A few Fail Whale sightings yesterday reminded me of how far and how fast Twitter has grown up and out. It seems like only yesterday when a couple of million users sometimes went 2-3 consecutive days looking at nothing BUT Fail Whales.

Now it's a rarity. And Twitter has done a good job, in my view, at bringing in monetization streams that are unobtrusive to users and relatively nonthreatening to our data.

But still there are some thing about Twitter that seem to need improvement. And, ironically, by using it to express my opinion, I've discovered there are quite a few others who agree with me on two new features that many people would embrace:

1. Show number of times user has been blocked.  Most of us have had the experience. Someone you don't know jumps into your stream. They start pinging you frequently. They post comments that may be inappropriate, disturbing or just lame. You wonder if you are over-reacting. You go to that user's home page and get some helpful information. But would it not be nice to know how many times this user has been blocked? Such a feature would also serve as a warning signal that the person you are talking with is actually a bot.
2. Install a topical filter. There are people who I greatly enjoy following. But they have defaulted foursquare to post every visit to their local Home Depot or coffee shop. I really don't want to know about it. Simultaneously, If either the Boston Red Sox or Celtics get into post-season games, I tend to post scores of play-by-play tweets. This annoys quite a few people who follow me primarily for social media content. I understand and wish they could do something about it without unfollowing me. A simple button should allow people to filter by topic without dropping someone they wish to follow.

I know, I know. The Tweetdeck zealots keep telling me that the client of their choice already has topical filters. But that just means that it should be easy for Twitter to incorporate one into their core technology where ALL users should enjoy it.

I also know that you can use FourSquare and opt not to send your posts to Twitter. But many of their friends like to see the geographic comments. Some may actually care about who is now mayor at the local Trailways bus depot.

They should have the right to post to Twitter and I should have the option to filter it out if I don't want it.

I know from Twitter that some people agree with me. Perhaps you don't. Please let me know.

And one more thing. If the Fail Whale is coming back, perhaps they could get a few more selections of the artwork--or some variation. Perhaps run a contest to name each of the 8 bluebirds with tweet user names and perhaps get a corporate sponsor for the FailWhale. If none will pay, then donate the space to GreenPeace.

Back in 2005, Robert Scoble and I collaborated on a book about blogging for business called Naked Conversations, which seems to have done pretty well. We went on to collaborate on an eBook for Dow Jones, then for a stint on the ill-fated FastCompany.TV.

Along with that Robert and I spoke together a lot. I'm not sure how many times but it was around twenty.

By 2008, blogging evolved into social media. The small, but global, band of conversational tool enthusiasts, had morphed into more than a half-billion people in virtually every country with broadband access.

In 2005, blogging was a disruptive force. Now the tools of social media are a part of a great many people's everyday lives. Instead of talking about them all the time, we are just using them to communicate or get our jobs done.

After the Fast Company interlude, Robert joined Rackspace , where he runs  building43, a community of fanatical Internet users, many of whom he video interviews.

I went on to write Twitterville, then get immersed on consulting companies  on how to use social media to achieve business goals. It seems that without design Robert and I got immersed in different parts of the Global Neighborhood and saw each other less and less.

We have not appeared anywhere together since 2008. The last time we actually saw each other was over a year ago.

So, when Mark Kithcart, a friend who I met when I briefly consulted  in Santa Rosa-based Democrosoft , invited me to speak at the wine-country Wow10 Event and he asked me if Scoble would join, I figured it was time for a public reunion.

I had thought Robert and I were going to be interviewed by someone about how the social media industry had changed since 2005. I thought "Naked Reunion" would be a good name for it.

But the event has changed just a bit. Robert and I will now be part of a roundtable and the questions will be whatever attendees want to ask us. This is probably a better idea. Then people can talk about whatever is on their minds rather than ours.

