Football fans around the world!  Did you like the opening ceremony? Did you watch the first game? AYOBA!

Now, while you are taking a break and waiting for the next match, why don’t you have fun playing a shootout and helping to eliminate AIDS in Africa at the same time!  How cool is that?

How can you do that?  Well, easy … just go visit Yahoo! Penalty Shootout for (RED) site and follow the link from there.

For every goal you make, Yahoo will donate $1 for up to $100,000!  But remember, this is only valid for today only (11/06/2010)!

So, hurry up, score as many goal as you want!

Jason Calacanis has this mailing list called Jason Nation that I am a subscriber of, and today on his latest email, he declared that his going to quit Facebook.  What is interesting for me is that, even though he practically slammed Zuckerberg and his Facebook, at the most recent TWIT podcast, when asked if he was planning to quit Facebook, he said he’s not sure.

Well now, in this latest email Jason declared that this Friday, 21st of May, he will broadcast the deletion of this Facebook account, live on this This Week In Startups show.

After a slew of other Tech Pundits leaving Facebook, Jason is the latest, but my guess is, he won’t be the last.

I am republishing Jason email here in its entirety (thanks for the permission Jason!) so you can read it yourself and comment on it.

My favorite lines though are as follows:

Did I sign up for Facebook and give you my personal information so you
could give it to third parties WITHOUT my permission? Uhhh…. no.

We signed up with Facebook to share photos and updates with our
friends and families. You duped and double-crossed us by giving *your*
partners *our* private information so you could begin your world
domination plans one Javascript include at a time.

I agree 100%.

Date: May 19th 2010
JasonNation Members: 23,286 emails strong
Location: Mahalo HQ, Santa Monica
Republishing: Republish anywhere (with header/footer)
Subscribe/Unsub: www.jasonnation.com
Some exciting news: http://tcrn.ch/bR35Xu
============================

JNation,

I’ve decided that this Friday at 1 pm Pacific, I will broadcast the
deletion of my Facebook page live on the Internet. (Watch it here:
http://bit.ly/bATQjU)

Simply put, I no longer trust Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg with my information.

Additionally, Facebook has become a waste of time for me. Every minute
I put into Facebook is a minute I will never get back. It’s time I
could have spent writing one of these emails to you guys, finding new
startups to invest in, working on Mahalo.com (almost profitable!) or
spending time with my family.

Facebook is a Ponzi scheme run by a very bad actor. The best way to
express our discontent with Mark Zuckerberg is to simply walk away.

We trusted Zuckerberg with our personal information and he has abused
that trust over and over again. He won’t even come forward and discuss
the issue with anyone in the industry–including his own users!
c
Question: What kind of CEO gets slammed like Zuckerberg has in the
last week and doesn’t make themselves available to discuss the issue
with the press or users?

Answer: A guilty one.

You call this a gift?
================
In a final insult, Facebook lackey Tim Sparapani said this week: “The
flip side of this privacy story… is that we have customized and
individualized every single website out there for people, if they
choose to have it. That’s an extraordinary gift to the public.”

Really?

Did I sign up for Facebook and give you my personal information so you
could give it to third parties WITHOUT my permission? Uhhh…. no.

We signed up with Facebook to share photos and updates with our
friends and families. You duped and double-crossed us by giving *your*
partners *our* private information so you could begin your world
domination plans one Javascript include at a time.

Essentially, Facebook is reselling our data in order to get websites
to add the “Like” button. It may not be a cash transaction yet, but it
is clearly quid pro quo. If you want to give the world a gift, how
about letting us export our own data?

Question: If you don’t allow users to export their own data, but you
do allow your partners to suck it down instantly–and for all
time–what does that say about your intent?

Answer: It says your intent is bad.

NOTE: Hey Sparapani, the super savvy Danny Sullivan F.C.Y.A. (look it
up!): Facebook did not create the personalized web
(http://bit.ly/9hZQop).

