So after getting tons of requests for people to either retweet, digg, reddit, vote on, stumble, whatever, I’ve decided I’ve had enough. Those of you who know me, know I RARELY ask anyone to rt my stuff or digg or spread my content. Maybe twice in the last year if that, have I asked people for that stuff.

So with that in mind, here is my new policy. If you ask me to lend my social capital to you, you have to adhere to any of the following criteria.

It must be something you spent time creating or working on
Its genuinely interesting
Its for a good cause
You’ve retweeted my stuff in the recent past (on your own accord)

If none of those things are applicable, then I will firmly say NO or ignore you.
If you send me a mass unsolicited DM promoting something, I will not retweet it, unless you are giving me a commission. Even then, better be worth my time.

Surefire ways for me to not retweet your stuff:
It is spammy
it isn’t even remotely interesting
It supports a cause I am not a supporter of, like Sarah Palin for president.

What are your rules for retweeting?

So my friend Erica O’Grady wrote an inspired post the other day outlining her “Perfect Man.” It got me thinking of a few things, one being whether or not it was a good idea for me to even touch upon the Perfect Woman idea, and the other being how much freaking flack would I get if I wrote it. So I thought about it some more, and figured, screw it, its a great exercise, and its not like I’m some misogynistic pig, I only joke around about that stuff j/k. (Also I am told this is exactly what the movie the ugly truth is all about)

I do have some issues with women (or men) making these defacto lists of what their perfect mate would be, namely that people think they cannot settle for someone who doesn’t adhere to the entire list, or that they can never attain someone close to their ideal. There is no perfect man or woman people. There I said it. We set ourselves up with crazy expectations and delusions when we set these lists up as rules and not guidelines. That being said, it is great to have things to strive for, and to know what one is looking for in life. I’d argue I really don’t know what I’m looking for yet, I have some ideas, but still need more experiences to fill out how I formulate my “bucket list” of life.

All that aside, here are some of the ideal qualities I’d like to see in a woman (note the use of the word IDEAL and not PERFECT):

1. Not a project – (meaning I don’t have to “fix her”)
2. Independent – I don’t want their life focusing on me, or depending on me. I want to complement, but not compose their life. I want to make her life better.
3. Driven – Must want to excel in life, and improve
4. Intelligent/challenging – I get bored very easily and need someone who can keep up with my conversations. They need to challenge my senses, keep me on my toes intellectually, call out my bullshit when necessary.
5. Cultured/worldly – I don’t mean loving the opera, I mean at least being open to diversity and new experiences
6. Adventurous – Back to #4, I get bored, and need to try new things, seek out new places.
7. Active – I don’t want someone who just sits around all day. I do enough of that while working.
8. Passionate – This isn’t a lust thing, but passionate about something that drives them, gets their gears going up there.
9. Funny – Or at least have a great sense of humor.
10. Thick skinned – Life is tough, I want someone who is aware of that. She doesn’t have to be tough, just not melodramatic about trivial things
11. Stable (mentally) – I’m not good at dealing with crazy. Especially when its crazy for the sake of attention only.
12. Stable (financially) – She doesn’t have to be rich, just have a career trajectory in mind. Having a professional plan is all I want.
13. Able to be an extrovert and an introvert too – Sometimes I’m shy and need someone to balance me out, othertimes i need someone happy to sit back as I’m the center of attention
14. Willing to compete – With me, or with others in life. I don’t want someone who lacks that fire inside them
15. Makes up their own opinions – I want someone who comes to their own conclusions, not what they were fed blindly as a child. Also don’t agree with everything I say, I say dumb shit on PURPOSE to gauge reactions.
16. Attractive – Do I really need to explain this?

So there you have it, a list of ideal qualities I’d like to see in a woman. Please take this with a grain of salt, as I firmly believe one shouldn’t go around making these lists and using them as shopping lists or grades. So what am I missing here? Should I not have put this out there?

So this really chaps my ass, when I see a single tweet, a whopping 140 characters of consciousness, expanded into 2,476 characters of pure speculation. Yeah that’s right, TechCrunch managed to just explode one tweet by Alex Payne of twitter into an entire blog post without bothering to verify anything first. Not only did techcrunch writer MG Siegler operate the engine of this speculation train, he managed to drag Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider onto it as a passenger. Henry in this case is no victim as he just paraphrased/quoted MG on his post.

