At merely mentioning “twitter skins” in an earlier blog post, this blog ranks #2 and #3 in Google for searches on “twitter skins”.  And that natural search result drove 8 visitors yesterday, of which several decided to take me up on my offer of a free skin.  This is a great example of the positive feedback loop that can occur when you blog about something, see that it got some traction, and then decide to blog more about it because there is interest.  In fact, I am amazed that there are so many folks on Twitter– over a million now.  And twitter.com has an Alexa rank of 624 now– it’s the 624th most popular site on the web (yes, I know these numbers are not fully accurate for various reasons, but the point stands).  There is a full on cottage industry– twellow.com for yellow pages, be-a-magpie.com for PPC (you can have ads for one in every N tweets)– plus a host of monitoring services.  Seems that many of us are essentially unpaid volunteers to grow twitter’s user base and market valuation.

But back to free twitter skins– hit me up if you want one and we’ll turn them around in the order requested.  Make sure to tell me what you want for your background and include a .jpg of your headshot, assuming you want that.

Do you remember the craze with “pimp your profile” on MySpace, where teenagers (and even adults) would spend hours customizing their profile pages, however uglier they became?  I can see a cottage industry for doing the same on every social network– might as well have twitter backgrounds, twitter glitter (do you like that name?), and other bling-bling.  I can see a ton of folks buying domain names that have twitter plus something in them.

And this is coming from a guy who felt twitter was a waste of time for people who didn’t already have enough of their time wasted through instant messenger, Facebook, their blog, and a whole host of social networks.  I feel like I’m so busy keeping up with work, that I can’t get any work done.  Imagine that.

Have you seen YSlow? It is a Firefox plugin that extends Firebug’s functionality to show some interesting information, such as page load times, and the heaviest parts of the site. You can use the information gathered to increase performance on your sites. Here’s an 8 minute video presentation on YSlow by Jeremy Zawodny, who was at Yahoo! when I was there.  BlitzLocal.com, which admittedly a work-in-progress, scored only a 64.  Humbling, as are the scores of many of the sites that we know and manage.  If you already have Firebug and like it, then you’ll love Yslow.

I said “suck” above to get your attention. There are many ways to suck– your product or service sucks, your design sucks, your customer service sucks, or whatever.  But you should never suck because your site loads slow or has coding issues.

Update: Perhaps the most common culprit we see that is an easy fix is to not compress images.  That will often balloon the page to 1 MB.

For those who haven’t seen this before, a hilarious view of what Facebook might look like in 20 years.  But the real question is– what will us folks who are in our 20′s and 30′s be doing when we’re 50 or 60?  Will we be using social networks to find discount caskets?  We’ll still need services as senior citizens, so how will we deal with that in an ultra-connected online world?  Blackberrys and Iphones that are integrated with hearing aids?  Social security payments that are made directly to our PayPal accounts?  What are your thoughts?

How about making a resolution to not make any more resolutions? Seriously, when you example instances of when people fail versus succeed, a few key traits stand out. I’ll explain at the end of the article– but first… I read a study where patients were told by their doctors that if they didn’t stop smoking or change their diets that they had months to live. The doctors explain what their patients would experience with heart disease, lung cancer, and other complications over the remaining months if they didn’t drastically change. You know what happened?

In the majority of cases, people didn’t change. You would think that would be a wake-up call, if any. But a factual recitation about how smoking causes lung cancer is something we, as intelligent human beings, all know. Yet folks smoke anyway. Or they overeat at meals, overspend their credit line, choose bad boyfriends, and make a host of irrational decisions. Why do they fail here, even when literally threatened with a life and death situation?

They make a public commitment, they involve friends in achieving their goals, they have specific goals in different timeframes, they connect emotionally with their goals, and they have a feedback loop. Incidentally, aren’t those the same characteristics that make videos games highly addictive? Aren’t those the same dynamics that cause folks to spend hours on Facebook or (insert your favorite social media site here), coming back day after day? Imagine if you could harness that same level of dedication and enthusiasm in your job, your diet, or any other goal you want to achieve?

