• Trying to do a "decaffeinated" week to see how it affects my performance at the gym. So far, so good. #FB #
• Awkward… wasn't paying attention and sat down at the wrong table, cracking joke about the country on the radio. Glad dude wasn't a fan #f #
• @luisespinal Haha. Well I'm doing it mainly because it finally sunk in that caffeine and creatine don't play well together. in reply to luisespinal #
• They wouldn't look at you funny if you ordered a burger at Burger King or a taco at Taco Bell. But at Panda Express… #fb #
• Woman pitching Avon to desperate-looking young lady; two 40-something men discussing mail-order brides. #Starbucks at midday in the midwest #
• Judging #MMA at Memorial Hall in KC tonight. Amateur fights, apparently. #
• Did I mention how much I love my #Netbook? Sitting here cageside about to judge a MMA event, on Trillian, Bullshido, Twitter, and Facebook. #
• I swear they left the doors open to the outside. It's about 50 degrees here at cageside. #
• They just fixed the heat. First I tweet about scalding coffee and the place goes out of business, now this. Hmm… My mortgage is too high! #

Dear Gentleman Driving Gray Grand Prix,

Perhaps you could explain how you can get upset at me when you’re the one who blew through the stop sign and nearly t-boned my car? Do you realize that when both of our windows are up because it’s 20 degrees outside, yelling and waving your arms isn’t a very effective means of communication? This is why after a few seconds of you doing it, I responded by making a gesture representing the act of fellatio.

Additionally, it’s probably not a good idea to get out of your car and walk around chest-thumping like you’re going to do something when the other guy happens to be wearing wrestling shoes, a cup, and gloves because he just left the gym where he was deadlifting two of you.

Fortunately for and unlike you, I am a grown-up and my pride isn’t so easily wounded as to compel me to regain it by acting like a tough guy, let alone risking a criminal conviction and an ass beating.

Sincerely,

Guy in Red Mazdaspeed 6

• Apparently in the last "Follow Friday" I got included by a few fans of Trance music. Not sure why, but glowsticks are cool I guess. #
• "Today" started at 3AM. The MO ARNG wants to make sure I'm a functioning piece of equipment; they tested my belts, hoses, and fluid levels. #
• Call me a jerk, but I can't think of a single event at the Winter #Olympics that I consider as a valid sport. Maybe Biathlon… maybe. #FB #
• #FF @EFF @mashable @CreativeCombat – some overlap, but we're tweeting from a unified console. That would be @HootSuite http://ow.ly/1985r #
• New sushi place in Lee's Summit… "Sakura". Decent service; hard to mess up raw fish so I guess I'll say it was good too. #

So I’m digitally milling around, doing 15 things at once, as always. And it occurs to me that there really just isn’t a great tool to centralize all of one’s social media. I know there are a few out there that try, but none in particular just get my search engines running (if you know what I mean).

As someone who’s done a lot of web branding, the first thing that pops into my mind when it’s daydreaming about hypothetical solutions to such a problem, is “what would the domain name be?”. And honestly, that’s partly because it’s one of the more fun parts of a project like that. It’s a lot like scrounging through a junkyard trying to find an alternator for your 280Z (the Z, not the ZX, those are ugly and suck). Only GoDaddy is the junkyard. When you do find something worthy of taking home and bolting onto your car (or project, to crank the torture rack on the analogy), it’s highly gratifying. I imagine it’s a lot like the feeling a Neanderthal got when he found a wounded sabertooth he could finish off and drag back to the village, earning him some hot cavewoman action.

Anyway, before you can go searching, it helps to have a rough idea of the name you want, which is an extension of the message you’re trying to convey about your product or service (yeah, I know, “duh” to you too). And as I always do, I like my brands to have a bit of conceptual wiggle room. For example: “Creative Combat” is loaded with all sorts of associations. This includes the fact that “creative” can refer to components of an advertising campaign, whereas “Combat” references the fact that your ad campaign is battling it out with other ad campaigns, for clicks and eyeballs.

So the first thing that popped into my head, for a solution to the Social Media Aggregation/Dashboard issue, was the word “Hive”. I’m sure that it’s because of the recent launch of Google Buzz (why yes, Virginia, I did link to a blog post just two down from this one). But it could also have something to do with the fact that I was craving some toast with honey (antioxidants for the win).

Regardless, unless the Internet gods were smiling on me, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get “Hive.anything”. But what about “Hiv3”; the leetspeak version of the word? Sure enough, while .com was taken, .net and .org weren’t.

And what’s cool is that the domain/brand could express multiple things, such as “Hi! (version 3)”, and, of course, a central place for all the buzz going around the intertubes.

And then it occurred to me that it could also express “a third strain of the human immunodeficiency virus”, and this is where the practical part of my brain, Liz Lemon style, yelled “shut it down”. I’m pretty sure any positive, productive, traffic-magnetic connotations implied by the brand would always have a cold bucket of water hanging over them, ready to splash them in the face with the reality of the horrific pandemic.

Oh well.

They’re still up for grabs at the time of this post, so if you think you’ve got a better way of spinning it, go ahead. I’ll be donating a bit of money to AIDS research in the meantime.

• Just noticed my location on Twitter is still listed as Tehran. I wonder if it's still helping the green revolution. Marg Bar, Dinnerjacket. #
• #FF @PeterLampasona (MMA), @PopSci (Popular Science), @scooterscoffee (the water of life). @2dot0forSales #

So Google launched its second foray into social networking today.

“Wait, second?” you ask. Yep. Oh, you never heard of Orkut?

Don’t feel bad if you haven’t. That’s probably because you’re not a Brazilian gang member.

It remains to be seen whether or not this will be a “Facebook killer”, or at least deliver a low blow to the giant site. However, Google’s approach to launching this is great for two main reasons:

Workplace Restrictions

For a large chunk of the population, the act of checking social networking sites during work hours has replaced the smoke break. Employers have noticed this, and consequently, Facebook, Myspace, etc. are blocked at many workplaces.

On the other hand, checking your personal email isn’t looked upon with the same suspicion. So, Google gets the benefit of the doubt, and people who are already prone to flaking off for a few extra minutes, will most likely enjoy this new feature.

I don’t imagine that this was a huge component of their launch strategy, but the idea of having a unified platform for communications addresses a need that goes well beyond what Facebook can provide. After all, they don’t exactly do email.

You’re already networked

I only know a handful of people who aren’t using Gmail for their personal email accounts. And of those, they’re either hardcore privacy advocates, or just too attached to their Hotmail or Yahoo accounts.

For people like me, checking Gmail is like checking the time. I usually have it up in a browser tab whenever my browser is open. Unlike Gmail, however, I only usually keep Facebook up in a tab if I’m doing something business related. It’s a credit to Facebook’s usability that it’s so easy to get immersed in commenting on status updates and what-not, but it’s also a productivity killer.

The idea of using a Facebook-like app for something beyond finding out what my buddy thinks of the iPad or how Barack Obama’s going to turn us all into Socialists, is highly appealing. And the fact that my contacts are already, well, my contacts, makes life just a smidge easier.

It remains to be seen if Buzz is in the “sliced bread” category yet. But so far, it’s at least as cool as toast.

• Working from home: the laptop is on top of my netbook, and the chihuahua is on top of my lap. Not sure how this configuration happened… #
• RT @PopSci Cyber-Thieves Make Millions from Emissions Cap-and-Trade Scam #
• RT @BoingBoing Google now offers search results from "within your social circle" #
• You know society has devolved when you see people at a restaurant for lunch in their pajamas and fuzzy house slippers. #