Robert
Scoble thinks Apple has a PR problem because people on Twitter are
reporting problems with iPhones that were not unlocked and subject to getting bricked.

Saul
Hansell of The New York Times predicts war as Steve Jobs takes on hackers
unlocking iPhones from the AT&T networking, downloading unofficial
applications, or otherwise modifying the device.

Isn’t this whole iPhone thing starting to resemble a
Stephen King novel?

Part of the problem appears to be how the iPhone is
being met in the market. Sold as a cell phone, it’s being perceived by many technorati as a hand held computer, and hackers
can’t resist hacking even with a $399 iPhone. We don’t advocate unlocking
your iPhone. 

Brian Oberkirch offers a slide show on Designing
for Hackability, asking questions like: How can we make social networks
more hackable? Portable? Efficient?

Here
are some interesting links as the battle heats up: 

Think
Different: Think Again Apple where Apple gets a video hacked.

Podcast of TALKSHOW

Nokia
is working the buzz

The
Bottom Line: We’re keeping an eye on the Apple share price.

<img src="/images/64360-56413/CELL.jpg” border=”0″ width=”185″>

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch.

Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying
from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept.
18, 2007, before a
packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, “Really Achieving Your
Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave
advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.

“Experience is what you get when you did not get what you wanted”.

Mood: Connected & Hungry!

Gear: Champion SF 49er’s jersey

Listening to: Pandora 

Reading Zen Habits (tagline: Simple Productivity) and
realized the blog name, and its tag are an oxymoron. The point of Zen, or even
better, the point to Zen, is to lose the habits of our identity creation to
realize the true nature of our consciousness (one interpretation).

This isn’t to discount
the site. They offer many simple-to-adopt lifestyle to improve your health and
well-being, such as these ten: 

• 4 Simple Steps to Start the Exercise Habit
• 10 Tasty, Easy and Healthy Breakfast Ideas
• How to Become a Vegetarian, the Easy Way
• The Zen of Running, and How to Make It Work For You
• Zen To Slim: A Simple, 5-Step Weight Loss Plan
• 5 Powerful Reasons to Eat Slower
• 16 Tips to Triple Your Workout Effectiveness
• 20 Ways to Eliminate Stress From Your Life
• Beginner’s
  Guide to Cycling
• Beginner’s Guide to Running

The pictures they use
are calming, but maybe Zen for Dummies is more appropriate?

The river flows . . . 

Blogging is a stream of consciousness activity, somewhat
randomly (if random exists, how
many angels can dance on the head of a pin?) as one link leads to another .
. . to Bill Hartzer’s post Collegiate
Social Networking Moves to College.com.

Bill says: Since Facebook
has virtually abandoned the college crowd and opened up its social network to
the public, college students have been left out in the cold. College.com is coming to the aid of those
college students who feel abandoned by Facebook by launching their own social
network. 

Now that Facebook is courting corporate giants like Google,
a circle closes while another opens. Wasn’t Google’s initial incarnation as a
search engine referencing EDU sites for academia before it turned into an
online advertising juggernaut?

The river flows . . . 

. . . Email
is so “yesterday”

where Sean Driscoll from
Microsoft goes from old school email alerts to new media connecting . . .

Old School:

– Contact my Admin, Jake Grey (xxxxx@microsoft.com or 425-704-xxxx) as
he knows how to reach me.

– If urgent, you can try my cell phone, #
below in autosig.

New Media:

– Reach me through my blog at www.communitygrouptherapy.com

– Track me down via Twitter at http://twitter.com/seanodmvp

– Post a message on my wall in Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=745365643

the river flows . . .

. . .  to Jeremiah Owyang’s embarrassing
Facebook add that got him in hot water with his wife.  

the river flows . . .

. . . to Scott Adams
Dilbert post On
the Other Hand and his essay about cognitive dissonance using an
economist’s yin-yang training to explore all sides of an argument, like: 

1. Global
   warming is real, and people are a major cause.
2. When
   considering the problems that global warming will cause, we shouldn’t
   ignore the benefits of global warming, such as fewer deaths from
   cold. 
3. The
   oceans rose a foot in the last hundred years, and the world adapted, so
   the additional rise from global warming might not be as big a problem as
   people assume.
4. Developing
   economical fossil fuel alternatives is the only rational solution to
   global warming because countries such as China and India will use the
   cheapest fuel, period. If only the developed countries that can afford
   alternatives change their ways, it’s not enough to make a dent in the
   problem.

Which brings us back to
Zen Habits: 6 Tips for Commuting to Work by Bike, and the circle is complete.

The Bottom Line: It’s Friday, enjoy your weekend!