How about for the low, low price of $1,995? No, how about just $599 if you act in the next 30 minutes? Operators are standing by now. How about actually for free with no strings and no free set of Ginzu knives? The answer is sparkpeople.com. Sparkpeople.com is a community for folks who want to achieve their fitness and life balance goals. And with great fitness comes success in all other aspects of your life. This site hits upon all the game dynamics mentioned above. Chris Downie, who founded sparkpeople.com originally as a weight loss site, had the community of enthusiasts to prove it.

Instead of the traditional monthly attrition rate of 35% that you see in most programs, he’s less than 1/10th that rate. I had the pleasure of meeting Chris several times, as he explained these motivation principles to me– and it’s amazing how many people he’s been able to help because of this. Look out Tony Robbins, here comes Chris Downie! And what a humble fellow he is. He walk the talk with his own lifestyle. It reminds me of the obese CEO of a famous athletic shoe company or the CEO of a major search engine that didn’t even have a computer their first year. If you want to spark your lifestyle into success into the new year, tap into SparkPeople.com to make losing weight and getting fit as fun and addictive as Facebook.

There’s been recent debate from folks like Jim Cramer and Business Week on whether Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme. Of course, it is!

• You don’t have your own account that holds the deposits you make.
• The money you put in now is used to pay off people who joined earlier.
• The number of people in the scheme must keep growing to pay off current needs.
• The “bubble” pops when we can’t find enough new people to put money in.

Charles Ponzi would be proud of folks like Uncle Sam and Bernard Madoff.  Ony we’re not talking about $50 billion, like Madoff’s scheme.  Guess how much of Social Security is unfunded– meaning that we don’t have the money to pay it off?  $4.3 trillion dollars according to the Social Security Administration themselves.  A trillion is a million million, if you can imagine that.

But unlike a regular Ponzi scheme, this is one that most of us are aware of, but think we can pass off to future generations– we have urgent things we need to spend money on now.  And we can reduce the burden by raising taxes, cutting the benefit amounts, and raising the minimum age to collect.  I personally think that Social Security should go back to what it was originally created for– as a safety net for folks who don’t have a safety net.

It was borne out the FDR era, where soldiers coming back from war were not guaranteed a job.  So instead of spending 20 years accumulating a pension at one company, you could move around and take a retirement with you.  But like car insurance, health insurance, or welfare– social security should pay out only when someone desperately needs it.  I know a lot of wealthy people who are collecting these checks– and they claim to deserve it, since they paid in.

But if social security were truly a safety net, instead of giving out cash, it would give vouchers for rent, food, and have welfare-like restrictions on it.  You want to talk about supply side (trickle down) economics?   Your hard-earned tax dollars are not being used to create jobs or build businesses– unless you count the lollipops and golf outings that Grandpa is spending your money on.

Time to halt this Ponzi scheme, which will, in turn, give each us more of our paychecks back.  And then we won’t need the social security, except for those folks that need the safety net.

I have to admit– the restaurants, hotel suites, and first class flights are nice.  It’s even nicer to be able to tell folks about it, since you’re getting twice the benefit (enjoying plus telling).  Is there anything wrong with wanting to enjoy the good life?  Does that make me evil or greedy?  Hey, you only live once.

And as for showing off, isn’t that part of the game?  Just look at the food pictures that JohnChow.com takes or the lifestyles that other affiliates openly broadcast to the world.  In fact, I think it’s a legitimate business expense. My business as an affiliate marketer and ability to broker deals is largely based on my reputation.  Thus, when folks gossip about my lifestyle, I consider it to be free PR.  And it’s better than paid advertising– it’s more believable.   And why not take friends out to nice places?   You’re building relationships, plus they’ll return the favor to you.

But now that I’ve created a “baller” reputation, I’ve had to strive hard to maintain it, even when I’m broke.  The reason I fly first class now is that I’m afraid of someone seeing me fly coach.  Yeah, the seat is bigger and the food is much better.  But really, if someone who knows me happens to see me in coach, my reputation will be ruined.  They will go and tell everyone.  Plus, I’ll have less to talk about when I’m hanging around other affiliates that I’m trying to impress.  I might even be made fun of or folks might not think that I’m a serious player in business.  They’ll think that I’m just fronting.