Facebook alternatives
====================
If you’re tired of Facebook’s games, I suggest that you use the
following services: Twitter.com for Updates, Flickr.com for Photo
Sharing and Geni.com for your family tree. Those three services are
much better for their individual functions (updates, photos and family
connections) than Facebook!

That leaves casual games, the only piece for which I don’t have a
really good recommendation (besides getting a sick iPad and playing
WeRule!)

Zynga, makers of Mafia Wars and Farmville, knows they can’t trust
Zuckerberg and they going to have all their games off-site this year.
Sure they signed a five-year pack with Facebook this week, but that
must have been driven by Facebook desperate not to lose them. My guess
is Pincus got them to take only 10% of the virtual currency avalanche,
in exchange for their blessing on Facebook’s standard 30% rake.

Zynga will also start a social gaming network, basically Facebook
without the photo sharing, later this year I’m sure. Pincus is way to
smart to get Zuckerpunched.

If only Evan Williams would step up and have the Twitter team build
(private) groups, photo hosting, video hosting and support for Zynga’s
games, we would actually have a place to move to.

Twitter needs to create a viable alternative to Facebook this year.
Twitter has a leader you can trust; Facebook does not. You can do it
Twitter…. Step up!

Three ways to “leave” Facebook
====================
If you’re going to join me (and folks like Leo Laporte and Peter
Rojas) in leaving Facebook, please consider recording yourself doing
so. Post that video to YouTube saying “I deleted/deactivated my
Facebook page!”

As we’ve discussed, there are better services for you to use from
companies you can trust.

I suggest doing one of three things below with your Facebook account
*after* you back it up.

[ Note: Before taking these steps, I suggest downloading your photos
manually and/or trying Backupify's beta Facebook backup service--which
is free. www.backupify.com. I'm an angel investor in this amazing
company.]

1. Just stop using Facebook: Don’t log in, don’t republish your tweets
to Facebook and don’t update your status. Turn off all your photos.
This is a basic step that will also get you a lot time back for the
rest of your life. Try NOT logging into Facebook for three days and
see how much better your life is–I’m sure it will be! Take your
“Facebook time” and use it to actually ask a friend or family member
how they are doing. Take the dog or your kids (or yourself!) for a
walk.

The fact is, Facebook sends only a dozen folks to a link when I post
it. Compare that to hundreds to thousands of people clicking through
on Twitter (on a CTR basis Twitter is 10-20x Facebook!). Also, the
content on Twitter it typically valuable to me. The content on
Facebook tends to be “I’m playing this game” or someone “liking”
something inane. Get off Facebook and do something more productive.
Nothing important happens on Facebook–nothing.

2. Deactivate your account: This renders your account dormant, but you
can still log in at any time and “wake it up” again. Bear in mind,
your information is still stored on Facebook. They still have your
data. Having said that, there is no harm in trying this either…
Deactivate for the rest of the month and see what June 1st feels like
after you wean yourself off the Facebook crack. Just two or three
clicks and you can do it: http://www.facebook.com/deactivate.php

3. Delete your account: This deletes everything from Facebook–though
I’m not sure it removes your data from their partners sites and I’m
not sure how long they keep your data on backup drives. I’m hearing
conflicting reports, so if you know (or work inside Facebook and have
411), please ship it in confidence to me! If you’re done with
Facebook, don’t delay. Just do it! Those friends from high school will
Google you and find your Twitter account if it’s at all important. :-)
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

Conclusion
===========
I don’t think Facebook is going away, but if they see 100 people turn
their accounts off every day, then 1,000, then some day 10,000, they
are going to start taking the issue more seriously. Good people of the
Internet should stand up for what is right and send a clear message to
Facebook: we don’t trust you, so we can’t participate in your service.

Questions:
1. Does Facebook provide any value to you?
2. Can Twitter or Zynga become viable alternatives to Facebook?
3. Are you considering leaving Facebook?
4. Rank, in order, the most loathsome companies and why: Goldman
Sachs, Facebook, BP Oil.
5. I will be in New York City next week for TechCrunch Disrupt. See you there!