I've also noticed that Robert and I no longer has top billing in event promotion. The wine-tasting part does. This is a good thing. Because if it turns out that after all this time, Robert and I really suck together on stage, the wine will make it less important to attendees,

I hope we see you there. In any case, it will be great to once again sit on the dais with Robert.

[Matt Cutts on Mt. Kilimanjaro]

Matt Cutts, Google's most popular blogger and social media community denizen recently went to the mountain.

Perhaps, at the mountain, he had a dream, a dream that one day Google will rise up and live out the true meaning of social media. Perhaps in his dream, Google will develop a social network that ensure all digital children will walk free, free from the fear that their identities and personal information will not be abused by Facebook or some other force not committed to do no evil.

It seems that community is very much in Matt's DNA, despite his day job as a Google SEO honcho. This is relevant because Om Malick recently speculated that Google keeps botching social network efforts because it has a defective social gene.

I disagree and have written why. I am not Google champion, but it seems to me that we social media users would be a lot better off if Google could give us a viable alternative to what we have now.

So here, free of charge, are a few suggestions on how Google could, for once, get it right in social media. And since Matt Cutts is an SEO guy, I know that he will read this if I keep saying "Matt Cutts."

So let me put this in the form of An Open Letter to Matt Cutts. I know you're not the decision maker, but I'm pretty sure this post will catch your Matt Cutts eyes.

1. Start with Matt Cutts.

Matt Cutts is really very good at social networking. He's strong and respected in blogging and Twitter. Move him off of SEO and get him to start a skunkworks. Among his primary jobs is will be to teach others at Google just what Matt Cutts is doing so very well. Get a few SM enablers on staff--not to reach outward, but to teach inward. This is vital because you keep trying to attract a user that you just don't understand.

2. Ask the SM community for help.

You are Google for gawd sakes. You are surrounded by the pioneers who started this seminal global movement. Create a Board of Advisers and meet with them regularly. Start with a one day off campus. Primary agenda: They talk. Google listens.

3. Start small like you did with Google search.

Back then,  you launched modestly and word of mouth carried you beyond most people's imaginations. Now you have traditional marketers try to push products into new marketplaces with old-time hoopla. It just doesn't work that way. As you recently experienced, Buzz is the last thing you hear before you get stung.

4. Make it customizable

GMail is starting to feel like an old-time customer portal. You keep trying to integrate  all your stuff and get it in front of us. Some people appreciate this, but it's annoying others. Let us decide where to put your services and which to delete altogether. Why on earth can't I put Maps on my top level instead of Google Reader which I rarely use anymore? Why can't I decide.

5. Make 'no evil' your differentiator.

This is the most important of all. It's fundamental to fixing your recessive social gene.

We all know who your competition is. We all know what we don't like about it. What we do like is that its easy to find friends, customers, prospects and people who share our interests.

Make it that easy, but add one ABSOLUTE guarantee: you will not mess with user data. You never, ever will use our data without our opted-in permission.

A couple of days ago, I started a Twitter list of social media professionals. I've entered nearly 150 names so far and I imagine this list will continue to grow for some time.

I define a social media pro, quite simply, as someone making a living--or trying to--through social media. It can be a developer a corporate communicator a consultant, writer, college professor or whatever.

To be on the list, you need to show some evidence that social media is central to your work. You can tweet me a recommendation or ask to be put on the list. The best way is for someone I already know and trust to recommend you.

The list does not rank people, nor does it mean that I endorse everyone on it. It doesn't even mean that you are any good at what you do.

It simply means that through personal knowledge or a few minutes of checking you out online, it appears to me that social media is essential to your work.

I've been asked, somewhat suspiciously, what I'm up to. I must have some secret plan for what I will do with the list. Not really. I was looking for a list like this one on Twitter. I found rankings of influence and power. I found "top" which seems to be about followers, but I just couldn't find an objective, inclusive resource, so I started one.

