Vanessa Fox. Nude.

Facebook is apparently the next big thing, even though it’s not exactly new or next, but it is a thing so at least the hype is partially accurate. My feelings towards Facebook are the same as my feelings towards most social networking sites. I want to like it, I mostly like it. I want a way to stay connected and my laziness combined with my inability to be offline make social networking seem like it should be perfect. But I don’t entirely like it. It’s like walking the shores of Lake Michigan when what you really want is the Pacific ocean. Close, but still not quite right.

But I have been attempting to use Facebook (although I have been doing an exceptionally poor job of it) and I have a few questions.

1. What if I don’t have a college email address?
Can I really just not tell you where I went to school? I need an email address? Are you purposely telling those of us who went to college before the days of email that we’re too old to use the site?

2. Seriously, how do you find your friends exactly?
Possibly I haven’t done a good job of figuring this out, but shouldn’t it be easy? I type a name into the search box and I get thousands of people with that name. And I can try to filter by network, but it doesn’t look all that simple. Can’t I just type some keywords about the person, like where they live and where they work? Maybe their favorite movie or type of donut?

3. What the hell is poking?
Just there to make me feel unhip, right?

4. We hooked up?
There’s nothing wrong with “we hooked up” as a concept, but the options on how you met someone leave a little to be desired. I feel as though there are some major categories missing. Where’s “met at the supermarket, looking at spring vegetables”? And Facebook, I will let you in on a little secret. I have been admitting that I’ve met many of my friends online for years. And most of the people on Facebook are also online and are using Facebook to talk to their friends online. So, they are likely OK with admitting they’ve sometimes met this way. In fact, I could use a whole subsection of “met online” options. You probably want options other than only “that craigslist casual encounters section”, but “on a forum”, “through blogging”, and “on [fill in the blank] social networking site” are a good start.

Mostly I want to just be able to type in whatever I want, but there’s not a text field available to me. Possibly once I choose “met randomly” I can add details? But that makes no sense as it makes all my friendships look like haphazard collisions when I was wandering around drunk one night. And maybe some of my friendships starting out that way (I have been to a lot of search conferences, after all), but not all of them.

5. Can’t you partner up with Flickr?
I get it. It’s cool that you can tag your pictures with people’s names and then they get notified when someone comments. But I am keeping track of too many things already. I can’t deal with storing my pictures in multiple locations. Can’t I just upload my Flickr feed and have some handy API for mapping my Facebook friends to my Flickr permissions and tags? I see that there are now a bunch of add-on apps for Flickr. But which one (if any) does what I want?

6. Why do you keep showing me random things?
For instance, it looks like I can see events from anyone in my network. My network is Seattle. It doesn’t help me much to go to an events page where I see events from everyone in Seattle. It may briefly make me feel popular until I realize I’m not actually invited to any of these things. I’m looking at the first event listed for me. It’s called “my birthday dinner”. However, it appears to be missing the person who set up the event so I can’t even tell whose birthday I’m missing. I suppose there may be some value in posting public events for your network. Like maybe if you’re in a band and you want to let everyone in Seattle know where you’re playing. The implementation could just use a little more thought. I’m also shown “6 of 55,656 people” in my network. Maybe this all would be more useful if I had a network other than this giant city full of people with whom the only thing I have in common is, well, the giant city.

Maybe if I used the APIs and add-ons and things, I could get Facebook to do exactly what I wanted. But I don’t want to build a social networking site. I just want to use one. Is that so much to ask?

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and I’ve mostly been offline for the last week or so. I’ll likely be mostly offline for another couple of weeks, which I know, sounds like crazyville. If you’ve ever seen me walking around with my blackberry, you know that my biggest frustration with it is that it’s not connected directly into my brain so that I can just think in the direction of the blackberry rather than type into it and perhaps turn my eyes into giant widescreen monitors. See, the projection of the internet could be somewhat transparent so I could still see the rest of the world and I could fade out the display if I really needed to see beyond it a little better (you know, like if I were talking to you) or tune it brighter if I needed to concentrate more on the projection (like if I were reading your blog). It’s all about you. Really. (Possibly I’ve thought about this a little too much.)

So as you might imagine, being offline is a strange and alien world to me. But also, being offline may mean something a little different to me. It’s not that I’m not online at all. Let’s not be completely insane. I’m just saying I have moments of non-connectivity, which is odd enough.

I’ve had a few things going on (I know, that’s an understatement much like “that Leonardo Dicaprio guy had a sucky boat trip in that one movie”), but have been online enough to read my email. I cannot describe how much it all means to me. (Thanks so much to everyone who dropped me a line. I am back online now and can tell you thanks individually now too.)

