They look amazing.

I don’t often give a book five stars. Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, bones and butter gets six.

Simply one of the best books I’ve read in years. The storytelling is as remarkable and the writing. Thought provoking, stimulating and heart-stirring. A brilliant, brilliant book. Not just about the transition to becoming a chef – but also a map of a journey through life.

If you love cooking. If you love life at the edge. You will love this book.

Can’t wait to dine at Prune.

Like David, I’m in the middle of Enchantment – Guy’s new book. And really enjoying it. His many ideas combine old stalwarts with some fresh thinking. David pulled out four I liked and I’ll add more over the week. I especially liked the second one:

• Build an ecosystem. If the offering can be surrounded by a meaningful system of entities and complement (add value) and support the brand, it will have a more solid connection and will have created barriers to competitors. Apple is the gold standard with the huge number of apps, the communities of users, the blogs, the consultants, the Apple store, the conferences, and on and on. To create an ecosystem, a firm needs to find a worthy concept, communicate, create evangelists, encourage involved communities, and be open to participation and criticism.
• Separate the believers. In implementing a concept intended to achieve enchantment make sure all the employees and partners are on-board. You cannot create enchantment if the “sellers” are not all drinking the Kool-Aid. The Macintosh in the mid-1980s put the division in a separate building with Steve Jobs in charge so that the effort was not contaminated by the rest of the firm with their “mass market” mentality. Zappos.com discourages non-believers by offering $4,000 to new recruits to leave the firm.
• Frame the competition. The focus is always on managing our own brand, making sure that we know what it stands for, and that this vision is communicated to the marketplace. But framing the competition can have an equally strong impact on preference. In 2010, Steve Jobs responded to critics that thought that Apple excessively controlled iPhone applications, by pointing out that it was true that those who want porn are better off with Google’s Android products. Android phones were thus positioned for porn users.
• Illustrate the salient point. There is a tendency to focus on factual data supporting functional benefits because it seems persuasive, credible, and informative. But it is usually boring and hard to connect. So bring the data to life by illustrations. Talk about cost of few per year instead of miles per gallon. How long a donation will feed a child instead of monetary amount.

The Twitter growth numbers are amazing:

tweets

• 3 years, 2 months and 1 day. The time it took from the first Tweet to the billionth Tweet.
• 1 week. The time it now takes for users to send a billion Tweets.
• 50 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, one year ago.
• 140 million. The average number of Tweets people sent per day, in the last month.
• 177 million. Tweets sent on March 11, 2011.
• 456. Tweets per second (TPS) when Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 (a record at that time).
• 6,939. Current TPS record, set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day.

accounts

• 572,000. Number of new accounts created on March 12, 2011.
• 460,000. Average number of new accounts per day over the last month.
• 182%. Increase in number of mobile users over the past year.

#employees

• 8. 29. 130. 350. 400. Number of Twitter employees in Jan 2008, Jan 2009, Jan 2010, Jan 2011 and today.

Spent today at Signal – Federated’s conference here in Austin. Was as good as the LA version. Like SXSW for adults. Some bloody smart start-ups coming our way. Loved the conversations around curation. Then saw this profile on Yuri in Forbes. He is right:

The amount of information people digest, says Milner, is doubling every two years, now that so much of our time is spent in front of screens. That overload leads to shorter attention spans, shorter units of communication and a dire need for curation. Our friends are filling that role on Facebook, but before long, Milner believes, the machines will be more involved, much the way Facebook now suggests new friends for you. "You need a second degree of curation.”

Milner agrees with Oxford University anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s theory that our brain can handle only 150 stable social relationships at any given time. But while the size of our circle may not change, the mix will. Someone in China who speaks no English may be a better social connection than someone you’ve known for years. In a decade or so automatic language translation will make it seamless to communicate with new friends in China. "Facebook now is mostly about people you know," he says. "In the future it could be about people you know less but are more important."

Milner also sees Facebook competing with Google to become the place you go to search for information. "Facebook can be an accumulation of different intelligences," he says. "Ask a question, [get it] translated into many languages and somebody, somewhere in the world, will have an answer."

"Facebook will get to 1 billion users" in the next couple of years, says John Lindfors, an ex-Goldman banker who joined DST Global last year. "It’s the platform for a new Internet ecosystem."