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My coworkers often laugh at me because of the number of Amazon.com boxes I receive. I buy everything from books to toilet paper to golfballs from the site. It’s possible that I’m the company’s single best customer.

So it might surprise you to hear that I haven’t purchased a Kindle Fire yet. Why? The answer’s pretty simple: I know it’s going to get better. And cheaper. And it will head in both of those directions quickly. So why not wait for the next one?

If you’ve purchased one of the other non-iPad tablet devices on the market, you may be the only one who has. They are each (in some order) thicker, heavier, slower, duller, or just generally crappier than their iPad competitor. Having a down-market product is fine in and of itself, but the companies then seem to exacerbate the problem by having prices that seem to imply a lack of simple logic (case in point). Remember, the iPad starts at $499.

But clearly the Kindle Fire will be different, because Jeff Bezos and company have no interest in charging a premium price for a product that they essentially expect to be a virtual USPS mailbox for their growing inventory of digital goods. Amazon worries about the long-term only and, as the NY Times noted, they actually mean it.

So while the question, “What happens when the Kindle Fire costs $0?” may include a bit of hyperbole, it’s not hard to imagine a day when the Kindle Fire: (1) has progressed to being a truly capable tablet that covers 90% of the iPad’s functions capably, and (2) costs a trivial sum, maybe $49 or $79. What happens then?

If we’re to believe Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma and expect this market to follow other technology markets in history, Apple and the iPad will not be able to simply innovate with ‘sustaining’ features that incrementally drive the state of the art forward. Apple will need to continue to introduce disruptive innovation into the tablet market just to compete with their lower-price, down-market competitors.

In other words, a slightly better browser, camera, or email application won’t be enough to fend off the Kindle tidal wave. It will need to be marrying the iPad with a hovercraft skateboard, a frisbee, or maybe a hot plate stovetop (don’t laugh, think about how handy that would be!). Jokes of course, but you get the idea. It is a lot to ask, but Apple has been developing magical products for quite a while now, so perhaps the disruptive innovation will continue.

In either case, I’m bullish on Amazon’s prospects in moving to win the non-iPad segment of the tablet market. If I see another $499 tablet from any number of poor Apple competitors, I’ll lose my mind.

One thing is clear after using Google+ for about a week: the company is pretty serious about Google+. Unlike Google Buzz, which always felt like a bolt-on, annoyance in my Gmail inbox, Google+ feels like a thoughtful annoyance across all of my Google experiences.

Heading to google.com to find out who played Omar on The Wire? Visiting Gmail to respond to my dad’s email? Running to Google Finance to see how my investment in CRM is doing today? On all these properties, I’m greeted with a (newly-redesigned) gray bar that includes an impossible-to-avoid red number.

If you consider how sacred the pixels on google.com traditionally were to the company, it’s clear that Google is all-in here.

On a tactical level, it’s a logical approach to use those properties as a distribution club. It’s a blunt object that Google can swing to push out Google+ in a way that no other “new” social network could reproduce. A distribution lever like this is a necessary component for Google+’s success, but the challenge is that it is not at all sufficient.

I used the term ‘annoyance’, because the core value of Google+ is so orthogonal to my intention on the various Google properties that it is jarring. I’m on Google Finance thinking about my stocks and wondering if NFLX will continue to go up – I’ve come to that page without any intention of seeing what my friends have shared on Google+. The red number is incredibly “outside” of that experience.

It’s the only item in the top bar not just giving me access to another property, but actually calling for my attention. Note that Google has never gone to these lengths for Gmail, though it would make as much sense functionally. It’s because they know email is not a threat.

And at a macro level, that’s the story here. Despite growing revenue to almost $30B in 2010, Google sends a strong message with Google+ that it is paranoid about its position in “Social.” It is so paranoid, that I wonder if anyone in Mountain View realizes that they’re now bundling their new shiny social network with their properties in a way that resembles Microsoft.

Don’t Be Evil was always a handy mantra at the Googleplex to describe the company’s aspirational moral goals to value its users. In practice, it was much more of a way for the company to point out unfair advantages that other companies had.

