Here’s the deal. If you’re real life friends with Kevin Rose, you have a new product website to launch, and Kevin submits the story for you, expect that the submission will make the Digg front page within hours of its submission.

There’s preferential treatment to young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and their close-knit circles are pretty exclusive.

Many have contested the launch of Jason Calacanis’s newest venture, Mahalo. The discussion pretty much revolves around the same concept: 1) “old is new again”; 2) this is Wikipedia and About.com; 3) it’s just not scalable.

Many believe that Mahalo, by itself, would probably not gain popularity. Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors seemed to have been big for all of a week but many seem to have already forgotten about it. However, once you have a rockstar Digging your site, you’re bound to make waves and get popular.

Once upon a time, Jason whined that SEOs were snake oil salesmen. Jason said: “SEO is BS, if you generate a web page with good content Google will rank the page properly.�? I personally don’t have anything against Jason’s very candid opinion.

It’s been nearly two weeks since the SMX Advanced conference was held in Seattle, but it’s about time for my recap. Barry and I arrived in Seattle late Sunday night, so we missed a pretty good Microsoft party. While that’s a bit sad (and I’ll try to make the next one), the conference series showed that there was much else to be enjoyed.

There’s a great amount of conference coverage. My BFF the Lisa and her partner in crime (she’s actually a real person after all), Susan, covered all the sessions, and my newest Florida friend, Rhea Drysdale, blogged on Search Engine Journal. Andy Beal and Jordan McCollum also filled some gaps over at Marketing Pilgrim.

Carolyn Shelby and I both blogged for Search Engine Roundtable, and our SMX coverage of each individual session is linked below for your enjoyment and edification:

• You&A with Matt Cutts
• Duplicate Content Summit
• SEO, Meet SMM
• Personalized Search: Fear or Not?
• Keynote with Satya Nadella of Microsoft
• Debate: Is Bid Management Dead? (Disclaimer: As I said on Search Engine Roundtable, this was the hardest thing to blog. Ever.)
• Pump Up Your Paid Search
• Beyond the Majors

As I promised in my earlier thread, besides answering the typical question, “What are you doing?”, Twitter has many additional uses. What are my top picks?

1. Twitter as a tool to communicate during conferences. After attending SMX (I’ll post something on that soon) and SES NY, I realized that Twitter is a useful tool for conferencegoers to communicate their whereabouts or to share breaking news and announcements. This was particularly prevalent during the South by Southwest conference several months ago, which helped fuel Twitter’s growth. The SXSW Twitter feed helped many communicate with each other and even allowed for individuals to meet for the first time. Similarly, Michael Twittered during SES in April. So did I. I also did so during SMX.
2. Twitter as a tracking device. This is an interesting and unconventional way of using Twitter. Personally, I haven’t seen it that often (with the exception of this cute little flight post Barry wrote about me), but I think it has potential. Last week, when I went to Seattle, I was in a timezone that put my family three hours ahead of me. Still, they were interested in my whereabouts and wanted me to email them. When email is unavailable, there’s almost always SMS. It’s much easier to send a text message to 40404 than to buzz your sleeping family member letting them know you landed. Have them check your Twitter page to see that you are safe and sound. If you’re someone who spams Twitter often, your family (and friends) should see a lot of updates from you.

In the past few months, Facebook has been attracting a plethora of new users, including people who vowed never to jump on that bandwagon. I guess that most people cave into peer pressure after all.

Especially online. Especially when it connects the older generations to the younger generations (like parents to their children and grandparents to their grandchildren). I can’t wait until my grandma signs up for Facebook. Her picture is already posted on it.

A lot of people among me have been overwhelmed by the recent changes at Facebook. On May 24, Facebook launched the F8 Facebook Developer Platform, allowing third-party application developers to integrate new applications and tools into their Facebook account.

For awhile, I feared that this would be MySpace. But as I saw the opportunities, this is hardly a MySpace at all. Facebook still has the clean look, but you can spruce it up a bit and personalize it even further.

And while people are posting preliminary results of their first impressions of Facebook applications, here is what’s driving me to Facebook: