Email and blog post subject lines are going to die and here's why: the first sentence or two works much better.

 When I first started blogging in 2006 or so, I loved the idea of being able to have conversations with people all over the world, many of whom I didn't even know existed.  It's served me really well in that respect, I've met a ton of people and developed my most important online social network.  I have several relationships in the real world that developed because of blogs.

Then Twitter came along, and was all real-timey and stuff.  It's fun.  It feels like a cocktail party.  I can blurt out things that I think would make funny fortune cookies and there's an audience for that I guess.  But in terms of content it was a real lightweight compared to blogs, the medium is just too constraining.  At its core Twitter is a 140-character message bus, and there are lots of things lacking there for heavy-duty collaboration to happen.

Next came Facebook, which allowed me to find a lot of people but not necessarily the ones I wanted to have technical conversations with.  It's also completely ungeared towards anything longer than a sentence or two, the commenting system resembles a car with just an engine and a frame and a steering wheel.  Also not suited to hard-core collaboration of any kind.

Over time the collaboration model on blogs got better with the introduction of commenting systems like Disqus (although I still don't like the fact that I rely on them 100% to safeguard those comments).  But it never really changed much, we always had blogs and RSS to distribute and comment on meatier content.

But then, this year, came Wave.  And I fell head over heels in love with it.

I've been fascinated by quantum physics since I was a kid, learning about how reality works just really pushes my buttons for some reason.  Or, should I say, learning about how little scientists know about how reality really works intrigues me.

I realize that Twitter's gotten a TON of publicity lately, but I was sitting the in airport last night when I saw a Best Buy ad that featured a Twitter address instead of a bestbuy.com:

It'll be interesting to see how they do with this, if they actually manage to get a decent following they could end up as the first company with instant access to a decent chunk of their customer base.

So far they have 5,116 customers, and this commercial was running on CNN.  I don't know how long it's been running for, but CNN seems like it would have a more tech savvy audience.  I would love to see some demographics on Twitter usage, but I would bet it's a pretty young crowd, not CNN.

Yes, I know about the 15 year-old kid from Morgan Stanley who claims that nobody he knows uses Twitter.  I can only tell you that the teenage girls that I know in my family use it all the time to follow celebrities they like.  I see no reason why they wouldn't subscribe to feeds that they like also.

I find this interesting because for all the years RSS has been around, nobody has ever tried to push it like this.  It makes me wonder if RSS is just too conceptual for most people, but they understand Twitter because it has a name and somebody famous explained it to them. 

Sticking an RSS button in the corner of a site just looks like a weird picture to most people, but do they understand a Twitter URL?  Will be interesting to watch how Best Buy's experiment works, what's cool is we can watch it in real time via their subscriber count.

Look, I know why you're here.  There's only one reason that you'd be searching for this, which is to put an advertisement for your product or Nigerian investment opportunity on somebody's site.

The civilized world calls this behavior "spamming" and it is frowned on EXTREMELY heavily.  I mean, seriously, you'd better not tell people what you do at parties.  Make up a decent lie, like you're an IRS agent or a lobbyist.  Definitely don't tell your dates, if you can get them.

You know, you might want to sit down and re-evaluate your life.  Wouldn't it feel better to contribute something to society?  Help to move mankind ahead a little bit?  Are you really going to feel happy about what you're doing right now when you look back on your life?

Anyway, your IP address has been logged and is being forwarded to the major social networks for blacklisting.  It's for your own good.

Um, yeah, so this is kind of a weird post, but for some reason people were showing up at my blog looking for this stuff.  I figured I'd better say something to them.

Cisco decided to stop paying for my cell phone, so I FINALLY went out and bought an iPhone yesterday.  (Short review:  I love love love love love love love it.)  Have been waiting for this thing for like two years now, but it rocks.

My car, which runs a version of Windows CE (the stereo head unit, to be exact), has been perfectly content playing music from my iPod.  However it does not like my iPhone because of the iPhone 3.0 software, and it turns out that I have to patch my stereo in order to control my iPhone with it.

I was struck by the fact that I had just experienced a version compatibility issue between my phone and my car.  How crazy is that.

A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job. 

The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What does two plus two equal?"   The mathematician replies "Four." The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?"  The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly."

The interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What does two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four."

Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What does two plus two equal?"

The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says "What do you need it to equal?"

...

And that little economist grew up to be Lawrence Summers.  (Kidding.  Kind of.)

A real gem found here:

What's more, I think I know his secret identity!

Good thing we passed Obama's stimulus plan, he says it's working very well:

(BTW the Treasury used 8.9% unemployment as it's "worst case scenario" number for all of 2009 in those bank stress tests.  Glad we have experts on the job.)  Paying for this powerful medicine is hammering the bond market, doing great things for mortgage rates:

This is going to be fantastic for real estate, especially since we are about to get a wave of mortgage resets.

Hope everyone locked their rates while the getting was good.

To those of you who are looking at buying a "bargain" house right now, let me just say that catching falling knives is best left to circus performers.

Needless to say, I believe we are at or near a top for the year in the equity markets, soon to punch through the year's low of 666 on the S&P 500.  Just wanted to go on the record with this since everyone is so unbelievably optimistic right now.  Those green shoots are weeds.

I've really been enjoying my recent study of predictive analytics and data mining.  It's provoked me to think about the nature of value, how much of it there is lying around waiting to be uncovered, and what it takes to uncover it. 

It has also caused me to gain a much deeper appreciation for people who both have expertise in an area of business and the desire and drive to learn the skill set they can use to turn that experience into something extraordinary.