Never been to this joint? Worth a look if you haven't yet, in all your years.

Bar is lively and not too crowded, even on a Friday. Soccer on the tv, and steaks in the back.

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Facebook sure knows how to steal a good idea. From their founding (apparently) to pictures a la the Myspace stuff to status streams a la Twitter. They are aggressive, and it works. Look at the Twitter growth chart - that went down in the three months after Fb's new stream design last September.

So is Foursquare really better on its own? Or is it intrinsically something you want to share with your Facebook friends? I think it kind of is the latter actually.

My Foursquare friends are not currently more real. They are just more techie.

Maybe 4sq is a game -- but Facebook is great for games, like Farmville.

Maybe Fsq is an ingenious data-capture tool, like Recaptcha is for OCR, in which case Yelp is the bigger issue. Yelp is already very community-driven and very good at mobile.

But if its a little bit social and a little bit commercial -- ie about facilitating interactions with local business -- then they look A LOT like Yelp. It's the eternal quest really. If this little piece is a product, you have a way to carve a real business out of an incumbent's area. If it's a feature, you will be steamrolled.

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There was a team of maybe 50 guys breaking down a huge 10 story concrete building, by hand. With sledgehammers. In the burning heat.

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Progress!

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-------------------------------------
From: Amol Sarva
To: amol@getpeek.com
Subject: Chomsky
Date: Mar 5, 3:29 PM

Here is the full interview by IWW, but the relevant part is this:
"So take right now, for example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I've never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And in fact they are getting shafted. For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. Well Rush Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and run the government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you—they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and communists and so on.
Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].
I mean, the liberal democrats aren't going to tell the average American, "Yeah, you're being shafted because of the policies that we've established over the years that we're maintaining now." That's not going to be an answer. And they're not getting answers from the left. So, there's an internal coherence and logic to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they sound very convincing, they're very self-confident, and they have an answer to everything—a crazy answer, but it's an answer. And it's our fault if that goes on. So one thing to be done is don't ridicule these people, join them, and talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer, like, "Take over your factories.""
EDIT: A few people are curious about that last line about the factories. I believe what Chomsky's recommending is something like what happened in Argentina recently; their economy tanked in 2001, they started shutting down the factories while the bosses got fat compensation packages. The workers of some of those plants got together and occupied the factories and started up production again; this is a pretty awesome documentary for anyone who wants to know more. And generally Chomsky has always argued that "the people who work in the factories ought to own them", rather than renting themselves to bosses for a wage, which he considers a "fundamental attack on human dignity". Take it or leave it, but them's his opinions.
EDIT 2: Chomsky's spiritual home on reddit for anyone who wants to know: www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism

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My own take: they, along with a whole class of Asian makers, only make boxes and no software and even worse no cloud apps. Back when they bought all that content, they had the right idea. You can't just make electronics. You need to make software, UIs, services. They didn't.

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Shout out to Gomobo who is making online restaurant ordering a reality.

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