Best regards,

Jason

—————–
—————–
—————–
—————–

Some housekeeping:

1. Mahalo is looking for developers! We use cutting-edge technologies
like Cassandra and Django, but you don’t have to have worked with
those before to join our team. Nope, we hire people based on how we
think they will “fit our culture.” Our culture is one of hard work,
dedication, resourcefulness, resiliency and is filled with positive
and quixotic individuals. You will not survive in a company like this
unless you are absurdly hard working, but if you are you will
immediately be given a ton of responsibility. You’ll also get to work
in a pure meritocracy, where people rise and fall with their
contribution–not their age or ability to suck up to the boss. We love
hiring folks outside of Los Angeles and bringing them to live in Santa
Monica. So, if you want to work for the next three or four years at
Mahalo and crush it send me your resume and cover letter. If you would
like to take it easy, phone it in and not get taken out of your
comfort zone send me your resume and I will forward it to a BDC (big
dumb company). :-)

2. The Open Angel Forum is booming! We’re coming to Boston in June,
and London and Seattle shortly after that. If you know of any angel
investors in these cities send them to krute@openangelforum.com.
Details at www.openangelforum.com.

3. TechCrunch50 is, sadly, not happening this year. However, as the
creator of TechCrunch50 I will be marching on and launching 50
companies over two days in early 2011. Please bookmark
www.thelaunchconference.com for more details.

4. We just had the CEO of Groupon, Andrew Mason, on This Week in
Startups. He was great!
http://thisweekin.com/announcements/twist-52-with-andrew-mason/

5. I will be at the Wall Street Journal’s amazing D Conference for the
fifth year in a row–and three years after launching Mahalo! Looking
forward to seeing everyone there and sharing some big news. :-)

6. Having done eight angel investments this year I’m only going to do
two more I think. Those startups will, most-likely, come in through
the Open Angel Forum. The best way to pitch me on an idea is to submit
your company to OAF or send me a link to your product. I don’t invest
in products that are not built already (why would you when you can
invest in products that have been built is my thinking).

7. I’m working on the book proposal after getting a bunch of
interesting offers. What would you want to hear about if I did a book?

8. If you are interested in pitching a show for ThisWeekIn.com please
send it to TWI’s creative director Lon Harris at lon@mahalo.com. I
don’t have any day-to-day involvement in the company. Feel free to cc
me of course.

———
Jason McCabe Calacanis
902 Colorado Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90401
jason@calacanis.com
www.twitter.com/jason
www.blippy.com/jason

Tell me, are you going to quit Facebook too?

Bytheway, if you want to subscribe to this mailing list, you can visit JasonNation.com and register yourself there.

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t hung out at my local Buzz Joint for a while. No, it’s not because the onslaught of Scoble’s Buzzes, or the fact that I have to login to a different GMail account than the one I normally have to check it. It’s just that between Twitter, Facebook and all my RSS Reading List, I just don’t have enough spare time to frequenting yet another Social Media place. Though somehow I feel a pang of guilt, seeing that I used to champion the Buzz, even when people was slagging it left, right and middle.

Today though, my interest is back to the Buzz, why because Google has released its own, official Buzz Button. Yes, Mashable and Techcrunch had it the day after Buzz was released, but it was practically a hack, that runs along the line of what I explained on my previous post about how to add a Buzz This Bookmarklet.

To get the button, just go to Google Buzz Stuff page, change some settings if you like and copy and paste the resulting Javascript to your HTML page.

The result could be like the following:

That’s not all what Google has given us today. As well as the Buzz This button, we also have the Follow on Buzz button. Essentially a Follow Me link to your Google Profile page, where people can follow you. Here is an example of for my Google Profile: Follow on Buzz

Ok, so I’m not sure if this will rekindle myself with Buzz, but it does open to, let’s say, an easier opportunity for reader to share your website to the world.

The social media space has been ‘Buzzing‘ about Google Buzz about a week now.  If you don’t know what Google Buzz is, go and read Google’s own introduction on Google Buzz and then go the Google Buzz landing page.