<img src="/images/64360-56413/zen.jpg” border=”0″ height=”203″ width=”264″>

Jill
Konrath is busy. She’s a leading-edge sales strategist and business
advisor with am impressive
client list.

And she has
no time for self-serving trash talking from sellers. 5 seconds tops before she
hits the delete button whether it’s e-mail, voice-mail, snail mail or whatever
the pitch.

I could care
less about your product, service, solution or your company, she states bluntly in her post on Selling
to Big Companies.

What is her notion
of trash talk? Here are some examples:

• extraordinary
  differentiators
• one-stop
  shopping
• any
  self-serving marketing-speak pablum
• unique strategies

Savvy marketers that do get her attention do it by being completely
focused on her business and the impact they can have on it!

She is always interested in ways to: 

• Shorten
  time to market
• Speed up
  the sales cycles
• Reduce
  supply chain costs

She declares: This
is business talk, not marketing speak!

And she’s also
interested in any good information or fresh insights about the
challenges her company is facing. How about how other companies are
addressing these issues? If so, she’s interested in that too.

The Bottom Line: We’re very interested in what Jill has
to say. Trash talk moving OUT, customer focused business information (adding value to the sales cycle) to impact
your bottom line, moving IN.

I have in my google reader over 171 bloggers remotely and directly connect with the topics around social networks and business communities I enjoy reading. Here are the top 3 (only one person’s perspective).

This is based on frequency, relevant, timeliness and useful”ness” of content.

These 3 over the last 3 months have the MOST number of starred and shared items in my google reader.

Highly recommend you grab a feed.

1. Chris Brogan
2. Jeremiah Owyang
3. Jake McKee

Video link: http://ech.case.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=FAF

Matt Dickman is a tough guy. He’s from Cleveland: You Gotta Be
Tough!

He’s posted a video of Yahoo! Mash (beta) on his site, Techno//Marketer.
The beta versions are by invite only, so if you’ve been invited to signup
(we’re jealous) you might not need to watch his review.

It’s a recommended watch if for nothing else than he’s
inserted himself into the clip. That’s the kind of brand spunk you get from a
tough Clevelander. 

Matt’s key point is that the beta version is begging for crowdsourcing, to let the
people and the developers get their hands on it, which makes complete sense.

Matt gives a listing of the features and modules, comparing
them to Facebook and MySpace, like Sean
P. Aune who describes it as a primordial version of Facebook 

Neither mentions one of the key features which is inherent
in the name:

 <img src="/images/64360-56413/Yahoo_Mash.png” border=”0″ width=”164″>

As Lee
Odden describes it, it’s about mashing other people’s profiles, which may
be fun and just in time for pre-Halloween.

Scott
Karp offers interesting insight about the assumptions that developers make
about its users, the main one being that Mash thinks he’s a teenager interested
in expressing all the quirkiness that makes him UNIQUE.

Michael
Calore says this. Compared to the more-established social hubs on the web,
Mash is a lightweight offering. It has its share of the usual widgets and
games, but unlike almost every other social network, there’s no blogging
component, no photo-management tool, and no e-mail or contact management. Mash
isn’t the platform, Yahoo is the platform.

Whatever the final outcome of Mash, we have to admire the
behind the scenes marketing that is driving the beta release. 

1. Like
   the gmail beta, they’ve made it somewhat exclusive by invitation only
2. They
   whole mash-it-up profile bending will appeal to teens (like those behind
   the growth of Myspace and Facebook). It’s fun even though they probably
   don’t need another social online community built around them. (Today’s
   teen consumers are tomorrow’s adult consumers, think
   longtail.)
3. The
   rest are likely media & tech professional checking it out. When the
   novelty of mashing wears off, Yahoo! might actually have caught on with
   some other nifty applications freely developed. Like an online focus
   group, they threw out bait to see what’s biting.

The Bottom Line: We’ll get
back to you on this one . . .

<img src="/images/64360-56413/Carp.jpg” border=”0″ width=”441″>

Facebook:
The $10 Billion Social Network? This caught my attention. I get literally NO spam at Facebook. Granted I have few (about 100) friends and am judicious about adding new friends.

Much to no ones surprise, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft (all
apparently interested in buying investing in the popular online social site, and possibly
gearing up for a bidding war) are all looking at a $10 (now $15) billion valuation of
Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to turn down Yahoo’s previous $1 billion
offer appears quite savvy for the then 23-year old owner. 

Perhaps more important to its valuation than Facebook’s
current profitability and popularity is its potential for future growth.

Since Facebook began allowing outside software developers to
create applications for use on the site (widgets), speculation has grown that a
new social media operating
system is being defined with a wide range of tools (like search) found on
computer desktops. 

