Shel Israel's Naked Conversations Blog

[Tara Hunt's Twitter Avatar]

I have been working for the past few weeks with ChallengeDating, a  social network for people who want an adventurous way to meet new people to date. The challenger issues a video dare. "Takers" then upload a video meeting that dare. The rest of us get to watch and vote on who we like.

On Monday, I tweeted that we are looking to hire someone to serve as the  face of the company. I got several questions and realized I need to expand and clarify who and what we are looking for.

Five years ago Azhar Khan and I worked together on a startup he co-founded called Riya. To help them launch, I recruited the inimitable  Tara Hunt who raised our visibility by orders of magnitude. Most of what she didwas hang out with social media people, networking and evangelizing our photo recognition technology. She was active on all social media platforms. She generated a great deal of interest, awareness and enthusiasm for the company, which, as Like.com was recently acquired by Google.

Tara is the role model for this new job. We need someone like that for ChallengeDating. Our "Challenge Evangelist," needs to be a born social networker. She needs to already be active in online networking and she also should understand the experiences of online dating well enough to help us ensure the experience of our participants is more fun and rewarding.

One more aspect. We are a video site. Our Challenge Evangelist must be comfortable and talented in front of a camera. She will be video and blog posting on our behalf at a prolific rate.

And oh yes. By nature, she is a non-traditional thinker who has both a sense of humor and adventure.

ChallengeDating is a pre-venture startup. By definition, it offers the significant promises and risks the entrepreneurs love and others do not. The job would start as a consulting position could grow into a fulltime position.

We also have a preference for someone familiar with the Bay Area social media and singles scenes. While the offices are still virtual, it is where the rest of us are located and where we will focus in our early development phases.

If you are interested, please email me. A resume is nice, but I'll be looking at your style and creativity in your cover letter to an equal degree.

I love poking conventional wisdom in the eye. I think that what this new client is going to let me do.

A few weeks back I had a chat with a venture capitalist who had a higher opinion of his knowledge of social media than I did. When he told me that Facebook and Twitter had filled the social network space and there just wasn't room for anything else, I found myself resisting the urge to ROFL.

And my very next business connection, re-enforced my belief that social networking, like social media, has only just begun. Not all things have been invented yet. I got reminded that just when the conventional wisdom declared that Search was a worthless category, a couple of Stanford kids started Google.

Later that day, my old friend Azhar Khan contacted me with a clear example of where social networking can and will go. I knew Azhar from Riya, which he co-founded and where I consulted. Later Riya became Like.com and was recently purchased by Google. It had evolved into something far different--and apparently more valuable--than the photo recognition software we had launched in 2006.

Azhar showed me something which is clearly a new kind of social network, one that has two very intelligent twists or so it seems to me. First, it is for people who want to find dates. Second,  the person seeking a date issues a challenge. It can be something like "show me your best dance move," or "write a song about me. It's all done on user-generated video.

Take a look at the final alpha site. It tells you a lot about how it works. The people you see were recruited mostly on the streets of Santa Cruz, but they are real people and capture a sense of how the site will work.

I'm going to help the Challenge Dating team take the next step and go into live beta sometime in the next few weeks. It is for women seeking men, men seeking women, as well as same sex dates.

But instead of the company holding the cameras, the challengers will upload their own videos and those wishing to meet the challenge will upload videos as well.

There is much tweaking to do. I'm pre-announcing what we are up to now, because we want user and viewer feedback. In the end, people who use a social network rule the social network.  Is Challenge Dating something you would use? Do you think you might visit because it will be entertaining.

How far away can a date live and still be geographically desirable. How can we make dating safe? Do you think the network will grow on it's own once we release it or do we need to offer some sort of incentives?

Please tell me what you think. Please tell me how we can make this better.

I am looking for unconventional wisdom. It makes far more interesting and valuable companies than conventionality allows.

A few Fail Whale sightings yesterday reminded me of how far and how fast Twitter has grown up and out. It seems like only yesterday when a couple of million users sometimes went 2-3 consecutive days looking at nothing BUT Fail Whales.

Now it's a rarity. And Twitter has done a good job, in my view, at bringing in monetization streams that are unobtrusive to users and relatively nonthreatening to our data.

But still there are some thing about Twitter that seem to need improvement. And, ironically, by using it to express my opinion, I've discovered there are quite a few others who agree with me on two new features that many people would embrace:

1. Show number of times user has been blocked.  Most of us have had the experience. Someone you don't know jumps into your stream. They start pinging you frequently. They post comments that may be inappropriate, disturbing or just lame. You wonder if you are over-reacting. You go to that user's home page and get some helpful information. But would it not be nice to know how many times this user has been blocked? Such a feature would also serve as a warning signal that the person you are talking with is actually a bot.
2. Install a topical filter. There are people who I greatly enjoy following. But they have defaulted foursquare to post every visit to their local Home Depot or coffee shop. I really don't want to know about it. Simultaneously, If either the Boston Red Sox or Celtics get into post-season games, I tend to post scores of play-by-play tweets. This annoys quite a few people who follow me primarily for social media content. I understand and wish they could do something about it without unfollowing me. A simple button should allow people to filter by topic without dropping someone they wish to follow.

I know, I know. The Tweetdeck zealots keep telling me that the client of their choice already has topical filters. But that just means that it should be easy for Twitter to incorporate one into their core technology where ALL users should enjoy it.

I also know that you can use FourSquare and opt not to send your posts to Twitter. But many of their friends like to see the geographic comments. Some may actually care about who is now mayor at the local Trailways bus depot.

They should have the right to post to Twitter and I should have the option to filter it out if I don't want it.

I know from Twitter that some people agree with me. Perhaps you don't. Please let me know.

And one more thing. If the Fail Whale is coming back, perhaps they could get a few more selections of the artwork--or some variation. Perhaps run a contest to name each of the 8 bluebirds with tweet user names and perhaps get a corporate sponsor for the FailWhale. If none will pay, then donate the space to GreenPeace.

Back in 2005, Robert Scoble and I collaborated on a book about blogging for business called Naked Conversations, which seems to have done pretty well. We went on to collaborate on an eBook for Dow Jones, then for a stint on the ill-fated FastCompany.TV.