So all this, a total of close to 3700 characters spawned from an innocent 140 characters. (Not counting the comments in each place, or this rant right here) So are we really getting a revolution in journalism? Or just half-assed journalism of old delivered faster? Do we really need to sensationalize EVERY tweet and turn it all into “news” ?

The best response though comes from one of the comments posted on SAI
“this article, and its headline, are bullshit. gruber nails it: https://twitter.com/gruber/statuses/9806432443
”

I can’t wait until someone like Eric Schmidt tweets out “felt good dumping all that stuff” and people assume he is dumping google stock and all hell breaks loose.

So call me a hypocrite if you like for posting 1400 characters about this, but in this case I’m commenting on the “reporters” writers, not the actual tweet. I personally can’t wait for an upgraded API & website from twitter.

So Henry Blodget posts yesterday on Silicon Alley Insider a piece “Palm CEO explains to employees why the company is toast,” outlining a few key points from Jon Rubenstein to his troops. The gist of Jon’s points boil down to:

1. No one wants our products
2. Carriers won’t buy as many as we had hoped
3. Product quality stinks
4. Palm is increasing marketing

Soo in a nutshell, Palm is fucked, and now is scrambling to keep up. Remember Palm is competing DIRECTLY with Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, RIMM’s Blackberry, Nokia SymbianOS, and now Microsoft Windows 7 Mobile. Every one of those competitors has a larger market share than Palm’s WebOS right now, with the sole exception being Windows7Mobile, and solely because it was just announced last week and isn’t in consumer hands yet. So Palm has the largest uphill battle imaginable, and really doesn’t seem to “get it” as far as why they are stinking up the place over there.

If you are going to be building a smartphone platform and hardware for that platform as well, you have to think about how the smartphone market has shifted. It is no longer about how many features your phone can do out of the box with your pre-installed version of tetris, its about how flexible can your phone be based on after-purchase software. So that means you need tons of readily available software out there for people to install. That’s why Apple having 140,000 apps vs your 1,400 or so is a big freaking deal. Apple only had to make a miniscule percentage of those apps on their own too, because they made the tools to build on their platform readily available.

Palm thought they were being totally effing clever when they spouted off about how their WebOS was going to be better because its basically a browser and anyone can program for the web right? Big freaking fail here guys. Sure I can build a thousand apps for the web if I wanted to, but those apps won’t instantly run on my Palm Pre or Pixi, they all have to be converted to run within the constraints of the WebOS. If you’re coming from behind, as Palm clearly is, they need to really incentivize the hell out of building an app for WebOS. Either give a better revenue share, give me a free phone w/free data plan, or pay me to port my apps to WebOS. Palm didn’t even bother supporting the developer community which had jumped at the opportunity to build for the WebOS (palmdevcamp anyone?).

So the only way for Palm to solve the utter lack of apps on their platform is to do the following:

• Build an iphone->webOS conversion tool to get people 90% of the way there
• Give out 10,000 Palm Pres to developers and load them up w/$100 worth of data or make them unlocked
• Pay the top web and iphone and android app developers to come over $10k or more to port an app. – Actually seems like they are trying this w/a $1M bonus payout contest to hot app devs.
• Get your phones on more than just Sprint. (Seriously who thought that was a good idea? “let’s hedge our livelyhood on the last place carrier selling a ton of our phones”)

I feel like I may have said these things before. oh wait i did. 8 months ago. nothing has improved. http://brianbreslin.com/why-im-not-building-for-the-palm-pre/

If the iPod was to music, and the kindle is to text, then what will the iPad mean to [insert media here]. Fake steve jobs had an interesting point when he states the kindle is a piece of shit, if the first ipod was to music what we correlate the kindle being to books, then what is the ipod touch to music, and what is the future equivalent kindle to books?

