It’s not that I’m asocial. It’s not that I don’t like you. And no, I don’t hate sports.

I’ll actually be at work during the Super Bowl, sweating through one of the most nerve wracking launches I’ve ever been a part of. My contract gig at HomeAway is wrapping up, and after two months of ActionScript-slinging and Airport-sprinting, we get to share it with the world.

Third Quarter. Griswolds. Stay tuned.

Walmart was first, so they get to be the target of my vitriol. Yes, I know this holiday season will be unlike any other for retailers, but pulling the Christmas Miracle lever to get the sap flowing in the first week of November is just too darn early.

Admittedly, it’s hard for me to hate Walmart more than I already do—the real travesty is that this puts Halloween officially in our rear-view mirror, and I must bid adieu to The Mash. It’s easily in the Top 5 of cool projects I’ve had the luck to contribute to, the best use of Facebook Connect I’ve ever implemented, and the team was an absolute blast to be a part of.

Check it out quick before it’s retired and we’re left with another season of going to Jared.

Don’t have anything to do tonight? Of course not.

You should come check out my talk on building add-ons for Firefox and Fennec at this month’s Refresh Austin meeting.

Tonight. Buffalo Billiards. 7pm.

There’s food. There’s beer. There’s ample time to heckle me.

Be there.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=170821558189

Yes, I know I’m unabashedly biased, but how awesome were Jay-Z and Alicia last night? Seriously, if I was on the Phillies I would’ve just walked back to the bus—there was no way they were winning that game last night.

But as far as intimidating intros go, where does it rank? I ask you, America: Ivan Drago in Rocky 4 or Jay-Z from Game 2?

I wasn’t very happy when the “Facebook is buying FriendFeed!” news broke.  To me, it signaled a “full speed ahead” battle cry in the misguided race with Twitter down the “real-time stream” rabbit hole.  Strangely enough, fresh off a week dominated by “Why is FriendFeed a Ghost Town?“, some leaked designs suggest Facebook is putting on the brakes and returning to its roots.

I remember standing stationary in the busy hallways at SXSW/i ‘06, mesmerized by the Twitter chatter plastered on Plasmas all over the Convention Center.  The overwhelming buzz and seemingly overnight new media darling status has quickly changed that mystical chatter into annoying noise.  What kind of noise?  Well, as I write this, the top trending item on Twitter is “RIP Kanye West“.  Now I’m sure it’s very possible that The Louis Vuitton Don has passed, but Jeff Goldblum and I are skeptical.

What does this “noise” have to with Facebook?   Nothing.  Other than its raging case of Twitter-envy.

The original Facebook News Feed worked as a curator.  It knew that you didn’t want to search through each and every one of your friends’ profiles to figure out the big news of the day.  Just like working through my email inbox, I could read through all of the Facebook-supplied, juicy tidbits until I got to one I had already read, and then cross “checking Facebook” off my mental to-do list.  “I’m done,” I would think.  “I’m caught up. I’m in the know.”

But like the Facebook fiend that I am, it wouldn’t take long for fear to creep in.  “Hm…it’s been a little while since I’ve been on Facebook,” would lead to, “I wonder if there’s anything new going on,”  which would ultimately turn into a panicked, “Crap, I hope I’m not missing anything!”, and right back to facebook.com I would go.

But as Facebook started to feel the unwarranted heat from Twitter, the News Feed suddenly changed from a curated summary into a real-time, unfiltered activity stream.  Going even more Single White Female, Facebook organized a username land-grab, and even implemented their own version of @ replies.

Now this isn’t a problem when you’re just starting out on Facebook, but as the average social graph size continues to grow, it becomes impossible to read through absolutely everything.  Shouldn’t a friend getting engaged be given more prominence than Liz sending Eric a horse topiary?  With zero possibility of processing every bit of the unfiltered minutiae of my friends’ activities, there’s no fear of missing something, because you’re always missing something. Without that fear, checking Facebook slips a notch from being a must-do, to being a fun-to-do.

And that’s what the new Facebook homepage design hopes to fix.  Leaked earlier this week by a brand advertiser being pitched to by Facebook, it seems that they’re bringing story curation back to the forefront.

“Facebook is simplifying the user experience on the home page by introducing Top News and Recent Activity streams. Now, when users log on to Facebook for the first time in a while, they will see the most important stories that they missed while they were away. From there, users can navigate to the real-time stream and toggle between both views throughout their sessions. In addition to making it easier for users to view content that is most relevant to them, this change also speeds up the time it takes for the home page to load and makes birthday reminders more prominent.

Ultimately, Facebook believes these changes will increase engagement on the home page by surfacing more relevant stories to users.”

The emphasis added was mine, and it can’t be stressed enough.  Facebook is turning off the firehose stream of data, and returning to the role of uber-connected friend that knows all the best and most juicy gossip. If you don’t stay in touch, you’re going to miss something.

Facebook is bringing the “fear” back. And that should scare all of its competitors.

The following is a post I wrote for the T3 Blog.

I sometimes think I was the last person on Earth to fall in love with Pandora. It was a quick courtship—in just a matter of weeks, Pandora became the background music to my day. It didn’t matter if I was at work or at home, the world just felt silent without her. And once I found Pandora for Blackberry, we were joined at the hip. Literally.

