One of the things I’m most looking forward to post-wedding is having Hayley live with me rather than downstairs in a different apartment. The status quo presents several frustrations that I am more than happy to be rid of.. No more guessing and worrying about whether or not the other is actually awake and out of bed in the morning (which was a FAIL this morning as I showed up for morning prayer and Hayley was still sleeping). No more “oh crap, I left that pan down at my apartment!” revelations as we’re speedily trying to prepare a meal. No more staying up late so I don’t feel like I’m abandoning Hayley as she does some internety things at my place late into the evening when I would rather be sleeping (NOTE: she doesn’t have internet access at her apartment – she mooches).

All things considered, it’s an extremely excellent thing that she’ll be moving in. There are, however, a few minor concerns I’m trying to wrap my head around..  (Be aware that I’m not directing any of my thoughts/complaints/reflections at Hayley – I’m just trying to get used to a new reality.  And I’m trying to be funny about it.)

(see if you can find the easter egg in the image)

#1) Closets

I won’t use an actual picture of Hayley’s closet, but I think this one is a mildly decent representation of what it looks like. Essentially, it’s full of clothing. Lots of clothing. Take this picture and add in another 50% more and we’re just about there.

Women have clothes. I get that. It may be annoying to me on some levels, but I recognize that women think and function differently than men do when it comes to the amount of clothing they have. Women have skirts or blouses that one work in combination with only one other skirt or blouse – this is not something men deal with, and thus the plethora of clothing can be considered somewhat reasonable for the fashionable woman.  Simply, women have “outfits”..  Men only use that word when referring to military units.

I do, however, have one major concern with this situation.. Where am I going to put all of my clothes? I have 4 pairs of jeans, 4-5 slacks, 1 suit, a couple dozen dress shirts, a dozen polos, and a bunch of t-shirts.. Add in socks, gym clothes, undergarments, and ties; I need a little bit of space as well. Not a cavernous closet of my own, but I do need to hang up something!

Well, once the wedding bells have rung, I think I’ll be living out of boxes for a few months.  We don’t have any bedroom furniture (currently), so I can’t just fold up everything and place it in a dresser.. We will go purchase a bedroom set at some point, but even then I’m a bit concerned about the direction I’m heading in.  I feel like I need a separate storage unit just to manage the SHOES!  OHHHH, THE SHOES!

I’m certainly being dramatic for the fun of it, but I am really curious as to how this will work itself out.

(MAJOR NOTE: This issue of enough space is also a concern when it comes to the bathroom, balcony, and the apartment in general for that matter… It is going to be crowded!)

*sigh*

#2) Decorations

I know I currently live in a glorious bachelor pad, and with a woman moving in things will change. But.. I don’t know that I’m ready for a million pillows on my couches.

Hayley is already excited to start sewing some pillow cases that we can use to have a ton of pillows around the living room…  Then she wants to find some really classy art stuff, work on setting a theme (potentially using a grass-green as the base color), and essentially destroy my soul as a consequence of all this femininity.

I will have a great deal of patience with new decor if our place looks nice (according to my standards of nice), but this is one of the few areas where Hayley and I have disagreements.  Hayley is a little more glamorous than I am, I suppose; I mean, she did request we season pass Gossip Girl on the TiVo… My dream home is a large and spacious lodge with huge windows, wooden furniture, big comfy couches, and lots of earth tones.  Hayley would be much happier in the classic colonial mansion with very fashionable drapes blocking out significant amounts of natural light..

I think there is enough overlap where we can be happy, but we have honestly not yet discovered enough overlap to assuage my fears.  Part of this is just me being stubborn about losing my man-cave of an apartment, so of course I recognize my thoughts as pretty ridiculous.  I do, however,  wonder if I’ll one day wakeup to find ruffles on everything…  This sounds like a potential nightmare for me!

#3) Relaxation Habits

I will keep this short: I don’t like cuddling while I play video games. It’s distracting, I get warm really fast, and someone keeps bumping my arm.. Cuddling while playing Red Dead Redemption is like mixing milk with Mountain Dew – it can be done, but no one enjoys it.

I think this is something every man needs to get used to though – the Mass Cuddle Effect.  I hereby swear that I will cuddle during all chick-flicks, episodes of Community, and before bedtime as long as I can avoid my husbandly duties during game time.  I think this is the most fair thing I’ve ever agreed to.  :)

— And now I will subtly retract my tongue from my cheek region.

