Personally, I'm not sure which I'm more over... Facebook or news sites that split up relatively short articles over multiple pages to increase page views.

The five stages of Facebook grief - Computerworld: A gaming site called Roiworld surveyed 600 teenagers and found that 20% of teens have either dropped Facebook or are using it less. Of those who have abandoned Facebook altogether, 43% say it's because there are "too many adults or older people," their parents are on Facebook or because they're concerned about privacy.

Thank goodness for RSS and Safari's Reader feature to help me avoid both (scams that prey upon human nature) as much as possible. /rant

I love this paragraph from Doc Searls' post today:

Doc Searls Weblog · Context is King: "Phil Windley (disclosure: I’ve done work for Phil) gives a talk in which he provides a brief history of e-commerce. It goes, ‘1995: Invention of the cookie. The End.’ Thanks to the cookie, we have contexts — but only inside each company’s silo. We can’t provide our own contexts except to the degree that each company’s website allows it. And they’re all different. This too is a bug, not a feature. (Just like carrying around a pile of loyalty cards and key tabs is a bug. Hey, I know more about who and what I’m loyal to than any company does — and I’d like my own ways of expressing that.)"

He is frustrated that while in France google.com automatically defaults to google.fr (the French Google) despite any easy-to-access attempts to get to the US English version. Cookies are a fascinating topic both in terms of advertising and (especially now with the evolving "social" web) social sites. I wrote about a similar problem I saw in the way online advertisers were using cookies back in 2004 (wow, time flies):

Digital Moses Confidential: How Fresh is Your Cookie?: "It would seem that cookies would be the ideal and have enough inherit flexibility and durability to reign as the online direct response’s choice for tracking well into the future. The cookie quickly gained its pre-eminence in the online world because of its simplicity, its relative obscurity and its long-term reach. However, recent market forces are converging to form the perfect storm that threatens to make the simple cookie… well, crumble."

I was wrong about the gathering storm then, but I think I was right about the implications for sticking with the way cookies have evolved as the keycards (in some cases debit cards) of our online/social experience. It's a model that's bound to break eventually (hopefully) because as Doc points out later in his post, relying on cookies to inform corporate 3rd parties about our contexts (location, social, status, etc) is not optimal because we ourselves are made dependent variables. Instead, we should control our data and our context and be independent. That's what I'm trying to do with this whole harrelson.fm experiment and I hope it works. I'm having fun with it so far and it's been a blast to really have a reason to think hard about where my data flows and goes as it makes its way through all these tubes.

Apple's new ad unit promoting awareness of its FaceTime feature of iPhone 4 is remarkable in many ways. First, there's the striking simplicity of the presentation of complex emotions. There's also the lack of the iPhone being mentioned by name in the ad, but instead used as a utility or appliance (in this case with a "revolutionary" feature). Of course, video conferencing is nothing new (Skype, Nokia and Google Chat have all made use of the paradigm for the last few years) and I've spent my time video chatting with my daughter over the past year while teaching an hour and a half away from my home. As a result, perhaps what is most striking is the music choice behind the ad... Armstrong's "When You're Smiling." The song has enough cultural reference (even global culture as we'll see in a second) to elicit an emotional response and a feeling of connection or familiarity with a new device. The song itself makes use of familiar devices (such as chord progression and bridges) that were well established jazz fundamentals. However, I was most curious as to how the song has been used in advertising spots before Apple. What fascinated me the most were the range of intended emotions in the various ad spots. Apple's Facetime ad differs dramatically from some of these prior uses: First, Lebanon's MEA: Comfort? Security? Smile more at airports? Next, Coca Cola used the song in a 1999 Mexican ad spot to present a campaign to "Drink the Good Thing" (high fructose corn syrup FTW!): Coke will make you happy and all of your problems will go away (but watch out for the braces)! Of course the song has also been used for humor (as in Seinfeld). I'm constantly amazed at the depth and complexity of what seems to be a very simple concept (a song in an ad). However, as Apple (Steve Jobs) seems to be well aware, it's that complexity of emotions that can turn a device into a must have gadget.

The iPad is an especially good reader for @mxnews' print publication, which is our local free and excellent weekly (that you can see at MountainX.com). Don't tell Jeff, but I actually look at the ads more when they are presented as pixels on my iPad than I do when I view them in print. In fact, I'm heading to Ingles for the 5-for-1 Breyer's ice cream sale today.

Saw this on WeatherUnderground's Asheville forecast page just now.