We as a collective whole have been so focused on ways to cram existing/established media formats we are familiar with into new devices that we are missing the point of technological improvements/innovations. Say we decided that the iPad, which is the device I’m thinking about in this example, should just be a glorified feed reader with formatting similar to magazines or newspapers. Wouldn’t we be missing out on all the innovation possible? I for one can’t wait to see LAYERS of data sprinkled throughout the canvas of my future media content. The fact that we can add in extra information about anything, instantly, means we can AUGMENT the media and content creation we’ve become so accustomed to consuming in static format.

So if you aren’t excited about the iPad, then please step aside as there are other people out there more than willing to take your place in the creation of the future. The iPad strikes me as the most important step we’ve seen in quite some time in personal computing. It opens up the possibilities for the message to be enhanced by the medium.

So I mentioned during my panel at WordcampMiami today that I have a cookie recipe, which I believe kicks ass. So someone called me out for not having posted said recipe on my blog. So here it is. I’d love it if you guys contributed improvements or feedback. If you know me, you know I have a weakness for chocolate chip cookies.

• 1 cup butter (2 sticks) or margarine – softened
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 4 Teaspoons of Cocoa Powder/Ground Chocolate
• 2 & 1/4 Teaspoons Cinnamon Powder
• 2 standard eggs
• 2 Teaspoons vanilla
• 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cups Semi-Sweet Chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup Double Chocolate Chips (not quite as bitter as Dark Chocolate Chips)
• 1/2 cup Dark Chocolate Chips
• Handful of white chocolate chips – (optional but highly recommended)

Heat oven to 375° F.
Stir flour with baking soda, cocoa powder, cinnamon, and salt; set aside.
In large mixer bowl, cream butter with sugar, brown sugar, eggs and vanilla.
Gradually blend dry mixture into creamed mixture.
Stir in chocolate chips (and nuts if you decide to add those, your call really).
Drop by tablespoon onto ungreased cookie sheets.
Bake at 375° F for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown.
Makes about 48 cookies (this is if you make them all small).

Tips & Tricks
I’ve noticed that when I refrigerate the dough, then cook it, they come out better. One idea is to wrap the dough in non-stick wax paper or parchment paper and then roll it up into a log (like those pre-made cookies you buy at the grocery store), then when you are ready, just cut off a couple of cookies and voila!

or How to solve the SameAM dilemma

Coconut Grove is in need of a wakeup call. The neighborhood which I hold dear to my heart has seen better times, and I think now is the perfect time to figure out how to revitalize it. I’d like to use this blog as a forum for discussing how to reinvigorate The Grove.

So much arguing is going back and forth about the fact that Center Coconut Grove is being disadvantaged by having to stop serving alcohol at 3am vs 5am everywhere else in the city. MADD, the local cyclists, and Commissioner Sarnoff are all adamantly opposed to moving the rules back to their original and citywide times citing that the extra drinking hours would endanger kids, cyclists, and the whole world. Aside from the fact this rule is negatively impacting the local watering holes, I believe there is a simple solution to be had that would accomodate all.

So if MADD and these other activist groups want to cut back on drunk driving, why not cut back on driving altogether. Lets make it easy for people to get to and from the grove without having to drive. Right now in the grove its an incredible pain in the ass to catch a cab unless you’re outside the Mayfair hotel or the Ritz, or luckout and get a cabbie driving past you. So I propose we establish 2 more taxi stands (2 cab spaces each) in the center grove area. I’d put one right on commodore by Main HWY and the other right in front of Johnny Rockets or Jaguar on Grand. I’d also post taxi info on the new information poles/maps that I’d put throughout the grove (more on this later).

So now that we’ve made getting a cab easier, I think we should incentivize people to use them. Cabs in Miami are relatively expensive (not like London, but not cheap either). So I propose the BID offer a $5 cab voucher to all bar/restaurant patrons who appear drunk. They can give the patron a coupon that the cabbies can redeem for cash at the end of the week, and it counts towards the patron’s cab fare. These coupons only count on fares in and out of the grove.

Incentivizing + improving accessibility to transportation will hopefully appease the groups afraid of higher crime/drunk driving. Once these provisions are put in place, I’d give every venue the same opportunity to stay open late. Though I might consider putting bars on a 3 month probationary period where they have to close earlier while they get their sea legs so to speak. That would need to be a discussion for the local BID.

