the tindog coffeehouse

As a father I’ve tried to prepare for the delicate, difficult, and even sometimes embarrassing questions that my kids will inevitably ask. Ask me anything related to religion, morality, or the human anatomy, and while I may not have all the answers, I’m at least not surprised to hear the question. But nothing — and I mean nothing — could’ve prepared me for the question Megan asked me last night:

“Daddy, what would you do if I went to Texas A&M?”

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It’s a social network where you create status entries about things you’re doing and post related photos. You can tag friends, and they can comment on your posts. What is it? If you said Facebook, you’d be right. If you said Gowalla, well, you’d be right there, too.

Last week, I wrote about my knee-jerk reaction to Gowalla’s massive overhaul, deemed Gowalla 4.0. Gone are the game-like incentives such as pins and items, replaced by lists and guides. Instead of checking in to a place, you create a story about it.

I’ve had some time to think about it since then, and it occurred to me that in the process of becoming unlike Foursquare, Gowalla has become a sort of stripped down version of Facebook. Of course, Facebook doesn’t have the travel guides that Gowalla does, but the user activity is much the same. I’m creating a story (status update) about some place I’ve gone, not for virtual rewards but for the sheer socialness of it. Stories are meant to be social objects complete with photos, comments, tagging of friends, and sharing beyond a user’s private profile. Sounds a lot like Facebook, no?

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I’ve been a big fan of Gowalla since January, when I signed up for the social geolocation service mostly out of curiosity. I also signed up for Foursquare around the same time, and while I used both for a while, I never really liked Foursquare and eventually stopped using it.

The biggest advantage Gowalla had over its check-in competitor was that it was actually fun. I loved getting new stamps and working toward new pins while collecting virtual items such as a longhorn or an espresso machine along the way. I posted a bunch of photos and enjoyed seeing where friends had been and what they had collected. I would go out of my way to go to new restaurants just to earn a new stamp or go back to a place because I knew they had a particular item I wanted. When I had a recent business trip to Cleveland, I purposefully chose to have a layover in Charlotte in part to earn a North Carolina pin and get closer to the “Frequent Flyer” and “Fly Like an Eagle” pins. With Gowalla, there was an incentive to discover new places, go where I’ve never been, and share my experiences in the process. Which was the core concept of the service; it was meant to be more of a digital passport and virtual scavenger hunt than a simple check-in service that catered to the bar crowd like Foursquare.

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Last September, our pastor challenged the church to read through the Bible in a year, something that for some reason I had never done. I had read much of the Bible but never the whole thing and never for a whole year straight. I decided it was time to change that, and so I took the challenge.

And three days ago, I finished it.

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I just fixed the college football conference realignment mess.

You’re welcome.

Actually, to be fair most of the work was already done. TCU is already set to move the Big East next year, Texas A&M is still hoping to go to the SEC, and today the ACC officially announced that Pitt and Syracuse are moving over from the Big East. The rest is just details.

Under my plan, the six BCS automatic qualifying conferences are reduced to five, each with 14 teams. Yes, I know people keep talking about 16-team superconferences, but my plan gives you six extra teams, and if nothing else, I’m all about extra value.

So here goes:

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How many teams does the Big 12 Conference have to lose before it stops being the Big “12″? And when exactly is it no longer considered “Big”? We may find out pretty soon now that Texas A&M has officially declared they’re packing up their marbles and leaving the Big 12 for a shot at the bottom of the SEC.

The Aggies apparently weren’t too keen on their intrastate rival Longhorns getting their own television network, despite the fact that the Longhorn Network will be available to exactly seven households in America, none of which are in Austin. But logic has never been A&M’s strong suit, so they’ve chosen to abandon 100+ years of tradition and possibly as much as $30 million in exit fees in hopes that the SEC will let them in to their exclusive club. Yeah, good luck with that. Let’s see, how many Big 12 football titles has A&M won? How many BCS games have they gone to? How many National Championships have they won since the rise of the BCS? Zero. And yet they really expect to do better against the likes of Auburn, Florida, Alabama, and LSU?

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