**Special Note** For the record this post was in my drafts and I'm using it to test posting with Windows Live Writer.  I don't know why you'd need to know that but I thought I'd tell you anyway.

Jeff Zuckerberg is an interesting character. From his scandalous “under 30 comments” (I was offended and I’m under 30) to the newsfeed controversy he’s managed to rub people the wrong way at an astounding rate (for a nice summary of most of these scandals see here). This is still my favorite Zuckerberg quote…

"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. "I don't know...Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."

At the same time, his company has managed to add enough innovation to largely negate much of the negative influence that the various scandals have had.

So I’m interested to see where this whole Beacon mess goes. For those who have been under a rock, Facebook created a new service called Beacon in which each user’s purchases (from other sites) would be published on their newsfeed (Dare Obasanjo has a nice summary post about it). People were automatically opted in to this and there was no global opt out which caused a huge stir.

The issue here is that anyone with even a little experience with people should have seen this coming from a mile away. Had they even polled their own employees I have to believe that a good percentage of them would have balked at the idea of springing this on people without even a warning.

Which brings me to my point which is that I don’t think a 23 year old should be running a company with such a public profile. There are certainly exceptions to that rule (Bill Gates for example) but Mr. Zuckerberg has proven time and again that he isn’t one of those exceptions. If it were me, I’d hunt down a CEO with some experience in dealing with the public and resign myself to the role of Chief Technologist as soon as is humanly possible.

One of the things I've never wanted to be was the guy who starts a blog, updates it for a couple of weeks, and then never updates it again leaving it out there for all to see.  To me it just seems like it's a testament to that person's laziness and I didn't want to be that person.

So I decided if I was going to start a blog that I would do it in private for 6 weeks before I ever made it public.  That is why, while this is my first official post, you'll find several posts from the past few weeks that pre-date this one. 

In the end I'm glad I did it this way.  I'm certainly not prepared to call myself a great blogger just yet but I will say that I've gotten 10x better at this in just the few weeks I've been doing it.  More over I've started to define who I am as a blogger and have begun to make changes to reflect that.

For example, it has really been a disappointment to me that I've not posted more code here.  The "techmeme-topics" tend to draw more of a reaction from me so that ends up being what I've commented on thus far.  But going forward I'd very much like to focus more on productive stuff like writing code and designing software and less on all the (in the long run) superfluous chatter. 

There is a lot more that I'd like to say but I still have some "blog configuration" issues to work out so I'm going to cut this short.  My first public post turned out to be a little harder than the private ones but I suspect that too will get easier with time.  At least, I hope it will (I don't want to accidentally end up being the guy who wrote a blog for a couple weeks and then gave up)