That being said, I'm starting to see lots of uses for this list:

• Conference promoters have a quick resource for finding talent. They can visit this list and find people addressing almost any topic related to social media.
• Recruiters and people needing consultants or contract talent have a place that offers many options.
• For people very interested in the topic of social media, this list rocks.  Members are prolific and stay mostly n topic. They post informative links. For the past two days, I've spent more time following the list stream than my own, and am enjoying and learning a good deal. The list seems to be popular. With less than 150 names, it already has over 40 followers.

There have been some surprises--not with the list itself, but with my compiling it. Some folk though it was elitist to compile a list of social media pros. I think not. We have lists of lawyers and plumbers, why not people who practice in the conversational media?

There have been more than a few "me, ME, ME!!!" folk who just wanted to be on a list. Some made claims that just were not backed up by online evidence of any great social media involvement. For example, one person had 46 followers and had posted 18 times. I could be wrong, but I assumed that person was not really a social media pro.

I can easily be fooled. But if I see someone in the stream who consistently seems unprofessional or unfocused on social media, I will quietly delete them.

But mostly, I've had people thank me. They find it to be a useful list. It could end up causing me more distraction from other projects than I wish, so I really don't know how long or well I can keep it current.

Right now, it has my attention. If you think you should be on the list or if you know someone else, please let me know. Come to think of it, the way I meander all over the board, I may have to delete me.

We'll see where this list takes itself.

A couple of weeks back, I wrote about why I'm rooting for Google in social media. Coincidentally and almost simultaneously Om Malik wrote a great piece about why doing social media right just isn't part of Google's DNA.

We both used baseball metaphors. I said Google would strike out less if it stopped trying to hit the ball out of the park and Om compared Google's experience to his own failures to convert from cricket play to baseball.

Our two pieces were not directly opposed, but I seem a bit more hopeful that Google has a chance for success in social media and that such a success would benefit we users and customers in general.

Enterprise DNA does change. It is difficult but companies transform successfully all the time. Wells Fargo started as a stage coach company. Now it is in financial services. IBM owned 90 percent of the computer hardware industry. Now it owns virtually none.

Unlike humans, companies can adapt their DNA. They do it by changing who they hire and the culture that those people develop. Google today has a process that makes them very good at search and simultaneously not so good at social media.

Of all the bungles that Google has yet made in social media, the largest was not in Buzz or Wave or the shrinking Blogger franchise. It was in the fact that Ev Williams and Biz Stone worked together at Google at the same time. For these two to develop Twitter however, they had to leave the company and start all over on their own.

If Ev and Biz had been encouraged to futz around on their own, then share this Twitter thing with a few friends, who then shared it with a few friends, history may have been different.

But rewriting history is only a game. All you can glean by looking backwards is wisdom. And if failures make you wiser, as Vinod Khosla says, then Google should be the wisest of all companies when it comes to social media. Either that, or the company is destined to be like Sisyphus, the guy in Greek legend who kept pushing the rock up the mountain only to have the rock rolled back down and him having to repeat and repeat.

If Google does not show some of this wisdom soon, it may start feel its strength sap. It could lose the clout and credibility it enjoys today. It will become a less interesting company. Fewer brilliant technologists may wish to join.

I am told that people inside Google still like Buzz. They still use it internally. They plan to take components and add it to future products. They need to understand that new products are not about what they like so much as what customers want.

For Google to succeed in social media, it needs to treat a project like a skunkworks. The culture needed to make it onto the social media playing field requires one that is different than the one that exists today.

Google also needs to learn the social media technique of "launching by asking."

No social media tool or platform has begun by making a lot of big marketing noise. Social media successes are consistantly grassroots in their orientation.

Google needs to connect with the existing community, to reach out to those who influence us most. Get them involved.

Instead of swinging for the fence, they need to try to get to first base. And they need to understand the difference between bats and wickets before they go for their next hit.

Yesterday,  was my third anniversary as a Twitter user.What a weird strange trip it has been.