But basically Google Buzz is like an odd combination of Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Plurk and Pownce :)

Just like all of the above social media tools, one of the reason we are using them is to ‘share’ something that we like to our friends and followers.  This could be a nice blog-post, news article, Flickr photos or YouTube video; and in most of these services, there is usually an easy way to share a link update update the status at the same time.  Some of the sharing mechanism that has been used is through the browser bookmarklet.

When Google Buzz was introduced, early adopters was having a hard time to share links quickly.  Sure you can copy and paste the link into the status update text-box, which by the way Buzz would automatically parses the link and brought back some more info (like a summary of the link and some images, like Facebook does).  But there was nothing to share straight from your browser.

Then Mashable put up a post that they had managed to incorporate a Buzz This button onto their post, alongside their Retweet and Facebook Share buttons.

I thought that was really cool!  So I tried to look at the code behind this button, and I found the they way how to do it.
It’s actually a kind of a hack because Google themselves haven’t released the API for posting a Buzz, and the key is Google Reader!  With your Buzz account you can connect your Google Reader account so that whenever you ‘share’ a feed link from your Google Reader, it will automatically be posted to your Buzz account.

So, first thing you need to do is to connect your Google Reader account to your Buzz account.

And then the cool thing about Google Reader is, it provides you already with a Bookmarklet to do exactly this!

The only thing you need to do is go to your Google Reader page, click on the Shared Items sub-menu on the sidebar (if you can’t see it, it’s under ‘Your Stuff’ menu).  This will show you a list of your shared items, but also the “Note in Reader” Bookmarklet button.

As instructed, drag the button and drop it to your Browser’s bookmark bar, and you are done!

Next time you find a good link that you want to post to Buzz, just click on the button, add some comment (if you want) and click on the Post Item button.  Your link will be automatically share within Google Reader as well as Buzz.

In my previous post, I discussed about the first things that we could do to follow people on Twitter.  In this second part of the series, I would like to touch on how we could follow people on Twitter by Recommendation.

Recommendation is probably the best way to follow people on Twitter, especially when we trust the source of this recommendation, which could be from your friend, a reputable user or a leading website.

To make this a bit easier to digest I am going to divide these recommendations into two types.  One is what I would call Passive Recommendation, and the other one is, yes you’ve guessed it, Active Recommendation.

What I mean by Passive Recommendation is when we don’t need to do some pro-active work, i.e. no need to go out there and find people to follow ourselves. Instead, the list are provided for us, delivered via several channels. It’s the Lazy Route :)

Here are some examples of these so-called recommendation channels:

Friends Recommendation
Remember those friends I mentioned above? The ones who successfully managed to ‘drag’ you to join this ‘party’? Well, they must have some people that they are following. And more often than not, they will gladly recommend you some of these people. But even if they won’t recommend anbody, you could just go to their Twitter Page, and follow whoever they are following :)

Twitter Recommendation (a.k.a Suggested Users)
This is a list of users that Twitter thinks we would be interested to follow. It is presented to new users during the registration process. And if you’ve missed it the first time, or if you want to find more users, you can go to Find People section on your Twitter page, and choose the Suggested Users tab. Of course, there is no obligation what so ever to follow these people, but nevertheless there is no harm to check it out from time to time, even if it’s just for fun :)

List of Recommended People to Follow on Twitter
Once in a while, someone would  write a blog post, sharing a list of people that he/she thinks worth to follow.
You can just go and check one of these and follow the user on that list. For some examples of these type of recommendation, go ahead and check out my “Ultimate List of People to Follow on Twitter” post.

- #FollowFriday
Sometimes it’s not easy to explain what #FollowFriday is, especially if somebody is new to the concept of Hashtag or just a plain tagging.
But the idea of #FollowFriday is basically the same as the idea of writing down the recommended list that I’ve mentioned above, except that with #FollowFriday, you list the Twitter Usernames on your tweet, and that you should do it only on Fridays, and every tweet must have #FollowFriday hashtag.
Micah Baldwin was the guy who invented Follow Friday, and you can read the history of #FollowFriday on his blog post. #FollowFriday has become a major meme in Twitterverse and some people do it religiously every Friday. And as usual, the developers didn’t want to miss the opportunity to build a myriad of 3rd Party apps which were built just to serve this purpose. Brian Cray has a list of tools that you can use to monitor FollowFriday stream.