One way to fix the email bankruptcy problem is to change jobs and lose access to your primary mail account. Despite all that talk about tossing it all out and starting over, losing that mail account was like losing an arm. Or like someone telling me I wasn’t going to be able to eat potatoes again for the rest of my life. I wanted to go back through everything and keep it all. What hadn’t I replied to? What was left undone? Whose words were to disappear into the blackness of the lost world of closed email accounts?

On the plus side, I have resolved to follow the advice of everyone I’ve ever met and figure out how to get things done so you can all experience a new me of prompt email replies! Really! It could happen!

However, if you do email me (address is on the about page) and you aren’t looking to tempt me with your artfully crafted spam mail, there are a few titles you should avoid. It’s sad because they are good, relevant titles, but you’ve just got to banish them from your mind as though these words don’t exist in your vocabulary. They’re passenger pigeons and dodos and sea cows (were too real). Don’t worry. I have also compiled a list of suggested replacements to help you out.

Congratulations!
I know, it may seem like the perfect thing to say to someone who’s experiencing life changes, but generally, the body of an email with this title starts with “you have won millions in a lottery that you didn’t enter, but someone put your name in because you’re such a cool person and just transfer us over the thousand dollars in processing fees and we’ll get right on sending your prize!”

Alternate titles

• Eh, I heard the news. Whatever.
• I hope you don’t go down in flames. Good luck or something. You’ll probably need a lot of it.
• What were you thinking?

Urgent! Please reply ASAP!
Makes perfect sense if your email is urgent right? You read about my avalanche of mail and want yours to stand out from the Hilton Honors newsletters. Sadly, if you send an email with this title, I can only assume that your parents died tragically and left you billions of dollars that you can only access through a convoluted bank transfer plan that somehow involves my savings account.

Alternate titles

• No hurry. Whenever you get to this is fine.
• I can wait. I have things to do anyway.
• What is it with people replying to emails right away? Sheesh. You’re clogging up my inbox. Space it out people.

I’ve seen your performance in bed, and clearly, you could use some pharmaceutical help.
Actually, this title is perfect as is. What’s your cheapest price?

The problem: lots and lots of cardboard boxes. Clearly, one can’t simply stack them up in a corner of the room and turn them into furniture. I mean, one could, but spiders could hide in there and so every time you’d walk by or sit in the room or somewhere else in the house or even walk up towards the front door you would think, are big scary spiders hiding in that tower of cardboard boxes? And that’s just no way to live.

The solution? One truck (borrowed from someone who’s currently out the country and surely won’t notice his truck is gone as long as I return it before he gets back mind), one rather large tarp, lots of rope, two MacGyver-type women, and a cutting implement of some kind.

It was all going so well until we needed the sharp implement. You might instantly think knife, because you’re a smart person and it wouldn’t cross your mind that this house would contain exactly zero knives of any variety. (Don’t ask. It’s a long story about the lack of knives. You would be bored. It’s not that interesting of a story.) So, then your clever mind might jump to scissors, and yes, this house contains two of those. Sadly, both are too dull to cut through the tape on boxes.

When I ran into the dull scissors dilemma, my mind instantly went (of course) to the foil cutter on the corkscrew. And if you are wondering why a corkscrew was handy and a knife was not, well, then you and I live in completely different worlds. I live in the land of corkscrews. (And a world without shrimp, but that’s entirely unrelated.)

It worked great on the boxes, but not quite so great when I was stripping speaker wire. So, I picked up some wire strippers on my next trip to Home Depot. Oddly, it didn’t cross my mind to pick up some kind of a knife.

Mystery Guest was up for the challenge of of the truck and the tarp. We eyed the truck bed, overflowing with cardboard and styrofoam. We looked at the tarp. And the ropes.

“Do you know how to tie a knot?”

“No. Do you?”

“No. This rope came with instructions. Or maybe just a glossary of knots. You know, like fishermen use. I’ll bring it out with us.”

It was all fine until we had to thread the rope through the tarp as only one side of the tarp had holes. This was entirely our fault since we folded the tarp over. (Did I mention it was a really big tarp?) But now we needed to make our own holes. Mystery Guest went in to get some kind of cutting utensil. I had already clued her in to the wonder of the corkscrew. She brought out…

…a plastic knife!

Haha. Well, that was a funny joke. She then pulled out the corkscrew and the wire cutters. Which meant our tool arsenal consisted of:

Both of the non-plastic items barely made a dent. So, what the hell, let’s try the plastic knife! And the serrated edge sliced right on through that tarp like butter. Let this be a lesson to us all.

I would describe our knot-tying, but I feel I should end on a triumphant note. The contents of the truck didn’t fly out as I was driving to the recycling center, so I count the knots as a success. Mystery Guest was potentially feeling a bit overconfident and was ready to take to the high seas to try out the hard knocks sea-faring life just to see how far our knots would take us, but we were armed only with that plastic knife, so perhaps it’s best we rethought that plan.

