spend so little quality time with my friends. The quality time gets crowded-out by work on one side, and the big parties on the other, and unless I make a space in the middle for small group interaction, it never seemed to happen.

I remembered something that Vivek, Ricky, and Sumesh had taught me. When they moved back to Dallas after college, they began going out, trying to meet people. It was difficult. You see all these people out at bars, you may vaguely know some of them, you get introduced to some more, but how do turn these people into actual friends? How do you convert “weekend friends” - people you go out with on weekends but spend no real quality time with, into “weeknight friends” that you can really connect with, can help you find a girl, or find a job, or accomplish what you’re passionate about? The answer, my three friends taught me, was SGI. Small Group Interaction, they told me, was the missing key to creating lasting friendships and getting to know people in Dallas, and it wasn’t until they were able to create SGI that they were able to break-into the Dallas community.

We started talking about it, and I shared with them some of my recipes for SGI. One great idea, I have found, is the pre-party or pre-game. You meet at someone’s house for a drink before going out to dinner, to an event, or to a bar. Psychologically now, instead of “I saw them at a bar” the night becomes “we all went out to a bar together.” Another great concept - the after-event trip to IHOP, or the after-party at someone’s apartment. Now, hopefully you can find someplace more interesting than IHOP - a good option in Seattle is 13 Coins which is a bit more charming - but again it serves the purpose of converting the people you met up with at a bar or at an event into people whom you spend the evening with, and shared the experience with. Another good idea - the Sunday brunch. Let everyone know the night before, when you see them, that we should all meet up at CJ’s or Coastal Kitchen for brunch the next day - keep it late - like noon - so that everyone has time to show up - and again it extends the night into the morning, where you can have a more meaningful conversation.

I started thinking about my own ambitions of throwing dinner parties. Reeta and I used to joke that we were “YITs - Yuppies-in-Training” and that someday we would throw fabulous dinner parties together. Nina and I, after I made her watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s with me, decided that we would throw a fabulous party someday, just like Holly Golightly. And the original inspiration, my mother, was a master at dinner parties, having learned from her parents, and had brought me up in the family art of fabulous parties. It is no surprise, then, that Seema and Sirina told Khushboo, my girlfriend, that she was perfect for me, because they could see her throwing dinner parties at my side someday. All of this came back to my desire to throw a dinner party, to class it up, and to very deliberately invite the most interesting people in Seattle, just for the sake of fun. It’s that type of organizing that I always relished, that I never made time for.

That’s when I decided that I want to throw a dinner party of my own. I stayed up that night, writing up a guestlist, brainstorming a menu, because of course for this party I would learn to cook. I looked up recipes, I brainstormed drinks, appetizers, and even reviewed the Holly Golightly playlist I had been building for years, in anticipation of the day I finally threw my dinner party.

4. Infrastructure

Becoming an effective connector is a lot like becoming the dictator of a small South American country: the first thing you do is seize control of key infrastructure like the airport and the tv station. The reason? The dictator knows that if he controls the capitol building, he controls the seat of power. But if you control the TV station, you control what people think, and if you’ve got the airport, you control who can come and who can leave. And that gives you real power.

In Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi talked about this in his chapter on “Be A Conference Commando” where he suggested tools to effectively network at a conference. One of his tactics was to volunteer your time to help-out the conference organizers in any way possible. Being part of the infrastructure gives you access to privileged information, and gets you access to the speakers as well as knowledge of private round-tables and VIP events. It also gives you the power to share those insider-parties with your network and decide who can come-and-go, which makes you of-value, giving you more opportunities to pay-it-forward with people who want to be there.

Another great example is a friend of mine, who volunteers his time with the alumni recruiting team for his school. He was a recent college graduate, and the recruiter for his school had an alumni recruiting team - essentially a small group of young alums who were willing to help the recruiter extend his network on campus. My friend volunteered his time to help, to fly-out to recruit, and worked-hard to pass along good candidates and cultivate a relationship with the recruiter. The recruiter, in turn, gave him credibility with his college network, because he had insider information into the recruiting process, and became a resource for anyone at his alma mater seeking a job with Microsoft. By putting himself at the center of a key piece of infrastructure, he had access to information and insight that both the recruiter and his friends back on-campus valued.

One of the reasons that I’m a part of NetIP is that I love organizing things. I love creating something that other attend, I love having a cause to fight for. At my most social, senior year of college, I actually wasn’t working for any organizations, so it’s easy to think that I was at my most social that year simply because I was dumping time into being social. But the truth is I had a cause my senior year too - it was planning all the social events for my circle of friends, and making the most of senior year. It is that desire to organize that really was my love throughout college, and, in retrospect, that is what propelled me to such great social heights. But when I moved to Seattle, I decided to focus all my energy on work, fearing that I would spend too much time on extra-currics, as I did in college. That fear has limited my growth here. it made me weak. It made me less-social, it limited my capacity to network -that which had always been my strength. Which is why 8 months ago I decided it was finally time to stop living in fear - to embrace that which I love - and that’s why I joined the board of NetIP.

