Tip One: Don’t go to South by Southwest Interactive.

I’m serious. It sucked last year, and it’s going to suck again this year. You’re kidding yourself if you think otherwise. The idea that SXSWi is a conference – or even a festival – for people doing interesting and useful things in technology is a fallacy. In reality, it’s just a non-stop orgy of bullshit fanboyism – a chance for people with stickers on their laptops to go and add more stickers to their laptops; an opportunity for sweaty dorks in Diggnation t-shirts to line up for two hours in the hope of getting Alex Albrecht to – I dunno – sign their laptop, I suppose, or maybe give them another freaking sticker. Even the parties – which are basically the only reason to go – are horrible: the free bars runs out too soon, and they’re always rammed with the kind of people who you could be forgiven for assuming have never been inside licenced premises before.

Try WWDC instead. It’s like SxSW, except the parties are accessible, the community is friendlier, and the people who attend actually make money at what they do.

Without the collective network of millions, Facebook would not exist. We are the customers because we’re paying with a different (and arguably, more sparse) currency: attention.

We are the product. Advertisers are the customer. This may seem like a semantic distinction — at least in context — but there is a fundamental difference in how customers and products are treated, even if both groups are made up of human beings.

You made a “product” to compete with their “product,” tastefully arranging your regiment, only to discover that they hadn’t made a product at all – they made a narrative. A statement about how technology should interface with a life.

See also: the associated comic.

My personal dream feature is something like fake follow — where the other person sees you as a follower but you don’t actually see their posts in your timeline — but with a twist: I do want to any post from that person that someone has marked as a favorite.

When I say oversharing, I don’t mean accidentally telling the world about the salacious details of your skeezy one-night stand. That’s actually kind of amusing.

Update: I must be tired from all of that CSS. The link now goes to the right place.

Now I just need to start charging for software.

That means NBC gets thrown to the lions, and two dying business models — a broadcast TV network and a big dumb cable operator — have found a way to sink faster, by tying themselves together.

The demo was shown on an HP table computer with a touchscreen, but it could easily be ported to an iPhone or an Apple iTablet, whenever that becomes available.

Designed to mimic a format nobody wants on a device nobody is buying, but could easily be ported to a device that doesn’t exist. Sounds exciting!

Amazon’s Black Friday sale has extended into Cyber Monday, featuring such deals as Left 4 Dead 2 for a mere $38.99. Or this SlingBox for the low, low price of “See price in cart”.

Best Buy also has a ton of good deals in their Blu-ray sale, with some interesting titles for under $10.