The other day I made contact with an old friend through Facebook. It’d been years upon years upon Paleozoic eras since we last talked and so we used Facebook’s message feature to catch up quickly. Pretty soon though, it became apparent that I was being sold a perfect bill of goods. Terms like “loving wife,” “successful business,” and “preparing for Iron Man” peppered our exchange and soon I began to think his email sounded like an ad. I don’t know, when people I haven’t seen for nine years ask how I am, I tend to fill them in on where I live, how many kids I have, and what I do. I try to use down-to-earth, normal-people adjectives and don’t tend to say things like:

“Hey! I’m amazing, thanks for asking! I have an age-defying flat stomach even after birthing two kids naturally…two kids who are currently in Montessori school, are child models, and reading at the college level. We travel a lot because my kids are also classical pianists who play for heads of state and my husband is an astronaut who likes to take the family on his intergalactic space trips. Also, I have a robot dog that speaks 18 languages. As for me? I’m Oprah’s stockbroker. For fun, I chisel marble masterpieces and enjoy the sensual administrations of my nubile waitstaff.”

I mean. COME ON. 

We’re entering the final stretch of our upgrades to the new private page!  The new private pages now support personal search, customization, and a unified look.  They also include clean up of the Private Messages, Friends Manager, and Profile Pics interfaces.

A few notes for the final step in the process:

• If you are using the “Old Private Home”, nothing will change.  You will continue to be able to use your existing private page, with its custom look and feel.
• If you haven’t tried out the upgraded new private page, please try it out here!

Starting next week (July 19th), for users of our current default private page: we are going to start migrating users of our new private page over to the upgraded version.  If you would rather stay on the un-upgraded “new private page”, we’ll allow you to downgrade for a period of several weeks until the upgrade is finalized. 

Some people say you can judge a man by the shoes on his feet. I like to take it one step further. I believe that you can tell a lot about a person’s character and what type of man he’s going to be just by the style of socks he chooses to wear. 

We upgraded and cleaned up the profile pics manager for everyone!

• http://upload.xanga.com/profilepicsmain.aspx

I asked Marc to describe the changes, and he summed it up nicely: “everything is awesomer.”  The uploading is more seamless, and the images can also be sorted in either grid or list form. 

Near the end of June each year, parades are held in cities throughout the US and elsewhere in the world to celebrate gay pride.  These marches began as a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots on June 28, 1969, in which patrons of a gay bar in New York City rioted in response to a police raid and continued harassment.  Originally these parades were knows as “gay freedom” or “gay liberation” marches, although over the last four decades they have come to be known more general as “Gay Pride”.