The Real Lance Brown

The following will not appear in the “Lifestyles of the Natural & Professional” section of the upcoming issue of The Simplifier:

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Oh, to be the young upstart! The new guard, the fresh blossom; it’s so inspiring and exciting…to beat the crusty, lame, old, creaky…

I’m speaking, of course, of the feud between the Project Simplify and Natural Professional Facebook “fan pages”. We (The Natural Professional) are totally crushing Project Simplify! I mean, they’ve had a fan page since like 2009 (and I don’t mean December 2009)—and we already have more than twice as many fans. And we’ve only had a fan page since like 2009 (and I do mean December)!

Just to be clear, we (Project Simplify) are proud to see our little N.P. having such early success, and we’re totally not jealous at all. (Because, of course, we know we’re largely responsible for said success.)

Well, that’s very big of you, Project Simplify, and we (The Natural Professional) would like to point out that PS is totally not old and dusty and archaic at all. And we will absolutely try to remember them when we get rich and famous.

Hey—no need to get nasty! We Project Simplify have a few cards we could play too—you The Natural Professional might want to remember that…

You see what we (the Shawn Tuttle and Lance Brown) have to deal with here? Simplification can be so ironic!

I don’t know exactly how to settle this feud, but I can tell you—and this is confidential—that Project Simplify is genuinely happy to see the blossoming of The Natural Professional’s presence on Facebook, and would like to encourage you to become a “fan” if you aren’t already. It will work out its jealousy issues in time. ;-)

B.L. Ochman’s blog: Why You Should Stop Sleeping With Your Laptop

Recently, at a Tweetup, several of my online buds admitted that they sleep with their laptops. They said they check their email when they get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Sorry guys, but that’s just nuts.

I’ve rebelled. This summer, for the first time in a long, long time, I unplugged for a couple of weeks. Two weeks – count ‘em – unplugged. No computer. No email. No compulsive tracking of Twitter. No updating any of the three blogs I write. No FriendFeed, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Flickr, or iPod Touch. No Seesmic. No Skype. No TV. DIdn’t even read a newspaper most days.

A curious thing happened.

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Read B.L.’s whole blog post (keep reading far enough and you’ll even find me, in the comments section.)

I like that Ben Stilller (@redhourben on Twitter) took this humble-yet-funny approach to introducing his online presence to the new Web:

His short video where he introduces Mickey Rooney to Twitter is cute too:

Palo Alto  – In a move sure to send shockwaves across the Facebook universe, Facebook executives announced early this morning that the company would be purchasing social media giant Facebook, and would begin folding its features into Facebook as soon as possible.

This move, which was announced via an updated status message on Facebook, comes right on the heels of the 250-million-member site’s purchase of competitor FriendFeed, and their subsequent announcement of “Facebook Lite”. Company executives say the timing of this third move was intentional.

“We really wanted to find a way to build on the momentum of our other two big announcements this week,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “And what better way to demonstrate our commitment to being Internet game-changers than to buy our own company? I don’t think anyone would disagree that we look like a great investment. And Facebook met us at a price we couldn’t pass up!”

Initial buzz among industry watchers was positive. @SocialMediaKING tweeted, “FB + FF + FL + FB > TW”, and @Top_SEO_Guy replied, “Right? I’d totally buy Facebook right now, LOL. #nobrainer”

Similar sentiments were echoed in comments on people’s messages at FriendFeed, and even at Posterous and Tumblr. Facebook’s fan page on Facebook gained nearly 200,000 fans in the hours since the buyout, and the resultant 200,000 wall postings on members’ profiles have received an unprecedented 3 million “Likes” in that same time period.

About this last bit of news, technology maven Robert Scoble was initially rumored to have tweeted, “3 million – that’s a lot of likes”, but it is now believed that quote was a fake retweet.