Begin side rant: The place to have meaningful online conversations used to be Twitter, but since Twitter is never up anymore and doesn’t have threaded comments, the discussion is starting to die over there. Twitter is still totally useful for microblogging and populating the sidebar of my blog, but it’s not where I’m having meaningful conversations anymore. The lack of a working reply function for close to a week broke that entirely for me and a lot of other people. ///rant off

However, the good news is that you can still follow peoples’ Twitters in FriendFeed and you can now follow both of them via your Mahalo profile page (along with a lot of other services) , should you so choose. And if you do, you can add me as a friend on Mahalo here, you can follow me on Twitter here, and you can subscribe to my FriendFeed here. Also, if you like what we’re doing at Mahalo and you use FriendFeed, make sure you join the Mahalo room.

Basically, today we made it where anyone can create a page on Mahalo and anyone can edit any Guide Note on Mahalo. Our staff is watching the edits, of course, to protect against spamming or abuse, as well as to fact check any information added, but we’re looking forward to seeing what cool things people start creating on the site. Let us know what you think and if there’s anything you’d like to see improved with these new features.

Mahalo.com, Inc. is a new human-powered social search service backed by Sequoia Capital (the world’s #1 venture firm), Newscorp, CBS, Elon Musk (Paypal founder), Mark Cuban and others. This kind of opportunity is **extremely rare** in LA: these high-profile rewards are usually found only in Silicon Valley.

We are looking for a Designer who can create clean, innovative, tasteful, lightweight designs. We need a fulltime, in-house designer to define the look and feel of many upcoming enhancements to the Mahalo.com website.

You should ‘get’ Web 2.0 — Facebook, Twitter, etc. You understand user interface design for the Net. Of course, you should be artistic and blow us away with your graphics. We’re looking for someone whose aesthetic sensibility is similar to this: http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/

Rudimentary CSS / HTML knowledge required (you should be able to create a skeleton of your design — but don’t worry: we have developers who will program the javascript, database calls, etc.)

What we’re NOT looking for: monster flash splash screens, screens that fade in and out, tons of animation, print or television-style graphics.

If you’re world-class Designer looking for a very visible position in a world-class Web 2.0 company, then we’re looking for you. Please send us a resume + portfolio asap to Mark (at) Mahalo.com

NO OFFSHORE!  NO RECRUITERS!

We want ninjas. If you’re a ninja in LA, make sure you let Mark know.

Also, if you’re a writer looking for work, we’re still looking for some great writers on the editorial team, so get in touch with me: ck at mahalo dot com

Kristin and I moved into our new one bedroom apartment in Santa Monica this weekend. Big thanks to Ryan Budke and Mike Rhoads for helping us with the move. After today, we have unpacked enough of our stuff so that it is starting to feel like some sort of home.

It’s nice, because we’re moving out of a 10 month stay with roommates. Married couples should never have to live with other people in a roommate scenario *ever*, no matter how wonderful the roommates (or how wonderful they’re not). It’s not been fun.

What’s not nice about the move is that thanks to the state the real estate market has been in for the past 10 months, we still have our nice 2 bedroom back in Bronxville. As a result, we’re renting an apartment that is roughly the size of the apartment we had when we first moved in together. The past 10 months were like jumping back in time to college, rooming with others. The next year is going to be like jumping ahead slightly in the past to our lives in 2003. The added expense of supporting two places will be much like the debt and the extra car we were carrying back then, but at least this time the money is going into something that will hopefully eventually get us a return. There’s been some interest from one person who came and looked at the place twice. Hopefully we’ll get an offer soon and not spend too long with the super tight budget belt.

In any case, I think we’re both going to be happier here now. I’d move back to New York in a minute if I could, but Santa Monica isn’t too bad when you have a place to call your own. I can still ride my bike to work, too.

We’ve got some great new How Tos at Mahalo. Here’s a nice sampling of recent additions:
How to Poach Chicken
How to Make Spring Rolls
How to Make a Toga
How to Make Friends Online
How to Make Bread Pudding
How to Buy a Timeshare
How to Make a White Russian
How to Write a Check
How to Speak Russian
How to Make a Sex on the Beach 
How to Make a Long Island Iced Tea
How to Make Potato Salad
How to Make Egg Salad
How to Bleach Hair
How to Write a Children’s Book
How to Become a Substitute Teacher
How to Make Iced Coffee
How to Write a Love Poem
How to Arrange Flowers

If you’re a freelance writer interested in building some how to articles for us, please check out the How to Group’s Most Wanted List in the Mahalo Greenhouse.

Really? Yeah, really. I just downloaded it and it won’t run on my 2Ghz MacBook because the integrated graphics card isn’t up to the game’s specs. And this isn’t even full-fledged Spore. It’s just the Creature Creator!

So incredibly disappointed right now….

Update: According to this TUAW post, you can modify a few files after you install and it will work. I’ll try this later tonight when I am home from work.

Jason and Mark also blogged about this.