tl;dr – No, waste of time.

Let’s face it. The world is a cruel place, and there are far more awful people than awesome people.

This is one of those first world problems, and my solution for it. Should you follow your frenemies?

A frenemy is someone that is your “friend” in social networks but in real life is out to get you. They “get” you economically or politically but they aren’t out to kill you.

I used to believe that you should “friend” every one but I soon realized that my on-line presence soon became a node for opportunists to get up a rung higher in the game of status.

Now, I’m selective. There are lots of folks that will say to you in the face, “Hey, let’s catch up.” Or “let’s do lunch soon.” But they do not really mean it. There are lots of folks that are plain nasty. One person invited me out to lunch just to say that he perceived me as lazy despite working on weekends and at the time having #1 apps for their segment in the Apple Store.

Anyways, I am un-following these folks. I don’t care about using foursquare to avoid them. I don’t care if they’re talking to my boss. The key here is to stay as light as possible.

I wrote a piece about the current state of job recruiting from a coder looking for work. I wondered:

What would it be like if you didn’t have to do a job interview?

(The non-tl;dr summary is below.)

By “job interview,” I just mean the normal process where I job candidate replies to an ad, contacts an employer directly, or works with a recruiter, and gets a job through that process. High-profile experts are courted, or work out a mutually beneficial deal where it doesn’t feel like an interview.

I asked around for folks that didn’t have to interview. One name that consistently came to the top was Zed Shaw.

Zed is the creator of the Mongrel Web Server, and a really great framework that is powered by Mongrel, Tir. Personally, I first heard of him from a video Leah Culver linked to on a talk that Zed gave, “The ACL is dead.” A careful viewing of that talk is always rewarded, especially if you are a coder freelancing for a corporation.

Here’s my interview with him (conducted over email). Thanks Zed!

Barce: What’s your own process for choosing the projects you want to work on?

Zed: Within my profession I try to just work on whatever is needed to get the
project or job done. Sometimes that ends up being a lot of crap work so
other people can do more important stuff. Professionally I don’t mind
this kind of work as it’s low investment and removes the pressure off
other folks who would rather do interesting things. I think I also tend
to pick off the lower level work because most of my original ideas are
usually too weird for a professional setting.

Personally, I tend to work on projects that match ideas I might have,
and usually they have a secondary motive that’s outside of programming.
Many times these ideas come from combining a couple of concepts, or
they’re based on a problem I’ve noticed, or they are just a kind of
funny joke or cool hack I thought up.

I think the most important thing is I don’t try to plan my inspiration
in my personal projects, but instead go with it when it comes. I don’t
have a “process”, and in fact I think “process” kills creativity.
Proess definitely helps make creative ideas a reality, but it doesn’t
create the initial concepts very well.

Professionally though, inspiration is for amateurs and I just do my
work.

Barce: What advice can you give someone who feels trapped by their job or surrounded by recruiters?

Zed: Well, if you’re trapped by your job then I’d say start working on
getting a new one. Nobody is every really *trapped*, but maybe you
can’t just quit right away. Instead, work on projects at home,
constantly look for new work, and move to where the work is. Even if
it’s temporary, moving to say San Francisco during the boom times could
be a major boost to your career.

I’d also say that going back to school is a good way to update your life
and change your profession. I’m a firm believer in getting government
student loans and using them to go to school. They’re cheap, low
interest, and the US government is usually very nice about letting you
pay them back. I’m not so sure about other places around the world
though.

Barcee: What’s the most disruptive technology you know about right now?

Zed: If I were to be honest, I’d have to say Facebook, even though I
absolutely hate it. It’s probably the one technology in recent history,
maybe after HTTP and the Browser, that is changing the way governments,
societies, and regular people work. It’s also sort of irritating that
the most important thing to hit most people’s lives is also one of the
most privacy invading companies in the world.

After that I’d have to say the rise of automated operations and
virtualized machines. Things like Xen, kvm, and even llvm as compiler
infrastructure are changing how systems are managed and deployed, which
then leads to bigger automation for large hetergenous networks. I’m
sort of waiting for operating systems to catch up and realize that their
configuration systems are getting in the way of real automation.

Barce: Thanks again, Zed, for the interview. The take aways that I hope readers get from this are:

• Zed has open source projects that free him from the normal interviewing process. Building your own open source project is one way to free yourself.
• “Professionally though, inspiration is for amateurs and I just do my work.”
• “[W]ork on projects at home,
  constantly look for new work, and move to where the work is.”
• Facebook is the most disruptive technology that’s changing governments… Virtualization / Cloud technologies are a 2nd.

I’ve been working on reducing the amount of twitter spam.

To me Twitter Spam is any sort of @ reply or DM that links to a site that tries to hack you back, and it can do so more than you care for.

Here are 5 ways that work for reducing twitter spam:

1. The silent cannot be spammed. If you stay quiet for a few days the amount of folks who will spam you goes down.
2. Make your account private.
3. Prune your account of the spam-like and spam vectors. For me this means removing folks that follow more than have followers or act like bots (because they probably are). This also means using Echofon on the iPhone. Echofon is helpful in that it shows the vector a spammer used to get to me. In this case I might get spammed an at reply every time a certain user “ats” me back. Echofon makes this very obvious.
4. Actively block spammers and report them as spam.
5. Avoid using terms that spammers like. You know the one’s I mean. I’d mention it here but it would ruin my blog’s ranking.