She was really proud of those knots though. And her plastic knife foresight.

Next time you are stranded on an island or in a lifeboat and you have only string, a toothpick, and a pack of gum to survive the winter, I totally recommend bringing Mystery Guest along. She’s very resourceful. And can totally almost tie knots.

I am stunned and speechless and grateful. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate all of your kind words and that you’ve gone out of your way to blog and post and email me. It makes me amazingly happy that the work we’ve done at webmaster central has helped your businesses and your sites. And I’m so glad that I’ve been able to help some of you with stuff I’ve written or spoken about or when I’ve talked to you. It’s been so wonderful to meet and talk with so many of you and I hope that continues! The next round will be on me. Seriously, you all rock.

Next up: more writing about Buffy and traveling and social networking and blogging and my damn phones and how it just can’t be easy anymore to hook up a TV. Also, I need to do more ranting about ordering stuff over the phone. I’ve now been trying to return that wall mount for the TV I didn’t buy for over a week.

For the last two years, I have had a fantastic time helping to build Google Webmaster Central. I have loved working with the (ever-expanding!) team, writing about search on the blog and for the help center, and designing features for the webmaster community. And speaking of the webmaster community, I have been lucky enough to have been able to meet them, get to know their challenges, and well, then there’s the drinking. There may have been a little of that too. Search is a fascinating industry and I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to create such exciting things in the space.

Now I have an all-new opportunity to work on the unique challenges of the vertical and local search space at Zillow. I’m moving on from webmaster central knowing that there’s a great team who care as much about this audience as I do and they’ve got exciting plans in store for the coming year. I’ll really miss working with my team, but I’m happy they’ve been getting out and meeting more of you and I know they’ve had a great time drinking with you too. I mean talking. Did I say drinking?

I’ll still be around in search. My company name may change, but I still plan to see you all online and at the bar, talking search and Buffy and mobile devices.

So, why the change? Well, it was one thing for Dave to go on about me being nude all the time, but then he started paging me in the middle of the night, and I said enough of this. (Not really, Dave. I still love you! ) And honestly, working with webmasters has been absolutely one of the best parts of working on webmaster central. I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished and happy that will keep moving forward to even better things.

Making the move was a very difficult decision, but the challenge of creating something new in a space that’s so young and evolving was too great to pass up. And I have great confidence in the webmaster central team and know this project that feels so much like my baby is in very capable hands and will continue to grow and thrive.

I know. It is hard to wrap your mind around. The idea of reading blogs without a feed reader is crazy, right? Who would do that? Nobody but a crazy person, that’s who. RSS has made it so easy to read blogs. You can skim, read what you want, click over (or not). What’s not to like?

Well, a few things.

Some bloggers would prefer you read their posts on their sites (for lots of different reasons: so you will see what the rest of their sites have to offer; so you can experience their writing in its original brilliantly styled layout; because you might click on the ads…) and so they supply only partial feeds. And apparently some blog readers prefer to read posts on the original sites as well. (OK, one one blog reader. Sorry I called you crazy before!)

If you are a crazy non-RSS type reader, you can just bookmark all the sites you like, maybe put the bookmarks in a folder, then open all in tabs or click through them one by one. I don’t know really. I’m not the lone crazy, so you’ll have to ask him how he does it.

If you subscribe to partial RSS feeds, then you can do as I do and go through them in your feed reader then open the ones you want to read through in tabs. (If you don’t use a tabbed browser, I’m assuming you mostly cry.)

But is there another way?

There’s always another way.

You could try Nibelung. Nibelung is an old school webring system from way before the days of RSS. I used it years ago when blogs were still called online journals. (If you’re too young to remember those days, please don’t tell me. I feel old enough as it is.) You just add all the sites you read, then next through them. The entire site loads up in a frame. You can scroll through the site, navigate through it, and yes, click on the ads if you’d like. When you’re ready for the next site, just click the next link. It looks a little like this:

Here, try it out.

The one loony reader may find it helpful, but if you’re a reader of partial feeds, you may find it helpful too. You could put all your partial feeds in one ring and then just click through them and read the articles all in one fell swoop rather than the schizophrenic method I use of reading the partial part of each feed, then going back and reading the rest of each feed in all my open tabs (at some point during the day, or possibly week).

So what’s the downside? Well, if you use it for the partial feeds trick then you’ve got to do your blog reading in two different places and you probably have things categorized so that might be a bit clumsy. And Nibelung isn’t all that full-featured, so for instance, if you want to organize things into categories, you have to create separate rings. And you have to be public about your email address, although if you hide your ring, your email stays hidden as well.

And Nibelung has been around for years but isn’t all that high-traffic, so it’s not set up to take a heavy load. If you all start using it, we might have to lobby the owner to move it to a more robust server and whip up some features. I’m sure if we asked nicely we could work something out.

