May 16th was my last day at Amazon. After about a week of a half of vacation I’m starting all over today at blist.com, a small, early-stage startup in Pioneer Square, Seattle. My tentative job title is “Technical Project Manager”, but my actual work will encompass so much more. I’m looking forward to working with such a young, ambitious company and getting the chance to leverage my skills and experience in ways that will hopefully help make them very successful.

In my tenure at Amazon, I had the opportunity to work with so many awesome people that I can’t count how many people I need to thank. I still love Amazon and all it’s hard working employees, but this opportunity at blist was too good to pass up. They’re small, scrappy, and have a grand vision of the future, probably much like Amazon did when it was starting out. It’s a big jump, but it should be a great ride, and I look forward to being able to accomplish some great things.

Photo borrowed from TheMahers Seattle Lunch2.0 photoset on flickr

Although I’ve had accounts on a good number of them, I just can’t keep them properly updated and maintained anymore. Thus, I’ve decided to start “pruning my network,” so to speak. As such, I’ve cancelled my accounts on Orkut and Friendster. I haven’t even touched my Orkut account in about 2 years, except to occasionally accept friend requests from the hordes of (often quite attractive) Brazillian women who seem to try and befriend everyone on Orkut. And I hadn’t logged into Friendster for so long that I couldn’t remember my password. I also plan on canceling my Myspace account soon, but I’d like to notify a few friends on there before I suddenly disappear.

From now on, I plan on maintaining a much smaller collection of social sites:

• Flickr for my photo collections
• Facebook for general friend-networking
• LinkedIn for career networking
• Twitter for random comments

If you want to network with me, you’re best to find me on one of those four in the future.

Update: I’ve notified those people in my MySpace that weren’t already on Facebook and I’ve canceled my account.

I don’t normally review other websites on here, but this site is screaming for a post. Two friends from Michigan recently launched The Kegulator. Input the number of people coming to your party and how drunk you want them to be, and it tells you how much beer you need. Not only that, it does it in convenient case/pony/keg increments. And accounts for beer loss. And tells you how many cups and how much ice to buy.

Best use of AJAX ever.

Update: Has anybody else noticed that lately all I seem to be posting about is beer?

I recently switched from using Bloglines to using Google Reader as my primary RSS/Atom feed reader. Great move. I love Google Reader. In my opinion, its the best online feed reader on the market. Seamless integration with my GMail, only marks posts I actually read as read, etc. Its a bit slow sometimes, but hell, so was Bloglines. I can live with it.

But the real problem with feed readers, and blogs in general, is social. People need to stop the “me too” posts. I’m sick of it. I subscribe to most of the big guys. Boing Boing. TechCrunch. Slashdot. Digg. Deli.icio.us. And tons of little guys. And about 20% of the content they post is the same damn stuff everybody else has posted. If one more person today posts anything about:

• Microsoft paying for people to edit Wikipedia
• Second Life (anything about Second Life. I’m sick of the whole concept)
• MySpace’s spam lawsuit

… I’m going to freaking kill somebody.

For me, the ultimate killer feed reader wouldn’t be yet another feed aggregator, it would be a meme aggregator, an agent to identify trends of similar posts and eliminate them so I only get the most relevent posts, not the same news story over and over. And while you’re at it, track the posts I actually spend time reading and don’t just scroll over, and use that data to figure out what topics I actually care about, so I don’t get carpal tunnel of the scroll wheel finger skipping posts I don’t care about.

Overall, we were all incredibly impressed. The “unconference” format was excellent - short 5 minute presentations, all on very interesting topics, kept things flowing quickly and you never got bored. Plus, easy access to beer never hurts.

Some of the excellent presenters included:

• RealityAllStarz (freaking sweet, I already have an account)
• Biznik, business social networking
• The Darfur Wall (Go. Donate. Now!)
• Scott “The Closer” Ruthfield from Amazon.com, on how Amazon doesn’t suck as much as you think
• Rob Flickenger with HackerFriendly, on “book sprints” and print-on-demand

I’ll be at the next one. For sure.

I have to say I was pretty excited about ValleyShwag. As an avid shwag-hound and a self-declared Web 2.0 geek (even though I work for what is technically more of a Web 1.0 company), the idea of getting a monthly care package full of goodies from cool Bay Area tech companies sounded pretty neat. Even at $15/mo, I signed up as soon as I read about it on Boing Boing.

Yesterday I got my ValleySchwag 3. And I’m not that impressed.

After getting double billed for a ValleySchwag 2 that I never received (they shipped it to the wrong address even though I corrected my address with them and in my account), I get a ValleySchwag 3 that’s not nearly as cool as everybody else got in the first two ’schwags.

I guess the Laughing Squid and EFF stickers are cool though. I did get two t-shirts, although I could swear I put my size in as large instead of medium. When I checked my account I was listed as medium though, so maybe something was changed.

I understand that they must be going through some serious growing pains, what with going from like 30 subscribers to several thousand in a month. And two t-shirts alone is a lot to ask for when you’re only paying $15/mo. But I would have swapped one of the t-shirts for another handfull of stickers or some other fun stuff.