- Recommendation Service

The recent Twitter Boom, which resulting in a massive increase in Twitter Sign-ups in a very short time, has produced a horde of newbies who were eager to join the party but know no one, or even given direction in to how to find people to follow. Sure the Twitter suggested list could give them a jump start, and the barrage of #FollowFridays that comes every Friday might give them hints on whom to follow. But even this has caused more confusion than clarity (with people sending endless #FollowFriday Tweets). There was a common feeling that we were missing something, that we were lacking a central repository where anybody can create, manage and share their recommendations in one place. Sure enough, the developers swiftly followed this by creating, shall I say, List Repositories.
Two of the most used of these so called repositories are TweepML and Lunch.

The problem with lists that individual people were making (like the examples on my previous post) are that first of all people were writing it in any form they pleased, and second of all it’s a real pain to try to follow each person in that list (you have to click to the individual Twitter page, and follow the person there). It’s just not practical and it’s wasting a lot of time.
TweepML is trying to solve this problem. First of all, it’s a centralized repository of lists, which means you can find all lists that had been created in one place. Moreover these lists are tagged by keywords, and they are searchable. Secondly, for every list, you are able to follow ‘all‘ or ‘some‘ of the people that are on that list in one click of a button :) And lastly, and this probably a little bit geeky, TweepML tried to set a standard, in term of data exchange format, to represent this list. This means that the list would be portable and ‘machine’ readable, i.e. any application that support this standard would be able to read and use the same list format.
Lunch is a similar service where you can put together your own list. Unlike TweepML, it lacks the one-button follow functionality. You can read a nice review about Lunch at this blog post.

By now most of you would have already gotten the new Twitter List functionality integrated to your Twitter account. In one way, this new functionality could be a big blow to the 3rd party services which offer similar functionality, like TweepML and Lunch above. But as TweepML had posted on one of its blog post, these 3rd party services would have to adapt (or die). Indeed TweepML is doing just this by allowing you to import any Twitter List to TweepML very easily.
As for the Twitter List itself, although it is quite a powerful feature, it doesn’t come without limitation. So, there is always room for improvement, which can only be provided by 3rd party services.

The last service that I would like to recommend is what I called the Recommendation Bot.  Basically, you use this service by registering yourself, and it will go away for a couple of days, presumably doing a lot of calculation on your following and followers, and come back with some recommendation of people whom it thinks you should follow.  This recommendation could be based on the fact that the person had been retweeted a couple of times by one or more of your followers, and/or because some of your followers had written testimonials on this recommended person.

One recommendation bot that I’ve used is Mr. Tweet.  After login into Mr.Tweet, the bot will go away and calculate your profile and come back in a few days later via DM saying that your recommended list is ready for viewing.  Meanwhile you can check some recommendations based on your followers. It will regularly DM you from time to time with updated recommended list.

Those are some of examples of Passive Recommendation. I hope they can help you to find more followers :)

On the next post, I will go through examples for the Active Recommendation.

I was having conversation with my wife the other day over dinner about the coming Valentine’s day and whether we are going to do anything or to go anywhere.  To cut the story short, we ended the discussion with a conclusion (and to my relieved) that it’s nothing to do with Love and all of that, everything’s just business.  I mean take flowers for example, how much do you (men) spend usually for Valentine’s flowers?  One nice, big, fresh stalk of Rose could set you, at least, £5! A dozen of Red Roses would cost about £20 or more.  These are normal prices on normal days.  But if you try to buy it on the last minute, suddenly everything seems to be much more expensive than usual.  And then there is the candle-light dinner, not only that suddenly all tables are booked up, but the ‘special menu‘ has also ‘special price’ attached to it.  I can go on and on here.