It’s quite possible that the greatest breakthrough of our time is online retail. What could be better than sitting in bed with your laptop, in comfy pajamas, browsing around, seeing what you want, then click, click, it arrives at your door? This internet shopping thing is truly a miraculous invention. I admit, I took this luxury for granted. I forgot those days of trudging uphill in the snow both ways, balancing my purchases on my back, at the mercy of the limited in-store selection.

But never again will I treat the privilege of shopping online so casually. I will treasure it like a precious gift, a delicate glass unicorn like Harmony’s minions got her in that one episode when she decided she would be Buffy’s arch nemesis. Before the days when Buffy needed to know the plural of nemesis. Nemeses?

I have learned my lesson and I share it with you so you too, can treat your online shopping options like a unicorn. Or something like that. It’s possible I’ve lost the metaphor.

Yesterday, I decided to purchase a few monitors (OK, three) and a TV at an online site that will rename unnamed. I merrily browsed around, clicked the little add to cart buttons, entered my discount code, then my credit card information and clicked that magical purchase button. The entire process took maybe five minutes. And then it happened. The dreaded error page. The page didn’t make much sense, just vague wording about a temporary error and how calling the 800 number would make things all better.

I foolishly listened to the error message. In retrospect, I realize that what I should have done was run screaming as far away from my telephone as possible. Or just gone to Fry’s. But instead, I dialed the phone. And was sucked into an inner vortex of hell. It was like Dante’s seventh circle only possible with more boiling blood rivers.

First, the initial conversation to even get to the same point I had been at when I clicked that happy little purchase button was 35 minutes. I do not exaggerate. 35 minutes to explain what I wanted and then explain again, and then explain about the discount code, and then, and I am not making this up, I had to go out to my car, fire up my broadband card on my laptop, and read the URL that I ended up on after clicking on the monitor and entering the discount code. It is less fun that you think to repeat into your cell phone, “no, then a slash, then an ampersand, then a p and an equals sign. no, equals, right, then a question mark…”. It’s pain like I hope even my worst enemy never has to experience. OK, maybe my worst enemy.

And then after confirming my address three times and my credit card twice, I thought the pain had ended. But she called back no fewer than eight times. Was the address in fact correct? Yes. Did I want my confirmation code? No, remember how I asked to have it emailed to me because I’m driving? Oh right. And then she couldn’t get my credit card to go through for some unknown reason. And then it went through fine. It was a never ending cycle of misery and torment.

Then I did some online research (the second greatest invention of all time!) and found that my discount code meant that I was still paying about $500 more than average for the TV I had ordered. So I had to call back. You might think I could at least cancel online, but of course I never actually got that email with my confirmation code. The person on the phone then couldn’t find my order. Did I mean the monitors? No, actually I meant the TV. After 12 minutes on hold, she tracked it down. And why did I want to cancel? Well, the whole $500 more thing. That was a factor. And while I was at it, could I also cancel the mounting hardware? But why would I want to cancel that? Well, you know, since I’m not buying the TV now, I don’t really need the hardware. I only had repeat myself three or four times before she agreed to cancel both.

Finally, I was done!

Only not so much. I got another phone call. Why am I canceling my TV order? I said that I had explained this when I canceled. Yes, but I had explained that to customer service, and this was the sales department. They needed to know too! I asked, couldn’t those two departments just talk to each other? No, they had to hear it from me. Of course they did.

So, two days and a total of over an hour on the phone and I may indeed one day get my monitors. At least I can wait and hope.

Oh online shopping. Please never go away from me again. I promise to treat you with care and respect forever. Like a unicorn.

You know you’re traveling too much when you have to fly to the town where you live in order to speak at a conference. But indeed, I flew into Seattle just in time for SMX Advanced. I spoke about duplicate content, but since the panel was a summit format, it was mostly designed to get feedback from the audience about how search engines could make the lives of webmasters easier. And since it was an advanced audience, I figured they mostly knew about duplicate content issues already and I may as well just dive right into getting feedback rather than spend time on the basics. So, I did the logical thing and just talked about Buffy.

Buffy had to deal with duplicate content issues a lot. It’s quite possible she’s gotten tired of all that vampire slaying and is now off doing SEO.

Speaking of duplicates, fuzzy, good Willow or evil Willow? Here are some pictures to help you decide.

Fuzzy Sweater Willow

Evil Leather Outfit Willow

The Second Evil Willow

(A non-Buffy tangent: The question I got most often after the session was about the supplemental index. Does having duplicate content cause sites to be placed there? Nope, that’s mostly an indirect effect. If you have pages that are duplicates or very similar, then your backlinks are likely distributed among those pages, so your PageRank may be more diluted than if you had one consolidated page that all the backlinks pointed to. And lower PageRank may cause pages to be supplemental.)

Now back to your regularly scheduled Buffy.