Along with that Robert and I spoke together a lot. I'm not sure how many times but it was around twenty.

By 2008, blogging evolved into social media. The small, but global, band of conversational tool enthusiasts, had morphed into more than a half-billion people in virtually every country with broadband access.

In 2005, blogging was a disruptive force. Now the tools of social media are a part of a great many people's everyday lives. Instead of talking about them all the time, we are just using them to communicate or get our jobs done.

After the Fast Company interlude, Robert joined Rackspace , where he runs  building43, a community of fanatical Internet users, many of whom he video interviews.

I went on to write Twitterville, then get immersed on consulting companies  on how to use social media to achieve business goals. It seems that without design Robert and I got immersed in different parts of the Global Neighborhood and saw each other less and less.

We have not appeared anywhere together since 2008. The last time we actually saw each other was over a year ago.

So, when Mark Kithcart, a friend who I met when I briefly consulted  in Santa Rosa-based Democrosoft , invited me to speak at the wine-country Wow10 Event and he asked me if Scoble would join, I figured it was time for a public reunion.

I had thought Robert and I were going to be interviewed by someone about how the social media industry had changed since 2005. I thought "Naked Reunion" would be a good name for it.

But the event has changed just a bit. Robert and I will now be part of a roundtable and the questions will be whatever attendees want to ask us. This is probably a better idea. Then people can talk about whatever is on their minds rather than ours.

I've also noticed that Robert and I no longer has top billing in event promotion. The wine-tasting part does. This is a good thing. Because if it turns out that after all this time, Robert and I really suck together on stage, the wine will make it less important to attendees,

I hope we see you there. In any case, it will be great to once again sit on the dais with Robert.

[Matt Cutts on Mt. Kilimanjaro]

Matt Cutts, Google's most popular blogger and social media community denizen recently went to the mountain.

Perhaps, at the mountain, he had a dream, a dream that one day Google will rise up and live out the true meaning of social media. Perhaps in his dream, Google will develop a social network that ensure all digital children will walk free, free from the fear that their identities and personal information will not be abused by Facebook or some other force not committed to do no evil.

It seems that community is very much in Matt's DNA, despite his day job as a Google SEO honcho. This is relevant because Om Malick recently speculated that Google keeps botching social network efforts because it has a defective social gene.

I disagree and have written why. I am not Google champion, but it seems to me that we social media users would be a lot better off if Google could give us a viable alternative to what we have now.

So here, free of charge, are a few suggestions on how Google could, for once, get it right in social media. And since Matt Cutts is an SEO guy, I know that he will read this if I keep saying "Matt Cutts."

So let me put this in the form of An Open Letter to Matt Cutts. I know you're not the decision maker, but I'm pretty sure this post will catch your Matt Cutts eyes.

1. Start with Matt Cutts.

Matt Cutts is really very good at social networking. He's strong and respected in blogging and Twitter. Move him off of SEO and get him to start a skunkworks. Among his primary jobs is will be to teach others at Google just what Matt Cutts is doing so very well. Get a few SM enablers on staff--not to reach outward, but to teach inward. This is vital because you keep trying to attract a user that you just don't understand.

2. Ask the SM community for help.

You are Google for gawd sakes. You are surrounded by the pioneers who started this seminal global movement. Create a Board of Advisers and meet with them regularly. Start with a one day off campus. Primary agenda: They talk. Google listens.

3. Start small like you did with Google search.

Back then,  you launched modestly and word of mouth carried you beyond most people's imaginations. Now you have traditional marketers try to push products into new marketplaces with old-time hoopla. It just doesn't work that way. As you recently experienced, Buzz is the last thing you hear before you get stung.

4. Make it customizable

GMail is starting to feel like an old-time customer portal. You keep trying to integrate  all your stuff and get it in front of us. Some people appreciate this, but it's annoying others. Let us decide where to put your services and which to delete altogether. Why on earth can't I put Maps on my top level instead of Google Reader which I rarely use anymore? Why can't I decide.

5. Make 'no evil' your differentiator.

This is the most important of all. It's fundamental to fixing your recessive social gene.

We all know who your competition is. We all know what we don't like about it. What we do like is that its easy to find friends, customers, prospects and people who share our interests.

Make it that easy, but add one ABSOLUTE guarantee: you will not mess with user data. You never, ever will use our data without our opted-in permission.

A couple of days ago, I started a Twitter list of social media professionals. I've entered nearly 150 names so far and I imagine this list will continue to grow for some time.

I define a social media pro, quite simply, as someone making a living--or trying to--through social media. It can be a developer a corporate communicator a consultant, writer, college professor or whatever.

To be on the list, you need to show some evidence that social media is central to your work. You can tweet me a recommendation or ask to be put on the list. The best way is for someone I already know and trust to recommend you.

The list does not rank people, nor does it mean that I endorse everyone on it. It doesn't even mean that you are any good at what you do.

It simply means that through personal knowledge or a few minutes of checking you out online, it appears to me that social media is essential to your work.

I've been asked, somewhat suspiciously, what I'm up to. I must have some secret plan for what I will do with the list. Not really. I was looking for a list like this one on Twitter. I found rankings of influence and power. I found "top" which seems to be about followers, but I just couldn't find an objective, inclusive resource, so I started one.

That being said, I'm starting to see lots of uses for this list:

• Conference promoters have a quick resource for finding talent. They can visit this list and find people addressing almost any topic related to social media.
• Recruiters and people needing consultants or contract talent have a place that offers many options.
• For people very interested in the topic of social media, this list rocks.  Members are prolific and stay mostly n topic. They post informative links. For the past two days, I've spent more time following the list stream than my own, and am enjoying and learning a good deal. The list seems to be popular. With less than 150 names, it already has over 40 followers.

There have been some surprises--not with the list itself, but with my compiling it. Some folk though it was elitist to compile a list of social media pros. I think not. We have lists of lawyers and plumbers, why not people who practice in the conversational media?

There have been more than a few "me, ME, ME!!!" folk who just wanted to be on a list. Some made claims that just were not backed up by online evidence of any great social media involvement. For example, one person had 46 followers and had posted 18 times. I could be wrong, but I assumed that person was not really a social media pro.

