Finally, it seems Facebook will solve the missing piece of Facebook. Though details are not public yet, Facebook has added two new api calls — “friends.getLists” and “friends.getListsMembers”. I think it means Facebook will be adding a way for me to group my friends — hopefully, a “newsfeed” for each group is part of this new friendlist feature they are working on. Mashable wonders if these calls are an attempt to compete against linkedin and slide — I don’t think so. Personally, I think Facebook saw a weakness in their platform and this is the fix.

As Fred says, fixing problems is the way to build a great company — Facebook is definitely on the right track.

More on Techmeme (and I’m guessing more people will write about this later today)

In case anyone missed it like I did, there was a lunar eclipse on Monday night. Here’s a picture from the Seattle Times.

More photos on Flickr.

I’m with Fred on this issue – the Internet is NOT Dead and Boring, which means I disagree with Mark Cuban’s post. I, for one, love all the innovation happening.

If you want to read more, head on over to Techmeme — articles seem to be popping up by the minute.

Surrounding yourself with passionate people is important — both in life and in business.

Though I do firmly believe in the vision of Zillow, I wouldn’t be at Zillow if it weren’t for all the fantastic colleagues I get to work with — it was the team that attracted me. I’ve heard both Rich and Lloyd (co-founders of Zillow), both of whom have considerable business experience, drill home the “surround yourself with passionate people” theme several times. I can confidently say they (props to our recruiting team too) are doing a great job of attracting a fantastic team; I’m blown away with the passion and skill of the vast, vast majority of employees I’ve worked with over the past two years. So, if you haven’t surrounded yourself with passionate people, go find them — it’s like night and day whem compared to people who aren’t passionate about anything. Don’t be freaked out by passion.

For some thoughts on inspiration, head over to Realtor Genius and read Quit Yer Yarping & Talk Solutions Already – Raise My Bar by Raising Yours. I stated in the comments that what inspires me is “Helping others educate themselves and improve their business/life in the process. Along the same lines — micro finance, which you’ll see me blogging more about in the future on my own blog.”

And yes, you will start seeing some more microfinance content from me over the next couple months.

I just found a fantastic website, WorldChanging, via White African’s “Blog Envy” post. And I definitely couldn’t just read one article — I just read “Understanding Blogs” and “Sustainability and Empathy” and “Building Community through Lunch”

Here’s the mission:

worldchanging was founded on the idea that real solutions already exist for building the future we want. it’s just a matter of grabbing hold and getting moving.

I think so. Politics needs more transparency — PERIOD.

And I think Youtube can help politicians interact more directly with the public. Enter CitizenTube, Youtube’s Political vLog.

Here’s an interesting video addressing the question that is worth watching.

If you’re interested in web 2.0, social networking, online community building, or anything related — you definitely have to check out Brad’s Thoughts on the Social Graph. The social graph is global mapping of everybody and how they’re related. The social graph infrastructure Brad is proposing is not aiming to replace facebook, myspace, or bebo, but is aiming to organize relationships across the internet and open them up for anyone to use.

Here’s the ultimate goal –

Ultimately make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as “the” central graph owner.

More on Techmeme.

I wrote about CNN’s “What if Everyone Cared?” campaign several weeks ago and just noticed I’ve been getting some traffic from CNN’s search module — which led me to this music video by Nickelback that I thought I’d share.

You can also check out Nickelback’s web site if you’d like.

via StumbleUpon

So, I was just going to login to my msn account via www.hotmail.com and was surprised to see this screen (click for bigger view) –

I think attempting to change the “Hotmail” brand name to Windows Live Hotmail is a terrible, terrible strategic move on the part of Microsoft. I mean, seriously, there aren’t many people on the internet who don’t know the Hotmail brand. But now they are trying to rebrand everything with “Live,” which I think is incredibly stupid. I can only wonder what their marketing department is thinking…

Apparently it’s true according to ZDNet and Mashable. Are you kidding me? It’s shocking Classmates.com is going for an IPO — I haven’t heard their name mentioned in the press in ages (maybe even a couple years), while both Facebook and Myspace are referenced almost daily. I certainly don’t know anyone that would buy stock from them, but, maybe that’s just me.

via Techmeme 

You should go read this article on TechDirt, which says that publishing FULL feeds will actually INCREASE page views.

Personally, I find partial feeds annoying as hell.

