John Battelle's Searchblog

From Biz' post on Twitter's shift:

Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore—starting today, we've shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, "What's happening?"

Well, regardless of spin, this is a major shift, to my mind. Semantics matter, *a lot*, when your entire business is, well, semantics. Language is how we encode that which is essential to who we are. And there is a world of difference between "What are YOU doing" (emphasis mine) and "What's happening".

For starters, it's a rather subtle leapfrog of Facebook, which has recently mimicked Twitter with its status updates. Facebook is stuck (but there are upsides to this stuck-ness) in a personal framework. Twitter, by moving past the YOU, is declaring Facebook's imitation moot.

Will that stick? We'll see. But I love to see the evolution of the space. It's such good narrative...

Look. Sure, it's a mobile ad platform, and sure, Google wants to play there, more than they already are. OK. Fine. But really. What's the play?

Droid.

Data.

Droid.

Iphone App Data.

Droid.

K?

Data. Just to be clear. Data. About what works, on iPhone apps, so they can leverage it...for Droid.

K.

Saw this greeting me whilst on Twitter.com today (gotta love WiFi on a plane):

Nice to see Twitter rolling out so many new things, like Lists, which seems to be taking off (though I find the lack of a discovery interface vexing, for now).

Retweeting is integrated in an elegant way, tweets that have been retweeted have a little cycled arrow icon, which identifies tweets that folks you've followed have retweeted. Another signal (as are Lists) that Twitter will be able to use as core data to drive its unique value. Watch that space, it's where Twitter will win (or lose).

Twitter also added the ability to retweet any tweet from within Twitter.com, as you can see in the bottom left of the pic below. No doubt this is all already in the API, as Lists was when it rolled out.

Now, why does all this matter? Well, it helps Twitter, as I already said, by providing the company with very valuable core data about what people find worthy of attention. And signals of attention are gold in a data driven platform like Twitter. Secondly, it addresses the continuing problem of discovery - seeing what has been retweeted helps people find others who might be worth following.

Big week last week for Twitter, two deals with two search powerhouses, new revenue, and new traffic will flow due to both. I asked about the pending search deals deep into the interview but Evan plays coy, the announcements come the following day.

Sergey made a surprise visit to Web 2 last week, just as he did six years ago for the first one.

Literally some of the best work I've ever been involved with, yet again, six years in. Many of you asked for the playlist I used for the show (coverage best seen at #w2s, lots of news happened at the event, including Sergey Brin stopping by).

Here's a screen shot of my playlist. I'll make it live soon. (And yes, btw, the songs and their timing with sessions often mean something. But I can't really get into what and why right now.)

Earnings are coming in that make for happy year over year comps, and hence, a happy time in tech land. Intel, Google, IBM all

beating expectations - welcome news for an economy that has felt pretty damn terrible lately. And now the Dow has touched 10K and stayed there - something we haven't seen for a year.  

But I still worry - do you? I worry we'll over correct, and lose the perspective we've all earned over the last year of pain. I sure hope we don't. That said, I sure am happy to see the gloom lifting. We're going into winter, but it sort of feels like Spring right now....

More here.

...as pointed out in this WSJ Digits piece:

As part of the shift, Google is thinking up and tailoring more ad campaigns in close consultation with ad agencies. In May, the Mountain View, Calif., Internet giant altered its sales structure to work more closely with ad agencies and react more quickly to trends by organizing sales staff exclusively by industry, like automotive and technology. It also created a senior position responsible for improving communication with the largest ad agencies.

....The new approach is a turnabout for Google, which for years argued that advertising should be designed and priced based on strict benchmarks such as how many times an ad was viewed, rather than its emotional appeal. Marketers spent handsomely on search ads for specific uses, such as driving sales of a particular product, but when they wanted something more unique they went elsewhere, to Yahoo Inc. or other media, such as television.

If ever there was a strong meme in search, it's the impact of social: Everyone is talking about how Facebook and Twitter are threatening Google for what I've called the "oxygen" of the web: distribution of attention.  

A little background. Google rose to prominence as the absolute winner in the Internet's distribution game. The de facto interface for knowledge navigation, Google brought signal to the noise of Web 1.0: Sure, nearly everything worth publishing was now on the web, but how on earth could you find that ONE thing that mattered to your query, NOW?