Noooot really, but we like to joke that I am. Jason likes to joke that I am turning into a mini-HaX0r since I tend to know workarounds for just about everything he wants to do these days, but since I almost universally refuse to touch code, Jeff != HaX0r Really, all I did this time was jailbreak the iPhone.

Simply put, this was long overdue. Travis sung the praises of a jailbreak over a year ago, but I hesitated because I viewed it as a hassle when it comes to installing firmware updates and things of that nature (which I still haven’t quite figured out how all that will work, but I will). Since then I have felt the frustration of all that the iPhone doesn’t (thanks Droid ads for pointing this out over and over again), I have gone ahead and done what was necessary. I now introduce you to, Jeff’s iPhone 2.0:

(FYI – I was charging the phone when I took these screenshots)

Kinda neat, yeah?  Nothing mind blowing, but I love that I can run multiple apps (notice the radio icon in the bottom right corner as a “waiting” tab on it, meaning it’s running in the background), have 5 apps in the dock down below, a theme/skin (custom icons, a background other than black, my own name instead of AT&T in the upper corner, etc…), a simplified lock-screen…  Simple stuff that’s apparent right away, and very very nice!

The jailbreak process is incredibly straight forward.  I used the Pwnage Tool (google it and you’ll find a plethora of information), made sure I had current backups in iTunes (which is essential if you wanna keep your Apple App Store applications where you left them), and followed a couple different tutorials (one for when I worked on my phone and a different one for Jason’s – only really because I lost the first link).   This is why I can’t call myself a HaX0r…  The real geeks made it easy for schlubs like me!

Really, a key feature is being able to run multiple apps at once – something the phone SHOULD be able to do but Apple keeps it from happening..  I installed an app called Backgrounder (off of Cydia, the jailbreak app store) to run the multiple apps, and another called ProSwicther which gives me the fun look and feel of a Palm Pre when switching through applications, including the same touch gestures (see below – to close an app you can hit the (x) or slide it off the top of the screen).

While some of that stuff is just aesthetics (btw, did I mention my ring-tone is now the hidden door sound of the original Legend of Zelda? Major shout-out to Derek Christensen for the idea), there are some serious tweaks going on in the background.  To name a few, I’m running open SSH to gain access to my file structure, NetaTalk (uses Apple Protocol) to allow wireless access to my iPhone’s file structure, 3G Unrestrictor which gets past the “You Can Only Use This App on Wireless, not 3G” stuff, and SBSettings (see images below) to have easy access to turning features on and off as well as free up memory or kill applications.

(Note the “Available Memory” in the first image.  I hit “Free Up Memory” and it cleared a considerable amount that was being wasted.  Also note that the SSH toggle on the right only exists because I have Open SSH installed)

Finally the iPhone is what it should have been, arguably, from the beginning!  Does everything work perfectly?  Surprisingly, it’s pretty close!  Apple continually spews lies about how running multiple apps will kill the battery or destroy the memory management, but it seems pretty obvious that the jailbreak community has figure some of this stuff out.  MAYBE my battery dies a bit faster than it would otherwise, but I have to charge it every night anyway…  And with the ability to quickly turn off 3G, location awareness, and wifi in SBSettings, it’s really easy to actually conserve more battery that way.   This is the only reason I have some hope for the iPad – Apple made a fail of a product, but perhaps the jailbreak community can actually make it cool!

Oh, and my favorite jailbreak app?

WHAAA?!  You mean I can haz texts in appz?!  (Sorry I’m using you as an example Aly!) I didn’t take a screen shot of the actual reply function, but essentially I just hit that reply button and an overlay of the texting screen pops up and I can immediately respond without going to the texting application (don’t fool yourself, it’s an app like the others but with a push notification like setup – it is NOT like the phone or email clients that are constantly running).   This is a HUGE plus for me!  HUGE!  I get text messages throughout the day, and I hated having to close whatever I was working on to reply.  Granted, now that I can run multiple apps I could just move from app to app, but this streamlines the process even more!  Why does this not exist in the native iPhone OS?  Ask El Jobso, cause it freakin’ should!

