"A friend is a present you give to yourself," read a fortune cookie I received last night. With all due respect to Robert Louis Stevenson, the 19th century poet and novelist responsible for that quote, an overflow of friends in social networks and Web 2.0 is simply making them less like presents, and, in many cases, unmanageable! Call me a curmudgeon, but I'm not alone.

I spend quite a bit of time tracking issues related to consumer privacy, so I was very happy to see yesterday's announcement that Safecount has been relaunched by Kantar, WPP's research arm, as a consumer-controlled research platform. I think that it is a great idea whose time has come. Having been involved in the initial launching of Safecount, which was the brainchild of Dynamic Logic founder Nick Nyhan and was focused on developing policies and programs to improve the transparency of cookie usage for consumers, I take particular interest in seeing the folks at WPP turning what started as some …

Yelp is a simple idea, much like Craigslist, and one that might have enough legs to expand to other markets. I hear New York and Los Angeles are starting to Yelp. I imagine other major cities will do so as well, because just like Craigslist before it, I was amazed at how quickly the tool is becoming useful to people outside the Bay Area. The innovation that begins here expands digitally in an exponential fashion to other cities. Other cities may bring us fashion, but we bring them cool technology!