A hundred billion plus dollar business ensued: we all now use Google to find that which we want to find on the web. In particular, Google is great at delivering authority on the web for those things that had already been published and ranked: In a way, Google has become the reference librarian of the web.

But...just searching a reference library is one thing. What about finding things people are talking about right now? And wouldn't it be great if you could cross index that reference library with your social graph, so that people you trusted helped you go from query to decision?

Twitter and Facebook promise that next step in search. Let's tease this out a bit.

We have different modes when we search. Sometimes we are looking for that perfect reference point - an article on how to train a dog, for example, or a how to guide on building a treehouse. But then we hit a critical inflection - we want to validate our reference material with a real live human connection. And Google can't really do that. In short, we want to cross reference what we've learned with the experience of someone we trust.

Before the rise and ubiquity of social networks, the ability to do this was pretty serendipitous - sometimes in our reference search we found humans with whom we could connect and then learn (this happened to me in 1995 as I was searching online for my birth mother, but that's another story).

But it's happening more and more online now, thanks to our ability to use Twitter and Facebook to query our social graph. Through status updates or tweets, we can ask real people that which before we asked Google. And, by reading through the lifestreams of our network, we can discover that which we might never has asked, but nevertheless find interesting.

It's late and I'm working way too many hours to do this line of thinking justice. But I will simply state it this way: Facebook and Twitter, you need to get better at mixing traditional web search with what you've already got. And Google/Microsoft, well, vicey versa. You need to get better at mixing social into your traditional web search.

Whoever does it best, wins.

Update: A new study on the interplay of search and social media can be found here.

As I mentioned a couple of days back, one of the folks I get to interview on stage later this month is Sheryl Sandberg, who I met with earlier this week (this post was one result of that meeting). Sheryl is Mark Zuckerberg's key partner in building out Facebook, and while she won't take credit publicly, I'd wager that Facebook's recent declarations of profitability and top line revenue growth have a lot to do with her leadership and focus on Facebook's online advertising platform, which is clearly starting to scale.

Recall that Sandberg came from Google, where she ran ad platforms, and she made the choice to move to Facebook for a reason. What did she see? Well, my own thoughts run to the trends I've been pointing out for the past year or so - the model of attention distribution is shifting in the web economy, and Facebook, along with Twitter and other social sites, are increasingly taking share from Google. Follow the referrals, so to speak. Search is still king, but it's no longer a dictatorship.

So what do you want to hear from Sandberg?

Others we'll be interviewing (and I've asked for your help):

Qi Lu

Carol Bartz

Evan Williams

Brian Roberts

Jeff Immelt

To come: Aneesh Chopra, Jon Miller, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Otellini, Shantanu Narayen, Tim Armstrong, Tim Berners Lee, and more. Again, an amazing lineup.

If you want to come, I can still get you a Searchblog discount (for about another week). Just ping me here.

Today was a good day. I got to meet with serious leaders of the Internet economy, think Big Thoughts, and push my understanding of the world a bit. In short, I spent the day with folks I'll be interviewing onstage at Web 2 next month, but also, with people who run companies that in one way or another are key partners and players in the ecosystem I love and in which my company (FM) works.

I started with a private meeting with a fellow who is taking time off from Google. Can't say much more than that, but it was a great conversation. From there, I met with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. Now, I've got a lot more to say about Adobe, which recently purchased Omniture, but for now, trust me when I say, keep your eye on Adobe. Next, I met with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. And then, I met with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

I noted an anecdotal observation to Sheryl - that I would write something here, tweet a notification of my post on Twitter, and that notification would then update my Facebook status through an app.

Then, I'd watch what happens. And what happens, more often than not, is that I'll get as many if not more comments on the Facebook status update - inside Facebook - as I do on this site or on Twitter. And more often than not, those comments on Facebook are as thoughtful if not more thoughtful than the ones here. On Twitter, responses to posts here are more likely than not retweets, which is great, but not the same as a comment.

I asked Sheryl if she thought I was an outlier, expecting her to agree that in fact I was. But instead, she said the opposite: people like to comment on links referred through friend networks, and for good reason. It's one thing to comment on blogs like this one, in relative anonymity. It's quite another to comment in the context of Facebook, where those comments are seen by a group of folks with whom you have a social relationship.