All in all, I’m happy as a clam.  Yes, the novelty of it all has kind of worn off, but that doesn’t mean I’m not super happy about it.  Really, truly, this is the kind of stuff the iPhone should already be able to do.  If Apple adds a majority of these improvements to the standard OS then maybe I’ll switch back at that point, but right now the jailbreak community has figured out how to truly unlock the power of the device.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had an over-the-top action movie with a killer (pun intended) cast and some serious action. Tropic Thunder doesn’t count.

With respect to the awesome action flicks of the 80′s and early 90′s, I present to you Sly Stallone’s latest project: The Expendables

UPDATE: Thanks Jason for pointing out that the older video wasn’t working. Hopefully this embed works for the time being…

UPDATE: Looks like the internets just can’t handle such a sweet movie trailer. Look for it yourself, somewhere else. I don’t know why it keeps getting pulled, but I know I’m not going to repost it every five minutes.  Here’s a picture of a kitty that exemplifies how I feel:

So, I completely abandoned Pyxlin recently… I abandoned it because I was pointed towards LDSJournal.com, which I consider a better solution to my needs. Not only is it free, but I like how easy it is to use, without the obnoxious wait times and such that I experienced with Pyxlin’s site. Pyxlin was great, and I don’t regret the money I spent to get a year subscription (it was cheap, and I wrote daily), but that’s all a sunk cost now that I see something that meets my needs in a better way.

Few examples:

LDSJournal.com runs much faster because it doesn’t run on the silly platform that Pyxlin uses!

Pyxlin:

LDSJournal:

As you can see, posting on LDSJournal is very similar to posting on your blog. I don’t have to worry about the silly typesetting thing that gets really annoying.

You can also use Firefox spell checking (see above picture for red squigglies), which you could not do in Pyxlin… You were instead forced to use their retarded spell checker.

LDSJournal also allows for footnotes (images and such) as well as journal addendums that can be time stamped differently to show that you went back to old journal entries and had thoughts that you wanted to share. This could be really neat for reviewing your journal at the end of the month or end of the year. You could go in and explain how certain thoughts became really important to you as the month went on and how different experiences may have shaped what you decided your next steps in life to be.

I also don’t have to have silly chapters and things in my LDSJournal. Everything is associated with a date (see the calendar on both the image above and the one below that lets you know when you’ve made an entry), and when I decide to print something (the functionality for that is forthcoming, but I’m faithful since I’ve already seen development since I moved to their service) it will be set chronologically without hassle. Apparently they are also working on the “tag” feature I would really like, which would allow me to print a different journal just based on entries with spiritual experiences or confessions of love (cheesy!).

I also like that it tells me right at the bottom what my most recent journal entries are and the dates associated with them. This just makes it a little easier for me to keep track of my progress with an actual idea of what I wrote about based on the entry title.

Anyway, this is my new recommendation! Certainly check it out (it’s FREE). I encourage everyone to keep a journal for a bunch of reasons:

1. It helps you process what you did during the day
2. It is great for thinking through whatever you are experiencing in life
3. I often have my “A HA!” moments as I’m writing in my journal, and those really help shape my life
4. It’s sort of recommended by the Prophets and Apostles…

I may have a new favorite online service: Pyxlin… I saw this in the Daily Universe (BYU’s Student newspaper) yesterday, and since I have been an avid Journaler over the last 8 months (though I’ve been pretty bad at it recently) I thought I would check it out. Seriously, I’m pretty highly impressed!!! Pyxlin isn’t a terribly new idea in it’s basic form – it’s an online Journal tool – but it’s a service that finally does things right.

The biggest downfalls I’ve seen to previous services like this have been that they don’t provide all the functionality I want in their web service (a full text editor and the ability to upload my photos however I want) nor do they provide much of a way for you to get a hardbound copy of what you have worked so diligently to keep… Well, those are two things that Pyxlin definitely gets right! Keeping an online journal sure is convenient since you can access it from anywhere and flake out during class if you’d like, but finally I can get my journal in a book at the end of the year to keep on my book shelf.

I like to see when people do technology the right way… Too often people try and digitize your whole life, but for the majority of us there is a strong feeling of nostalgia for the things of the past… I LOVE having hard copies of my journals. Can I tell you how much I love that? I LOOOOVE having hard copies of my journals. It’s nice to pull it out once in a while to see what I was feeling and thinking about a while back… It’s really great if you want to share some personal thoughts that you wrote about your girlfriend when you first started dating… Seriously, it’s a big deal to me, and to see someone respond to that type of user requirement (I know I’m not the only one who feels this way) is really impressive.

