“SouthBy” is what us Austin natives call the madcap media festival of SxSW that takes over the city every March for about 2 weeks. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to rock out with Black Mountain at the Scoot Inn during the music part of the festival/conference, as I’ll just be staying for the Interactive part, but I got to see them at the Rock n Roll Hotel here in DC this past Tuesday, and I have to say that the rocking was extreme.

But, as Levar Burton would say, you don’t have to take my word for it—check them out here.

But back to the festival. I’m rather chagrined to see that the follow-up to last year’s awesome Will Wright keynote (where we got to see him actually play Spore!) is an interview by over-hyped digital gift mogul Mark Zuckerberg. I call him a “digital gift mogul” because that’s all Facebook really sells. They just lost their “chief revenue officer” earlier this week, too. He says it’s because he wants to be a CEO, but I think it’s because he’s not interested in working for a company that covers its nut with nothing more than breathlessly-proffered VC and digital icons of Troll dolls and panties.

Anywho…Zuckerberg is a flavor of the month. Well maybe six months or so, but he doesn’t deserve to be the keynote speaker at SxSW Interactive. Especially when PC Magazine is putting out articles like this one, entitled “Facebook’s Death Spiral” just before the conference. A couple classes on graph theory and some regurgitated ideas that four or five other people have had before you does not a visionary make, and visionaries are who we’re supposed to have as keynote speakers @ SxSW. That’s a chair that’s been previously held by giants like Philip Glass, Malcolm Gladwell, Howard Rheingold, and Bruce Sterling. We’ll let Mark Cuban and Ana Marie Cox slip in under the door, even if they don’t really fit the mold. But even with them there, Zuck doesn’t belong in the club.

Calling Zuckerman a visionary for making Facebook after Friendster and MySpace (and a bazillion other, less famous general-purpose social networks) had been around for years is like comparing me to Merriwether Lewis because I drove from St. Louis to Montana in a Dodge Caravan. Sooner or later, Google will stitch together all their services, hire some badass interaction dudes like Adaptive Path or IDEO, and put Facebook out of their chumptastic misery.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here wondering if I can start an anti-keynote, like maybe at a 6th street bar, called something like “Let’s All List the Technical, Philisophical, and Interactional Reasons that Facebook isn’t Worth $15 Billion.”

I wonder how many people would show?

New "how private is Facebook" article in the NYTimes:

While the Web site offers users the option to deactivate their accounts, Facebook servers keep copies of the information in those accounts indefinitely. Indeed, many users who have contacted Facebook to request that their accounts be deleted have not succeeded in erasing their records from the network.

“It’s like the Hotel California,” said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

It took Mr. Das about two months and several e-mail exchanges with Facebook’s customer service representatives to erase most of his information from the site, which finally occurred after he sent an e-mail threatening legal action. But even after that, a reporter was able to find Mr. Das’s empty profile on Facebook and successfully sent him an e-mail message through the network.

See? This is why I like Flickr for photos

Since I’m married, I pay no attention to online dating services, so I’m a little late to this party:

Match My Friends™ allows anyone to quickly and easily create a profile for their friend and search for potential dates on their behalf–all without having to have a Match.com profile themselves. After receiving an invitation directly from their friend, the single friend then has the opportunity to enhance and approve the profile before it is ever posted on Match.com.

Watch this video introducing the feature–it’s pretty funny. Wendy, the “hot friend” never says a word, and the two married folk who do talk seem to spend a lot of time reassuring you that this isn’t for freaks and losers, and that neither you nor the potential other that your friends find will “end up on Match.com unless you both agree to.”

In any case, it seems a fantastic use of social networking–one of the first really decent ones I’ve seen. It’s well and good to have lots of digital buddies on Facebook to share photos and goof off, but connecting through friends for dating purposes might finally be the solution to the longstanding it’s-so-hard-to-meet-good-people problem, and therefore kick social networks up to a new level of usefulness.

When you wake up to read that Facebook has been valued at $15 billion, this coming by extrapolating the 1.6% stake that Microsoft bought last week for $240 million, you have to ask yourself what everyone else is: is the next bubble upon us?

If this is the only indication, I think the answer is yes. And I get that from one pesky statistic, the one that haunted web companies in the late 1990s: the price to earnings ratio. A p-to-e ratio tells what the market is valuing your stock at in relation to how much you’re earning. Here’s what the Wall Street Journal has to say on that front. Basically, they’re skeptical—even with the oh-so-sexy factor of actual profits emanating from FB:

That’s right, unlike past meteoric technology risers, the three-year-old company is actually profitable. Facebook’s valuation also equates to 100 times its $150 million of annual revenue. To put a valuation like that into perspective, if you slapped it on General Electric, the industrial conglomerate would have a market cap of $11 trillion, just $1 trillion short of the total U.S. GDP. Even America Online, the poster child for the late-1990s Internet excess, only sported a price-to-earnings multiple at its height of 232 times.

So we’re doing with Facebook 2x the p-to-e craziness we were doing with AOL in the late nineties? We have indeed learned nothing.