I'd like to close that loop - show the comments locked in the Facebook domain on the site here - and I'm looking into getting that done. Let me know if you have any insight on how I might automate it.

Regardless, the implications are rather vast. Facebook has become a defacto leader in distribution of attention - just as Google was back in 2004-6. And everyone - trust me, everyone - is paying attention. Twitter is also a major distributor of attention, but Facebook dwarfs Twitter in terms of social media sharing. I've got a lot more to say about this, but let me mark it this way: With search, we declared private intention, then chose our links to click.

With social media, we publicly declare our intentions and our links. It's a shift of models that is very, very meaningful. More on that later.

And, by the way, Sheryl and I spoke about a lot more than closing the loops on comments. But for more on that, you'll have to wait for Web 2!

Twitter is a fad! Google isn't American! We're in charge! Thank God there's Tyler Bruhle!

Please.

A spate of Google books coming out, including one from Ken Auletta and one already out from Jeff Jarvis, and another from Richard Brandt. Ken's book has dangling, draw-you-in quote, as usual: Apparently Eric Schmidt told him that Google will be the world's first $100billion media company. MEDIA company, mind you. MEDIA.

Oh, never mind.

Today comes news that Google is offering a universal commenting feature that allows anyone using Google's toolbar to leave a comment on any page they visit. Called Sidewiki, the service is intended to "increase engagement on the page" for publishers. But as much as I love the idea of SideWiki, I'm skeptical of it for one simple reason: Google isn't in the community business, and SideWiki, if it's going to work, needs to either A/be driven by communities or B/Needs to be embraced as a standard by publishers, who are the proxy for communities.  

Now, Google is an advertising services business, and one could argue that it's in the business of publishing as well (YouTube, Blogger, Knol). However, the company is not that great at leading community. I've covered this before (Google Maps and Wikipedia, the lack of Google News comments, the failure of Google Video vs. YouTube (and hence, YT takes off, gets bought by Google...), so I won't repeat myself. Suffice to say, I think SideWiki will suffer from the same fate as Google's previous efforts requiring community input: Google is not seen as a explicit community platform.

I sort of wish Yahoo would do stuff like this. This is the kind of product Yahoo could really win with.

SEL coverage here.

Unemployment is up and continuing to rise, the recession, while possibly, maybe, sort of technically over, does not feel over at all, and while Murdoch says "things are better" in the advertising economy, "better" means "no longer totally crap."

So why on earth would I write a headline like the one adorning this post?

Because despite all that bad news, there's a fair amount of good news in the web space. A number of healthy private companies are doing quite well, and seem poised to become serious IPO candidates. Among them:

Facebook. The company said it's now cash flow positive and has been profitable for several quarters. This is the final step toward a public bow, one that could possibly stimulate a wee bit of Googly optimism, just as Google did during the mini-boom of 2004-07.

Demand. According to all accounts, this company has been profitable for several years, is growing nicely, and has revenues well over nine figures. Its search/content/social media mashup model is unique and growing.

Linked In. With a new CEO (Jeff Weiner) who would not have joined had there not been a promise of a large exit, multiple revenue sources, and a strong community, Linked In is another late stage company in the Big IPO queue.

Three companies does not a trend make, but I am sure there are others, and there are even more companies that are one to two years out (like Twitter, for example). It doesn't take that much to get a trend going in these markets. Unlike the bubble of ten years ago (wow, has it been that long), these companies all have profits, histories, and strong operating plans. And the markets have been on a tear, there is plenty of money on the sidelines, and folks are looking for a place to take a little risk after a year of hiding in treasuries and triple A-rated muni bonds.

In short, I think the IPO market is back on the table, and I would not be surprised to see it start to take off in the next several quarters.

Who did I miss, and what companies do you think might be ready to go soon?

This graph is a rough estimate, does not include use of Twitter apps, mobile, etc. It's just traffic to Twitter.com. But it has proven a reliable trending mechanism for Twitter. And it shows a leveling off. Now, I am going to go out on a limb and say the growth is probably mostly in mobile and third party instances. But still...

Way to go dudes at Omgili!