When I started on Aug. 8, 2007, the estimates varied greatly as to how many people were using it from a low of 340,000 to as many as 4 million, but no one really believed it could be that high. thirty-six months later, the high estimates are topping 140 million and few people doubt its accuracy.

In August 2007,the big names in Twitterville were neighborhood heroes like Leo LaPorte, Veronica Belmont and Robert Scoble. These name remain prominent, but if you consider followers an important milestone, all three of them have been dwarfed by assorted celebrities from Hollywood and sports, many of them finding Twitterville a useful way to prolong fading careers.

Three years ago, a great deal of the content was about shiny things, the newest in new technology, but mostly we talked about Twitter and it's potential for business and friendship and world peace. Occasionally, we discussed where we were and what we had for lunch.

Now we use Twitter to talk less about Twitter itself and more about anything we want to discuss. Three years ago, most business and political people disdained Twitter and now they embrace it. Being on Twitter  is essential to professionals and consultants today as being in the Yellow Pages was twenty years ago.

I don't love all these changes, but I expected them. I could even get boastful and say that I predicted some of them. But I really had no idea that these changes would come so fast.

I  still find conversations to enjoy. Scoble is still there pumping out more Shiny Thing news than I can digest. But now there are millions of people discussing thousands of topics on all sorts of subjects I don't care about.

Businesses coming into Twitter seem to have strayed from the conversational capabilities that make Twitter so special, reverting back to the broadcasting of messages, a method that failed so badly in other channels, that it created the opportunity that has become Twitter.

I keep thinking of the roots of television. General Sarnoff at NBC wanted to provide opera and Shakespeare for the masses. Around the corner Stanton and Paley pushed sitcoms and got rich selling cigarette and beer through ads.

I think Twitter is now a crossroads. It can revolutionize the access people have to each other. It can fundamentally change how news is gathered and distributed. It can make quality customer service scalable. It can let newcomers to the marketplace be familiar with people in a company before they buy or apply.

Or it can become another channel down which messages are jammed by people who really don't care what you think.

I really don't know how it will come out. I can only hope.

The thing about Google in social media is that they just keep swinging the bat no matter how many times they strike out. Yesterday, they killed Wave, which turned out to be merely a ripple and today they came back to announce acquisition of the prolific and talented Slide social media apps group.

Google keeps trying in social media, keeps failing and then comes back again. Jokes about them in social media have become both more prolific and funnier.  Silicon Valley Watcher editor Tom Foremski recently speculated that Google is a one trick pony.

Of course, Foremski overstated the case as Android watchers will tell you. And if it matters, Orkut, Google's aging social network remains big in Brazil. But more than that Google is among the most influential and well-positioned companies on the Internet.

It essentially invented online contextual advertising and created a model that users will accept and advertisers find valuable. More than that, Google knows more about Internet users than any other company, more about us than our governments know. Google knows what we look at and when and where we look,

While it has had its share of gaffes and attacks, overall most people who understand what Google does have come to trust it with our personal data.

That of course brings us directly to Facebook, which has soared to become the most visited social networking site. It claims to have 500 million active users, a more than one in every 14 people on earth.

The more people know about Facebook, the less we trust them with our data. And in that fact I see a huge market opportunity.

All Google needs to do is to build something very much like Facebook has. EXCEPT it makes clear that user privacy is at the core of company priorities. Users get to decide who see how much about them. They make it easy to tweak options at any time.

Right now many people who hate Facebook use Facebook. They go to Facebook despite all its many flaws for the same reasons that more people want to go to Manhattan than say, Cody, Wyoming. It's where people who are relevant to them can be found and where you can meet them. People go to Facebook  to find and make friends, customers, prospects, recruits and voters or even Scrabble opponents.

Everything else--except of course for Twitter--offers the same social promise as Cody, Wyoming.

Google has the brand, credibility and technical and business ability to build a social network that can compete successfully with Facebook.

It will not be a simple task. There is a reason that they keep producing products with names like Buzz that hit the market with a fizzle. They do not yet have a social culture. They launch products with lots of noise then sit back and wait and hope that the type of word-of-mouth the exploded Google will happen again.

