A few months ago, after feeling the initial rush of getting a million users of our Facebook app We're Related in just 29 days, I set up a Facebook group with an admittedly dumb name: Utah CEOs With a Facebook Strategy. It now has 488 members. We met a couple of times in Provo earlier this year. Jason McGowan and Michael Jensen from our team at FamilyLink.com shared with about 30-40 attendees how to build an app that is viral and can scale, and I tried to pump the Facebook opportunity as well as I could. I'm a true believer in what Facebook did with their Platform, as you will see from my original blog post the day they announced it, back in May 2007, when I predicted that Facebook would become the world's leading social network.

I switched to GMail about 2 years ago, but I have kept my Yahoo email account around so it can forward everything automatically to GMail.

But today, because of Jerry Yang's CES Keynote, which makes it clear that Yahoo is going to become very friendly to third party developers, and because Yahoo Mail still has more users (I think) than GMail, I decided that I would download Yahoo Go! to my Blackberry, and start using YahooMail again, so I can keep my feet in both camps.

Last night I was told about a great site for buying cell phones online called letstalk.com. So I checked it out and they do seem to have most phones and most carriers, so a lot more options than you typically see. They offer referral bonuses as well. My friend got a free Blackberry Pearl and loves it.

I just returned from 7 days in Europe. Thanks to LinkedIn Answers, I probably saved $1,000 on airfare on this trip by taking the advice of some of my connections who are more experienced last-minute travellers. (I've joked that with all this great advice, I could publish an ebook on last minute European travel and probably sell it for $10 on our ebook site.)

I'm reviewing some of the powerpoints from December's Search Engine Strategies Conference, particularly the presentations on mobile web site design and marketing, which were excellent.

The session on Mobile Search Optimization, moderated by Danny Sullivan, was excellent. Someone took copious notes and posted them. Must have been a court reporter present.

I found this a little hard to believe--both the percentage of companies supposedly doing mobile marketing and also the overall advertising budget for mobile marketing.

From MarketingVOX:

A study this month from JupiterResearch found 22 percent of companies advertising online also are doing mobile marketing. Overall, the study predicted, mobile ad spending would more than double - from an anticipated $1.4 billion this year to $2.9 billion in 2011.

Comscore and Telephia have teamed up to offer data about web sites that are being visited by mobile web users.

In their first report, Comscore and Telephia show some interesting data about mobile web use. It looks like checking weather is very popular.

Nice article on why marketers should care about local/mobile search:

According to the article, the top five uses of mobile search are:

1. Maps and directions
2. Directory listings
3. Restaurants
4. Stores
5. Local movies

I still like Blackberry best, but if they completely walk away from their traditional keyboard, the exact one I have been using since 1999, I may be tempted to follow a lot of my colleagues and try out a Treo. I won't switch to any new smart phone or PDA unless I can type 50+ words per minute on it. I've tried the newer Blackberry keyboards and they are miserable.

Maybe I'll use my Blackberry 7290 for the next 10 years the way one of my friends still uses his HP Jornada with DOS from about 1992 for searching the scriptures. He says there has never been anything better...

If you run a business with an internet strategy, hopefully you've started thinking about a mobile strategy as well. You need to skate where the puck is going and not where it has been.

IDC estimates that 24 million US mobile phone users will pay for some kind of TV/Video content or services by 2010, up from 7 million this year. That is a sizeable market share. And it will only get bigger.