I can easily be fooled. But if I see someone in the stream who consistently seems unprofessional or unfocused on social media, I will quietly delete them.

But mostly, I've had people thank me. They find it to be a useful list. It could end up causing me more distraction from other projects than I wish, so I really don't know how long or well I can keep it current.

Right now, it has my attention. If you think you should be on the list or if you know someone else, please let me know. Come to think of it, the way I meander all over the board, I may have to delete me.

We'll see where this list takes itself.

Last year, my 65th birthday coincided with the launch of my Twitterville book. We threw a party at a local airplane museum attended by over 350 people. The next morning, we had 35 people who were actually in the book in our yard for breakfast.

It was the biggest birthday celebration I ever had and it was glorious.

This year, the big event in my life was that I still had it. My birthday was Saturday and I spent most of it working on a writing project. Paula and I had a dinner with 5 friends the previous night.

It was a quiet birthday, one in which I felt grateful more than any other emotion. One hundred days earlier, I underwent triple bypass open heart surgery. The chances of dying in the surgery were very low. The chances of dying if I did not have it, were very high.

I had a personal way to celebrate. I went out and ran about 4.6 miles. I had intended to run 5, but these days I take a more conservative approach and am pretty damned proud I could go so far so soon after such a massive medical procedure.

I got very few cards this year, but scores of people wished my a happy day on social networks. I feel recognized, appreciated and very grateful.

Launching a book on my 65th was extremely cool. Being alive and ambulatory with a small circle of people I love on my 66th is as good as it gets.

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about why I'm rooting for Google in social media. Coincidentally and almost simultaneously Om Malik wrote a great piece about why doing social media right just isn't part of Google's DNA.

We both used baseball metaphors. I said Google would strike out less if it stopped trying to hit the ball out of the park and Om compared Google's experience to his own failures to convert from cricket play to baseball.

Our two pieces were not directly opposed, but I seem a bit more hopeful that Google has a chance for success in social media and that such a success would benefit we users and customers in general.

Enterprise DNA does change. It is difficult but companies transform successfully all the time. Wells Fargo started as a stage coach company. Now it is in financial services. IBM owned 90 percent of the computer hardware industry. Now it owns virtually none.

Unlike humans, companies can adapt their DNA. They do it by changing who they hire and the culture that those people develop. Google today has a process that makes them very good at search and simultaneously not so good at social media.

Of all the bungles that Google has yet made in social media, the largest was not in Buzz or Wave or the shrinking Blogger franchise. It was in the fact that Ev Williams and Biz Stone worked together at Google at the same time. For these two to develop Twitter however, they had to leave the company and start all over on their own.

If Ev and Biz had been encouraged to futz around on their own, then share this Twitter thing with a few friends, who then shared it with a few friends, history may have been different.

But rewriting history is only a game. All you can glean by looking backwards is wisdom. And if failures make you wiser, as Vinod Khosla says, then Google should be the wisest of all companies when it comes to social media. Either that, or the company is destined to be like Sisyphus, the guy in Greek legend who kept pushing the rock up the mountain only to have the rock rolled back down and him having to repeat and repeat.

If Google does not show some of this wisdom soon, it may start feel its strength sap. It could lose the clout and credibility it enjoys today. It will become a less interesting company. Fewer brilliant technologists may wish to join.

I am told that people inside Google still like Buzz. They still use it internally. They plan to take components and add it to future products. They need to understand that new products are not about what they like so much as what customers want.

For Google to succeed in social media, it needs to treat a project like a skunkworks. The culture needed to make it onto the social media playing field requires one that is different than the one that exists today.

Google also needs to learn the social media technique of "launching by asking."

No social media tool or platform has begun by making a lot of big marketing noise. Social media successes are consistantly grassroots in their orientation.

Google needs to connect with the existing community, to reach out to those who influence us most. Get them involved.

Instead of swinging for the fence, they need to try to get to first base. And they need to understand the difference between bats and wickets before they go for their next hit.

My inveterate friend Tom Foremski picked City Lights Bookstore at 6 pm for getting together. It seemed fitting. Tom and I are both writers whose styles and perspectives were shaped in the 60s and City Lights, is the last bastion of the stormy renaissance that is usually called "The Beat Era."

I finished my business in San Francisco earlier than expected. I arrived at City lights at 4:30 with abundant time to kill.  I strolled the shelves of poet-bookseller Lawrence Ferlinghetti's fabled bookstore. I had read a great many of the books being offered and I had read them long ago.

But I'm not big on nostalgia and after a short while I felt like I had been there and done that as far as City Lights was concerned. I had killed less than half an hour.

I wandered outside and watched the amazing diversity of the neighborhood, clicking a few street scene photos. The neighborhood is like a Coney Island of the mind.  City Lights is sort of a cultural island surrounded by diverse sections of San Francisco. You are just a few footsteps from the Financial District, Chinatown and the restaurants of North Beach.

It also abuts the strip joints and porn shops of San Francisco's small, seamy adult entertainment district. There, just a couple of doors down from a sex toy supermarket I caught a new marquee: The Beat Museum, and I wandered over.

It cost four bucks to get in and what a weird, strange trip it will deliver. If you were on the magic bus of the 60s, its a visit to memory lane. If you were were not, then it educates you that the Beat Generation was a period of enlightenment, a time to explore the hope of peace and tolerance. Yes it was about sex and drugs, but it was so much more than that.

It was a period of art and music, of poetry and challenging conventional truths. It was a period of people bypassing powerful institutions, conventional wisdom and tolerance. It was a time where people exchanged ideas, often with great passion attached to them.

Very quickly, The Beat Museum brings all that back. It looks at the usual nexus of the era: Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassidy and the others, but mostly it spotlights Jack Kerouac, but mostly it talks about Jack Kerouac, author of several groundbreaking books, the best-remembered being On the Road.

Kerouac, was my favorite. His style was fast and contemporary. It sounded at times like the bebop jazz that he loved. You felt like you got to know the people he wrote about because his conversations were so, well, naked.

There are so many ties between the roots of social media and the beat era. Many of the thinkers and technologists who have provided us with the tools were shaped in that era.

It seems to me that we of the social media movement are braided and bonded to those of the Beat Generation. We have a love of innovation. We have hope for a future that provides people greater health and safety. We believe that conversation will reveal much and resolve a few differences. We have a distrust of the all-powerful and the institutional. We reserve the right to question anything.

Kerouac used a manual typewriter and wrote books. If he were alive today, I'm sure he's still write books, but he would use the tools of our time. He would be unquestionably among the most prominent of our bloggers.

The style he pioneered is the style that succeeds the best in the blogosphere, whether you are talking for an enterprise or telling about a traveling adventure.

Yes, Kerouac would have tweeted as well. He probably would also have been prolific with a handheld camera. Kerouac understood, even in writing books, that it's dialog that matters. He captured conversations in his books.

Just think of what he could do with the tools we have today. Just think of the influence he would have on the young minds of today as he had on the young minds of the 60s.

[NOTE--  I recently completed several posts on a 10-day, 2700-mile road trip through California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming and Nevada.  For transportation, we drove a 2010 Ford Escape Hybrid, loaned to us by Ford Motors in return for my objective review, which follows here.]

I pitched Scott Monty at Ford Motors on a lark. I was planning a summer road trip and wondered if I could review a Ford Fusion Hybrid as I, and my wife, bopped around the US Northwest visiting family and National Parks.

My pitch was that I would write from the perspective of an everyday driver, who handles a car differently than professionals who actually understand cars and how to drive them. My hidden agenda was the hope that I'd get better mileage than my own aging Acura RL has been getting.

Scott liked the idea and put me in touch with Gwen Peake, a digital communications manager who steered me away from the fusion and into a new Escape Hybrid, a four-passenger SUV, which she said would give us more power and a better view of the roadside beauties we were looking for.

I agreed,  figuring Ford would know better than me. They were absolutely right. Overall, my wife Paula and I loved almost everything about the Escape. My 90-year-old mother-in-law who tested the back seat for the first 400 miles of our junket directed me to ditch my Acura and go out and buy one of these immediately.

If this were the time for me to buy a new car, the Escape Hybrid would be a major candidate.

It took us less than 500 miles to get used to both the unique characteristics of the near silent motor and the bigness of the SUV. In fact, the Escape handled pretty much like my four-door sedan. It handled hills and curves well. It had plenty of pick up. It held easily in wind gusts. It was silent, smooth, spacious and solid.

One surprise is that we found it as quiet inside as in my luxury sedan, which would be about twice the price of the $30K hybrid if I bought a new one today. We found the sound system, visibility dashboard gave us everything we would want in a car.

Most of our driving was on open roads. We climbed up as high as 8900 feet in the Rockies and were on lots of sparsely driven back-roads, testing it's performance, which cost me $85 in Eastern Idaho. Our mileage never went below 30 MPH or above 32. We tried regular, medium and high octane gas and both performance and mileage remained the same.

The rear section handled all the luggage three adults needed, leaving the back seat open for human habitation.

There was some slight strain when we tromped the accelerator while climbing the steeper stretches of Rocky Mountain road. The tachometer went above 4000 and we heard sort of a wimpy whiny sound. But I would expect that. The temperature was often above 90. The air thin, the incline sharp and few cars would take those hills without complaining.

Ford has a deal with Microsoft, which puts a Windows into every dashboard. It's called Synch and manages Bluetooth and USB connected devices. It also handles the navigation system. Both Paula and I have used Nav systems before but we could not decipher how to program this one for a destination. We brought it to a Ford dealership where a nice sales lady read pages from the manual. She got it to work once then failed on a second try.

We were also puzzled why playing an iPod through Synch was more confusing than playing music through the iPod. This may have all been user error, but it seemed to us that Synch could be made a lot easier.

This is a new generation of SUV, one that doesn't bother with four-wheel drive. It is probably designed more for the soccer mom/pop than the off-road aficionado.

From what I could make out, the Escape Hybrid fills the bill in every way.

Yesterday,  was my third anniversary as a Twitter user.What a weird strange trip it has been.

When I started on Aug. 8, 2007, the estimates varied greatly as to how many people were using it from a low of 340,000 to as many as 4 million, but no one really believed it could be that high. thirty-six months later, the high estimates are topping 140 million and few people doubt its accuracy.

In August 2007,the big names in Twitterville were neighborhood heroes like Leo LaPorte, Veronica Belmont and Robert Scoble. These name remain prominent, but if you consider followers an important milestone, all three of them have been dwarfed by assorted celebrities from Hollywood and sports, many of them finding Twitterville a useful way to prolong fading careers.

Three years ago, a great deal of the content was about shiny things, the newest in new technology, but mostly we talked about Twitter and it's potential for business and friendship and world peace. Occasionally, we discussed where we were and what we had for lunch.

Now we use Twitter to talk less about Twitter itself and more about anything we want to discuss. Three years ago, most business and political people disdained Twitter and now they embrace it. Being on Twitter  is essential to professionals and consultants today as being in the Yellow Pages was twenty years ago.

I don't love all these changes, but I expected them. I could even get boastful and say that I predicted some of them. But I really had no idea that these changes would come so fast.

I  still find conversations to enjoy. Scoble is still there pumping out more Shiny Thing news than I can digest. But now there are millions of people discussing thousands of topics on all sorts of subjects I don't care about.

Businesses coming into Twitter seem to have strayed from the conversational capabilities that make Twitter so special, reverting back to the broadcasting of messages, a method that failed so badly in other channels, that it created the opportunity that has become Twitter.

I keep thinking of the roots of television. General Sarnoff at NBC wanted to provide opera and Shakespeare for the masses. Around the corner Stanton and Paley pushed sitcoms and got rich selling cigarette and beer through ads.

I think Twitter is now a crossroads. It can revolutionize the access people have to each other. It can fundamentally change how news is gathered and distributed. It can make quality customer service scalable. It can let newcomers to the marketplace be familiar with people in a company before they buy or apply.

Or it can become another channel down which messages are jammed by people who really don't care what you think.

I really don't know how it will come out. I can only hope.

