Yakuza Crates

A current addiction of mine contains the phrase "Yakuza Crates". Many of you will be familiar with the term. Yakuza, or a Japanese gangster. I've spent most of my free time lately completely immersed in a game on Facebook call "Mafia Wars". Mafia wars has the simplicity of clicking a link on a website, but the addictiveness of crack cocaine. Seems once you start you can't walk away. The makers of this game have found a perfect mix of simplicity, competitiveness, social networking and what i'll call "onion'ey goodness" Every time you think you got a handle on the game you realize there are several tasks or layers that you need to be working on at one time. Toss in the social side of human nature and you've got yourself a fun little game. The entire concept is your a mafia member. You have to grow your mafia family and do all the stuff mafia people do. Simple enough. If you do facebook, and want to enjoy some fun I encourage you to join. If you do decide to try it please add me to your mafia!!

I guess Mafia wars has also struck a deeper chord with me. I've been a member of Facebook for a long time. Not as long as cammo, he was the first person i ever knew that was a member. Facebook has grown and morphed since then. Today social networking is king and growing at light speed. In my own journey i've gone from having a website over a decade ago. Years later i gave up the webpage for the ease of blogging. Now my paradigm has started to lean away again toward... for lack of a better word. Micro-blogging. It is far easier to share a quick thought, or idea in the world of microblogging than it is to put the thought together to create an entire blog entry. I'm sure people way smarter than me are studying this phenomena but it makes you wonder when this Facebook generation gets to the work place how this technology will impact the workplace. Email will be WAY too slow. This crew will be a custom to always being connected to each other and having the ability to communicate instantly. They care about what others are doing, but in some cases have no need to be near them physically. It will be so interesting to try to cram the Facebook generation into the current world of offices, phone conversations, actual letters in the mail, etc. I am some what of a t'weener in this aspect. I see the need to do things in offices and phones, and mail. But man, i can so get on board with instant communication and online conversing. Even at work i've noticed this bias in my tech support. My tendency is to get back with folks much much quicker if they are on instant messenger than if i have to call them. These are just some random thoughts, but should be fun to see the worlds collide in the not so distant future.

I end this blog with this. If you have never done facebook. I dare you to try it. I bet in 1 week you will have communicated with at least one person that you have not spoken to in years. You'll find out that there is a whole new world in the facebook land. And you'll have quick access to information about what is going on in peoples lives than you did not have the day before you joined.