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I’m doing some work with Zynga Games, helping them throw a developer bash Monday night as Jillian’s in the Metro, across from Moscone West, from 5:30 to 8:30pm. If you’re interested in casual, indie or social games, you’ll want to stop by.

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I’m currently engaged in a conversation with Dopplr about why they should offer opt-in public profiles. I’ve suggested several reasons, but really, there’s only one that matters. In the graph below, that massive spike represents the exact moment that LinkedIn a) enabled public profiles and b) stood a chance of becoming a publicly traded company.

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Whether I wear the mantle of “privileged Silicon Valley power-nerd”, I am less concerned about privacy than most.

However, something seems to be lost in the discussion surrounding Google’s new Social Graph API. While it’s true that an automated crawler is now connecting online social relationships, a user must explicitly link their online profiles for the crawler to cross the garden walls.

For Google to aggregate your Twitter and Flickr connections, you must publicly declare your Flickr profile on your Twitter profile. This may sound a tad harsh, but if you don’t want that information aggregated, don’t link the accounts.

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The promise of Dopplr.com is fantastic – effortlessly share your travel schedule with others in order to serendipitously connect with them in person. Unfortunately, the current experience blows. Someone has to search the site for me in order to see my schedule (i.e. the Facebook model).

I would happily promote my Dopplr schedule on my various online profiles (this blog, LinkedIn and Facebook), but there does not seem to be a mechanism for doing so.

As a result, Dopplr seems more like a data harvesting tool than a way for me to inform people of my future whereabouts.

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I love seeing who’s visiting the site and get the biggest thrill when I see someone come back a couple of times in one week. It means a lot to me.

To the MBL team: we really built something great, guys. You rock.

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When we were picking god parents, we heavily leaned toward one couple. Love ‘em to death, but their taste in movies is baaaaad! Ultimately, I couldn’t implicitly approve of someone taking Royse to see Wild Hogs 3: Back in the Saddle. (Don’t worry, I’m not talking about you.)

Just because I’m viewing someone’s profile doesn’t mean that I like the same music, participate in the same activities or even live in the same place. I might just want to sleep with them.

Social ads are simply the least contextually accurate ads on the web, and the eCPMs bear that out.

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Ian and I chatted today about a hypothesis floated between he and Jeremy Liew: if crappy games do so well on FB, think of what real games would do.

My take:

• Most of these are game-like.
• They are basically ads for themselves. They’re memes.
• Most dies fast, but a few Energizer bunnies and old women screaming, “where’s the beef!” will last for years.
• As soon as you try to monetize them through sales, you are screwed. This is beyond casual, this is inertia.

Occasionally, 100 words really sucks, so I’m cheating. Chat transcript on permalink
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