Empathy Politiku now on Huffpo. Thanks to the stellar line of contributors it was, well, stellar.  Even got syndicated at the top of the NYTimes.com Headlines around the web section last Thursday!!  The editors have, since then, archived it on their Blogrunner Souter retrospective page.

Started Tweeting, finally.  Since Politikus are so all-consuming when I work on them I started two Twitter accounts:  @SusannaSpeier (to Tweet and get Tweeted by re everything under the eventually-to-be-exploding Sun) and @Politiku (so individual Politikus can be syndicated as autonomous entities).  Tweets, with their 160 character limit, kinda lend themselves to that, anyway.  Plus, it enables the stuff submitted too late to include on Huffpo to circulate.

Boyfriend and I went to the Apple Store yesterday.  Generous, classy and supportive guy that he is, he wanted to get me an iPhone 3G and help me cover the cost of switching from Verizon to AT&T for my birthday.  Found the applications kinda cumbersome, tho.  Plus, it’s kinda slow.  Decided to wait for the new one to come out —it’ll be over twice as fast— and so he shopping spreed me with a flurry of breezy Gatsby-esque summer attire.

Facebook’s new staking a claim in ones own name land rush thing will be the end of Facebook, according to Douglas Rushkoff (who I met over a post-root canal reading at the Corneila Cafe St. circa 2000). Doug is pyrotechnic-ally brilliant (according to my own observations and also according to Joshua Goldberg) and so consequently I’m gonna hang back, like Doug is, and let whoever want to claim my name, claim my name.  Given the fact

I’m the only Susanna Speier out there, whoever else might try to claim would do so for the loathsome purpose of selling it back to me at a premium and so, as a result, I wont ever try and steak a claim on a Facebook Vanity plate.

The beginning of the end of my Facebook relationship and I don’t even care.  Well, I sort of don’t.  See, I’m one of those people that thrives on interactions with others.  It energizes me.  Facebook birthday wall wishes were posting in throughout the day…spanning what, I think, was every single era of my life from elementary school on and I found this extraordinary.  Okay, I promised an ode so here goes:
(try and imagine this as though scored by a minimalist composer)

Huffpo, Twitter and the iPhone’s nixed
now, according to Doug Rushkoff,
Facebook self-deep-sixed
due to the failure of their gold rush land grab.

And if this occurs
if Facebook simply poofs and vanishes
due to the failure of their gold rush land grab
or dissipates into ether through the sublimation process
then, oh how I will miss those birthday wall posts.
The utterly unequivocal birthday wall posts.
Those Birthday wall posts.  When someone from each and every era of your life emerges from the digital woodwork in order to wish you happiness.

Birthdays can be scary,
Birthdays can be strange,
Birthday can even be lonely,
Wrought with fear and loss and longing and dissatisfaction,
due to everything you have thus far failed to achieve of obtain.

But when your friends
from each and every era of your life
and time zones all around the globe
and zones south of the equator
where the leaves are turning red and gold,

When your family your former classmates, your colleagues and even your acquaintances all take the time to post a Happy Birthday
then that is a truly Happy Birthday
it is, in fact, the kind of Happy Birthday
that makes me hope that Doug Rushkoff
is wrong about the end of Facebook
or at least, makes me wish that Facebook would
dispense with the vanity domain concept
and go back to the old ways
of random numerically coded domains.