(Old Faithful in the early morning sun. Photos by Shel)

[NOTE:  This is the 6th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  recently completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest.]

I have traveled a good deal.  There is no place that I have seen on earth that compares to Yellowstone National Park for unique and diverse beauty. Like Jackson Hole, I had been to Yellowstone more than 40 years earlier.  While Jackson was less than I had remembered it to be, Yellowstone was a great deal more.

The lakes, waterfalls, forests, geysers, cliffs frosted with gold and red mineral deposits, buffalo, elk, solitude, crowds, meadows and forests, steam-heated swimming holes, there is simply more to see and do, more to drop your jaw down in amazement than anywhere I have ever seen or heard about.

Of course, we had far too little time to see what we wanted to see. We could have spent more than double the time just driving along the two loops seeing the most famous--and crowded--sites. The hope of taking a long hike to get away from people and closer to wildlife just did not come to pass.

I had received some good advice from Shelli Johnson, who I know on Twitter as YellowstoneShel. Shelli is the go-to person on national park visits, where she organizes and leads tours that are more organic than the bus schlep types. We didn't have time to folow most of her tips but she did point us to the Old Faithful Inn and Yellowstone Lake Hotel, the two iconic and historic places to stay.

The two Hotels are decidedly different. Old Faithful Inn  is a magnificent log structure. We watched the geyser from our room, from it's deck and from its front yard. Yellowstone Lake Hotel is built in the style of the rural grand hotels that you find in ew England and upstateNew York.

The views of the lake take your breath away. Both Hotels are designated historic landmarks and we were told that this designation banned wifi and TV. We did not miss them, particularly when sporadic Edge coverage became available briefly on our iPhones.

Both hotels have an historic elegance to them. You can just picture fashionably clad visitors of days gone by, filling the lobbies and dining rooms. Times have changed. There is a buffet in one and in the other we sat next to four bikers who were dressed for the road and guzzled more beer from the bottle than food from their plates.

None of that mattered.

What mattered was what you saw and smelled outside. Our first morning, we strolled the shore of Yellowstone Lake as the sun rose and colors changed by the second. We hopped in our car and drove less than two miles before we his a traffic jam caused by a wild buffalo strolling down the center strip. A short while later, we came across a few score of his friends and felt like we'd been transported back a hundred years.

They snort and roll in dirt. The young bulls constantly challenge each other. I was told that they have bad tempers and are not the smartest of creatures. Most folk were smart enough to maintain a respectful distance.

The places you've heard about are the most visited and are still absolutely worth the view. Places like Artists Lookout seem able to spread crowds out to give visitors some sense of what it must have been like before it became a mecca for tourist buses.

By the end of Yellowstone, I had realized one more thing that happens in the space of 40 years. Yellowstone may not have changed, but I had. All the packing and driving, mapping and moving was beginning to have an eroding effect on us.

We decided to cancel the final leg of our trip, cutting out Mt. Rushmore, the Dakota Badlands and Black Hills. We headed south through Wyoming and picked up highways to drive home over the next three days, stopping only to marvel at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

We got home a few days early, spending much of the first day napping and being thankful we did not have to drive anywhere.

We're grateful for the trip, but if we were to try another roadside adventure, we would visit fewer places and stay longer at each. This was a survey course, and there is a great deal to be enjoyed in the details.

The thing about Google in social media is that they just keep swinging the bat no matter how many times they strike out. Yesterday, they killed Wave, which turned out to be merely a ripple and today they came back to announce acquisition of the prolific and talented Slide social media apps group.

Google keeps trying in social media, keeps failing and then comes back again. Jokes about them in social media have become both more prolific and funnier.  Silicon Valley Watcher editor Tom Foremski recently speculated that Google is a one trick pony.

Of course, Foremski overstated the case as Android watchers will tell you. And if it matters, Orkut, Google's aging social network remains big in Brazil. But more than that Google is among the most influential and well-positioned companies on the Internet.

It essentially invented online contextual advertising and created a model that users will accept and advertisers find valuable. More than that, Google knows more about Internet users than any other company, more about us than our governments know. Google knows what we look at and when and where we look,

While it has had its share of gaffes and attacks, overall most people who understand what Google does have come to trust it with our personal data.

That of course brings us directly to Facebook, which has soared to become the most visited social networking site. It claims to have 500 million active users, a more than one in every 14 people on earth.

The more people know about Facebook, the less we trust them with our data. And in that fact I see a huge market opportunity.

All Google needs to do is to build something very much like Facebook has. EXCEPT it makes clear that user privacy is at the core of company priorities. Users get to decide who see how much about them. They make it easy to tweak options at any time.

Right now many people who hate Facebook use Facebook. They go to Facebook despite all its many flaws for the same reasons that more people want to go to Manhattan than say, Cody, Wyoming. It's where people who are relevant to them can be found and where you can meet them. People go to Facebook  to find and make friends, customers, prospects, recruits and voters or even Scrabble opponents.

Everything else--except of course for Twitter--offers the same social promise as Cody, Wyoming.

Google has the brand, credibility and technical and business ability to build a social network that can compete successfully with Facebook.

It will not be a simple task. There is a reason that they keep producing products with names like Buzz that hit the market with a fizzle. They do not yet have a social culture. They launch products with lots of noise then sit back and wait and hope that the type of word-of-mouth the exploded Google will happen again.

Google can lead in social networking but it needs to be social in its behavior. It needs to tap into the people who influence early adoption in technology. Those influencers are only a few thousand in number, but they have the ability to move millions of users from one social space to another.

Will Google "get it?" Will they join the community before trying to lead it? I really don't know. Their past performance has given me doubts. But there remains a large and ripe market opportunity.

Maybe they'll get it right next time.

Yesterday morning I stumbled on this blog post by Abby Gilmore a young Bostonian, transplanted to Tempe Arizona where she used social media to land herself a job as an SEO specialist by using social media and personal initiative.

In a down market, it was nice to see. I've written a lot about social media as a recruiting tool. In Twitterville, I wrote about Sodexo who uses social media to recruit chefs and food service managers and save hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in recruiting costs.