Guy Kawasaki was the 3rd speaker leading up to lunch and talked about evangelism. Every entrepreneur is probably thinking about how to get the word out on the cheap w/out advertising. Here’s Guy’s 10 tips to effective product evangelism (he actually gave 11, but I seemed to have missed one) –

1. Make Meaning
2. Make Mantra
3. Roll the DICEE
   • Deep
   • Intelligent
   • Complete
   • Elegant
   • Emotive
4. Niche thyself
5. Let a hundred flowers blossom
6. Find the true influencers
7. Enable test drives
8. Look for agnostics, not atheists
9. Provide a slippery slope
10. Don’t let the bozos grind you down

Or you can just create something that is great, then everything becomes easier.

Robert Steele was the KeyTone speaker and had a very thought provoking presentation. Definitely thinking outside the box — his main point was “Open everything”; government, bandwidth, education, etc. I’ll come back to his presentation later because there is no way I can quickly put all my thoughts together on all the topics he touched — there was way too much to think about. Steele really believes that the future depends on the resilency of neighborhoods.

Darren Barefoot talked about doing good in a systematic way — and since he is a geek like the rest of us at Gnomedex, he focused on doing good using technology. Darren felt he needs a “currency to evaluate good” – and named it the stacey, and measured everything in his presentation in terms of “stacies”.

Here are some tech projects you can participate in to do “good” –

• nabuur.com – crowdsourcing across the globe. Connecting neighbors and villages.
• Icouldbe.org – mentoring the next generation
• Geekcorps – helping geeks help those in need.
• Moulinwiki.org – taking wikipedia content off the internet and bring information to people with computers, but not internet
• NothingButNets.net – $10 buys a mosquito net to help prevent malaria. 826,000 nets have been bought to date.
• GiveMeaning – Allows you to raise funds for any cause. 100 must vote for it before you can raise money for your cause.

He also talked a bit about happiness & showed the satisfaction of life map on wikipedia. GetaFirstLife has been seen by 600,000 people. And they laughed for an average of 15 seconds each.

If you want to have a major impact, build infrastructure. Help others do good.

For those looking to really connect with others who want to use the internet to help the developing world (and the world in general) — check out WebofChange, a conference that is taking place September 19-23 on Cortes Island, BC.

Sorry if my notes don’t totally make sense.

I was just reading through some of my feeds and found a dandy — a seemingly fantastic post at TypepadHack.org called “Blogs as Stores: A Comprehensive Overview of Ecommerce Solutions for Bloggers” (via Seth Godin). Give it a thorough read if you’re interested in monetizing your blog in a more effective way than generating advertising revenue on your blog.

I must admit, I haven’t read the entire post yet — but I wanted to bookmark it for myself so I can come back to it later. Is it weird that I use my blog to bookmark great articles rather than del.icio.us??

I found an interesting video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt giving his thoughts on “web 3.0″ on Read/Write (via techmeme).

Don’t get me wrong, I love facebook just as much as everyone else my age. However, the system does have a large problem that is a result of designing this platform for Generation Y.

Facebook doesn’t do well to different types of contacts. College kids (who were who the site was built for initally) don’t have separate networks of contacts to keep in touch with that prior generations do. Two years into the working world, it’s very clear to me that both my professional network and my network of friends are extremely important to keep in touch with, but keeping in touch means different things depending on the network.

Facebook’s newsfeed is a great way to quickly get a grasp on what’s happening in my network (at least online). But my newsfeed is almost useless now because of all the business connections (mainly real estate bloggers) I’ve added recently. The fact that most of them are “geeky” and are quite active on FB just adds to the noise. I’m not saying that I don’t value their relationships (I do), but their relationships are different from close friends who I keep in touch with. I don’t really need to know everything a real estate blogger in Florida does the day it happens. However, I do care to keep up with my friends who live in Seattle on a daily basis.

I essentially want separate “networks” — one for my friends, one for family, and one for business. What I really want is separate feeds for each of those networks. It seems like it shouldn’t be too challenging — just give me a way to put people into groups & give me a newsfeed for each group. Hopefully, Facebook is working feverishy to solve this problem.

I’ve been busy in San Francisco at Real Estate Connect since Tuesday morning, so I haven’t quite kept up on my e-mail, blog reading, and blog writing – my apologies.

The weirdest thing is I haven’t logged into Facebook since Tuesday. That may not be weird for some of you, but those of you in Generation Y likely know exactly how weird you feel if you have no idea what has happened on facebook in 4 days.

And this is the first time I’ve even LOOKED at my personal blog since Tuesday.

Things should get back to normal next week.