By now you probably know about the “Search Options” feature Google introduced in May. One of its features is to limit the search results by time frame. By default the available time frames are: Any time, Past year, Past week, Recent results and Past 24 hours. Past 24 hours is nice but still far away from Real-time. What Google isn’t telling you is that you can search in the past minute and even in the past second. The trick is to change a parameter in the URL that will narrow down the time frames. ....Notice the URL parameter qdr:d. I assume qdr stands for Query Date Range (sounds about right). All you have to do to search for the query in the past minute is to change the parameter to qdr:n, and for the past second to qdr:s.

Past Minute:

http://www.google.com/search?q=barack%20obama&hl=en&output=search&tbs=qd

Today my company Federated Media announced a new ad format for a group of our publishing partners. We call this beta program "Ad Stamp", and those of you who've been watching the space closely, and reading my thoughts on marketing here, won't be too surprised by what you see.

However, with Ad Stamp there is more than meets the eye, and I wanted to think out loud a bit about why I believe this format works, and how it might reflect some of the trends I've been watching and commenting upon in this space for years.

First and foremost, what is most striking about Ad Stamp is how much space is dedicated to the marketer's message (see image at left - the temporary and one time pushdown at the top is pushed back up in this mock up). Ad Stamp coordinates three large units across roughly 50% of the total space available on a site - an "ad edit ratio" not unlike most premium magazines. An initial visceral response might be "That's too much!", but I don't think that's how audiences are going to react.

Why? Because in the main, I think the rise of ad networks and the relegation of marketing impressions to increasingly competing "third rails" on the sides and tops of sites has created a "Nascar effect" where more than five - if not 15 - messages blink numbly and disparately at their subjects. This is not a quality environment for readers or brand marketers, and it's a premium publisher's job to create a quality environment for both. (For a longer treatise on this see my post "The Rise of Independent Media Brands Online").

It's our belief that delivering 100% of the real estate reserved for marketers to *one marketer at a time* could be part of a strong solution to this concern. Ad Stamp, while still an early test program (and one we hope to roll out to all our sites) does just that. The authors of sites involved in our initial test - sites like Serious Eats, Mashable, Apartment Therapy, Business Insider, Dooce, and Boing Boing - all responded positively to early mockups of Ad Stamp, and all for the same simple reason: It makes the site look better.

Looking good is just one part of the thinking behind Ad Stamp. Other premium publishers are doing similar, larger executions (see the OPA news for more), but FM takes a decidedly social twist, as you might expect. To that end, an equally, if not more significant part of Ad Stamp is a new unit we call "the Conversationalist."

The Conversationalist unit (an early execution is shown below) takes some of the best work FM has done over the years (content-driven, conversational ad units), and brings it full circle into the realm of high quality brand marketing. The thesis is this: When a reader comes to the page, he or she initially sees the uncluttered, focused brand message via the coordinated pushdown and tower on the side. (Both of these units are now quite standard across the premium publishing web, but are not often coordinated from a creative and messaging standpoint.) Given that FM sites are A/ a branded environment; B/ a conversational media environment; and C/ that brands are conversations; the next step is pretty logical for an enlightened marketer: Provide the reader with a space where he or she can converse with the brand.

That's where the Conversationalist comes in. Developed in part through work FM did with American Express, Microsoft, and many others, the unit can pull in and curate nearly any conversation deemed relevant by the marketer. Nearly every brand on the web now has Twitter, Facebook, and blog presences, for example. Some have an extremely sophisticated approach to social media (witness American Express Open's Open Forum or Asus and Intel's WePC, for example). In short, brands are becoming social media publishers, and they have a lot to say, and they are increasingly ready to begin a dialog with their customers. The Conversationalist is where they can do just that.

Consider the scenario of a movie campaign, for example, or a mobile phone launch. Both types of campaigns are driven by awareness - the marketer wants to announce the presence of something new and timely. Ad Stamp provides a large canvas for just that. But both campaigns also create a ton of conversation across the Web. The Conversationalist provides a place to curate and add to that dialog - via Twitter and Facebook feeds, blog search, and more.

We've noticed that ads which offer up a chance to join a dialog or engage with contextually relevant content perform one to four times better than ads without these features. It's my belief that combining a clean, clutter free environment with the opportunity to converse is a strong alternative to the Nascar-network blight that seems to be creeping into high quality conversational sites.  