Apple has a closed App Store for their iOS products? That’s evil and we won’t be like them.

Facebook has 700 million monthly active users, but won’t let us build one-click pipes to get all of that data out for our use because we’re way behind in Social? Evil.

Microsoft used its massive customer base from its operating system to drive users in the direction of IE and other applications through bundling? Unfair competitive advantage. Evil.

But Google using our massive base from totally unrelated properties to drive users in the direction of our new social network because we’re so far behind Facebook? Hmm.

Maybe its time to change the ‘Don’t be Evil’ message. Because when you leverage an unfair advantage to compete, I think most of the time that should just be called smart.

I love reading articles that question if Twitter is going to make money. It seems like everyone in the entire world has published a piece like that lately. I’ve even had, oh, 5-10 different people ask me how I thought Twitter would make money (maybe because I’ve always stated I thought it could be huge), though generally it’s asked in either an accusatory or skeptical tone.

Look, there are a lot of barriers to becoming a multi-billion dollar business with a sustainable, high-margin, defensible business that “prints money” (though Twitter seem to think it’ll build one). You can count on a hand or two the Internet companies that have done it. But I always find it humorous when a journalist who has talked to a few commentators, or a random person on the street who has thought about a company for a few minutes announces triumphantly that they don’t know how the product will monetize efficiently.

A few weeks ago, I came upon a BusinessWeek article that talked about a young, hyper-growth Internet company. It read:

But how will [the company] ever make money? There’s the rub. The company’s adamant refusal to use banner or other graphical ads eliminates what is the most lucrative income stream for rival [Internet properties].

It was an article that succinctly conveyed the popular opinion of the company at the time and made a number of cynical assumptions about how the company was ignoring some fairly common ways to make money.

And of course, the article was about Google.

Google. Current Market Cap: $138B

Now I’m not saying Twitter will be as big as Google or even that they’ll become *just* a large business. There are a ton of hurdles for it to get there, not the least of which is not stifling its growth by spending energy putting banner ads on twitter.com when so many of Twitter users don’t even use the website. But think about this:

• (Tens or Hundreds of?) Thousands of businesses are already using Twitter for customer service, PR, and marketing.
• Hundreds of thousands of businesses are wondering how to use Twitter to get their message out more effectively. They’re trying new things and clamoring for better tools.

Now if you can’t think of a way to make money in an environment like that when you’re sitting on top of one of the fastest-growing Internet properties in history, then you’re either not thinking hard enough or… worse.

As a Twitter user, I’m glad they’re, as Jeff Bezos said in video yesterday, “Thinking Long-term.” Now if they’re still not making money a year from now, well… good luck to them .

(As an aside, it’s fitting that the Zappos CEO happens to be one of the best examples of using Twitter effectively in business: http://twitter.com/Zappos)

It seems like folks in the Silicon Valley have been talking about the promise of mobile technologies and location-based services (LBS, for short) as long as I can remember. “Golly, just imagine when you’ll be able to walk down the street and randomly decide that you need some crack immediately, so you pull out your hologram mobile phone which will render a visual avatar (Star Wars-style) which will tell you where the nearest drug dealer is to score some rock. Won’t that be amazing?”

With that being said, and given a healthy amount of accompanying skepticism and cynicism, I dare say that location-based services really are on the cusp of mainstream. Just yesterday, Google launched this Loopt-lookalike called Google Latitude which essentially lets you stalk the shit out of your friends, assuming that they either a) mis-read the directions and accidentally consent to getting stalked, or b) actually let you see where they are.

What does that mean? Yesterday, when I arrived home in Palo Alto, I casually saw that my buddy Ben, who lives in San Francisco but whose girlfriend lives in Palo Alto, happened to be just a few blocks away at that exact moment. Kinda neat, yeah? We could meet up for a beer. And… that’s about the only useful real-world application I’ve found for the thing so far. That’s not to say stalking Husband of Pseudostoops as he commutes from Chicago to Evanston and back over Google Latitude isn’t fun, but it really isn’t a real use case beyond idle entertainment.

