It’s true! As reported by John Cook of the PI, Mike Showalter has joined Green Couch Conspiracy as the new VP of Product Management.

This is a big win for us. The role of product management - understanding users’ needs and designing the right application - is absolutely crucial to web startups. We’re thrilled to have Mike join us. He comes from Marchex, and before that… Serials Solutions, where he was Group Product Manager, and instrumental in launching 5 web-based applications in 5 years. All of which continue to be leaders in their categories today.

I’ll let other celebrities sum it up:

“The best ever!” — Ricky Bobby

“They’re SUPER-CHARGED with Mike Showalter on board!” — JR Jenkins (local product management celebrity)

Welcome aboard, Sho.

The development team is showing some more love for you all.

Yesterday they put “Iteration 10″ live which brings goodness in the form of:

Wired takes Facebook and other social networks to task for locking in users, advocating open standards for constructing relationships among users.

Wired attempted to recreate all of the functionality of Facebook by pulling resources from Flickr, Last.fm, LibraryThing, etc. into a Wordpress blog, ultimately failing because of the lack of an open standard. (They make no mention the Friend-of-a-Friend project, which is odd since it seems to aim to be this missing standard.)

Most interesting I suppose is that it underscores the core value of existing social networks — social networking, not the service addons. If the networking component can be commoditized then the existing social networks would compete on the merits of their feature bundles with sites specializing in those kinds of functionality.