Google can lead in social networking but it needs to be social in its behavior. It needs to tap into the people who influence early adoption in technology. Those influencers are only a few thousand in number, but they have the ability to move millions of users from one social space to another.

Will Google "get it?" Will they join the community before trying to lead it? I really don't know. Their past performance has given me doubts. But there remains a large and ripe market opportunity.

Maybe they'll get it right next time.

Yesterday morning I stumbled on this blog post by Abby Gilmore a young Bostonian, transplanted to Tempe Arizona where she used social media to land herself a job as an SEO specialist by using social media and personal initiative.

In a down market, it was nice to see. I've written a lot about social media as a recruiting tool. In Twitterville, I wrote about Sodexo who uses social media to recruit chefs and food service managers and save hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in recruiting costs.

But Abby's was the flip side. She was an applicant, not a recruiter. She was at the beginning of a career, not yet a Candidate for executive recruitment.

I wondered if there were other stories like hers and so, about 24 hours ago I asked on Twitter and got mixed results. I heard from two other young women, both with good stories about how social media helped land them jobs. One would let me use her name, but not the company that hired her until the company launched next month. The other said I could use her company name, but not hers, because her boss said he didn't want her to get too much glory.

Both those responses do not exactly depict the sort of openness and transparency that too me is at the essence of how social media works.

I did find one new entry-level success story in Josh Freeman, a reporter for Town Crier newspapers, part of Multimedia Nova Corp. , who was recruited by Canadian Social Media honcho Eden Spodek. Josh started as an intern, then was retained fulltime after graduation from journalism school.

The story was supposed to be about people just entering the workforce and I was about to spike the entire story, when I heard from a couple of social media friends.

Ryan Kuder May be the first "twofer." He landed his last two jobs through social media. A while back Dan Green, an executive recruiter connected with him on Twitter through mutual followship. He recruited Ryan for VP Marketing at Biz360, a business intelligence firm. But Biz360 was soon acquired and Ryan's job eliminated. But another social media friend sent Ryan a Twitter message alerting him to a new job as VP Marketing for Bizzy, a Silicon  Valley startup.

Up in Canada, Dave Fleet got into social media when he worked for the Ontario government a few years back. He maintains two blogs, one on his passion for running and the other on PR & social media. The latter drew the interest of several people at Canada's most social media-focused PR agency, Thornley Fallis. They became more conversational with each other on Twitter, where co-founder Joe Thornley eventually offered him a job. Fleet joined and was eventually promoted to vice president.

I intentionally limited this sampling to just 24 hours. What I found was no avalanche of evidence that recruitment is moving from tradional venues onto social media.

But it does show you that there are a growing number of people who are taking the initiative in a tough job market and are finding success.

There is one other example. I am one of a great many social media consultants. As a fulltime focus I am relatively new at it. Fully half my referrals have come through people I know in social media, people whom I have never met in real life.

I think social media is destined to become one huge jobs marketplace. In B2B SAP lets its customers post job listings in its SAP Community Network. It abstains from recruiting there themselves. But I am told quite a few companies and employees have found each other very effortlessly that way.

Earlier this morning I asked a question on Twitter: "What do you look at first each morning, eMail, Twitter or Facebook?"

In two hours time, more than 30 people responded. There was never any closeness to the results. Twice as many people start each day with email than Twitter. Facebook, in my unscientific survey finished a distant third, but Hell, I asked the question on Twitter.

I have no overwhelming point to make. I was just curious. I am not surprised at the results. I look at email first myself. It is where business  and new business come in first most of the time. My Gmail is an easier venue for deleting the spam and assorted crap we all must endure.

H. Stumm of Darmstadt, Germany gave the most creative non-answer. He said he goes to "CM" first, the Coffee Maker. Since he was the 8th of over 30 to respond, I assume he consumes his coffee with great gusto.

