(ed. note: i’m still the only person on the internet to use the phrase “fail whale’s teat“.)

It’s been 4+ years since the News Feed launched, and it’s hard to remember the site without it. Four years is no insignificant period of time. There have been countless startups either influenced by, or were flat out clones of the News Feed that no longer exist. A couple are still hanging on, the occasional one gets beamed up to the mothership, but most ease their way into the deadpool.

This one (massive) feature has become as ubiquitous as the dropdown, but it hasn’t changed at all in the past four years. Maybe there are a couple more options to hide annoying Farmville badges, or keep your ex out of sight, but it has always answered just one question: “What just happened?”

On the surface, that’s only subtly different than “What is happening?”, but at the core, the difference is vast. Why must News Feeds be focused on the Past? Aren’t the Present and the Future just as, if not more important?

What if you took the notion of a Past/Present/Future News Feed and installed it at my bank? Wouldn’t it make me a more educated customer? Couldn’t it be the perfect home for “good behavior incentives”?

October 11th
- Your Visa payment of $101.86 was received on time

October 19th
- Late Fee charge of $35.00 waived

Today
- Pending charge of $6.44 at Chipotle
- Pending charge of $21.64 at Best Buy

Thursday
- Your 2nd Mortgage payment of $334.98 is due

January 4th, 2011
- If you continue making payments on time, you will receive a $500 credit limit increase

What if you took the notion of a Past/Present/Future News Feed and installed it at a sports startup?

Find out tomorrow.

The crazy rotation that’s a part of any contractor’s life continues, but most of my gig time since HomeAway has been spent doing work for Ace Hardware. A handful of Facebook apps and a microsite made up the hit list.

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.

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.

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

I’ll have candy.

Tossed on my lap by @jrea, this is easily the most imaginative integration of Facebook Connect I’ve ever seen. From now on, whenever someone asks what Connect can do, I can just point to this. We all get that you can log in quickly and post items back to your page, but it’s sometimes hard to explain why it’s any better than a vanilla Facebook app.

I literally screamed out loud once this got going.

For Pete’s sake, someone please convince a client to launch something this awesome so I can build it.

Never.

The idea first popped up when I stumbled upon and applied for WK12, Wieden+Kennedy’s “experimental” internship program. I didn’t get in.

That was back in ‘04, and I should’ve realized the match earlier, because I was obsessed with commercials and billboards as a kid. The socioeconomic delta between my neighborhood and my friends’ cranked up the contrast on the beer and luxury car dominated, predatory campaigns.

Wearing the heads down on my VCR with repeated rewinding of commercials, it didn’t take me long to identify what, in my head, I call the “Majority of Minorites” rule:

Unless attempting to market specifically to a minority, fewer than half of the members of any marketing piece will belong to said minority.

…

Hm.

…

So…I started writing this post about Next Day Air (can’t wait to see it) and The Matrix: Revolutions being extremely rare exceptions to the rule, but I’m calling an audible because I just remembered something.

A few days ago @hyams posted a tweet about a gay couple in a commercial. I just took the time to track it down and it’s terribly interesting.

Granted, this commercial isn’t an exception to the Majority rule, but its rampant ambiguity is fascinating. Is the “couple” gay? Are they targeting the Gay community? Is the rainbow pattern on his shirt a clue? Is never seeing a clear shot of either man’s ring finger on their left hand a coincidence?

Does the rule apply if you’re not sure if the subjects are members?

Have a look for yourself, and be sure to check out the conversation on YouTube and Twitter as well.

With Coke’s global footprint, sliding into the 2nd spot sounds about right—there’s no reason that they shouldn’t be in the top 10. The interesting part of the story isn’t their ranking though, or even that the page was created by a pair of fans that stepped up and made it themselves. No, with companies either falling all over themselves, or doing absolutely nothing in today’s more social media for fear of doing the wrong thing, the unique part is Coke actually reaching out to the two creators.

“Everyone has this vision that if something like this happens, the big company will send you off to Guantanamo,” he said. “This was exactly the opposite.”

Coke instead flew the guys down to Atlanta for a few days of meetings, a tour of the World of Coke museum and a visit to the company’s legendary archives. It was a friendly, not heavy-handed approach, Mr. Jedrzejewski said.

“We talked openly about ideas, the future of the fan page,” he said.

(more)

Despite Hasbro always acting on the right side of the law, and continuing to make the Facebook app more robust, Scrabble will never be as beloved as Scrabulous was. There will always be a negative stigma attached to the game because the IP ordeal played out so very publicly.

It’s refreshing (heh) to see Coke approaching fans with a syrupy sweet (ha!), inclusive mindset, knowing that the bubbly (zing!) authenticity of actual, sincere fans is the most valuable online currency.

And oh yeah: High Fructose Corn Syrup. I couldn’t find a way to work that one in.