Man, it’s good to be back in Austin. I’m not completely thawed out yet, but I’m still beaming after watching two good college friends get married in Boston this weekend.

Weddings are pretty amazing things. We’re surrounded by friends and family, and love seems to be everywhere. And of course, like the sap I am, I found myself falling in love too.

With a clothing iron.

Now, feel free to chuckle (the rest of the wedding party sure did), but I’ve never been so enamored with a home appliance. As I was getting ready on the morning of the big day, nothing seemed unusual about this device that emitted a beep and a cool, blue-colored glow as soon as I plugged it in. But after a short pause, another soft beep and a hue change to green, I wondered if something might be amiss.

I propped up the iron and took a step back. Am I doing something wrong here? Had I deviated from my tried and true Ironing Playbook™?

- Plug in iron. Check.
- Crank the dial all the way up. Check.
- Start ironing immediately. Check.
- Singe shirt. Check.
- Quickly spin the dial way down. Check.
- Realize I went too far and crank it back up. Check.
- Get frustrated that it’s 2011 and I STILL don’t have a flying car or a robot to iron for me. Check.

Seemingly sensing my apprehension, the iron beeped softly once more and turned a rosy red. It was only then that I noticed the colored dots on the temperature dial. Subtly, and elegantly, this device had obliterated years of pent-up frustration with ironing, with a small light that simply told me how hot it was.

The lament I hear most often from budding entrepreneurs is that “I want to go out on my own and start something, but I just don’t know what to build.” Sadly, most follow the crowd and try to catch a ride on the hot wave at the moment, but my advice is always the same: Find a pain point and remove it. Figure out what annoys you, your friends, and your family every day, and create a novel way to eliminate it.

The very best products remove that pain and make us mini-superheroes. Whether it’s my personal goal of turning fans into Super Fans that are never the loser at the watercooler that missed the big game, or you’re the product designer that transformed me into an Ironing Ninja creating shirt creases so sharp I need a concealed weapon permit, your goal should be to make customers better at what they do every day.

Build a product or service that’s able to do that, and you just might see me walking it down
the aisle.

(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.

It’s a shame, really. You’ll just have to imagine all of the obscene, over-the-top alliteration I would’ve used.

Quick recap:

• The car2go 24 hour project was a ton of fun. Got to meet with their CTO and hear about what they have planned for the future. Since car2go.markphillip.com launched, Austin CarShare died. I’ll let you read between the lines. More importantly though, I now have a little blue car2go USB drive that I like to chew on. Win.
• My HVAC died back in June and I was AC-less for almost a month. Any discomfort for those few weeks is overshadowed by the awesomeness of the new cooling system. I’ve never been so thoroughly obsessed with a home appliance. Two-stage HVACs, ftw.
• Twitter is still dumb.
• Through some dumb luck and quickly-written emails, Are You Watching This?! was on ESPN.com and Deadspin. RUWT?! momentum is really good right now.
• I’ll be travelling a lot over the next six weeks. Get your airport abbreviation dictionaries out, kiddies.

Here’s 12 minutes of me talking about sports and race, along with a veiled shot at Twitter tossed in just for fun.

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.

Today we’re showing some love for Zack Metzner. And I’d like the record should state that it’s not because I’ve known him since forever, but because his new project JoblessJoe got a write-up in the Statesman today. Pimp.

“You wake up one day with that panicked feeling of, ‘Oh my God, I don’t have a job!’ You feel alone out there, not realizing there’s 13 million people who are probably in a similar situation out there.”

Metzner spent the rest of last year working on a Web site, JoblessJoe.com, which he hopes will be a “community support system” for people who are job hunting.

It’s one of several new Austin-based sites whose creators have turned the economic downturn into a reason to launch a jobs-related business online. (more)

“you have 8 1st degree dead friends, 476 2nd degree dead friends, and 24,538 3rd degree dead friends in your Personal Network.

Alerts: you have 1 new dead friend! [confirm]“

Hey legacy fans, remember the Deathster idea?  Almost 5 years later, it looks like companies are finally(!) tackling the problem.  They’re still missing pieces of the puzzle, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it.