When the press first caught wind of chrome they said that Microsoft was the likely target, and that Internet Explorer stood the most to lose from Google’s entry into the browser market. I however beg to differ. Internet Explorer has one advantage no other browser has: locked in marketshare in enterprise and all new copies of Windows. No one will ever fully displace Internet Explorer. No matter how shitty IE becomes, it has the advantage of already being there 90% of the time. So who should really be afraid of Chrome? Mozilla and Apple and to a much lesser extent Opera.

Firefox is the easiest target for Google to steal market share from of the bunch, and so they stand to lose the most in this browser war. I’m going to discount Opera’s share for the rest of this, as they really are only going to get their butts kicked in the mobile space as they lost the desktop wars long ago. Firefox is a self-installed piece of software, which means IT departments around the world need to willingly choose to put it into their installs, not like IE which is already there. With that in mind, it is up to firefox and firefox alone to keep their product as high quality as possible, or risk losing their existing momentum. For those of you that know me, you know I’ve been a mozilla fanboy for years, heck a part of my business is derived from Mozilla related stuff (Twitbin). But for my personal use, I’ve switched to Chrome, because its faster, more efficient, and less bloated, the exact things I started using firefox for originally.

Apple needs to fear chrome for other strategic reasons, but I suspect once apple switches everyone of the 250 Million iTunes users to iTunes Web (aka Safari), their user numbers will shift dramatically. As is there is no real compelling reason to use Safari on Windows when you have Chrome which is slightly faster, and has more flexibility.

So the one who stands to lose the biggest in this game is Firefox, as that is their core business. Even though they are open source, don’t forget that Google pays Mozilla 100+Million a year for search revenue share.

There was an interesting post in the economist blog “Free Exchange” with the title “The end of Haiti?” it was expanding a bit on Tyler Cowen’s post “Geopolitical speculations on Haiti” which suggested that the Haitian government is no more, and that Haiti as we know it is likely gone.

Take a few minutes and read both articles, then come back. They raise a few interesting points that are worth discussing in the wake of the incredible tragedy Haiti experienced last week.

This piece is less about the tragedy, as I couldn’t begin to create words that would do it justice, but more about how Haiti can emerge from this positively. There is no doubt that Haiti needed help before hand, as their country was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and on par with many 4th world countries worldwide before this disaster. Haiti was so poor that famine, disease, and crime were considered everyday normal occurrences, BEFORE the earthquake. So what are Haiti’s options for the future?

Haiti is going to need an immediate overhaul, top to bottom. This is my over simplified list of things they need, and not in any particular order (they need them all).

Government
The government needs to be put back in place ASAP, even if it is put under a UN receivership of sorts with a strict timeframe for return set in place immediately. Say 5 years. The UN will come in and implement the best practices of the world’s democracies it has experience with. The US system is unlikely to be the best solution as there needs to be something based on the existing Haitian system. Returning the semblance of stability will help every other facet to move smoothly. Note, I do not advocate trying to turn Haiti into the next Puerto Rico. I do think the US has a moral and geopolitical responsibility to help them be better than they were before, but not at the expense of their sovereignty.

Infrastructure
After the rubble and damaged buildings are removed, and recycled (maybe used to build the nation’s future highway systems), everything needs to be redone from the ground up. Port-au-prince needs to be the first planned city in the Caribbean. It needs modern roads, modern transportation systems (let’s start with green-buses), modern sewage, modern electricity, modern communications, etc. I could probably write an article entirely on the infrastructure needs of Haiti, but for now we’ll just point out that with enough aid money (I think the US needs to pony up 5-10Billion handed over to the UN conservatorship) Haiti could be the first truly green country in the west. Hydroelectric power (not just damns, but tidal, etc), solar, wind, and other forms of green energy could be spearheaded here.

Education
Haiti has a literacy rate of under 60%. Compare that to CUBA with the world’s highest literacy rate of 99.8% which is less than a hundred miles or so away. The first thing we need to do is start training teachers and building schools. Haiti doesn’t have the manufacturing, agricultural, or any semblance of economic infrastructure it needs for the future. The only way to pave Haiti’s success for the next 10-20-50 years is to educate the masses. Build as many schools as we can afford, from pre-k all the way up to universities and colleges. If we can’t get teachers in there to teach, start massive remote learning/distance learning programs.