But Abby's was the flip side. She was an applicant, not a recruiter. She was at the beginning of a career, not yet a Candidate for executive recruitment.

I wondered if there were other stories like hers and so, about 24 hours ago I asked on Twitter and got mixed results. I heard from two other young women, both with good stories about how social media helped land them jobs. One would let me use her name, but not the company that hired her until the company launched next month. The other said I could use her company name, but not hers, because her boss said he didn't want her to get too much glory.

Both those responses do not exactly depict the sort of openness and transparency that too me is at the essence of how social media works.

I did find one new entry-level success story in Josh Freeman, a reporter for Town Crier newspapers, part of Multimedia Nova Corp. , who was recruited by Canadian Social Media honcho Eden Spodek. Josh started as an intern, then was retained fulltime after graduation from journalism school.

The story was supposed to be about people just entering the workforce and I was about to spike the entire story, when I heard from a couple of social media friends.

Ryan Kuder May be the first "twofer." He landed his last two jobs through social media. A while back Dan Green, an executive recruiter connected with him on Twitter through mutual followship. He recruited Ryan for VP Marketing at Biz360, a business intelligence firm. But Biz360 was soon acquired and Ryan's job eliminated. But another social media friend sent Ryan a Twitter message alerting him to a new job as VP Marketing for Bizzy, a Silicon  Valley startup.

Up in Canada, Dave Fleet got into social media when he worked for the Ontario government a few years back. He maintains two blogs, one on his passion for running and the other on PR & social media. The latter drew the interest of several people at Canada's most social media-focused PR agency, Thornley Fallis. They became more conversational with each other on Twitter, where co-founder Joe Thornley eventually offered him a job. Fleet joined and was eventually promoted to vice president.

I intentionally limited this sampling to just 24 hours. What I found was no avalanche of evidence that recruitment is moving from tradional venues onto social media.

But it does show you that there are a growing number of people who are taking the initiative in a tough job market and are finding success.

There is one other example. I am one of a great many social media consultants. As a fulltime focus I am relatively new at it. Fully half my referrals have come through people I know in social media, people whom I have never met in real life.

I think social media is destined to become one huge jobs marketplace. In B2B SAP lets its customers post job listings in its SAP Community Network. It abstains from recruiting there themselves. But I am told quite a few companies and employees have found each other very effortlessly that way.

[The road through Grand Teton National Park. Photo by Shel]

[NOTE:  This is the 6th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  recently completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest.]

I had long remembered Jackson Hole, Wyo with fondness and nostalgia.  I last saw it in 1967 and I remembered it as a place where cowboy and ski culture converged. I remembered tall slim, ruddy-faced men wearing Wranglers, boots and Stetsons strolling along casual shop-lined streets. They would touch their hats and smile slightly whenever they passed by fashionably clad ladies.

Mostly, I remembered looking up from the town square and seeing a small community surrounded by views such as you see above, views of majestic snow-capped mountains, part of the Grand Teton range.

When Paula and I returned there a couple of weeks ago, we discovered what several decades does to the memory bank. First off, it is about a 40 mile drive to where I took the above shot. Jackson Hole is surrounded by attractive hills, such as what you see here, but compared with the Teton Mountains, they are molehills.

And the small handfuls of slim cowboys have been replaced by entire squadrons of over-sized tourists who have down-traded from Wranglers to Target sweatsuits.

The cowboy bars are still there, but now they seem more hokey to me than authentic. We spoke to a cowboy at the door of one. It turned out he was a New York City drama student and being a cowpoke was his summer job.

The center of Jackson Hole is not unattractive. But it is overrun. It is the a four-season entry point to winter sports, spring river rafting, dude ranches and the southern entry point to two glorious national parks.

The charm I remembered is still there. You just need to step back a couple of blocks from the shops and Bonanza Buffet type restaurants. Paula and I found Trio American Bistro. We had to wait an hour for a table, and used the time to stroll the town finding such oddities as Ben Franklin on a Park Bench. Then we enjoyed our favorite dining experience of the entire trip. Atmosphere, service and food were all top notch and the price was more than reasonable.

In the morning, we got to walk a few blocks and found ourselves at the edge of a big hill [or small mountain] one with a ski lift that was open for tourists, one that had tourists on horseback straddling it from side-to-side and one that still gave you a sense of beauty and tranquility.

Neither of us much regretted leaving the next day. We drove north and entered Grand Teton National Park, stopping at yet another majestic water body, this one, Jenny Lake. We were told that Jenny Lake is the starting point for a great many spectacular hikes, to places with enticing names such as "Inspiration Point" and "Hidden Falls."

But we pushed on. Our next destination was the frosting on the cake of this trip, Yellowstone National Park.

In Jackson Hole, I discovered that memory can enhance an aging reality. At Yellowstone I would realize that memory also can be dwarfed by the amazing scenic realities of a place as unique and rich as this national park.

Earlier this morning I asked a question on Twitter: "What do you look at first each morning, eMail, Twitter or Facebook?"

In two hours time, more than 30 people responded. There was never any closeness to the results. Twice as many people start each day with email than Twitter. Facebook, in my unscientific survey finished a distant third, but Hell, I asked the question on Twitter.

I have no overwhelming point to make. I was just curious. I am not surprised at the results. I look at email first myself. It is where business  and new business come in first most of the time. My Gmail is an easier venue for deleting the spam and assorted crap we all must endure.

H. Stumm of Darmstadt, Germany gave the most creative non-answer. He said he goes to "CM" first, the Coffee Maker. Since he was the 8th of over 30 to respond, I assume he consumes his coffee with great gusto.

What I do find remarkable is that Twitter has become the first or second "to go" destination for people I connect with every morning. The platform is less than four years old and yet it has become so very important to so very many people.

I wonder if it will continue to evolve as a top priority. Will it overtake eMail as the first place to look in the morning? Or will it's sharpness get dulled as more marketers and message senders insert themselves into what has been people-to-people conversations.

What do you look at first each day? What is rising and what is falling? Why?

[NOTE:  This is the 5th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  recently completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest.]

We were on US Route 20, in the easternmost portion of Idaho. We had left Craters of the Moon and were headed to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We had enjoyed enough scenery and wanted to get to our destination before dark.