I recommend you check it out and take a look at a pretty neat product. I don’t know anything about the guys who developed it, other than that they were/are apparently BYU students – thus why the Daily Universe covered it, so I don’t want anyone to think I’m recommending you check out something a friend built (though you should definitely check out RateMyApartments.com).

There is a site charge (something like $20 a year if you pay annually), but you can do a 7-day trial for free. Let me know what you think! I get excited about people using technology intelligently like this – it’s a big step up from the non-innovative ideas I often see.

Jason, Travis and I are looking at starting a company. We have a pretty sweet idea and we’ve got a lot of skills, but this whole starting a business thing isn’t an easy undertaking. More than anything, I’m intimidated as hell at the proposition of doing all of the stuff we’ve outlined as key steps to developing the business.

Basically, without giving a whole lot away, we’re trying to carve ourselves into an internet marketing niche that can serve a huge community with content that is interesting and fun while yet providing a great forum for coporations to get their propoganda to the masses.

This is something that I can definitely see as a success down the road, but the basic implementation needed to get us started and into everyone’s bookmarks is a little daunting to think about. Not only do we need to develop a great looking site, but there is some functionality that we’ll need implemented right away (such as a database and dynamic pages) that I’ve definitely never developed before or had to work with. Aside from that you have the constant issue of defining a revenue model, setting goals and acquiring enough content from corporate marketing departments to make your site sufficiently sticky. Needless to say, this is all incredibly new to me.

I’ll be searching through some internet documentation to see what I can find in regards to starting an internet only business. Hopefully I will find enough quality information specific to our online marketing idea to help smooth out some of the wrinkles I already see in our business plan that could potentially become problems. I mean, what’s the best way to develop something that needs a scalable infrastructure in terms of bandwidth, processing power, and storage? There are options like Amazon’s web services, but those can tend to be somewhat expensive – especially when you’re in beta!

Anyway, if anyone is seriously interested in joining our little team, let me know. The three of us would really like to dive through the first few steps in the development of our plan by ourselves, but I have a feeling we’ll need some quality web developers and the like once we get the ball rolling. Hopefully we’ll be successful and can walk away with some serious money in the future, but I am sure it will be a great learning experience no matter what happens.

It’s been a while since I’ve had some time to get a post up, and one of the reasons why is because I have been spending a lot of time preparing for the Omniture Web Analytics Competition at BYU. For those who don’t know, I’m taking a Web Analytics class this semester and we’re encouraged (maybe required?) to participate in the competition. This was my second semester participating in the competition, but unfortunately we worked with the same website’s data. Though you’d think I had an advantage, being familiar with http://www.costumecraze.com/, the Omniture people made it clear at the opening meeting that we needed to come in with new information this time around.

I can’t share any specific information due to my signing a non-disclosure agreement, but I can talk a bit about the SiteCatalyst product! To be completely honest, SiteCatalyst is an absolutely fabulous tool that still needs a little work. Currently, you have great flexibility and customization available to you (though sometimes you end up paying quite a bit more for some of those options) as an Omniture customer. The task of keeping up with all of your key performance indicators is pretty simple with the advanced dashboards you can create. From my experience, which is admittedly little, SiteCatalyst blows the competition away in sophistication and the level of customization available. Granted, those who use Omniture’s tools are paying out the nose, so SiteCatalyst better be good.

I do, however, have a few complaints. Omniture has broken up their reports into three main sections: Commerce, Traffic, and Paths. This is really helpful in some regards because it breaks up the many reports available into three different categories, yet I found myself extremely frustrated on several occasions. Because these three categories are very rigidly constructed, getting reports on data from both traffic and commerce is impossible (or at least hard enough to seem so). For example, should I want to find a report that gave me the percentage of site traffic that came from a specific domain and the revenue from that domain I would be out of luck. For some questions you can look up two different reports within their respective categories, but this is not always the case.

Without giving out specific information, I was trying to do research on CostumeCraze’s global presence (where commerce and traffic were coming from geographically) and I could not find reports that really helped me drill down on the issue. SiteCatalyst provides traffic maps, showing which countries around the world are providing site traffic, but I could not find anything that would help me see the revenue that matched up with that traffic. The data already being tracked, so why can’t I get to the information I need? There were ways to work around the problem, sort of, but I’d rather just have interoperability between the three categories.

