Listen, Facebook, we have to talk.

We have a lot of fun together. We go through photos, play scrabble, chat with friends, its great. But lately I’ve started to see a side to you that I’m finding rather aggressive. I am speaking specifically about your new “People You May Know” area on the main aggregate screen that provides a short list of people that you think I have simply overlooked.

Sorry, Facebook, it’s more complicated than that. While they are friends of my friends, I do not know them. Don’t get me wrong, I am aware they exist, the names are familiar to me, but I have yet to be properly introduced and conversed to the point where it wouldn’t be weird to ask them to consider me as their friend. So, I would appreciate easing off the pressure, I will meet them on my own, at some point, in real life.

And while we’re putting it all out there, Facebook. You leave me in an awkward place when you add ex-girlfriends from back in collegeto that list. I’m not sure whether we left things as friends, so asking them to add me as a friend is a pretty loaded request.

So, please Facebook, trust me that as soon as I see a familiar face, I will add them as a friend, but until then, stop telling me who I should be friends with.

At work I got an email saying that my Outlook inbox was over the allotted bandwidth. I was shocked, (not “how-can-this-be” shock, because I save everything so I did not doubt I did indeed reach the allocation level) because we had an allocation level that I was able to reach. I look to my Gmail and Yahoo accounts and for years their maximum allocation has grown well faster than I could catch, even with saving just about every email.

Yahoo recently announced that they are doing away with the allocation altogether, this is relatively trivial; considering they were already outside the scope of most people’s usage, but at the same time it was absolutely a huge move. Since the costs of storage continue to drop, Yahoo determined it was too cheap to meter and more strategic to just give it away for free, and find the revenue in another way (advertising or cross-selling perhaps).

This move to the FREE business model is the basis of this very illuminating WIRED magazine article from Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail). This article dives into the business strategies of the digital age, and the new economics that are essentially being invented on the fly that make sense of this bold new world. It’s a very intriguing look at the where we are economically and how the Internet and digital media is driving where we are heading, to a world where we get a whole lot more, for FREE.

As we get closer to the holidays and the shopping gets crazy and tensions get higher, it is important to step back and remember that it’s really all about being together, like Chewbacca reuniting with his family for Life Day, and enjoying the times we share, like Bea Arthur and Snaggletooth at the Cantina bar. If this all sounds very confusing and bizarre, then you are probably not familiar with the 1978 Star Wars Christmas Special. Fortunately, someone was kind enough to edit that train wreck of a two hour program down to 5 minutes and post it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asnVcbWQ2cg

I think the lesson learned from this special is all too self-evident. Taking risks is a part of growth, but you must be very very careful with the choices you make, especially when they impact your brand.

Editors can be so easily overlooked when talking about creative types. It is often forgotten that amidst the scanning for spelling or punctuation errors, they have to creatively synopize and sell the article in only a handful of words.

I really enjoyed this article headline from The Motley Fool (circled below), it made me click through to an article I would otherwise never have read, which in my book means it triumphantly succeeded.

I have a cell phone, iPod, portable DVD player, and PDA that are all quivering because they are about to become paperweights as soon as I finish serving the second year of my current Sprint contract. If the last day of the contract is October 1st, then come October 2nd I will be in line at the Cingular store for my new iPhone. I’m drinking the kool-aid on this one. I can see how it will suddenly change everything. Not convinced, try watching this video.

The key to a remarkable photograph is seeing the world at a slightly different artistic angle. I’ll wager then that the key to a remarkable sculpture is presenting the work in a slightly different way. For Nathan Sawaya, that unique angle is using Lego’s.

I used to have thousands of these things all over our house as a kid. I build everything from moonlanders to cityscapes, but I never had that inginiuity to try to create art.

See Sawaya’s collection of Lego Art over at CNN.com

When I lived in Delaware every Tax Day the post offices would paste a sign on their door noting that while they were closed, here is the closest location open for time-stamping your taxes. A single piece of paper on the door with a single address listed; it was simple and effective. Any procrastinating tax preparer at the eleventh hour is going to start at their local post office, and then proceed from there based on the instructions provided.

But Maryland didn’t provide any instructions. The Rockville Post Office was open to the public, but there were no signs, no workers, no notes, no instructions, no clear path at all what to do. There were also a dozen eleventh hour tax preparers inside befuddled and frustrated.

Somewhere in Maryland a post office was collecting filings. How hard would it have been to make that location known to the people of Maryland?