The nice thing about affiliate marketing is that I can avoid discussion of what I actually do.  Obviously, because of my lifestyle, I “must” be successful.  But what offers am I running, how do I get that traffic, what’s my payout, do I actually have any true expertise– those questions will remain unanswered.  Of course, I’m not going to tell you– that’s how I make money and I’m not about to broadcast my secrets to the world, you understand?  If I was doing agency-level work, such as had clients, then you could look at the clients I have and evaluate my work and that of my “team”.

But I am a one-man promotional vehicle.  My “team” consists of loose relationships with other affiliate marketers and some contract Indians I once hired on a job board.  I actually have no operating or project management expertise.  In fact, I don’t understand the basic differences between personal and corporate finance– I run them all under my personal bank account, which gets me into trouble with the IRS.  But if you ask me, I will deny any problems.  My ego and image is priority #1.  Everyone else is boasting about their earnings that don’t exist, so this is just part of the game. And was with any game, you do whatever it takes to win.  All is fair in love and war and affiliate marketing.

Maintaining my front is getting increasingly difficult. Bernard Madoff was able to keep it going for 4 years before being found out a couple weeks ago.  Reed Slatkin, one of the other larger Ponzi frauds in history, was able to keep it going for 15 years.  But what you don’t know won’t hurt you.  Like they say– if you got it, flaunt it.  Or as Mark Twain would say, “The secret to success is to be genuine– fake that, and you’ve got it made.”

People, this is the American dream.  We know that Hollywood actors are just pretending and nobody has a problem with that. And nobody thinks twice about how most marketing is just thinly veiled lies about whether that attractive young lady will actually have sex with you holding that particular brand of beer, or whether a certain diet supplement will really make you attractive or increase/decrease a particular body part’s size. Hey– want to lose weight quickly, by the way?

There’s a sucker born every minute, so if it isn’t me selling you those items, it will be someone else. Caveat emptor (or “buyer beware” for those of you who don’t know Latin).  If you’re dumb enough to fall for these marketing tricks, then you deserve to have your money taken from you.  I don’t have time to discuss the difference between ethical and legal.  I follow the Golden Rule– whoever has the gold, makes the rules. Did I mention–there’s money to be made!  I’ll steal from you, too, if you’re dumb enough to be taken.  And what do you call a dumb criminal?  One that gets caught.

Do you know me? Is this you?

If Facebook were to charge their 50 million uniques just $2 a month for membership, they would instantly become a billion dollar business.  While you as a user might not like the idea of having to pay, given that you’ve invested so much time on the site and that your friends are there, would you really want to have to re-enter all your information somewhere else?

So the hypothetical question is– what percentage of Facebook users would just leave versus having to pay.  And what share of high school and college kids don’t have credit cards, which would then require a mobile payment gateway (stick it on your phone bill, just like ringtones).  We know that mobile payment is a highly viable option, given that I personally know affiliate marketers who have made tens of millions selling products euphemistically called “premium SMS” on Facebook and even MySpace.

Adult Friend Finder, who was recently bought by Playboy for $500MM, has just over 20 million monthly uniques, which is about half of Facebook’s traffic.  Thus, apples-to-apples, Facebook should be worth about a billion dollars, instead of the crazy $15BN figure that they try to get people to believe. However, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.  AFF is a pay site– they make money via recurring credit card transactions for memberships.  Their demographic is older and is willing to pay for services.  Facebook, on the other hand, is still primarly teenagers.  Thus, if you were to compare AFF (an adult dating site) and Facebook, then you might say that they’re similar in value.

Now consider that Adult Friend Finder filed for an IPO for $460MM two days ago.  They did this to avoid having to sell assets to make an upcoming debt payment. This is an act of desperation, from a company that has #1 market share, by far.  If the dominant player in a market cannot succeed, what does that say for Facebook or all the other guys who are spending money exuberantly, only to find that the destination they’re racing towards is not a pot of gold, but a graveyard.