Omniture does offer other services, and it’s entirely possible that Discover (a new app they use) or another piece of software solves some of the problems I see in SiteCatalyst. Unfortunately, I haven’t had access to any of the more advanced tools, but I can probably research it a little bit. Either way, web analytics is a pretty interesting and I encourage those who are web developers to look into Google’s free analytics tools (http://www.google.com/analytics).

The great thing about the CP80 initiative is that it is about choice. It isn’t an argument that pornography should be made illegal in all forms or that laws should define that only adults may access it, but it is about giving a family or organization (I don’t want to leave business situations out of this) the choice of whether or not they want to allow pornographic content to come across their wires.

For those who are unaware, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and during the Priesthood session of the October 2006 General Conference, President Hinckley asked all the men of the Church (I’m assuming much of what he said applies to women as well) to “Rise Up, O Men of God”. During that talk he read a letter that was written to him by a brother who was (or at least I’m hoping I can use the past tense) heavily addicted to pornography. In the letter, the brother pleads, “…please plead with the brethren of the Church not only to avoid but eliminate the sources of pornographic material in their lives.” President Hinckley later tells us “…there must be self-discipline enough to turn it off.” Yes, I believe he was using the pronoun it to refer to the computer itself, but if it were possible, I think he would prefer we turn the pornographic material itself off.

The Family Movie Act is a great example of a way in which the US Government has given the family a say on what they can do to control media entering their home. The Family Movie Act is not about forcing rated R movies out of the house, or about forcing the movie industry to censor their products, but it gives families a choice about the kinds of media they watch. The CP80 solution to internet pornography is basically to require website to “rate” themselves just like movies are forced to be rated from G to PG to PG-13 to R, etc… Once a website is “rated” by switching to a different port, families can now decide whether or not they want that kind of media entering their homes.

There is no limit to freedom of speech, since those who want to access pornography will be able to, and it will not make it any harder for people to get to their website (the URL isn’t going to change, they’ll probably just be forced to have a landing page – something many digital certificate companies require for certification anyway [my roommate works at DigiCert]). Oh, and as for enforcement? I’m sure the government is OK with fining people like crazy if they violate; when do they not like collecting a lot of cash, they just need to make the fine hefty enough.

Just because it’s hard or seems like a large task doesn’t mean we should just give up. I don’t look to take away the right that others have to indulge in whatever they would like to indulge in, but I would very much like the ability to keep destructive materials out of my home. I have seen too many families, marriages, and lives destroyed over pornography to the point that I barely trust myself enough to say that I will never give in to it. Think about how much time you spend on your computer everyday! Think of how many idle hours some of you have spent just floating from one site to another online! What’s to say that Satan won’t hit you someday with a temptation strong enough to steer you or a loved one to something you would never partake of under normal circumstances. We will all face temptation, but I think it is wise counsel to eliminate as many situations and opportunities as possible when it comes to serious transgression.

Those of our generation can make a difference because we actually understand the technology behind the magic that is the internet.If we can’t stand as disciples of Jesus Christ on something like this, when will we stand on his side? I don’t know what legislation will pass, I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I think true discipleship asks us to stand up in situations like this. We wanted the ability to choose before we came to earth, shouldn’t we continue to fight for it now that we’re here?

I’ve been reading about the phenomenon of Internet video the last few days and I suppose I should comment on the issue (links to the articles can be found below). There are a couple different topics I’d like to touch on in this post…The real secret ingredient to successful online video advertising is similar to Metcalf’s Law in that as you increase the amount of locations that host your content you are thus increasing the power of your message. Think about it, if you have a really clever advertisement that is playing on half a dozen different websites that all receive a decent amount of daily traffic, you have a pretty strong network working for you. Users begin to take ownership of some of these great videos that are available because they found them on their favorite site, or because they can download the content to their local machine for later playback.

Sharing on-demand content with your friends is much easier than trying to find when it will be replayed on television; by creating quality, on-demand media that can spread throughout the internet you are increasing the total number of “views” you get for little to no marginal cost.  One of the keys, in my opinion, to a successful marketing campaign is being able to select a target market (or two) and successfully drive your advertising and other marketing efforts towards those people. By creating video content (or any content, really) that is posted online, you can more easily advertise to those who you are looking to target. MySpace and YouTube have become extremely large online communities where mass amounts of younger generation users spend a lot of their time. By creating quality content with the target audience in mind, you can now specifically place your ads on YouTube, MySpace, or on another online community that specifically caters to your desired market and thus increase the effectiveness of reaching your target audience.

