I have to thank my co-workers Becca and Heba for getting me to sign up for Facebook late last year while we were working in what we lovingly call “the dungeon.” I never really paid much attention to my Facebook profile, but I realized instantly that I liked it more than MySpace.

Over the past several months, I’ve acquired several friends and joined a few groups. And just recently, Facebook announced a new feature called “Applications” — which lets anyone develop third party applications that can be embedded within your profile. Some are as simple as a better way to send messages to your friends, others are movie quizzes (to share & rank your movie trivia knowledge w/ your friends) and then there’s the Red Sox Nation app, that lets you show your support and move up the ranks of the “Red Sox Organization” as you cheer and encourage other users to sign up for the application.

Facebook is clean. Facebook is useable. Facebook is Fun. These are three distinct features that MySpace does not have. Myspace is the World Wide Web of 1997, with flashing backgrounds, images, and horrible background music. I mean seriously, can you please tell me how these two sites are different: MySpace and The World’s Worst Web Page.

So, I’m happy to say that in a few short weeks I’ll be retiring my MySpace profile. Not completely, however, but more simply I’ll be removing all my personal information and replacing it with a single link:
Stop The Insanity. Look for me on Facebook.com.

Well, wouldja look at this neat little site. It’s called BlogPulse and it was developed and owned by a division of Nielson known as Nielson BuzzMetrics.

While I’m not totally clear on how it works, it’s a very cool way to track trends and fads that occur in the blogging community. Take for example, this “featured” trend that compares the blog posts relating to birth vs. death vs. marriage vs. taxes. What’s interesting is that death leads the overall category, however, for some strange reason there was a spike in marriage at the beginning of June. Strange.