The land, still attractive, was becoming less dramatic and the traffic quite sparse. Paula, having become comfortable with the Ford Escape Hybrid SUV, I was assigned to review, had her seat back and was blissfully dozing.

The road was flat and wide and I was curious to see just what this vehicle would do. My foot became heavier on the accelerator. The speedometer crept north of 80, when I came up on the rear bumper of the first car I'd seen in a while.

It was innocuous enough. It looked like a black pickup with one of those enclosures on the back and a rack on the top. Being from out of state, the first three letters of the plate "ISP" meant nothing to me.

I tromped it. By my reading, I was a tad over 90 when I whizzed by the pickup. I pulled back onto my side of the two-lane highway and decelerated. The Ford had done well.

At just that moment, I saw the blinking red/blue lights coming from what I had thought was the rack. I then dawned on me that the plate letters stood for "Idaho State Police." I had been caught cold and without a decent excuse.

In a minute, Officer C. Williams strolled up to my window. He had the friendly smile of gracious victory on his face.

"I didn't think you were going to go for it, but then you did. I got you cold, clocked you at 87." Actually, I had clocked me at 92 but I thought it wise not to correct him.

Officer C Williams stepped back and looked at the Escape. He circled it and examined the Michigan "Manufacturer" plates. He asked me if this was a rental.

I said no, that I was reviewing the car for Ford Motors and that I was on a 3000-mile road trip. "I'm supposed to put this car through it's paces. I thought this was a safe place to see how she could pick up and pass."

He smiled and said he thought it had done well.

"Is this one of those new experimental cars," he asked. I told him no, that the Escape had been around for a while. What was new is that this was a Hybrid. He asked about mileage, which was running at about 32 through Idaho.

Officer C. Williams, looked closely again at the SUV and went back to his car and Paula and I began one of those eternal waits. As he ambled back up to our window, I could see a long piece of paper in his hands and I knew I was screwed.

He had nicely reduced my estimated speed down to 80, which cut my fine in half to $85.

He examined the Escape one more time. "Nice car," he said and turned. "You folks have a nice day."

He followed us all the way to the next town. I set the pace at a loping 65.

I'm wondering. If Officer C. Williams buys an Escape, would Ford Global reimburse me the 85 bucks?

Craters of the Moon, Idaho. Photo by Shel

[NOTE:  This is the 4th in a series of off-topic posts. My wife Paula and I  just completed a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. The previous installment left off at Shasta Lake and this one picks up a few miles later. ]

From Lake Shasta we drove north past snow-crowned Mount Shasta. At Weed, Calif. we turned off I-5 and onto Route 97. With extremely few exceptions, we would not put wheels onto a highway for another 1200 miles and eight days. This was a wise choice.

On the Interstates you focus is on getting there, there's a sense of urgency. On back roads you focus is on being there's a sense of exploration. We stopped often to read historical markers, soak in magnificent views and enjoy assorted oddities along our way.

Route 97 extends north from Weed all the way to Canada. At an average height of 5000 is a scenic pageant of rivers, mountains, lava beds and forests.

Our biggest stop was at  Crater Lake, the bluest inland water body I've ever viewed. Filling 30 square miles of a collapsed volcano, it's surface is 7000 feet above the ocean and it's deepest point is 1900 feet, making it the deepest in the US.

From their, we continued north another 60 miles to the very pleasant little  city of Klamath Falls. Home of Oregon Tech and with a population of about 20,000, we had nice late-night Taco salads at Hidalgos Mexican Restaurant, then stayed in a safe, clean and affordable Great Western.

We continued north on 97 all the way to Bend where we caught up with Paula's daughter, her husband and two of our grand children for a weekend at Sunriver Resort. The first person to scout around this area was Kit Carson, but that was before it had its own airport, golf course, swimming pools and tennis courts. We got a great deal on a fabulous house that slept five adults and two kids for two nights for less than $1K. We biked, jogged, swam, ate at a great restaurant and on our own deck, enjoyed free in-home wifi and just sat on the rear porch looking at pine trees. I'm not big on resorts usually, but this one gets a top rating in my view for having a great balance between recreation and serenity.

After Sunriver, our goal was to get to the big tomato of our trip, Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. We drove a few miles north on 97 to US 20 east, which crosses into Idaho. We had no big plans for Idaho, a state that I know potatoes and HP printers. But we were surprised by its open space unrelenting beauty.

We made an over-night stop in downtown Boise at a Hampton Inn. The rooms were pleasant but the breakfast memorably awful.

In the morning, Highway 20 followed the Interstate for a while, then cut  into sparsely populated land you picture riding on a horse. It's a gently curvy road, part river meadow, rolling hills and some badland with mesa and cathedral rock formations erupting from time-to-time. There were also some large stands of white birch.

This was not an area for cute shops and restaurants. Paula and I had some steak sandwiches and we pulled over at Riley, Idaho. The sign said population 17, but I suspect they were exaggerating. We dined on rickety picnic benches, with a spectacular view blocked slightly by a port-a-johnny that was thankfully downwind.

We drove through the Sawtooth National Forest, the turnoff for the posh Sun Valley resort, abandoned gold mines and the out-of-use Rattlesnake Station, stage coach stop.

Then we went to the moon. Route 20's absolute high point is Craters of the Moon National Monument. I took the photo at the top of this page from one stop on a seven-mile loop. My photos did not capture the eerie sense of this area of eight volcanic disturbances, the most recent being a mere 1500 years ago. The lava fields we saw 800 miles west in Southern Oregon are part of this massive, unfinished area.

It really does feel like you are walking on the moon. Paula and I have seen the lava fields of the Big Island of Hawaii, but for some reason, these felt even more moonlike.

We stayed less than an hour and continued East. At most every stop we felt the pang of wanting to stay longer. We had seen so much and had so much more to see.

Our next stop would be the tourist mecca of Jackson Hole, WY, where I had last visited 43 years earlier. I learned that my memory could move mountains.

Mitch Joel, in my view, is a good guy. He's smart and his written and intelligent and popular book. We seem to agree on many issues. But one place where we are not joined at the hip is on our current views of Apple Computer.