Just off Baseline road and Highway 36 is Chautauqua Park– only a few minutes from downtown Boulder.  I hiked it today, Christmas Day, going from the parking lot to the top of Flatiron 1 in about 80 minutes.  There are 3 flatirons, the most spectacular being Flatiron 3 and the Royal Arch, which is about a 90 minute hike.  Overall, this is one of the best hikes in Boulder in terms of payoff versus effort expended.

As you climb higher and higher above the treeline, you get more revealing glimpses back down to Boulder and even Denver on a clear day.  Of course, this doesn’t compare with a place like Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park, which is a 2 hour one way hike, and one of the best rated hikes in the world– but for a 5-10 minute drive, it’s amazing.

The trail is easily accessible– only minor bouldering and hardly any exposure.  A 5 year old could do it– and I even saw some today, as many families had the same idea for a Christmas afternoon.  But be careful in the last third of the hike– the ice is quite slippery. And if you go on past what appears to be the top, the trail does continue on to wrap around a small peak a few hundred yards away that is not visible except from the flatirons.  Don’t let the wind knock you down, as it gusts strongly and can easily knock your footing on the ice.

The payoff is a private nook that is behind Flatiron 1, a little cave you can climb up to that isn’t on the map. And you do have to climb to get up there– it’s off the trail. But the view looking deeper into the mountain is well worth it.  Just don’t fall on the way down!  Coming back is a lot harder than going up, especially with the ice and strong wind.

A recent study of top ad serving platforms shows that Google holds the first two spots, via their acquisition of DoubleClick and their own AdSense platform.  Note that this study pools both display and text ads, plus that DoubleClick and AdSense are both significantly down year-over-year.  Blitzlocal has it’s own social ad server technology, which is specifically designed for serving dynamic social ads.  While we’ll never be the #1 player in the mainstream market, we can at least be the best in the social space.  And it’s good to have choices, wouldn’t you agree?

The joke we had when I worked at American Airlines is that it’s amazing how much money someone will pay for a free ticket.  They’ll even fly unnecessary segments at the end of the year just to keep their premium status or buy a significantly more expensive item for the miles.

Enter Amazon.com’s Prime program.  For $90 a year, I’ve been able to ship almost anything 2 day shipping for free and next day for $4.  I’ve probably spent $50k over the last year on books, electronics, toiletries, and food.  Today, I ordered dental floss and a pair of swim goggles. Yes- on Amazon.com.  And, yes– because of free shipping and the convenience of having it delivered to my door.  Of course, I did have to buy a 12 pack of dental floss, which will last me for the next 3 years,  but I DID get a good deal on it.  And certainly the FedEx and UPS delivery guys are probably not the happiest for having to cart stuff to me each day.

On a flight from London to Denver a week ago, I got into a conversation with the fellow who runs Amazon’s call centers in Ireland.  On a 10 hour flight, interesting things can happen.  Besides that fact that they have an insane staffing issue during the week of December, we discussed how free shipping had boosted Amazon’s sales in recent years.  I remarked how much Amazon had probably lost on me, because I would use Prime shipping to ship 24 packs of soda next day air for just $4– or order a $7 book, just because.  Not only have I ordered hundreds of items, but I’ve invited 4 other users to share my free shipping account (you just have to exchange birthdays to be able to verify). I estimated that Amazon lost thousands on me.

This fellow disgreed.  “How many friends have you told about Amazon.com and how much had that positive marketing been worth, using me as an evangelist (kind of like what I’m doing right now, in fact)?”  My counter to that was, “What if I had a program where I sold $10 bills for only $8– how popular would that be?”  His view was that free shipping can really be thought of as an advertising expense.  Instead of spending millions on TV commercials, why not just give that money back to consumers in the form of free shipping?  I have to admit that he got me there.

We have a couple clients that have shopping carts, selling things like equine nutritional supplements online.  We’re going to shamelessly copy some of the things that Amazon does– free shipping, product reviews, loyalty programs, address book, and so forth.  In fact, does anyone know of a shopping cart that approximates Amazon?  We are using magento.