Healthcare
300,000 people out of 9.5Million or so people are living with HIV and AIDS in Haiti, the highest rate of infection in the Caribbean. Huge swaths of the population are not vaccinated against common diseases like measles and malaria. We can solve that. Reportedly MSF/Doctors without borders has raised enough through text messaging to keep them operating in Haiti for the next decade. This doesn’t solve the systemic needs for hospitals, nurses, and more that Haiti needs. This is where we are going to need big pharma companies to step up start donating hospital equipment en masse. Once these hospitals are built, they are going to need MRIs, X-Rays, EKGs and more. They are also going to need doctors and nurses, something which Cuba will need to step up and help with, both in the training and the sharing of. Cuba produces more doctors and healthcare professionals per capita than any other country.

Reconstruction
This facet goes without saying, but there will need to be some provisions in place for it. Haiti needs to implement the building codes we have in Florida (hurricanes), as well as those of California (earthquakes) and make a concerted effort to strive for their implementation. Never before has there been an opportunity like this for urban planning and nation building, let’s just hope the world steps up and does whats best for Haiti’s longterm needs.

In the end this is going to need to be a global effort, much like the effects we saw of the tsunami in 2004, but in this case we have the issue of having to rebuild the government in its entirety. So how do would you start the rebuilding process?

Every year I decide to write up resolutions. So far I’ve consistently failed to adhere to them all on a regular basis. So this year I’m just saying things I’m shooting for, my general goals. I think resolutions should be more like “quit smoking” and resolving to change bad habits. Since I don’t smoke, I figure I should just set out goals.

So here they are in no order of importance:
1. Release a few iphone apps.
Ideally I want to have 4-6 apps out by the end of the year, a couple being games I have in mind already, and a couple would be mobile related services. You’ll just have to wait and see.

2. Turn StartPR into a solid business.
This year I’m going to be pushing the pedal to the metal on marketing and building the business end of startpr. We’ve invested a lot of time and money into it, and now need to turn on the revenue spigot so to speak. We’ve got a number of great add-ons and features and related products we plan on building around the StartPR platform this year, and are hoping we can turn this into a serious cash flow business.

3. Play more sports
I already play a lot of soccer, at least 3x a week, but this year I want to vary it up. Try different sports. I figure it will help to diversify the types of activities I put my body through, which will reduce stress on my knees/ankles (which take a beating due to soccer), and improve my overall fitness.

4. Grow Infinimedia
So we’ve posted respectable growth every year for the last 4. This most recent year we did 35% growth in revenue despite the worst recession in ages, and most certainly in my career. We grew our team, and matured as a company, however, we have a ways to go. So this year we will be rolling out more products, and refining our processes. My goal is to beat last year’s growth, and hit closer to 50% growth in gross revenue in 2010.

I rarely plug my own products and services (which you would know if you were a regular of this blog), but if you’re looking for someone to guide your social strategy (from a strategic and implementation standpoint) then contact us. /plug

5. Grow my own brand
Every time I hear someone talk about being personal branding experts, I kind of throw up a little in my mouth, but there is some value to the idea (its just so poorly represented by many of these newfangled social media experts and others). So this year I’m going to reinforce who I am through my content, speaking, and social activism efforts. I also am going to work more on not censoring myself and using this medium to share my opinions/theories more often, and hopefully spark some interesting discussions from them. Social media is about authenticity so I need to be more authentic. Less self-censorship, more hilariousness, more Brian.

6. Optimize my life.
I’m going to break things down to tangible chunks. Like lose 5lbs by March; doable I think. I figure that I don’t set out super broad/high level requirements when I build a website/app, I break those down to manageable chunks/sprints. So in essence I am going to apply the agile principles to my life.

7. Do more charity.
Last year with your help I raised $1700 for charity:water. This year I’d like to raise a lot more for a number of charities. Post suggestions on who I should rally my community around this year, what causes are near and dear to your hearts.