Serving Mark Zuckerberg in Sun Valley

At the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley last week, media luminaries from around the globe descended on the central Idaho mountains for a week of R&R and M&A. Many famous deals have been brokered at the conference over the years from the Google YouTube acquisition to Comcast's bid for a controlling stake in NBC/Universal last year.

This year the biggest news was Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg getting duped by a would-be autograph-seeker who turned out to be a process server notifying mighty Mark that he's being sued for an 84% ownership stake in Facebook.

The lawsuit may be frivolous (claiming Facebook was bought for $1000 back in '03 by one Paul Ceglia), but the rush experienced by the process server must have been as real as it gets. As depicted in Pineapple Express, process serving is a high-stakes game of cat and mouse, even when dealing with low-profile scumbags like drug dealers. Imagine when your quarry is Mark Zuckerberg, what kind of assassin's thrill that must bring when you realize he'll be in Sun Valley for the Allen & Co. conference and you head him off at the pass. A perfect plan meets perfect execution as your spring the trap and ambush the biggest name in Silicon Valley.

Facebook Makes Your Privacy Difficult to Understand

There's a genius working at the New York Times graphics design center who produced the comprehensive visual (from which I happily pimped the above) of Facebook's 'bewildering tangle' of a privacy policy.

I'm generally trusting of all things Internets, including Google's all-seeing eye (well acquainted with the collective id), but it's not a bad thing to be a little standoffish in knowing that the privacy rules governing the web are largely unwritten, or rather, being written by the companies you use everyday on the Web (Google, Facebook, etc.). Your guardedness should arise from the fact that they are attempting to create a market-driven, self-interest supporting code of conduct that balances their business interest against the whip of torts. As with any pioneering enterprise, the law isn't yet advanced enough to cover this ground with prescriptive rules simply because the list of contingencies is branching and broadening everyday with no signs of slowing down or normalizing. So the shake-out of privacy protection will probably happen by dint of these companies being called-out in court for bad behavior, aka violations of your privacy. All I'm saying is be careful how much you share since Facebook is working mostly to capitalize on your personal information as their marketable data. This should bother you only so much as you have ignorantly shared compromising information. The upside is relevant advertising, the downside is martyrdom in the courts. As always, the ancient writ of caveat emptor applies.

In these instances, I like to fall back on the rhetorical utility of my run-in with the naive young coed Boobs McGee, whom I interviewed several years ago at a campus recruiting visit to an elite college in the Northeastern United States. Before the interview, I received a dossier on Ms. McGee (actual name forgotten to protect her identity, which, on second thought, why should I work harder to protect her identity than she does?) with her resume and cover letter.

Naturally, I Googled her and found her Facebook page entirely too-open to the public featuring a profile picture of her busting out of a slinky black dress with some frat-guy chomped down on the upper-middle camber of her cleavage. Whatever her name was, 'Boobs McGee' she instantly became and the jettison of respect only quickened when her self-reported 'interests' included 'My Tits' and 'Cocaine.'

After the interview, I consulted with the career services folks and let them know that Ms. McGee wasn't quite right for us but might be better-suited for one of the open (and far more lucrative) Tiger Woods' mistress roles. Additionally, her professional faux pas might be cited as a parable to all undergraduate job-seekers as to the dangers of over-sharing via Facebook.

Facebook Account Hijacked

Just remember that when you leave yourself signed-in to Facebook you risk reputation-damaging misrepresentations. In this case, my wife took a quarter-pound bite out of my street-cred by posting lovey-dovey remarks about miracles, birth and love and babies and blessings. Look at my company on this wall, and I think you'll have to agree this isn't my kind of tea party.

Yelping in Philly

I wanted to write something today but didn't have any good ideas. A lot of the time, the blogging bit is inspired by something stupid or spontaneous that just somehow seems catchy. No such luck today, but still had the inkling to write, so I sat here for a while starting at this empy space and all I could think of at first was complaining about something. There's always plenty to complain about, Idaho wolf hunts, the economy, how disappointing I'm finding Obama's handling of the health care debate, but how productive is that?

So, I decided I'd point out how much I've gotten into Yelping recently, and I think I'm being creative there. Back in San Francisco, Yelp is taken for granted since it's a homegrown site everybody uses and the saturation level of reviews is high enough that most everything's got a gazillion reviews. As a result, I got used to making about 90% of my local consumer decisions using Google Maps and Yelp (and they're integrated of course) as my resources, but due to the abundance of opinions never felt like contributing my own.

Not so in Philadelphia. Here Yelp is still catching on comparatively. There's decent coverage, but not depth of reviews and you hear a lot of businesses don't know what it is (whereas they advertise their Yelp-savviness by sticker in San Francisco) so I'm finding a niche in promoting the technology and making it richer by bringing to bear my considerable, ahem, taste and opinions on the Philadelphia consumer market. So far I'm pretty bar and restaurant focused, as is a lot of the general blather online (evidenced by the surplus of banal Twitter and Facebook status updates about eating (who cares you're eating a sandwich)), but on Yelp at least it's solicited rather than forced upon.

But, to branch out and contribute usefully to the collective discourse in areas of life more fraught with import than the simple and regular filling of bellies, I've got reviews coming on a framing shop (results TBD), a barber (it takes a month to know how good a haircut is) and a home contractor (the first I've ever employed). I'll be thinking critically whenever I purchase a good or service and think the next guy might benefit should I pay it forward. Would this be a good forum for spreading the word amongst newcomers to Philly about the ugly necessity of automatic witholding of the dread Philadelphia Wage Tax and ensuring your employer's got your back there?

So I'm thinking big, but won't always blog about it, so I've embedded the Yelp map of my reviews on the right nav. I hope you'll follow.