…but after being named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year last year, I really thought more people would recognize me. 3 months later and not a single person has asked me for an autograph. Doesn’t America read anymore?

I was wondering, when looking across the various social networks that I’m a part of, what if anything can be extrapolated from the friend counts in each. In real life I have a given set of friends, and subsets of them and I are members of various networks under which we are labeled friends. My friend counts go like this across both social networks and sites with a social networking component:

MySpace: 90 (includes many people I don’t know)
LinkedIn: 74
Flickr: 70 (friends+family)
Friendster: 41
Facebook: 29
Amazon: 7
YouTube: 5
Del.icio.us: 4
Upcoming.org: 4
Digg: 3
Netflix: 3
Orkut: 3

UPDATE:Dodgeball: 20, Last.fm: 2, MyBlogLog: 2

Orkut almost doesn’t count because it’s largely abandoned (in the US), but I did sign up for it back in the day. Looking across all of the networks, it’s clear I have different sets of friends in each. I imagine that speaks, to some extent, as to which of my friends are the most nerdy. Fil is clearly tops in that list. He appears in 11 of 12 networks (no Netflix). Then there are people like Martha who appear in some of my least-populous networks (Netflix, Upcoming.org) but not the more popular (Facebook).

If I were to trim MySpace down to people I actually know, I think it would dip below LinkedIn on the list. Perhaps that speaks to my age? I keep in touch with more people in a professional context than social? As for some of the lower links (single digit ones) I think that’s largely explained by the lack of value those sites provide with their social components. Amazon is missing a huge opportunity, as their social components have languished for years, and they could do a lot of great things with them. Upcoming.org is another great opportunity that seems to be fading. Netflix is an exception – they do a nice job, but there just aren’t as many people I know with a Netflix account.

I have an order of magnitude fewer friends on YouTube as opposed to Flickr, which I don’t think is fully explained by the fact that photos are more popular than videos. I think a lot of it has to do with YouTube’s terrible user experience when it comes to inviting and sharing with friends. I still can’t see some of my friends’ videos, and I have no idea why.

From a strict social networking perspective, I like Facebook’s structure the best, but I have relatively few friends there. I think that largely speaks to my age. Facebook grew popular in colleges a few years after I left, and only a subset of people I know went back and joined it as alumni.

I also found it interesting that my friend counts across the various sites fit a long tail distribution.

I really wish I could have been at the Superbowl this weekend because I came up with a great idea for a sign. It would have said. “No Payton, they’re not saying ‘moooovers’, they’re saying boooo.” It would have been wordy and too obscure for non-football fans, but it would have been satisfying to me. Unlike the Superbowl.

It had an awesome start and looked like it was going to be an awesome game, and then fizzled out as time progressed. Yet again, the best football game of the playoffs was not the Superbowl. In hindsight the Colts-Patriots AFC Championship game was probably the best game. Last year I’d say it was the Steelers upset over the Colts. I guess you could argue 3 years ago, the Patriots-Eagles Superbowl was in fact the best game of the playoffs.

Oh well… congratulations to Peyton I guess.

I admit it… whenever I see the Colts logo on any promotional Superbowl material it makes me sick a little. They earned it – they outplayed the Patriots – but I still don’t like it.

So, for no other reason than I don’t want to hear about the Colts for the next 6 months, I will be cheering for the Bears this weekend. I think it will be a close game and a fun one to watch… if only they’d blur out the blue horseshoes.

It seems to be a big day for people I know on TV… here they quiz my mom and some other teachers (and students) on world figures on a CNN video. With the exception of letting the words “King Kong” slip out when trying to get Kim Jong-Il’s name, she did pretty well.

Jonah from the darfur wall was featured on TV last night. Congratulations Jonah! The statistics are fun to watch.

If you pick up a copy of the newly released Rails Cookbook from O’Reilly you’ll find my name under the “Acknowledgments” section in the Preface. This was the first time I had the opportunity to be a technical reviewer for a book, and it was fun and interesting. Go pick it up!

It’s rare during the winter months to spot someone on the street holding up a Seattle tourist map, but I ran into one this morning. My walk to work doesn’t go by any major tourist attractions, so when I see people with maps I usually end up having to tell them where downtown is because they want to see the market, or in one case pioneer square, which is roughly 25 blocks away.

This morning the guy I offered to help was named Salvatore and he was from Italy. He works for a company that builds ships, or ship supplies, or something along those lines. He was in town to visit one of his best customers Holland America, which is actually right near where I work. So, we walked there together and chatted a bit. He said he was just coming from Miami which he really disliked because you can’t walk anywhere. He was happy to be back in a city where he could walk from his hotel to his destination. I mentioned my last name and he said “central Italy?” to which, of course, I had to say I had no idea because whenever I’m told where I’m from I seem to forget it.

He mentioned he was from Florence and I told him I’d been there many years ago and really enjoyed it. He said he thought it was the most beautiful city in Italy. It’s not as large as Rome, and it’s not as overtly touristy as Venice (I’m paraphrasing). It has a rich history without being in-your-face about it. I walked him to the office he was looking for and he realized he was 45 minutes early – he had accounted for getting lost, and didn’t. He offered me a cup of coffee but I had to get to work, so I pointed him at the Shanty Cafe. The Shanty is awesome, but it looks like a dive. In hindsight I wonder if he thought I was playing a prank on him. He gave me his business card and I checked out his company’s website. Frontpage 3.0. Ouch.

I went 3 of 4 again this week. The game I’d listed as “the toughest one for me to call” was indeed the one I got wrong – the Colts beat the Ravens. I was surprised how well the Seahawks played against the Bears, but indeed they lost. The Patriots game was nerve-racking but they came through.

Next week – Pats over the Colts, Bears over the Saints. I don’t feel great about either prediction. All of the teams are excellent. I’ll be in Vegas frantically looking for a good place to watch the Pats game. Maybe I’ll even make a wager or two.