Spoiler Alert: You’ve been warned.

If “The Social Network” has a subliminal message, it’s this:

“Swinging for the fences means forgetting about everything they taught you in business school, and if you went to business school, you are fucked.”

1.Lunch Meetings and Face to Face is for losers.

If you are going to New York to talk to ad men, you are just cosplaying “Mad Men.” In fact, any social interaction that isn’t mediated and accelerated through something like Flowtown, or Salesforce, or LinkedIn is just that, cosplay. If you are doing business over lunch, then you might as well be dressing up for Renn Faire.

The lesson of this is one of the pivotal scenes in “The Social Network.” Not to give away too much, but in the movie, Fincher and Sorkin take great pains to show what happens to someone who doesn’t get it, even if he’s a co-founder. This person who didn’t get it has a business degree from Harvard, and went to New York to make deals for selling ads on Facebook.

2. Coders can do it faster and better than biz dev or people who cannot code.

Coders code much faster than any “traditional” business arrangement. If you have an idea, and cannot code it, you can never be relevant if you are swinging for the fences. Case in point: The Vinkelvoss twins did have the “idea” for a social network, but so did everybody and their grandma at the time, but execution is very different. Most business folks focus on the idea and the revenue model. The example with Facemash.com in the movie showed that this idea is flawed. Why? Making waves in society with technology will always be faster than a revenue model.

3. Our capacity for having the wisdom to understand the technology we create outstrips the rate at which we create technology.

If this is the case, then the point that the character of Sean Parker pushes throughout the movie, that putting ads on a site is like ending a real cool party at 11 pm, is something all startups swinging for the fences have to take to heart.

Great point, Sean. I mean look at what ImDB.com has become because of that ad revenue pop-up model of business. ImDB is so ugly and not cool.

At the TechCrunch Disrupt event today, Twitter user, @bigs, broke the news that Microsoft announced that it would be moving over 30 million users of their Live blogging service to WordPress.

As a WordPress expert that has had to work on WordPress in a Windows environment there is one big gotcha: character encoding.

Here are what common characters look like when they are moved from a Windows environment to WordPress:

a return: ^M
single-quotes: ?~@~Y
asterisk: ?~@?
double-quotes: ?~@~\ or ?~@~]

If the WordPress migration process is robust, then it will translate these characters correctly into UTF-8 or something friendly like that.

Live users will definitely welcome the link schema and permalinks on WordPress. Instead of

http://cid-d4909e7f27e254e9.profile.live.com/

a user will get

http://barce.wordpress.com/ .

Also WordPress users can now link their accounts to MSN Messenger so that they can update their MSN friends or co-workers.

Are you a Windows Live Blogging user? How’d your upgrade process go?

Check out Dinevore if you’re a foodie who is a techie. Their API is now live!

Contact them via twitter or contact their team via email.

Have you used Facebook Places? Do you find it useful? I used it once and didn’t find a need for it, or didn’t get hooked the way I got hooked with Foursqaure.

I have seen interesting interactions by folks who don’t use Foursquare in terms of creating fun pages for a Pho Venue in San Francisco.

That Pho place already has a great Yelp page, but now they’ve got a page on Facebook, too, so it really helps drive more eyeballs onto a business.

Comment below about what you think of Facebook Places.

Aristotle defined 3 kinds of friendship in Book 8 of the Nicomachean Ethics:

1. friendships of utility
2. friendships of pleasure
3. friendships based on the good

Perfect friendship is the friendship of those who are good. — Aristotle

What kind of a friendship is a social media friendship?

At first, a social media friend was merely someone whose name, picture or avatar appeared on one’s profile because that someone had approved a friend request. However, many people didn’t like the use of “friend” in this way and so they used “follower” and “follows” instead.

Algorithmically, a friend is just a node 1 deep in the B-Tree of life.

Marketing-wise, a friend is just a potential viral link.

From Aristotle’s perspective, a social media friend can be useful (get you a job), be pleasurable (funny comments), and share in some good (charities and fundraising).

Social media extends a very real world practice of seeing and treating people as things, or as means to an end into the on-line world.

This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world. — from “I and Thou” by Martin Buber

My website traffic tripled yesterday!

Once again the 3 keys are:
1. Use adwords to tell you which words are expensive.
2. Use the expensive adwords in your post. In this case, “make money with adsense,” is worth $1.50 per click.
3. Blast your social network using something like ping.fm .

Great blogging tools make you more efficient. They can also help you drive more traffic to your site.

1 Camera+ brightens up your photos and makes them look so much better. You can share your photos on major social networks.

2 WordPress for the iPhone is a must. I’ve written posts on my iPhone and it’s a great tool. Whatever blogging software you use, make sure you find the one that works with your smart phone!

3 Seesmic for the iPhone allows you to share your blog post created on the go. If you use ping.fm you can share one blog post on linkedin.com, facebook, myspace, friendster, flickr, tumblr, twitter, and bebo in one status update!

4 Once you’ve posted your message, it’s time to study your Google Analytics. The only iPhone app that does this for me is Analytics Apps. At $6.99 it is pricy, but if you’re on the road lots, it’ll start paying for itself.