Facebook could soon have 200 million users—all of whom
advertisers would value highly because they can easily recommend products and
services to their friends on. With so many advertiser-coveted users, Facebook
could command higher advertising rates than search ads.

Could FacebookOS defeat SPAM?

Been cruising Dell’s Ideastorm.
John Moore from Brand Autopsy has been cruising it also. He gives interesting
insight into what is going on with this online suggestion box that invites
customer dialogue on how Dell can improve its products and services.

Dell
uses Ideastorm as a way for its product development team to co-create
products with the public, otherwise known as crowd-sourcing.
Pre-installed Linux on Dell computers was one of the first ideas generated that
Dell product developers worked with customers to co-create and introduce to the
marketplace.

Dell’s corporate blog site, Direct2Dell
is moderated somewhat. 90% of their 400+ comments are posted after a quick
review, according to Moore. Being less techno and more customer-oriented, we’re
interested, but less absorbed by the bits and bytes
of information posted. From the social media perspective, we find often the medium
is the message.

Exploring the Direct2Dell Blogroll has led us to some very
interesting ideas. In particular, this post by John Jantsch on Reading
Blogs with Mobiles which delivered us to Winksite. In their own words,
they are the first standards-compliant mobile Website builder that also
includes RSS-driven content deployment and mobile-tuned community features such
as forum, chat, and polls.

Going Mobile! These are bits and bytes we like to sink our
teeth into.

The Bottom Line: Ideastorm is giving us ideas, and we’d
very much like to hear your thoughts on the way Dell is interacting with their
online community, and on mobile blog feeds.

FactoryCity offers this advice in a
recent post: Stop
Building Social Networks. I’m a sucker for a good, enticing headline. This
one is especially provocative coming from Chris Messina.

This isn’t about getting connected online with your friends,
it’s about having to re-up your profile and get your friends to join up every
time you sign up for a new online service. 

Chris asks every single social network community site makes
you:

• re-enter
  all your personal profile info (name, email, birthday, URL etc.)?
• re-add
  all your friends?

and why do you have to:

• re-turn
  off notifications?
• re-specify
  privacy preferences?
• re-block
  negative
  people? 

I believe what Chris is really saying is: Okay Web
Developers of social networking sites, we’ll let you slide on Web 2.0, but Web
3.0 needs to allow for single profile creation among many sites. Sounds like global data
synchronization of everything about me in one easy to share database. Makes
absolute sense. A master
data management solution to keep you and your P2P (person to person)
community sharing everything you want to share. It might even work for those
continually abandoning
their profiles when they forget their passwords.

One commenter offered this.

While Chris Messina may think that the fatigue effect
hasn’t spread beyond the social geeks I would suggest that the word social is
very quickly becoming one of the most used and misused words on the internet to
the point people are starting to gag when they read or hear it. After all it is
nothing more than a term of convenience because anyone who thinks that the act
of sitting behind a keyboard and monitor to communicate with other people is
being social needs a head check.

The Bottom Line: This one begs for a comment, especially
from social geeks and web developers. Any thoughts on the matter?

According to the data Helen Legatt reports on BizReport,
the majority of online contributors do it for fun and fame. Others said they do
it to share experiences with friends and benefit others. Financial reward isn’t
part of the equation since there isn’t any.

And there’s the scientific evidence that human
beings are hard-wired to connect, which we’ve touched on previously. 

And this leads us to Abraham
Maslow’s Hiearchy of Needs. His paper, A Theory of Human Motivation
was written in 1943.

 <img src="/images/64360-56413/clip_image002.gif” border=”0″ width=”400″>

Once people’s basic physiological needs are met, and they
feel safe and secure, they seek to widen their social network to create a sense
of belonging. This is at the core of the online community phenomenon, the
myspacing of the Internet. 

Blogging for fun and fame then continues our climb up the
pyramid of human needs in search of recognition and esteem, and sating our
natural curiosity to discover things. At the top, we find self-actualization
and our instinctive need to be creative and make the most our abilities. So,
even though the rapid growth of social and business communities became the next
big thing on the Internet, it’s nothing new to human nature. It was inevitable.

Maslow believed we should study and cultivate peak
experiences as a way of providing a route to achieve personal growth,
integration, and fulfillment. Peak experiences are unifying, and ego
transcending, bringing a sense of purpose to the individual and a sense of
integration. Individuals most likely to have peak experiences are
self-actualizing, mature, healthy, and self-fulfilled.

Why stop there?

At the core of every religion lays the theme of the
interconnectedness of all things. Imagine a moment in time if every individual
on the planet were to connect. With technologies like Twitter, we might
experience a group dynamic of transcendence well beyond our normal waking
reality, like an evolutionary jumpstart on human consciousness.

The Bottom Line: Get connected and bring it on!