Who would win a battle - Chewbacca or Hagrid? I say Hagrid, my coworkers disagree…

(question taken from this quiz)

Tom just told me that I clearly have not adjusted to LA yet. Why? Because I have a widget on my desktop showing me the weather. Who needs weather updates in LA - it’s always the same!

I like my weather, but yeah, I suppose I don’t need it anymore.

I thought this article from the Wall Street Journal was really interesting: OMG –My Boss Wants to ‘Friend’ Me On My Online Profile.

I have a very different perspective on this subject, obviously, given where I work. It’s always been fairly standard for me to have my coworkers as friends on whatever social network we happened to be playing with at the moment. My MySpace friends list is filled with coworkers, and I know current and former coworkers read this blog.

I did take notice when my Facebook friends list began to fill with former and current coworkers. Facebook used to be very small, where networks were really only people you knew, your true friends. But the atmosphere of the network changed, from small and private, to more open and social.

It’s all very interesting to me. The current trend at MySpace is to give people more control over who sees what. On Facebook, there already are advanced privacy controls. People are just rendering them useless by adding anyone as a friend.

I wonder if part of it is standard social network growing pains. Every network seems to go through this, people want as many friends as possible, gather them all, then start to prune when the numbers become unmanageable. Even on something as new as Pownce, you see the people with 450+ friends sending more requests, and can only wonder how these people keep up. I have all of 19 friends and updates are scrolling right off the screen.

The article’s focus isn’t really what I’ve been rambling about, it’s more about how you can slight someone if you dare decline their friend requests, and the harm in putting very personal information about yourself online. Both points are true, of course, I’ve never, ever thought twice about declining a friend request from a coworker. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve ever declined a request from anyone I know in real life, friend or not. I always figure, why not, I truly don’t put anything online I don’t mind the world seeing.

We may be giving people more and more ways to keep things private at MySpace, but that still doesn’t mean they’re not going to give acquaintances access. Facebook has lots and lots of ways to keep things private, but people already are giving anyone access. As long as that trend continues, how private is private?

Once upon a time, I wrote “friends-only” entries in here. I don’t do that anymore, and the entries are no longer online. I saw the definition of “friends” become “acquaintances” on Facebook and MySpace, starting getting random friends requests on here, and knew it was time.

Is there such a thing as private anymore? It’s an interesting question, and a challenge I think all of us who work in this space are going to have to tackle in the very near future. People do want privacy. They want to be able to secretly gossip with their friends, share family pictures, and tell private stories. They don’t want the boss to hear all about the bad date. It’s up to us to find a way to let people keep their secrets again.

Congrats to all of my former coworkers at AOL - I know this was a long time coming. It looks great!

Burned jogger shows lightning, headphones don’t mix.

It’ll be interesting to see how well this works. Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that people will ALWAYS associate teenage boys with obsessed gamers, no matter what we do. Not that teenage boys are by nature a menace to society but, well, ya know…the mental leaps that some people make are insane.

The iphone is really pretty. As in, so pretty I really, really want one pretty. But I have owned a Treo since they existed, a Palm since the IIc, and have come to depend on a lot of features Palm offers that the iPhone just doesn’t have right now.

My Treo is spontaneously rebooting a few times a week. And unfortunately, my iPod’s apparently getting near the end of its life too….it keeps freezing up on me. The iPhone isn’t really a proper replacement for my iPhone OR my Treo.

Sooo, if my Treo dies completely before there’s a major iPhone upgrade, I’m gonna have to buy something else. A 700w or something, maybe. Which is depressing, but I have no choice.

Otherwise, it depends what Apple has in store for the iPhone, and if I can live with not having ALL my music with me at ALL times. I think that’s gonna be what stops me from getting an iPhone at the end, but…

…it sure is pretty.