The creation of online content is also fairly cheap. By comparison to a television or print media ad, your costs to post some of these videos around the internet are extremely cheap or, in a lot of cases, free! It is no longer true that you need to spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign because television advertising means high costs if you want a quality time slot; in the current market you can develop an ad spot or short film for as little as a couple thousand dollars, and then have the ability to post it online for free at several video hosting sites. Even to post videos on a corporate or personal website if fairly cheap considering the plummeting costs of bandwidth. Though television and print media ads have their place, anyone can diversify their marketing efforts to the web and thus save money while increasing brand awareness and attitude.

The most curious thing, which wasn’t directly talked about in the articles I read, but was implied. If an organization wants to create a great following and truly have successful marketing on the web, they need to create a community that users will want to be a member of. This goes back to the whole Web 2.0concept that has been all the buzz over the last year or so, and the validity behind all of it is becoming more and more obvious. Think of some of the more successful web organizations out there and you’ll quickly come up with a list that includes MySpace, YouTube, and Amazon. One of the things that each of these sites have in common is their feeling of community and the fact that any registered user can create and contribute content to the site. MySpace gives you a page online where you can communicate with friends and create a customized page for yourself. YouTube gives each user the ability to upload and rate content. Amazon creates a community by allowing everyone to review products and make recommendations to others who may have similar tastes and preferences. As people become more attached to their online community, they spend more time on the site and become viral marketers to the world about the things they love online. I don’t necessarily endorse any of these services , but you have to concede that these companies have done something right that the rest of the world is trying to emulate or take advantage of (evidenced by the insane amount of money YouTube and MySpace sold for over the last year).

BTW, the sources I read can be found at the following locations:

• Blending Video and E-Commerce
• Business Goes Straight to Video

OK, OK… I admit, I gave into the Facebook stuff a couple of years ago and I initially felt very silly for doing so. Having said that, I now look at what the Facebook team has done with great awe… Honestly, they’ve put some amazingly cool technology onto a single website that will now let me share everything I want (while keeping everything I want private safely hidden) with my friends.I have to come forward and express my absolute hatred for myspace.com. I did have a myspace profile for a while, though I never posted anything besides my name and the school I attend… Before myspace was purchased for a bajillion dollars, I fully intended on becoming rich just so I could buy the site and shut down the servers. The reason I hate myspace so much is because it seems incredibly amateur. I also became increasingly concerned with the safety of the thing… The last thing the world needs is another avenue for people to be creepy with, right? There have been plenty of reports of sexual predators stalking young/teenage kids who are spending massive amounts of time on myspace, and that’s really sad and a problem that the myspace people should be taking a little more seriously; I don’t want my little sister in the middle of sexual predator’s battlefield. There seems to be little to no content moderation, and I don’t agree with that. I learned from a successful social networking professional that it’s a million times better to moderate content and ban those who abuse their membership, thus keeping the other billion people who responsibly use your product happy. Every time you allow one person to post inappropriate or disturbing content you lose five people who were more responsible.Anyway, I hate myspace.

Facebook has done things a little differently. First of all, the website looks classy! There is a lot to be said about the quality of the Facebook product; each page looks professional, there is a very consistent feel to each page, there is content moderation to make sure I don’t stumble upon inappropriate content, and I have very powerful control over my privacy options. I know myspace provides some of these things, but it doesn’t make the process of manipulating options very easy, nor does it look professional.

Groups are a fabulous way to link people together. Picture albums are a much better way of presenting your images in an easy to view manner (whether to your friends, everyone, or only a select few). Each user can select the political campaign issues they consider important, thus indirectly encouraging more and more people to vote. Companies can advertise in new and non-invasive ways through Facebook marketing (whether using the small banner ads – which I find very unobtrusive – or through groups). The new “share” technology is really interesting, bringing the non-Facebook world INTO the Facebook realm (I’ve shared one of my favorite websites – www.pandora.com – with my friends).

What I really enjoy is how the Facebook team is stepping outside of the box and changing many of the stereotypes of how the internet, and social networking sites, should work. They have done some really cool things with the new technologies and programming languages available to present a really fun and useful place for you to begin your daily web surfing experience.

Am I alone? What do you think about what the Facebook team has done?