Here’s a really funny one (I think): There’s a new Facebook application that would would give you a Burger King Whopper (yep, the store that sells, uh, the Whopper) in exchange for 10 of your Facebook friends. All you have to do is delete 10 of your friends. The application is called the Whopper Sacrifice.

So far around 50,000 Facebook friends have been deleted. That translates to around 5,000 whoppers probably being digested in people’s stomachs. That’s a lot of calories right there.

It is a pretty ingenious marketing ploy for Burger King I must admit. I bet right now, Facebook fanatics (millions of them) are talking about the Whopper. The marketing folks at Burger King deserve a raise for this.
Now this got me thinking, I don’t have a Facebook account. If I have, I must have forgotten about it already. Anyway, instead of deleting 10 Facebook accounts, what possible trade-offs would I insist should somebody send out a survey and ask what I would want in exchange for removing 10 Blogcatalog friends? Hmmm… I’d probably ask for a one-way backlink from a PR3 blog. Yeah, I’m cheap.

How about deleting 10 links in my Blogroll? Now this is gonna be a wee bit more expensive, after all I’m forsaking backlinks (I’m sure there’ll be retaliations from the owners of the links I removed) I’d probably ask for a 6 month 125×125 ad on the front page of a PR4 blog. Make that a PR6 if the sponsor selects the links I should delete.

How about deleting 10 posts, or 10 blogs, or 10 hosting accounts? Oh I don’t know, a gazillion dollars?

How many of you folks blog at work?

Or even just surf other people’s blog at work?

None?

Right.

Neither do I.

I’m not suggesting that you use your company’s resources for personal business, but just in case you’re tempted to check your stats or see if somebody made any comment to a post you made out of the office but you don’t want to be seen by your officemates doing it, here’s a cool way of camouflaging your surfing activity.

Introducing WorkFriendly– this is a nifty website that allows you to browse in relative safety without anyone raising an eyebrow everytime they pass by your cubicle. You only have to go to this website, put in the site you want to surf, and voila! that site is transformed into a Microsoft Outlook document. It even has a ‘BOSS KEY’ button that you can hover on whenever somebody undesirable is around and it would show an article on procrastination.

We all know that blog surfing at work is never a good thing. The company owns your time while you’re in the office. But if you must scratch your surfing itch, be kind to yourself use WorkFriendly.

I just signed up at Scoutle, a very interesting social networking site.

I first read about this site at Techcrunch and while I thought it was a very novel idea then, I didn’t really pay much attention to it. As I am wont to do however, I just starred the article on my Google Reader for my weekend review. When I read the article again earlier I decided to give it a go.

Scoutle is very interesting in the sense that you don’t actually do the networking yourself. Once you register to their site, you will have to create your own scout. You select the category and subcategories that are relevant to your site. You then name your scout and place a tag line or a slogan to make it more interesting. After installing a code snippet on your site also known to Scoutle as a Stage, your scout is ready to go.

Your created scout will automatically crawl the internet for scouts of related interests. Your scout will then log all its meetings with other scouts in your Scoutle profile for your viewing at your convenience. You can then opt to connect with the other scouts that your created scout met depending on whether their sites appeal to you.

Scoutle also works based on a point system. This system is elaborated in their site but the general idea is that you get points based on the number of your visitors and the Scoutle connections you have. So far, I have already made two connections with 3 other requests pending confirmation. Like other social networks, a connection will be made once both parties agree.

I think Scoutle has the potential to grow big in the social networking business given the quality of its offering. Even the stage that I placed on my site is waay too cool. I’ll be very interested to see how this service will fare a few months down the road.

If you’re thinking of going or spreading your social networking wings, I would highly recommend Scoutle.

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I’ve recently joined PostonFire, a social bookmarking/networking site that has all the services and features of the bigger, and more established social networking groups. And to a small blogger like me, this is a very good social networking tool that I am hoping would reap benefits for my blog.

With PostonFire a blogger can submit his post on the site where other bloggers can discover and vote if they like what is submitted. Unlike the other big networking groups where the already popular blogs dominate, PostonFire has the most breakthrough potential for the ordinary blogger.

PostonFire is still in its early stages but it is already experiencing rapid growth. For us bloggers who are waiting for the next big wave that will take our blog to whatever height we imagine, this site has the capability to take us where we want to go.

And now is the best time to join.

That is, getting a job. A recent blog entry in Michael Arrington’s Techcrunch, claims that graduating Computer Science students from Stanford University are being offered as much as $95K to join either Google or Facebook; those with a Masters in CS are also offered up to $130K. These are whopping amounts by third world standards. In my country, the Philippines, that’s already a Senior VP salary in some big company. Surely we have some really good graduating CS students who may even be considered at par with some of these Stanford graduates. Why don’t these two companies target them and hire them at half the cost?

Unfortunately, the big companies would rather focus their attention on these Ivy League schools to get their workers. The fact that third world countries’ quality of education leaves much to be desired doesn’t help either. What these big companies should do in my opinion is to think long term. If you want to hire the best people, why skim off the top? Why not start a grassroots program where you can monitor the progress of your future employees and ensure that they learn only those things that you would be looking for in your workers? This is an age old strategy in some countries, China for example. If they want to have future athletic champions, they start them while they’re young, taking over the care of these kids and molding them into the champions of the future.

Perhaps this is not a viable strategy in first world countries where the costs can be exorbitant, but if you put this to work in a third world country such as the Philippines, this is something that’s gonna pay dividends down the line. They don’t even have to spend that much. Just ensure that the kids they’re targeting have a tailored curriculum, send over some really good teachers, screen out the candidates with a fine-toothed comb, and voila, instant superworkers. They’ll have the best minds of the country flocking in to join their program.

I have seen the best minds of my generation studying under the onerous scholarships they were given that require them to work for at least two years in some dingy company after graduation. And these are the guys who are at the top of my class, graduating with honors and all those accolades and for what? To be enslaved as night auditors of hotels. These guys are bright and talented and their sponsoring institutions are wasting their brains making them work like regular folks.

I can only imagine the impact that these big companies can have once they rid themselves of their Ivy League and First World fixations and set their sites on the third world countries. You want the best minds at a cheap price? You know where these countries are, and they’re not changing addresses.

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