Timing is everything. I just got an email from Hillary Clinton, informing me that she just added me as her Flickr contact. She’s reciprocating a request I made a while back after she joined in like April of this year. In comparison Obama and Edwards added me immediately after I added them on Flickr and other social networks (they’ve been using Flickr actively for over 18 months). I’m not going to argue that Flickr etiquette is a litmus test of a Presidential candidate . . . oh wait, yes I’m going to do just that.

Here’s why Obama is going to be the next president and not Hillary:

Those are the number of contacts each has on Flickr as of today at 6:52pm central time. Obama has collected about 70 testimonials (they seem to scroll down forever) and Clinton has 0. Clinton’s profile is about three pages worth of bio (yap yap yap me me me I’ve got all this “experience”), which crowds out her 0 testimonials and 72 contacts; while Obama’s bio is short at three paragraphs with a quote from MLK and plenty of room to let his community speak for him.

Obama has been posting photos to his site almost hourly, and to that end he has stayed up front in my contacts feed, always on the radar. Hillary has uploaded THREE photos.

I realize Flickr is one site of many popular community sites on the Internet, but I think the extent to how these two candidates have used Flickr, and consequently understand how to use Flickr and other online communities as social marketing tools, speaks volumes. It is a perfect example of how Obama is using new technologies to connect directly with voters and power his campaign with the long tail, vs special interests. It’s extremely exciting to watch. Change is coming. Thank you Flickr ;)

The ScribeStorm website has never been a priority. Our plates have been full with so many other urgent projects that the one I threw together and designed last year stayed up for a long time. After months of searching I finally found a kick ass designer who’s vision fits well with the team and he produced a cool design for us three months back.

After some delays in launching our site it is finally completed and our blog is functioning. And Collin and Dave are already blogging (which makes me happy for some unclear reason).

Not sure who the audience will be other than prospective employees, clients and investors, but then again it is a “company blog”. But there are some cool company blogs out there. My friend Ariel’s Microsoft Blog comes to mind.

I read that statement more and more in magazines, newspaper and blog articles about new movie download services like Joost or Netflix’s Watch Now. By the end of their write up they usually conclude that the service is so-so because, “people won’t watch movies on their computer”.

Really?

I have a 52″ flat screen ten feet below where I am sitting right now. It’s in the basement, below our computer room/office, along with a nice reclining couch. Instead of lazing down there in the glow of HD goodness, I’m watching a movie on a 20″ monitor hooked up to my laptop.

Netflix apparently knows I’m spending more and more time watching my favorite YouTube channel and so they’ve responded by adding more of their titles to their streaming service. I realized their brilliance the other day when I dusted off my older DVD player and hooked it up to the 20″ monitor on my desk. Now I am feeding my Netflix movies to the “tv” on my computer desk through a DVD player and a laptop.

I’m not sure where this is all heading. But I’m now multi-tasking during my play time: blogging and watching movies, gmailing and watching movies, reading news and watching movies.

The only drawback I see right now is I no longer have free hands to eat my popcorn.

I’ve been searching for a nice concise web page for viewing up to date election information. I stumbled upon MSNBCs Super Tuesday Dashboard. It’s got a relatively small footprint, nice design, a filtered query list for organizing results to your liking and it has video!

Problem: clicking on any of the dozens of video links does not start video playback in the media player sitting on the page, but rather opens up a new tab (which doesn’t show video either, but rather a menu of video). I hate to be anyone on the development team responsible for the Super Tuesday Dashboard.

My question is how did this pass QA? It took me less than a minute and a few mouse clicks to realize that the media player is as useless as a car without tires. Honestly though the delegate query list on the right side is so cool that I’m probably going to use it all night, with YouTube opened up in another window to get video coverage.

UPDATE: a couple reloads and live video is now working (very cool).  But video links still kill the player and open up a new window (not cool).

Our designer is nearly finished with the avatars of the ScribeStorm development team. Here’s a sample of them with our new logo. He captured my bad hair day pretty well.

At some point I reached over 200 contacts on Flickr, and realized that I really didn’t know over half those people. Most of them had added me as a friend and I reciprocated out of habit. A good portion of my photos are marked for “friends only” for a reason, and so adding strangers as friends was a habit I needed to break.

So over the past couple months I’ve been demoting and dropping “friends”. It felt a little weird, and even though these people are strangers, I still felt “please don’t take this personally” every time I hit the remove button.

I’m now down to 60 friends on Flickr and while it seems much more manageable, it still feels like too many. Because really what a “friend” means to me on Flickr is - people that are allowed to see my daughter in the bathtub. What Flickr needs is a sort of BFF checkbox. Some sort of upgraded friend.