What I do find remarkable is that Twitter has become the first or second "to go" destination for people I connect with every morning. The platform is less than four years old and yet it has become so very important to so very many people.

I wonder if it will continue to evolve as a top priority. Will it overtake eMail as the first place to look in the morning? Or will it's sharpness get dulled as more marketers and message senders insert themselves into what has been people-to-people conversations.

What do you look at first each day? What is rising and what is falling? Why?

Mitch Joel, in my view, is a good guy. He's smart and his written and intelligent and popular book. We seem to agree on many issues. But one place where we are not joined at the hip is on our current views of Apple Computer.

Mitch thinks that all this negative noise--the Gizmodo incident, Ellen DeJeneris, FCC antitrust investigation, John Stewart and the most recent "antennagate" has done nothing to hurt the company.

Mitch sends evidence almost daily. He reports record lines in front of the San Francisco Apple Store, record sales for the year, and so on and so forth. Mitch offered to bet me $1,000 that a year from now, Apple will emerge unscathed from the current avalanche of unfavorable coverage. The loser would give the money to a favorite charity.

I am in no position to be gambling $1,000. Besides, unlike Mitch, I am not so very sure how all this will come out.

Someone else tweeted me, "Apple may be doing bad PR, but people don't care. I consider that an oxymoronic statement. PR, as I learned and practiced it, is about relationships with publics, not about hits from a press release or any such tactical nonsense.

Lately, Apple has been consistently doing a style of PR, that has surprised, angered and disappointed some people. I am one of them. At times I've considered them arrogant. At times they have played the part of the bully.

So long as they are the only ones making brilliant products, they can get away with such behavior. But the market is changing. Others have come out with very good phones and history suggests that those competitors will keep making better and better phones and with all that competition prices and margins are likely to slip.

This is where the PR gaffes come in.  PR shapes how people feel about a company. They involve trust. On rare occasions PR, has a dramatic, sudden impact on a company's market position. Usually the process is slower than that.

For a very large company the erosion can take a very long time. It took General Motors, for example, more than 20 years, to hit the rocks and they coupled bad PR  with building shoddy products.

Apple still builds fine products. But now there is a wart on the nose of the Apple hero image. Now, people who have not yet purchased an iPhone for the first time, may look at other options. Now, people who have contracts with AT&T expiring may shop around.

There is already a trickle of erosion. I know that because a small handful of folks on Twitter have told me they've switched or will.  I do not think the number will swell dramatically immediately.

But I think that if Apple does not change how it converses with its publics soon,  there is an excellent chance that it will begin feeling a loss of repeat customers and see new customer stray. I think that it's vendor-friendly service pricing [They get a share of AT&T's outrageous take] will go down and that impacts the bottom line.

In my view Apple needs to vastly upgrade the way it conducts conversations with customers.  Currently, its demonstration of responsiveness is Steve Jobs reading cherry-picked emails sort of the way the late Perry Como used to read song requests on his TV show in the late 1950s.

What Jobs is doing is performance-oriented, not conversation-oriented. It wows a few people for a short period of time, but most folk understand that it's hokey.

There are thousand, perhaps millions of people who now have fear, uncertainty and doubt about Apple. The best way to offset that is to join the popular social networks and to start using blogs and podcasts in a meaningful way.

We need to start seeing people who work at Apple, who are passionate about their work, who care about user concerns and who are not Steve Jobs.

I reduced my bet with Mitch Joel from $1,000 down to one drink, based on results of Apple sales/profit numbers one year from now. I am not extremely certain of winning. A large company is like a supertanker, running on an open throttle. It takes a lot of time and distance to change its direction. It takes a lot of time and distance also to change user perception.

What I am absolutely certain about is that Apple was in a much stronger market position six months ago than it is today. And if it does not alter course, the supertanker that is Apple Computer will eventually discover it is headed directly toward rocky shoals.

By then, it may be too late to alter course.