Ok I know what a lot of you are thinking…Windows Mobile 5! I am the proud owner of a Treo 700wx. Why not upgrade to an iPhone or a Blackberry and take advantage of other Twitter apps on those devices you might ask? I admit, and iPhone would be real cool, however here are several reasons why I haven’t jumped on that band wagon yet, most of them personal preference.

Reasons I’m holding out:

1. I am not a big fan of AT&T, I think they are a crutch for the iPhone. They are more expensive and their customer service is sub-par. I say this from personal experience with them, and I hear this from a lot of my friends on AT&T.
2. I have had phenomenal customer service with Sprint, and they have even improved recently based on some complaints about their level of service. The local Sprint stores are great in this area and being a regular they have helped me a lot (for example, as of late I have had some bad battery issues on my phone. I went to the Sprint store and my contact there, Drew, hooked me up with a brand new battery free of charge)
3. In regard to a Blackberry, I prefer a touch screen, although they are nice phones.

Well, enough of why I still have my Treo 700wx…now onto my search for a good, fast Twitter App for my WM5 phone. I tried Twobile and ceTwit, but both bogged down my phone so much and would crash often. I then came across Twikini, optimized specifically for WM phones. Within 5 minutes of using is I was already tweeting and texting my fellow WM friends that they needed to download it. Amazingly Twikini is super fast, feature rich, and extremely easy to use.

So for any of you stalwart Windows Mobile users out there, I would strongly recommend giving Twikini a try.

One big piece of news from today is the deal between Plaxo and Comcast – yep – another big merger. The purchase price is between $150 and $170 million. All in all I think this is a great move for Plaxo, even though they originally wanted $250 million. Plaxo has been making some great advances on there site over the past year, including Pulse - their version of the Facebook News Feeds and User Feeds. Even though Plaxo may not be as trendy and popular as Facebook, I do think with proper guidance and marketing it can be a great tool for a more business savvy audience and possibly an older generation.

As a product manager I have been seeing more and more variance between this role and what a project manager is supposed to operate as. I’ll admit that until recently I saw very little difference between the project manager and a product manager. Was I ever wrong! I started to poke around the with this question and a slough of great resources was opened up to about this differentiation. Since my world evolves around web technology primarily I needed to find some specifics on web product management. With a few Google searches I found a great blog Rob Grady. He explains on a very simple level the importance of taking a web product beyond a short term project to a point where management continues through the entire “product lifecycle.”

From what I gather, the primary difference between product and project management is that project management is focused on getting the project launched on time and within budget and oft times with no regard to what features are removed to get it launched. However, for the product manager, the customers or users of the product take priority number one and they concern themselves with even the smallest of details. Product managers realize that the cumulation of many small issues can make or break the site and cause users to stop using the product.

With the coming of the new year I will be taking a “cool nerd” approach to Product Management and will be providing periodic updates on what I discover through research and application.

Okay I know this is the band wagon, and this is all yesterdays news, but I couldn’t help blogging about Google’s Open Social.  I know it’s been awhile since I have posted anything new, but I have been swamped with launching a new platform.  ZDnet’s Robin Harris hits on an interesting thought about why Microsoft won the  deal with Facebook – that is was a “bluff”on the part of Google to get Microsoft to throw a bunch of money at Facebook.  I agree that 240 million is a small amount for either Microsoft or Google, and I think Harris is right that Google didn’t really want the deal because they had the plans for Open Social ready to reveal the following week to steal the thunder away from the Microsoft/Facebook deal – and they way I see it – it worked.  There are a lot of big companies, including Myspace that is going to support the Open Social movement.

A friend of mine and I were talking about all these big happenings and it’s like a big tug of war.  The good thing about this tug of war is that the social web is going to greatly benefit by the results.  Working in the social networking industry it continues to amaze me how fast the web and development of social applications are moving.  Making it more open and enhancing broad scale collaboration will only speed that process up even more.

The fairly new social network site MyLifeBrand recently received $750,000 from an undisclosed party – pretty hefty amount for a small start-up out of Utah (by the way my home state). MyLifeBrand launched earlier this year with some big claims about their social platform. I heard about the social network several months ago, but not until recently did I decide to give it a try. So here are my impressions:

• The graphics of the site are pretty cool, but the bright colored navigation buttons on the site are a bit distracting to me, in fact I avoided clicking on them for a good while because I thought they were paid banner ads or something.

• I am a bit confused with the Community -I can’t seem to figure out how to change from the Global community, but I imagine we’ll see more from this as time goes on.
• They have a nifty little way of allowing users to aggregrate other social networks although when I tried this with my Facebook account and it displayed Facebook in a frame – personally not a fan. Not sure how else they could achieve this, but my thoughts on this would be to minimize the MyLifeBrand navigation menus it would allow for a more appealing user experience.

• I tried to import my friends from my Facebook & Myspace accounts and it neither of them worked. Oh well, they are in Bet.
• I like the Jazzbots.com site that is running as a MyLifeBrand social community, and I can see this feature being a potentially high revenue platform if they do this right. If they prove a solid solution for the NBA Jazz it could open some doors for them.

It will be interesting to see what the $750k will do for MyLifeBrand, I would like to see more with the Community idea and the social aggregation.