For now, Ad Stamp is limited to about 20 sites in the FM family, in two distinct categories - tech/biz (around 11 million uniques) and Home (about 10 million). Should this new format prove successful, we'll roll it across all of FM, and it's my hope the rest of the industry will adopt similar formats. We're all in this together.

In summary, Ad Stamp is a response to what I wrote in a previous post about all of this more than a year ago:

Brands are, in essence, defined by the conversations your consumers have about your products or services (and yes, I am indebted to Cluetrain and Ogilvy and any number of other great thinkers, even Hopkins, who might justifiably be the bridge between direct response and brand advertising).

Brand advertising in traditional media has been about getting in between the ears of a target consumer in some way and "building brand equity" through media executions. In essence, brand advertising has been, up till now, an attempt to influence the conversation that potential consumers will have after experiencing the advertising.

With conversational media and marketing, that concept is time shifting. Now brand advertising can *join* and even *initiate and convene* those brand conversations. And that requires a different skill set, one media folks are just starting to explore. To date, we've just begun to figure out how to execute marketing in this new form of media in ways that work for all parties concerned - the content producer, the marketer, and the consumer. But that doesn't mean we won't. It just means we have very interesting work ahead of us.

I am thrilled that by working with the amazing folks at FM and our extremely thoughtful publisher and marketing partners, we're taking what has been a lot of theory on this site (OK, call it bloviating if you wish) and turning it into very real advances that are becoming reality in the field. I feel very, very fortunate. And as always, let me know what you think, as your input over the years is what has always led my thinking.

I live in the Bay area, a place that has been, in the past 20 or so years, woefully underserved by what those in the quality news business call, well, quality news. I also am a graduate of a fine Bay area quality new journalism program, and I taught there as well. And before I started my career in technology journalism and entrepreneurial pursuits, my first ever idea was to create a "quality" newspaper for the Bay area. (That's the late great New West magazine at left, started by legendary editor Clay Felker. If he couldn't make it happen, not sure anyone can.)

So imagine my merriment when I read this piece in the NYT entitled The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times Plan San Francisco Editions.

Oh joy! Finally, a place for quality local news! Right?

Not so fast.

The lede of the piece:

Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are planning to introduce San Francisco Bay Area editions, hoping to win new readers and advertisers there by offering more local news, in what could be the first glimpse at a new strategy by national newspapers to capitalize on the contraction of regional papers.

Now, I'm pleased as punch that the two majors want to give me and my neighbors a quality alternative to the failed local papers, but unless the pay attention to some pretty specific realities about this place, I don't imagine it's going to pan out for them in terms of ROI for effort expended. So here are a few thoughts, should either or both decide to focus on our odd little patch of Northern California paradise.

First off, no one in Concord cares a whit about news in San Francisco, unless the Bay Bridge is broken. This is a principle of hyperlocalism, and it's very, very distinct here in the Bay area. For decades editors have been trying to crack the code of what makes the Bay area hang together as a region, and they've all failed. Marin folks simply don't care about what's up in Palo Alto, and those who live in Noe Valley barely care about those who live five miles across town in the burgeoning SOMA neighborhood. If you want to have a local edition of a national newspaper here, you're going to have to figure out a way to cover stories all these folks care about. I'm not sure it's possible....unless....

...unless you focus on the local Bay area stories that we all care about: the ones that have national scope, and cover them with the same rigor and depth that you would any major national story. Now you'd be cooking with gas.

Those stories are, in no particular order:

- Technology and the Internet. No national paper comes close to owning this story (the way The Industry Standard did in the late 90s, or a handful of blog sites do now). There is a serious opening here for determined, high quality journalism. The WSJ already has All Things D, and the Times has a strong passel of reporters already here on the ground.

- Biotech/Health. I break it out because it's a massive story, and totally undercovered. The impact of genetic research and massive drug companies' agendas on policy, for example. The Bay area is one of several key centers of R&D and business in this area.

- The sustainability story. Again, the Bay area leads here, it's not just for hippies or rich liberals anymore.

- Real estate. Everyone cares about the value of their home, and this area is a major story in that regard - some of the highest foreclosure rates as well as the highest home prices within miles of each other. And commercial real estate is huge here as well.

- Asia. Making this very large story approachable to a local audience is key. The Bay area is deeply connected to Asian culture and business but I've not seen great reporting that makes that connection meaningful on a regular basis.