5. Always Be Closing

The ABC’s of selling are “Always Be Closing” - a famous line from Glengary Glen Ross - a movie about sales people - a sort-of predecessor to Boiler Room, if you’ve seen that. The concept that I discovered from my own job searches and watching others over the past three years is that it’s not enough to just have a network of people. You have to make those people actionable. You have “operationalize your assets” as they might say in the military. Don’t hate me, but perhaps it might be useful to think of networking the way you would think about dating women:

The average American will hold 10+ jobs in their lifetime. That means you’re not married to your job - if anything you’re casually dating it until a more attractive one comes along. And what’s your tolerance for being single - without a job? A few months at most?

This is what I used to think: “I know people, and people know me, so when I need a job, I’ll ask around and find one.” This is naïve and stupid. You never know when you’ll come home and the locks are changed. And on that day, you need to be - what? A few months? - away from having a new girl? The truth is that you need to be looking for a new girl even when you don’t want a new girl. The truth is that you need to be constantly evaluating your market value, constantly be invest in yourself, constantly be flirting with new opportunities, constantly be asking jobs out on dates, and trying to take them home, so that the day you actually want to close a deal, you’re already 80% of the way there. In effect: always be closing.

So those are my tips. Start by building a personal brand, use pay-it-forward tactics to be operationalize your assets and grow your network, use small group interaction to convert acquaintances into relationships, build and own infrastructure that others find value in, so that you become a connector, and always, always, always be closing. Hope this was useful.

There was a fantastic blog from Jon Battelle where he discussed this idea that Twitter was the next YouTube - the next search vertical with huge traction - and that Google would do everything in it’s power to own this new search vertical. Meanwhile, we saw attempts by Facebook to acquire Twitter, and when that failed, we saw Facebook lightning-quick roll-out FriendFeed and Twitter-esque features to compete and build out it’s own microblogging platform. And sure enough, yesterday TechCrunch had a post on acquisition talks between Twitter and Google. Biz Stone today responded with a blog post stating “Sometimes We Talk” with companies about acquisition, but “Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we’re just getting started.

So far, no one seems to have released a fantastic and powerful search coupled with a good monetization strategy, but one must imagine that Facebook, Google, and Twitter are all working on. There are signs at least Twitter is advancing in that direction. As my friend Akshay stated last week, in a moment of insight around who would win the war to own your lifestream, “Facebook can become Twitter, but Twitter can’t become Facebook.”

First off, I love what she does. She’s a Cal alum with a Ph.D from Berkeley’s School of Information, who studies new media and is currently a Microsoft Researcher at their New England campus.  I love the idea of being able to spend your days actually researching social media, group interaction, and the changes happening in how we interact as a result of technology. I’m a mere casual observer in comparison, and perhaps I wouldn’t love trudging through the data, but I love building models for how things work and interact.

She also had a great presentation style. For an academic, she’s very down to earth. I felt like we could go have a cup of coffee no problem. I also felt like she had an elegance and style to her presentation - the use of Flikr photos to liven-up the presentation - calling them “three acts” instead of “bullets,” “buckets,” or some other mundane list metaphor. Finally - I loved the way she closed. Not the usual “Q&A” end-slide, but the simple words that perhaps all of us should live by: “question everything.” It has an elegant double-meaning here - telling her audience that she is humble and encourages - expects - debate, criticism, and opposing ideas.

I loved the way she laid-out the history of social networking. I was amazed at how many of the conclusions she came to parallelled my own two-parter Treatise on the History of the Wall. As a digital native I take it’s evolution for granted - I lived it - but from her perspective she was able to live it but also analyze it while it was happening - and reached some fascinating conclusions.

For example, she painted a picture of the death of Friendster at the hands of it’s own harsh policies - it apparently evicted two highly-connected groups of people - fakesters & bands - who fled - taking their social graphs with them - and found refuge on MySpace. I loved that she compared the cultures of Facebook & MySpace and came to the same conclusions as me.

I also loved that she analyzed the differences between Twitter & Facebook - pointing out something I hadn’t been fully cognizant of - that Twitter has pickup among adults, while Facebook has traction with youth, and that youth will never stay on a network frequented by parents - and that this - not innovation around new features - is the biggest challenge Facebook will face as it continues to grow. Here’s the argument: Essentially, Facebook for people who were born digital represents a way for them to connect in the present. However, for the growing number of parents on facebook, it represents a way to connect with their past, to “show their old highschool friends how cool they’ve become.” Twitter, because of it’s traction among the media and integration into media outlets like CNN.com, has had much more success among adults.

Danah Boyd also points out that after the death of Friendster, the digerati abandoned social networking, and instead spent their time on media-sharing sites - hence the popularity of Flikr among grown-ups - whereas Flikr has almost no users under 25 - because we use Facebook. Similarly, the digerati picked-up Twitter, and, indeed, Twitter is a darling among tech blogs like TechCrunch, which is constantly defending it’s heavy coverage of all things Twitter. Moreover, the content is different. Facebook for youth is about what we’re currently doing. Pictures. Music. Movies. Partying. Nonsense. Because of who is on Twitter - political junkies and tech junkies - that’s not where youth want to spend their time. In fact, Danah Boyd suggests that youth find the whole concept of Twitter “kinda stupid.” All super-fascinating to me, and in-line with my earlier entry “If These Walls Could Talk.”

The challenge Danah outlines at the end of her talk is one around how we - the users - will deal with the changes that result from social media. The nexus of these changes will be how we deal with our information - what we’re doing - being accessible forever, by anyone, searchable, and out-of-context. As friends today often joke: thanks to Facebook, we’ll never be able to run for president. There’s too much dirt out there.