Don’t ge me wrong, I love my wife, but in this time of global financial downturn, it doesn’t seem ‘wise‘ for me to spend all those money.  Until today that is …

Today I saw an ads on the Tube Station that caught my eye.  It’s a big red poster with a big red bunch of flower, and under it written something I’ve seen quite often … FLOWE(RED).

I’m sure you knew already about the (RED) movement.  But just in case you didn’t know, the (RED) movement has the idea that every time you choose to buy a (RED) product or service, the company who makes that product will give up to 50% of its profit to buy and distribute antiretroviral medicine to our brothers and sisters dying of AIDS in Africa.  It has a good backing from some world-known brands too, from Converse to Nike, from Apple to Dell,  and from Gap to Starbucks, each has their special (RED) product.

For more info please check out the (RED) website, follow them at Twitter and Facebook, or watch some fantastic video at (RED) YouTube Channel.

The FLOWE(RED) also has the same idea, all the profits from the sale of these flowers will go to a global fund to help eradicate AIDS in Africa.

I think it’s quite a neat idea, and at least now I can say that I’m not wasting that 25 quid for nothing.  And as an added bonus, we will have flowers this Valentine’s Day :)

You can see how important Twitter is to our Internet Community when its inventor, founder and chairman, @Jack Dorsey had his own session (the first one of the event) and participated in the last session of recently held LeWeb 2009.  And being young and inexperience (in term of being web celebrity), he’s obviously prone to make some mistakes, especially when he had to sit on the Gillmore Gang, along with other ‘dignitaries‘ :)  So when Andrew Keen asked him if the rumor about Google buying Twitter was true, Jack quickly said (probably too quickly) that “There hasn’t been any announcement” :)  Unfortunately the other gang members wouldn’t let this go so easily, and Jack was forced to defend himself to fix the situation. “What do you mean there hasn’t been any announcement?”

Watch the following video starting on 31 minutes mark, and you will see this yourself.

It’s very easy to forget that the almost ubiquitous Twitter that we are fond and love started from a very simple idea (but then again most great products came from the simplest idea anyway).  Indeed most new users (post @aplusk and @oprah) probably think that Twitter has always been like this.  Well, the reality couldn’t be more different.
My Twitter ID is 3148, so I joined Twitter quite early in the days when Twitter just a simple geeky web-app to broadcast ‘what you were doing at that time‘ to your followers and that’s it.  And just like many others, I didn’t find the tool very useful, and to be honest a little bit boring (especially when all your friends were somewhere else).  Hence I left my account dormant, only visiting it once in a while, for about 6 months or so.  Until one day I found a small circle of friends with whom I could having conversation.  This changed everything, it changed Twitter as a broadcast medium into a conversation tool (more akin to Instant Messenger Apps), a place where I can chate with my friends and buildng relationship.  The rest is history.

How Twitter Was Invented

At this ‘Fireside‘ chat with @loic, @Jack Dorsey the inventor and founder of Twitter told the LeWeb 2009 audiences a little bit of the history how Twitter came about, which I think it is good for us to learn :) [Video below]

The SQUARE

In this occassion, Jack were also demoing his new Startup called Square :)  Square aims to enable people (ordinary people, not just businesses) to accept Card Payment easily without having to go through the long and difficult process of application and expensive hardware purchase which usually come before one can take payment by Card.  With Square you don’t need any contracts or mothly fees, and you can even get the ‘square‘ for FREE!

This device works like a Card Swiper, which you can attach to any mobile device that has a regulare audia input jack, like the one in your mobile phone, for example.  When you want to take (or make) payment with your card, you swipe it through this tiny device, which then reads the data and converts it into an audio signal. The microphone picks up the audio, sends it through the processors and then is routed to Square’s software application on the mobile device, and then the encrypted data is transmitted using either Wi-Fi or 3G Internet connection to back-end severs, which in turn communicate with the payment networks to complete the transactions.
The device is currently being tested by a selected shops, and if it goes well, Square will starts beta testing on early 2010.

Webcam chat at Ustream

Online TV Shows by Ustream