- Food and wine. Sorry, New York, but all the good stuff gets made here. (OK, that was hyperbole but no one can argue with Napa, Sonoma, and other amazing terroirs, and the restaurant culture alone is a major story).

- Sports. We all love our teams - The Giants, the 49ers, the colleges (Cal, Stanford in the main), and the Sharks. This is one thing our local paper does reasonably well.

If the WSJ and/or the NYT can create a "local" edition that *owns* these stories and tells them in a way that makes them meaningful to Bay area residents in a way that transcends traditional local blandishments, I can see a pretty strong audience developing for the product.

But then I look at the other side of the equation: The business proposition. Let's say the two papers create a strong local edition along the lines of what I've outlined above. Folks like me would be thrilled (I'd probably reconsider my decision some years ago to stop subscribing to both papers, though I'd want them online). Would that be enough? Probably not. You need regional advertising to truly make money in the news biz. So will strong local editions mean national papers sell more local advertising? To me, that's a very open question.

The advertisers that once filled the pages of the local papers here - car dealerships, department stores, Frye's electronics, Shaneco jewlers and the like, seem to have found new channels of communication for their customers. Most of those channels are online. I wonder, what will these national/regional plays do online? How will they go to market online? It's an interesting question, and one that will have to be resolved before these editions truly find their footing.

Well, I knew this day would come. I've been ignoring friend requests on Facebook for a month or so because, well, my longstanding friending policy has backfired, and I'm now at my "friend limit" of 5000 (well, 5003, to be exact). This limit has been much discussed, and I'm not sure I can add anything to what has become a timeworn dialog. It is what it is, and to be honest, I think 5000, upon reflection, is way too high a number. It probably should be around 500, if not 256 or something. Because, let's be frank. No one has more than about 100 real friends. The rest are...well...possible friends. Colleagues. Strangers and interesting looking people you might want to meet someday if you ever travel to Bangalore. And...in my case...

Well, my case is certainly not unique, but I'll tell the story anyway, if only to have a record of it in the Database of Intentions so my great great grandchildren can chuckle about it someday. (OK, so my three kids can chuckle at it now).

So back in 2005 or 6, I'm not sure when, I joined Facebook. And a bunch of folks starting friending me, folks I might have met at some point or other, I wasn't always sure. Every so often - say every 25th or so 'friend' - I'd see someone I recognized instantly. An elementary school buddy or a work colleague. But due to my somewhat unique profile in the web space - I have been lurking around these particular parts for nearly 25 years now - any number of people who I didn't know asked me to be pals.

Now, I don't think too hard about what it means to be a semi-public person in the rather small pond that is the web space, but I do have one pretty hard and fast rule: If you can avoid being an asshole, what's the point of the doing the opposite?

So from Day 1 on Facebook, my policy was pretty simple: I accepted every friend request that came my way. I figured it was quite kind of these real people to seek me out and ask to connect, and who knew where this platform might go? By 2005, nearly 50K folks had signed up for my RSS feed, and wasn't Facebook sort of a similar platform? Well, not exactly, but I think with Twitter my point has been made, somewhat. But I digress.

My "don't be a dick" policy served me well for several years. Folks friended me, some of them turned out to be pretty cool (they'd show up at events I promoted, they bought and critiqued my book, they cheered me on as I tried to make FM a success, they visited Searchblog when I had a new post). Sure, I recognized I was not your typical Facebook user - I was leveraging the service more as a platform for my work than a network of real friends, but that was OK. The service would figure out what to do with me at some point, right? After all, I wasn't alone.

But upon reflection, I totally screwed up in how I use Facebook. Buried in there somewhere are groups of folks I really do want to connect with in the way Zuck and co. meant for me to connect. And I Just Didn't Deal.

And now, by all anecdotal accounts, I have to migrate my friends to a "Fan Page." Like I'm Budweiser, or Coke, or MIA. Which I'm not.

No wonder I like Twitter so much.

But I'm resigned to fixing my Facebook world. At some point. Really.

Meanwhile, I'm really sorry to the folks I couldn't friend before I got cut off. I promise to figure it out. But honestly, it'll take me a few days to do it. And I'm a little short on a few open days.

What do you all think I should do? Facebook doesn't exactly make it easy to figure out how to migrate to the world of "Fan Pages" from the world of "5000 Friends."