Mitch thinks that all this negative noise--the Gizmodo incident, Ellen DeJeneris, FCC antitrust investigation, John Stewart and the most recent "antennagate" has done nothing to hurt the company.

Mitch sends evidence almost daily. He reports record lines in front of the San Francisco Apple Store, record sales for the year, and so on and so forth. Mitch offered to bet me $1,000 that a year from now, Apple will emerge unscathed from the current avalanche of unfavorable coverage. The loser would give the money to a favorite charity.

I am in no position to be gambling $1,000. Besides, unlike Mitch, I am not so very sure how all this will come out.

Someone else tweeted me, "Apple may be doing bad PR, but people don't care. I consider that an oxymoronic statement. PR, as I learned and practiced it, is about relationships with publics, not about hits from a press release or any such tactical nonsense.

Lately, Apple has been consistently doing a style of PR, that has surprised, angered and disappointed some people. I am one of them. At times I've considered them arrogant. At times they have played the part of the bully.

So long as they are the only ones making brilliant products, they can get away with such behavior. But the market is changing. Others have come out with very good phones and history suggests that those competitors will keep making better and better phones and with all that competition prices and margins are likely to slip.

This is where the PR gaffes come in.  PR shapes how people feel about a company. They involve trust. On rare occasions PR, has a dramatic, sudden impact on a company's market position. Usually the process is slower than that.

For a very large company the erosion can take a very long time. It took General Motors, for example, more than 20 years, to hit the rocks and they coupled bad PR  with building shoddy products.

Apple still builds fine products. But now there is a wart on the nose of the Apple hero image. Now, people who have not yet purchased an iPhone for the first time, may look at other options. Now, people who have contracts with AT&T expiring may shop around.

There is already a trickle of erosion. I know that because a small handful of folks on Twitter have told me they've switched or will.  I do not think the number will swell dramatically immediately.

But I think that if Apple does not change how it converses with its publics soon,  there is an excellent chance that it will begin feeling a loss of repeat customers and see new customer stray. I think that it's vendor-friendly service pricing [They get a share of AT&T's outrageous take] will go down and that impacts the bottom line.

In my view Apple needs to vastly upgrade the way it conducts conversations with customers.  Currently, its demonstration of responsiveness is Steve Jobs reading cherry-picked emails sort of the way the late Perry Como used to read song requests on his TV show in the late 1950s.

What Jobs is doing is performance-oriented, not conversation-oriented. It wows a few people for a short period of time, but most folk understand that it's hokey.

There are thousand, perhaps millions of people who now have fear, uncertainty and doubt about Apple. The best way to offset that is to join the popular social networks and to start using blogs and podcasts in a meaningful way.

We need to start seeing people who work at Apple, who are passionate about their work, who care about user concerns and who are not Steve Jobs.

I reduced my bet with Mitch Joel from $1,000 down to one drink, based on results of Apple sales/profit numbers one year from now. I am not extremely certain of winning. A large company is like a supertanker, running on an open throttle. It takes a lot of time and distance to change its direction. It takes a lot of time and distance also to change user perception.

What I am absolutely certain about is that Apple was in a much stronger market position six months ago than it is today. And if it does not alter course, the supertanker that is Apple Computer will eventually discover it is headed directly toward rocky shoals.

By then, it may be too late to alter course.

[NOTE:  This is the 3rd in a series of off-topic posts. I've just returned from a 10-day, 2,700-mile road trip through the US northwest. It was part-family oriented, part a visit to some of my best visual memories and in part a review of the new Ford Escape Hybrid, which Ford Motors loaned me for evaluation purposes.]

We began grumpy and came home exhausted. In between, Paula and I had one if the best experiences of our lives. We were gone 10 days, slept in nine different places and got to experience the bigness, the beauty and diversity of the American northwest.

The highlights of the trip were a two-day visit to Sunriver, Ore., a resort in Bend Ore., and visits to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. But the connecting points--the towns and back roads, the little spontaneous explorations were almost equal in interest and discovery.

For some reason our vacations are almost always preceded by about a week of tumult. This one was a record setter. Paula got sick. Her mother, Jean Berman, 91, had an infected leg, which doctors attached to a clumsy medical vacuum machine until a few days prior to our departure. Our younger daughter and her two small children visited us until the day before our departure. For the first time since my heart surgery, I was feeling some chest pains and worrying.

When the tires of the Escape rolled onto our street from our driveway, I was still waiting for Paula to shout out, "wait, I can't do this. I need a rest," but she didn't. We picked up Jean in Fremont and were on the road at 9 a.m. as scheduled.

It was 85 in Fremont at 9 am when we hit the road. By the time we stopped for lunch at the Vacaville In-N-Out Burger, it was 102. We did not yet know that our departure date would be the hottest day of the year in Northern California.

After lunch,  we connected north onto the tedious stretch of I-5 to Redding.  We bickered about unimportant things as we sat in traffic, looking at flat agribiz-owned farmland. The temperature kept rising. This was the most boring stretch we would experience. It was made more difficult by a few serious construction delays.

Redding turned out to be the geographic wormhole. Before it was redundant flatland. After were evergreen forests, pristine lakes and a surprising number of snow capped mountains--always a surprise in 100 degree weather.

The biggest and most breath-taking was Lassen  stands tall and powerful over everything else. We regretted not having time to visit Lassen National Park.

We turned off for the next point of interest. Lake Shasta was our first scheduled stop. We drove through the aging City of Lake Shasta onto Shasta Dam Road. As we drove through the small city, Paula and Jean wondered why there were no people on the streets in mid-afternoon.

Our dashboard said the outside temperature was 105 degrees.

We stopped for a moment to watch a few people swimming and boating and fishing and enjoying a cooler time than we felt in the parking lot. I caught site of a speckled eagle, the first I've ever seen. The fleet-flying, fierce-looking was far too fast for me to catch a photo.

At the dam, we spent a little time at the highly informative visitor center, where we caught our breath and felt our collective moods elevate. We were looking at incredible beauty.

We were on vacation.

[Note. Mount Lassen & the speckled eagles are file photos gleaned from Google images. I took the Shasta Lake & Dam shots.]