I spend a lot of time on PandaWhale these days.

If you’re looking for me, I’m on PandaWhale.

I’m stashing many things there.

And reflecting.

Where can I whale in 2010?

It’s Twenty Ten and I’m hungry for something new to add to my steady diet of facebooking, linking in, and tweeting. (2009 was pretty much the year of Twitter for me, thanks to Tweetie 2.)

So I asked myself: On which service can I become a whale in 2010?

Whale, n. One of the biggest users of an Internet service, who together with other whales form its delicious nucleus. Whales are Malcolm Gladwell‘s “Connectors” and they are the foundation of any social network’s etiquette, memory, and wisdom.

Being a whale on a social network can be quite frustrating — Facebook stops us at 5000 connections at which point our iPhone app pretty much stops working; LinkedIn won’t tell people how many connections we have once we’re over 500; and Twitter displays a fail whale whenever they can’t handle the truth.

So why do people become whales? Whales are born, not made; whales cannot NOT whale. It’s in our nature. Plus, being a whale can be quite rewarding: you get a lot of social capital and are able to move among different groups of people to spread interesting thoughts and products. Bonus: Whales also feel inexplicably good when they introduce people who otherwise might never have met.

So where in 2010 will I be able to whale to my big pimpin’ heart’s content?

Of the 30something startups I know who are hiring, this weekend I got more than a dozen invitations from:

• Plancast (119 connections)
• Foursquare (375)
• Yelp (147)
• Quora (104)

Yelp has been around for years, but its recent use of Facebook Connect has given it new life. Foursquare launched last year, but it has gotten really hot in the last month.

Even so, none of my connection counts on these services come close to my friends on Facebook (4997), LinkedIn (“500+” — really??), and Twitter (3838).

Side note: I’m also a fan of Gowalla (180 connections) but I haven’t gotten any new invites on there in a while. I wonder if users are intimidated by places with names like Death Star and Helms Deep.

Memo to all consumer Internet services: You get the behaviors you allow. Whales make it so.

Friends who are hiring!

Yes, this is the worst economy of my lifetime. I know plenty of great people who are looking for work, and I remind them not to lose hope. We’re clawing our way out of the recession one job at a time, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I do have some friends who are hiring — mostly for developer jobs, but as these companies grow, they’ll hire for other positions, too. I will try to keep this list up-to-date. But as heisenthought points out, everybody wants JavaScript developers, it seems.

Please at-reply me on Twitter if you’d like an introduction to any of these companies:

SayNow (Palo Alto, CA) — JavaScript and Ruby developers who like to rapidly prototype social applications

Gowalla (Austin, TX) — Ruby, JavaScript, and mobile developers

Foursquare (New York) — Excellent developers

Hypertable (Burlingame, CA) — Technically-minded salesperson

Quora (Palo Alto, CA) — Python developers

Asana (Palo Alto, CA) — designers, developers, and a businessperson

Plancast (San Francisco) — JavaScript and PHP developers

Payvment (San Francisco) — JavaScript and PHP developers

Apture (San Francisco) — JavaScript and Python developers

AppDiscover (Redwood City, CA) — iPhone and Android developers

Campfire Labs (San Francisco) — Javascript, Ruby, and Python developers, and systems engineers

Dolores Labs (San Francisco) — your guess is as good as mine

Sitepen (anywhere) — JavaScript developers, visual designers, and project managers

EcoFactor (San Carlos, CA) — Java developers

Manymoon (San Francisco) — Java and JavaScript developers

InTwig (Redwood City, CA) — JavaScript and PHP developers

eFitPlan (San Francisco) — Java/PHP/Ruby developers who want to fuse the latest exercise science with computer science to provide personalized workouts and fitness coaching to the masses, for free

Breakthrough (Palo Alto, CA) — Ruby engineers, a Product Manager, and a Director of Sales, ideally with health care experience but not required

Palaran (Palo Alto, CA) — Search scientists, Systems engineers, Frontend hackers

Reputation Defender (Redwood City, CA) — JavaScript and PHP developers

Truveo (San Francisco) — web developers and sysadmins

iSocket (San Mateo, CA) — JavaScript and PHP developers

Ribbit (Mountain View, CA) — C++, Java, Flash, and mobile developers

Ustream (Mountain View, CA) — C++, PHP, Flash, JavaScript, and mobile developers

Blekko (Redwood Shores, CA) — Perl, C++, and JavaScript developers

Wolfram Alpha (San Mateo, CA) — everything

Lithium (Emeryville, CA) — a little bit of everything

Gaia (San Jose, CA) — PHP and Flash developers

Watercooler (Mountain View, CA) — JavaScript, PHP, and Flash developers

Playdom (Mountain View, CA) — JavaScript, PHP, and Flash developers

Sociable (San Francisco, CA) — Product manager

Liftium (San Francisco) — JavaScript and Ruby developers who want to on-ramp new publishers using Liftium’s ad technology

Chai Labs (Mountain View, CA) — Rock stars

Snooth (New York) — JavaScript and PHP developers, and salespeople

Yelp (San Francisco) — JavaScript, Python, and iPhone developers

Etsy (Brooklyn, NY) — The question is, what AREN’T they hiring right now?

Hunch (New York) — JavaScript and Python developers, and an analytically-driven blogger

Betfair (San Francisco) — a little bit of everything

Glitch (Canada) — ???

Trackville (Mountain View, CA) — ???

Kerosene and a Match (Orange County, CA) — ???

knx.to (Menlo Park, CA) — business development person

speedi.ly (Palo Alto, CA) — ???

AdCru (San Mateo, CA) — ???

Ellerdale (Menlo Park, CA) — ???

PandaWhale (Palo Alto, CA) — iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and CSS/JavaScript-on-mobile-Webkit developers

Career Resources (Redwood City, CA) — looking for temps

And of course Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Zynga, Ning, Bing, and Silver Spring Networks are hiring too.

It was, is, and will be the economy, stupid!

Favorite post of 2007:

Historical Financial Charts — Are You Invested In These Markets?

Favorite post of 2008:

Agency Costs and the Financial Crisis

Good times.

Blog Action Day: Poverty!

Today is Blog Action Day: Poverty. You can register here.

The main thing I want to say about poverty is that I’m disappointed that poverty has left the discourse now that John Edwards is no longer actively campaigning. Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain has said much about poverty, and I’m guessing it’s because it’s not a topic that will help them win the election in a few weeks. That makes me a sad panda. You can tell a lot about a society by the way it treats its poorest people. They aren’t represented much in our Congress because the poor cannot afford lobbyists. More than forty years ago Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty, and we still struggle today. We can end poverty in America and in the world if we have the will. When we do so, America and the world will be much better off.

At least Barack Obama inspires people. John McCain seems like more of a placeholder than an inspirer. Perhaps, if elected, Barack will take up the issue of poverty. He does seem to care more about what poor people go through. But George W. Bush has left him a lot of other messes to clean up as well. So we’ll see.