I’m having the opposite problem in the Netflix world. I currently have 13 Netflix friends, and I want more. I want more movie notes, I want to snoop on more people’s queues, and I want to share what I’m watching with more “friends”. Since I first joined Netflix in 2000 I’ve noticed that I care less and less what Ebert thinks about a film, and in fact it’s probably been a year since I’ve read one of his reviews.

What I do care about is what Wendy, Ariel, Mike, Sam, Sean, Michael, Tiffany, Robert and my other Netflix Friends like and don’t like (and of course the ability to see what is in their living room at this very moment). I also want to find more Netflix friends with ratings similarities to me.

So on that note: if you want to try out being my Netflix friend, click here.

For the past couple months my mind has been occupied with digesting the news of what is now called Andriod, the mobile phone platform developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. Everyone was expecting a “gPhone“, a Google competitor to the iPhone, which was exciting of course. But what we got instead was even more exciting - the PC of mobile phones. This isn’t “Mobile 3.0″, this is PC 2.0.

For years we’ve had both the Apple computer: shiny, white, trendy, a status symbol in the geek community. And the PC: computing for the masses, customized for the masses, built by the masses. And while the PC is generally associated with a Microsoft monopoly on the OS, the PC is also an open source box from the hardware perspective. And primarily why my last Apple computer was the Classic, and ever since then I’ve owned a PC.

After using my iPhone (daily) for nearly four months one thing has become obvious to me - I like having a mini computer. While it is one hell of a phone, I’ve come to view the ability to call other people as one of many features. It should really be called the Mac tiny, littler brother to the Mac mini.

It’s the new generation of Apple computing: shiny, white silver, trendy, a status symbol in the geek community.

And the gPhone Android? It’s the next generation of PC computing: computing for the masses, customized for the masses, built by the masses. Oh and you can make calls with it.

And this is how I think it will be relatively soon. There will be two types of people. iPhone users and PC 2.0 users. The only change is the size and missed opportunity by Microsoft to revolutionize the world (again).

I cannot wait for the commercials (on YouTube mobile of course).

Three more iPhones arrived at the office this morning. I know this looks like unshameful startup spending but it’s not. We’ve been spending money (lots of money) on long distance calls between Fairfield and the West Coast and with AT&Ts mobile to mobile free calling plan we can pay for the new iPhones with our long distance savings in a month’s time (actually in about 3 weeks time going by our last bill).

We’ve also been dragging our feet to install a full fledged phone system with handsets on each desk, multiple extensions and conference calling. But the iPhone’s conference calling is pretty slick and again, we save the cost of installing an office phone system.

But wait there’s more!

ScribeStorm’s email is hosted by Google Apps, which means we’re on the Gmail platform (no Outlook server for us), and gmail on the iPhone is a treat to use. Now we all have one number to reach us at our desk or on the move, and it’s a cool iPhone to boot.

1. Walmart and Best Buy are now selling the A2 model for $99!
2. You can play DVDs on your HD-DVD player AND they will look better (the Toshiba A2s do an excellent job of upscaling your standard DVDs).
3. Due to reason #2, you now have another reason to buy a big HD TV (your standard DVDs will look awesome using the HD-DVD player).
4. Planet Earth on HD-DVD.
5. You will have the means to experience some of the cool technologies your friends and neighbors at ScribeStorm are building.
6. With a Netflix account (free trial), you can rent HD-DVDs for the same price as DVDs. And with a distribution center in Des Moines, Fairfielders can get their DVDs in the mail in as little as 24 hours from adding them to their queue online.
7. Danny Mavromatis, home tech geek guru and author of Mavromatic, prefers HD-DVD.

Robert Neer recently commented on my post about the Google Mashup of the California Wildfires, pointing out a related story on NPR. Which lead me to the KPBS website, creators of the San Diego focused Google Mashup of the California Wildfires. I found another cool thing at the KPBS site - they sponsored a public Flickr group for posting photos of the Wildfires.

I wanted to point this out for a couple reasons. First, it’s a great set of photos. Second, I love seeing organizations utilize social networking sites in meaningful ways. Third, I’ve been trying to convince the Fairfield Weekly, Fairfield Chamber of Commerce, The City of Fairfield and the Fairfield Art Walk to use Flickr as their photo pool for awhile now. None have done so, although the Art Walk has created a group on Flickr.

Why am I so pushy about Flickr? Well it’s an incredible application for aggregating and sharing photos (and therefore readers) with ZERO cost. It’s the ultimate and standard for social networking applications. And I don’t see nearly enough organizations realizing the marketing potential of using a site like Flickr. But wait there’s more! Flickr is also extremely easy to incorporate into an existing site.

Anyway, here’s the California Wildfire Flickr slideshow created by the readers of KPBS.org: