My MySpace.com profile was recently deleted by “Tom”. I wasn’t spamming with shady porn embedded links, or phishing for private information… I was “social networking”. MySpace allows people to chose “networking categoriesâ€? that fit their interests or profession, but apparently they don’t actually want you to network or contact these people.

You might assume that filling out the Networking categories on MySpace is for other people interested in these same industries… to “network.” Absolutely dead wrong.

This little bit of info tucked into the Terms of Service is actually quite amazing…

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Ze Frank shares his insight on the proper procedure for procrastination, otherwise known as the PPP.

Link c/o 43 Folders.

It has never been so simple.

Corporate idiocy and illiteracy captured by Seth.

Anyone that’s watched a movie or read a book, knows that a story well told can change your perception on just about anything. This slick piece of motion design crafted as a Bachelor thesis by Ozan Halici and Jürgen Mayer does just that.

Watch “Master Plan” and see if you still feel the same way about Google.

Found at Computerlove.

I wrote an article about Smashing Magazine and was going to post it next week. Not sure if I’m still going to.

You’ve probably seen Smashing Magazine at least once; almost every entry they “write” has made it to the front page of Digg because of their abuse use of Top X Lists.

The reason I’m considering not posting my original article and giving them any more praise for mastering the art of being Dugg, is because it seems that they like to borrow their lists from others.

Today’s post which has almost 1400 Diggs at the moment, is called “83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen“. A couple people have commented on Digg saying it looks a little familiar to another post on another blog, “80 WordPress Themes“. In fact, it looks exactly the same other than them adding 3 additional blogs to the list.

I could be mistaken and both sites might be owned and written by the same individual, albeit highly unlikely.

So, I’m not sure whether or not I’ll ever post anything else about Smashing Magazine. I’d like to hear what they have to say about this “borrowed interest” first. Anybody want to step up to the mic?

UPDATE: Read Vitaly Friedman’s comment below. Amazing how quickly he got back to us. I’m still not a fan of republishing content from one blog to another. But thanks for clearning up the issue Vitaly nonetheless.

Zecco, a site we’ve proclaimed our love for in the past, has finally released IRA services. They’re offering zero commission IRAs with access to over 300 listed ETFs for you to build a diversified portfolio with asset allocation across large-cap, small-cap, foreign and fixed income securities. You also get $0 commissions up to 10 trades a day and 40 trades a month in both your regular brokerage account and your IRA. That’s up to 20 free trades a day.

The only real fee here is a $30 annual whack for the IRA which isn’t much - hey, they can’t absorb everything!

On a personal note, I currently have a Zecco account and have had a few conversations with customer service representatives before. They’re not outsourced and they’re fantastic to deal with. I highly recommend them! Check ‘em out.

2007 was one of the worst years when it comes to Super Bowl ads. It seemed most companies either went the celeb or violence route, producing nothing near as powerful as Apple’s 1984 or as addictive as Budweiser’s Wassup.

One spot that I wish ran during the Super Bowl and would have taken top rank, in my opinion at least, is a promo for NBC’s prime time. Not only is it hillarious, its intelligent in that its created a new wave of pop culture that even Drew Barrymore jumped on in last week’s episode of SNL.

You need to get all over this. “That’s what she said“.

We’ve seen a walking table, an expanding table, and now, an accordion chair that morphs into just about any shape. I think my office chair tried to kill me while I was sleeping last night. Be afraid.

There’s a great interview with Bill Gates at Newsweek about Vista. They asked him some questions about Apple’s PC/Mac commercials and it sounds like he got a little heated up. Here’s an excerpt…
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Are you bugged by the Apple commercial where John Hodgman is the PC, and he has to undergo surgery to get Vista?
I’ve never seen it. I don’t think the over 90 percent of the [population] who use Windows PCs think of themselves as dullards, or the kind of klutzes that somebody is trying to say they are.

How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?
Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

Does the entire tenor of that campaign bother you, that Mac is the cool guy and PC -
That’s for my customers to decide.

In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.
You can go through and look at who showed any of these things first, if you care about the facts. If you just want to say, “Steve Jobs invented the world, and then the rest of us came along,” that’s fine. If you’re interested, [Vista development chief] Jim Allchin will be glad to educate you feature by feature what the truth is. I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn’t have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise. Let’s be realistic, who came up with [the] file, edit, view, help [menu bar]? Do you want to go back to the original Mac and think about where those interface concepts came from?

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Them are fightin’ words. Wouldn’t it be cool to see Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to head to head on Celebrity Deathmatch?

You can read the rest of the interview here