But I think Latitude is an enabler, not an actual application. And while products like Loopt were pushing in that direction, the truth is that starting up a service like that from scratch can take a while (even Twitter took years to get where it is now) and a catalyst like the latent email address books of millions of Gmail users is not a meaningless thing (though some folks who cry about Google copying Loopt would want you to believe that a product head start is all that matters). By the way, isn’t Google being pretty smart about leveraging that asset as a social network/graph these days?

Ultimately Latitude (and similar services) will only become really useful when really useful stuff is built on top of it. Anyone who’s seen Yelp on an iPhone knows that. Well, what are those applications? They’re literally everywhere if you think hard enough. I want a weather map that tells me exactly what’s going to happen within 100 feet of where I am in the next hour (without typing a bunch of shit in). I want to find 10 dudes within a mile radius who want to go play some pick-up basketball around the corner. I want to see a map of all the open parking spots within four blocks of this god forsaken place and reserve one for myself. See? That took 15 seconds to come up with those.

This could be the start of a big deal… or all of those crack addicts will have to keep picking their stuff up the normal way.

I’ve gotten some random pings from folks lately asking:

• What happened to that crazy lifestyle eating change you were on? Are you still doing that?
• Have any New Year’s Resolutions?

Good questions both. One quick note, I usually do 5 New Year’s Resolutions every year, but I don’t call them that because it sounds like they’re afterthoughts and the word ‘resolution’ now has a loaded connotation of ‘IMPENDING COMPLETE FAILURE COMING MOMENTARILY’.

Instead, I usually call them ‘simplifying principles’ because they’re things I’d really like to actively focus on this year and they’re meant to simplify my life, not add some additional thing I won’t remember to do. Before I get to those…

The Eating Thing

If you’ll remember, last year I attempted (mostly successfully) to undo 26 years of awful eating habits and prepare myself for the distinct eventuality that the next 30 years of my life are going to consist of: 1) working a lot, and 2) a gradually slowing metabolism. Let’s be very clear about this: I know of (maybe) five Asian males over the age of 35 who are not noticeably overweight. That’s it. If you’re Asian and your Dad is not overweight, then I’ll take your word for it and add him to the list, though he’s probably already one of the five.

With that backdrop, and because I often like to pit myself in games of will power against myself, I spent some time reading up on “What does eating healthy really MEAN?” last year and then attempted to live by that for 12 months. The results were largely good and I think the number of meals I strayed was probably less than 30.

This year I’ve made one slight adjustment to the approach, which I don’t think will make a material difference in practice, but I think will make an enormous difference in my personal mental state when driving by an In-n-Out. And that leads me to the five simplifying principles (of course non-work-related):

1. Eat healthy (as defined in 2008), with the exception that for every week in which I work out 3+ times, I get one free meal to eat whatever I want. Hopefully for all parties involved, that will be 52 weeks.
2. Write a short story. This was originally “Write more,” but in the name of setting actionable, measurable principles. Regardless, “Write more” is baked into this.
3. Read and thoughtfully review at least 12 books
4. Visit at least one new foreign country
5. Launch a couple (at least 2) useful, interesting sites

I would have added a sixth and a seventh (“Tailgate at least 10 times” and “Lower the beer to other beverages ratio”), but a) they seemed to work directly against one another, b) the seventh is pretty much covered by my #1, and c) I just really wasn’t ready to commit to seven different principles.

Let’s all have a solid 2009, people.

Big weekend for NFL-watching as I’ll be in Las Vegas placing wagers on these games and my fantasy team will be locked in a mortal death match with Kingsley’s:

As you can see, it would be a total travesty if that squad was to lose to CharlesHaleyFanClub. I also have to remember to pack my Brent Jones jersey for Vegas so I can scream obscenities at Dolphins fans and come off as a passionate fan instead of a crazy person.

Last week: 7-9
Overall Season Results: 110-96-2

Thursday posted Wednesday evening