It seemed perfect. I had found a limitless library of music that was sincerely interested in me. I would talk, she would listen. I would “thumbs up” Mos Def, and she’d introduce me to Atmosphere. I’d “thumbs down” The Offspring, and she’d remind me how much I loved The Darkness. It was summertime and I was in love. It was kismet. And it was free.

July 7th started off like any other Thursday, but that morning I got an e-mail that I’ll never forget. Pandora was leaving me for someone new. His name? “Revenue”.

I was crushed.

Our favorite Web sweethearts, YouTube, Facebook, Digg and (my favorite) Twitter, all operate in the red. Despite their rock star status and the seemingly endless amount of time I spend on these sites, not a single one has turned a profit. Emulating King Gillette is a great game plan, but why give away the razors when you have no clue how to make a blade?

Lately, we’re seeing more companies try to buck the trend. Small startup 37signals and their hugely popular project management tool Basecamp has been charging from day one. On the other end of the spectrum, global media mogul Rupert Murdoch plans to build an online pay wall for the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in 2010.

But will anyone actually pay? More importantly, will I pay for Pandora after having my heart broken? On the Internet, the gap between $0.00 and $0.01 is a chasm, and we’ve been trained to expect the former. Pandora’s new $0.99/month charge for access to more than 40 hours of music (or $36/year for unlimited music via Pandora One) is absolutely miniscule, but I still remember a fraternity brother strolling into my room a full 10 years ago babbling about free music and some program called “Napster” that some kid down the street had built.

As a die-hard geek, this was a watershed moment for me. Am I really going to pay for music? A co-worker (and fellow Pandora user) summed it up best in an IM, “Mark–you could pay that 99 cents, or, maintain your dignity. Time will tell…”.

So what did I decide? Let’s just say I’m one hour away from hitting my 40-hour quota for September, and for the second month in a row I’ll be selling my geek dignity for the price of a Biggie fries.

I’m sure my Commodore 64 is rolling over in its grave, but paying for a service this good actually feels right. And if an early adopter like me is okay with it, what does it mean for the mainstream? After an atrocious 18 months for tech companies that saw many enter the deadpool, expect many of the survivors to start charging monthly subscriptions. I’d also bet we’ll see companies in different industries band together with package deals, “Get music from Pandora, news from the Post, traffic alerts from Fox, and weather alerts from AccuWeather for just $9.99/month with the SuperGloboTron Everything Plan!”

So how does that saying go? “Once is an aberration, twice is a trend”? After two months of ponying up, be sure to check back in to see if I crack the wallet open in October. I’m pretty sure three times represents a seismic shift.

Happy Friday, folks. I hope everyone has a great Labor Day weekend on tap.

For those of you still stressing about what to get me for my birthday, allow me to suggest voting for my SXSW Panel: The Last Panel In. You’ll feel great, your teeth will suddenly become whiter, and you can avoid those crazy lines at BestBuy. Voting ends today.

I’m giving a new talk today on Identity on the Web—Microsoft Wallet got the ball rolling way back in ‘97, and these days Facebook Connect is the big fish in the credentials pond. We’ll be talking about who is using services like Connect, and who has implemented it well.

If you’re an Idea City employee, come on over to the Theater at 2p.

I’ll have candy.

Morning, folks.

I’ve submitted an idea for this year’s SXSW Interactive conference that I’m really excited about. To actually get selected, I need tons of votes on the SXSW Panel Picker. The concept is The Last Panel In and is powered by Refreshing Cities.

SXSW’s massive size forces panel selections well in advance of the conference. Occasionally, this leads to panels that are vague or out of date.

With The Last Panel In, we’ll reserve one spot in the schedule for a topic that we’ll vote on in early 2010. This experiment will let SXSW attendees choose a timely topic that they’ll be excited to learn about.

The following is a post I wrote for the T3 Blog.

For a brief moment this morning, Facebook and Twitter were both down. I quickly crafted a few succinct, snarky sentences before realizing I had nowhere to post it.

While Facebook seems to be back up and humming again, Twitter has confirmed that the site was forced down, and is being kept down, by an ongoing Denial-Of-Service (DDoS) attack. What’s a DDoS? Imagine 10,000 people descending on your local grocery store, not looking to buy anything, but just stroll up and down the aisles. Everything gets congested, and no one accomplishes anything.

Well, no one except for the people orchestrating the attack. Regardless of your feelings on Twitter the medium, there’s no denying its full-blown media darling status, or the huge bulls-eye that status places on its back. And Twitter’s (surprising) single network provider architecture certainly doesn’t help.

So what does this outage mean for users? Well, a lot and a little. We’ve all seen the stats on low retention rates for users that don’t dive into the conversation quickly–there are a lot of nascent n00bs that I’m sure will completely drop off because of this.

But then again, Australia and much of Japan will sleep right through it. The early-adopting Twitterati will probably enjoy the nostalgia of the Fail Whale. Heck, I’ve read reports of people taking strolls around the block to kill time while it’s down. What crazy times we live in!

So what does this mean for your brand? Well, a lot and a little. Companies like StockTwits and Bit.ly get smothered while sucking on the Fail Whale’s teat. Symbiotic relationships are great as long as there are multiple sea anemones for your Clownfish. No brand should place all of their customer service, marketing, or customer acquisition eggs in the basket of a pre-revenue startup still trying to find its way.

But then again, that’s not a news flash, because you knew that already. Right? Right?