Today, Yahoo! announced the release of Fire Eagle, a service that, according to Search Engine Land, “is intended to be something of a ‘clearinghouse’ or ’switchboard’ for location and help users ‘manage location’ across the internet and on mobile applications.”

Those of you who know what this means, raise your hands. Okay. That’s what I thought. Actually, I’m not blogging about what the service does. I’m blogging about Fire Eagle’s logo. I’m outraged! Yahoo! would infringe on the Tennessee Titans’ famed “flaming thumbtack” logo. While I’m sure that Yahoo!’s designer intentionally meant to make their logo look like a flaming thumbtack and with the Titan’s designer’s, it was just good ol’ dumb luck, I still think consumers may be confused by the remarkably similar flaming thumbtack images.

To protest Yahoo!’s blatant disregard for my home team’s copyrighted logo, I have decided that when I attend Titans games, I will not use Fire Eagle to manage my location across the internet and on mobile applications.

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape (at age 22), Opsware and Ning (translation: the smartest guy in the room), is joining the board of FaceBook, according to TechCrunch.

Andreessen, of course, has a unique position in the history of the Internet. His entrepreneurial success is also well documented. However, it was not until he started blogging that I realized what a great thinker and writer — a communicator — he is. (Although, like others, he has slowed down his blogging recently.)

I hope Andreessen’s joining FaceBook’s board sends an “openness” message regarding the future of FaceBook. Andreessen’s company, Ning, offers a platform for setting up a FaceBook-like community for your club, church, cause or company. In the past, I have perceived Ning as competitive to what I thought the longterm plans of FaceBook were. Granted, I can understand how the two could be complimentary — FaceBook is focused on macro-community, Ning is focused on micro-community. Obviously, my understanding (translation: speculation) means nothing as Andreessen and Zuckerberg are the only two minds that really had to be melded on this.

Fortunately, because Andreessen blogs, we can understand a little of how his mind works regarding the ways in which social platforms need to work together. On May 14, for example, he wrote about Ning’s integration of two “social” initiatives from Google, Open Social and Friend Connect. (They also support other initiatives like “Open ID.”)

Here’s a quote from that May 14th post:

“From a strategy standpoint, we want to enable maximum flow both into and out of Ning networks and the rest of the web. It should be as easy as possible for users to get from elsewhere on the web into a Ning network, and likewise as easy as possible to flow from a Ning network to anywhere else on the web — and ideally, while taking their social context with them. We think this makes strategic sense for two key reasons:

First, it’s good for users, and whatever is good for users is good for a service like Ning. We think that’s obvious.

Second, you don’t get lots of flow into anything on the web without having lots of flow out to the broader web.

Having someone on FaceBook’s board who advocates that point of view is a good thing for FaceBook — and the rest of us who develop tools and content designed to build community.

A comment on comments: Yesterday, I wrote the following on Twitter:

“FriendFeed, Twitter, Seesmic et al, are pointing in the direction of something. They aren’t the destination.”

Because everything I post on Twitter (and other places) is mirrored on FriendFeed, the “tweet” appeared there at the same time.

If you look at the comments following that FriendFeed post, you’ll note that my friend (and I don’t mean that just because we said so on FaceBook) Dave Winer commented that he, “Totally agree(d) with this.”

Because so many people have learned that it’s important to listen to Dave (even when they disagree with him) his FriendFeed comment about my “tweet” led to a robust disussion that still lingers 17 hours later.

Which leads me to the topic of comments: A small group of the people who read this blog are currently obsessed with trying to understand where “comments” fit into conversational media. Even those of us who think we at least have a grasp of social media — who know its role in de-centralizing “content” — are fascinated (and some, upset) that comments on our blogs are now becoming de-centralized.

It fascinates me that some bloggers, who more often than not, are using their blog to comment on items they read elsewhere, are becoming upset that comments about their posts are taking place elsewhere.

As for me, I love that comments are finally being recognized as the treasure they are.

I don’t care where the conversation takes place. I want to understand it and embrace it.

Why I find all of this fascinating: You know that kid who loves tearing apart physical things to understand how they work. The one who can actually put the stuff he or she tears apart back together again. “She should be an engineer when she grows up,” people will say about that kid.

I wasn’t that kid.

But looking back, I was obsessed with tearing apart virtual things to understand how they work. I was never interested in how my television worked, but I was extremely curious about how programs were written and produced. I was never really that interested in printing presses, but I can’t remember a time I didn’t wonder about how reporters gathered news and editorial decisions were made. I was also fascinated with what today I’d call group dynamics and how teams and clubs and cliques came together and grew or fell apart. I was an organizer of groups and a conversation “moderator” decades before I even realized that groups and conversation need to be organized and moderated. I was fascinated with why fans become fans and what “loyalty” is all about. I was that kid.

For almost 20 years (back to the CompuServe days) the online world has provided me (and many others like me) with an amazing laboratory in which we get to tear apart the flow of information and the creation of conversation and community in an attempt to understand how they work. For some of us, that’s like being a kid in a, well, info-candy shop.

I’ll admit. I’m not merely doing this for fun. I have a business that allows me to apply what I learn in this laboratory to improve our internal conversations and community — and to incorporate what we learn into improving and enhancing the products and services we sell. But, I think it’s also apparent that I still have a child-like curiousity about the ways in which people use technology to share with one-another and to spread information — and create community.

The most important thing I’ve learned is this: It’s not about the technology. I know so many people who are “afraid” of something because they think it’s “technology.” Frankly, technology developers don’t help things by creating products that are driven by features and functions than by ease-of-use. It still amazes me that after 30 years, so many professional marketers don’t understand why Apple has a cult following. “Cool” is what marketers think Apple is all about. “Not corporate” perhaps, you know, that I’m a Mac, I’m a PC thing, perhaps. As a Mac-tard since 1984, I’ll tell you why Apple has a cult following. They make products for people who don’t give a rip about technology. They make products for users. And even though they don’t say it anymore, their products are for the “rest of us” who don’t really care how the technology works, we just want the technology to disappear so we can listen, read, write, create, share, buy, sell, etc.

I’m obsessed with what’s taking place here. But I’m obsessed as a user and “content” creator and “community” builder and participant.

That’s why I’m such a geek.

[Photo: cocoen via Flickr.]

The Important Part: The people at Facebook describe your list of “friends” (contacts) as being your “social-graph.” Others use the term “social network” to describe in broad terms, your network of connections with other people. Chances are, you call that list of connections your “address book.” In the previous century, you may have called it your Rolodex. Your ability to export that list of contacts from your computer out to web services (geek word of the day - “portability”) is one of the building blocks of a future web where you can go onto any new site or service and instantly discover everyone using it who may be a friend of your second-cousin, Herbert. Today, Google announced that the newest update of the Mac operating system includes a preference in the “Address Book” program that will keep the Mac address book synch’d with the contact list on ones Google G-mail account. Why is this significant? There are lots of really smart people and groups working on standards and practices related to how someone “asserts” their online identity and their connections with others — and how web services should respect how individuals utilize such personal data. However, until the day comes when all of those standards and practices are worked out, your personal e-mail address and your phone number are serving as a form of “de-facto” identifier of who you are. Likewise, your list of e-mail contacts are filling the gap on identifying your social network. And until the powers-that-would-like-to-be all agree upon what your portable “social network/graph” is going to be and how it’s going to work, your address book has become a stand-in. That’s why, when you sign onto a new social networking site, they ask if you want to allow them to bounce your e-mail contact list up against their list of registered users. That way, you can discover who among your contacts are already using the service.

Take Away: For Apple Address Book users who used to have to “export” and “upload” your contact list manually, you now have one-click portability (and on-going syncing) to your Google G-mail contacts list of your most important “social graph.” And from your Google contacts, you can blast that social graph to infinity and beyond (or whatever Google Friend Connect is).

Related rambling: About a year ago, I talked about the concept of e-mail address as universal identifyer in a lengthy post.

[Photo credit: jcroach, Flickr.]

Seeing the NY Times headline, “Names That Match Forge a Bond on the Internet,” I figured the story would be related to the hilarious one-man stage performance, British TV show and book from several years ago called, Are you Dave Gorman? In 2000, Gorman travelled the world to meet other Dave Gormans. After his show came out, they even all got together for a big Dave Gorman-palooza (see photo, below). In other words, Dave Gorman is the patron saint of “Googlegängers” everywhere. But, alas, so fleeting is “Internet fame,” the article in the Times doesn’t even mention him. Back when he performed “Are You Dave Gorman?” off-Broadway, he got boffo review from the Times. But now, he’s just another forgotten Internet meme from days gone by who can’t even make it into a trend story about a trend he created. (Flashback: My review of Gorman’s 2004 show, “Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure”)

Sidenote: I have never met anyone with my exact name on the Internet. However, by a rather strange coincidence, I discovered that the President of the Lynchburg, Va. Chamber of Commerce has almost the same name as mine (his last name is Hammond, a name I often get called by mistake). Even more strange, however, is that the Vice President, Membership, of that organization has the same name as my wife’s maiden name. Interesting, yes. But not interesting enough to cause me to travel to Lynchburg.

That said, I’ve met several “Rexes” on the blogosphere and via Twitter and must say that our club, while small, is very cool.

No one asked, but here are the primary ways I’m currently expressing myself online.:

rexblog.com: Professional and business-related focus (media, technology, conversational & new media, marketing, magazines). Once each day, my blog includes a posting that aggregates all of the links I’ve bookmared on del.icio.us/rexblog that are related to those topics.

Hammock.com/rexhammock: My official Hammock Inc. “people page.”

RexHammock.com: Personal passions and random-topic tumble-log.

Twitter.com/r: Stream-of-life commentary in < 140 character posts, and where I "hang-out" online.

Flickr.com/rexblog: Where I post photos.

YouTube.com/rexhammock: Where I post videos.

Last.fm/user/rexhammock: Music I’m listening to.

Facebook, Linkedin, etc.: I don’t really “express myself” on these and other “social networking” sites, but on most of them, you can find me if you search for my name or the username “rexhammock.”

FriendFeed.com/rexhammock: A “lifestream” of everything I post anywhere.

Recently, I re-booted RexHammock.com, a URL on which I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr.com for several months. I had determined that I was under-utilizing it as merely a “lifestream” catcher — a place that collects all the different RSS feeds generated by my various online-expressions on Twitter.com/r, Flickr.com/photos/rexblog, etc. And, with services like FriendFeed.com and even MyBlogLog getting more into being pure-play lifestream platforms, I decided to go back and figure out how to better utilize the very cool features of Tumblr.

As you can see from RexHammock.com, one of the smart things they did was make it drop-dead-simple for me to use my own URL instead of some long / this-and-that account name. And, despite my design-free look on the site, the Tumblr platform has some attractive templates and is very CSS-friendly for those who want to (and can) be creative. I’m trying to master the functions and ethos of the platform and its community, before putting any time into determining what it should look like however. So, in my experiment, you can consider it now in a wire-frame state.

What I have determined is this: I’ll be writing about and pointing to mostly non-work or non-professional-related topics on RexHammock.com. For example, this week, I started off with my review of the Punch Brothers new release and have followed that up with posting quotes from the New York Times and the long piece yesterday on NPR’s All Things Considered. (I’m happy to note that if you had read my review on Tuesday, and had listened to a YouTube video I pointed to, you would have been better prepared to understand why such a “different” kind of recording is receiving such attention.)

So, to summarize: On rexblog.com, I’m gradually shifting to focused commentary and links related to magazines, new media (specifically, what I call “conversational media,”) marketing, corporate and association communication. Some of this is cross-posted on Hammock.com and elsewhere. My non-professional interests (stuff my wife & kids & pets do, the world, my hometown, travel, music, photography, books, movies, table saws, humor, tomatoes, Tennessee Titans, Vanderbilt basketball, etc.) are slowly showing up on RexHammock.com.

I’m quite honored. Kim Cameron says that while reading my weekend post about Facebook & identity, he “had a bit of an epiphany…we need a wider suite of standards that make identity useful for building social networking applications, rather than just basic identity assertions (as important as these may be). Otherwise, what can you do once you’ve pushed out the walls of your garden? Not much.”

I honored because I’d never heard of an “identity assertion” before (as important as they may be). I did know, however, that Kim is one of those people I was alluding to in that earlier post when I said I didn’t want to trivialize the serious study very smart people devote to the topic I was discussing.

Kim is Architect of Identity and Access in the Connected Systems Division at Microsoft — and he has some positive things to say about Facebook’s initial steps along the journey to the portability of identity and social network I mentioned in my first post.

Says Cameron:

“Facebook has had to provide access to the user’s information in order to become an application development platform. And I need to underline that they should be congratulated for using email (e.g. universal) addresses as identifiers. As a result, the list of friends I download from Facebook will work with any other system that is based on email identifiers and uses validation of ownership of the accounts. I think that deserves a standing ovation.

I didn’t think about it, but he’s correct: both Facebook and Linkedin allow me to upload my list of e-mail addresses so that I can bounce that network against their network — they then present a list of their registered users who are among my personal contacts. I can also download the list that I build there and synch it with my contacts later. That’s a big deal and it helped me jump-start my network of friends on each site. (It will be an even bigger one when I don’t have to do all that uploading and downloading, but can automatically synch it among all the services I use.)

As I don’t think about this stuff in such a way, I failed to recognize that networks that offer such a service are recognizing a person’s email address as a universal identifier. Linkedin even lets you enter former email addresses into your private profile so that you can allow people to find you who have your out-of-date identifier. And Plaxo is a social network built from the ground up on allowing one to assert their identity in the form of an email address and their social network in the form of a contact list with email addresses being the key identifier.

Geez, I’m having my own epiphany here.

There is another universal identifier (beyond their API and email-address-based identifier) Facebook offers for which I didn’t give them credit. One is RSS. There are many things they allow me to export from their site in the form of an RSS feed. In theory, I guess, that is their recognition that exportability (is that a word?) of content is required in the context of all those things we collectively call Web 2.0.

If you are reading this post on my weblog (and not on a newsreader via my RSS feed), you can see on the right-hand column of this page a whole series of “identity assertions” that I am able to “port” to this page from other places on the web via RSS or an API. Under the heading “rexblog nano,” you’ll see the last three “tweets” I’ve posted on twitter.com, then comes my “reader roll” via Mybloglog.com. Then you’ll see my link blog, which is merely an RSS feed of my del.icio.us posts. Below that is a feed of my most recent photos shared on Flickr.

You may think of those as “badges” or “widgets” or “flare” or whatever, but for me, they are expressions of who I am. And, frankly, I don’t want people to have to go surfing all over the place to discover those expressions. I use those other services to “assert and express my identity,” but, then, I want all those assertions to recollect themselves on one spot — right here.

I’d like to be able to display all the identity assertions I’m managing over at Facebook right here on this page, as well. Videos I post. Networks I create. Statuses I update. It will happen one day.

I’ll leave it up to the pros to figure it out. I’m just a user of this stuff. I have no idea how it works — or what it’s called.