Perhaps you're familiar with Mini-Microsoft, the anonymous Deep Throat Microsoft blogger who's been lovingly griping online about the company online since 2004. Mini is somewhat infamous (having been interviewed by Business Week and The Seattle Times) and has managed to maintain his anonymity despite all the attention.

I recently had the chance to pester Mini with some of my own questions, and took the opportunity to ask him about his sad experience with facebook, how he felt about Fake Steve Jobs, and his groupies.

Since you’re both famous and anonymous, you have groupies and fans you can’t fully take advantage of -- is that frustrating? Pretty much. :)

Early on I decided, "Hey, don’t let any of this go to your head," and figured the best way to ensure that my ego was in check was to never track usage of the blog and figure that I'm writing to a few dozen like-minded individuals. How many people read Mini-Microsoft? I have no idea. When LisaB did her InsideMS He-Who-Shall-Go-Unnamed bit onstage during the Company Meeting 2006, I was really surprised. Did people really understand what the dead-silence referred to?

Thanks to a moment in time on Facebook, I had a chance to realize that there a lot of fantastically interesting people who read the blog, each of which I would love to spend time with hanging out and just chatting to hear their thoughts and ideas. And there's no easy way to do that. I regret that.

Tell me about your doomed love affair with Facebook. Are you still grieving your bukkit? Yep.

It's good, though, that I'm no longer on Facebook. It wasn't until being summarily kicked off of Facebook that I realized Facebook has some crazy policies in place and Facebookers are overzealous in enforcing them, to a degree that it's a relatively hostile place to invest your time and energy into. Take for example them booting Robert Scoble recently. Or Guy Kawasaki being kicked off for a bit. It's certainly not a Nordstrom experience and I'm a bit baffled how they view their user base: with general contempt?

And I never heard back from Facebook regarding my dismissal. Maybe they just thought, "Read the rules, duh." So I had no opportunity to go back and say "Bye" or try to make a list of my friends.

Former Microsoftie Jon Pincus has a great snippet about Facebook: "… people see Facebook as Orwellian, panoptic, and generally creepy." He also has a write-up of tactics to defend yourself against being kicked off of Facebook. The fact that such a How-To is needed makes me appreciate, no matter how wonderful it was to connect to Mini-Microsoft readers, Facebook is the wrong place for me to be. I desperately wish there was a Facebook alternative that was a professional environment to reconnect with all my former Facebook friends.

How do you feel about being the 25th most influential ‘Softie, according to eWeek?

(1) I screech? :)

(2) That mask might give me nightmares. I prefer the paper bag.

(3) With all the people booted recently, am I up to #21 yet?

If you left Microsoft, where would you go?
On a long vacation overseas, to very non-Pacific Northwest kinds of environments. And then align myself, along with my Buttercup, about what we wanted to do next in life and where to be. Maybe that'd still be in the Seattle area, probably with a small start-up. Maybe not. Kind of a vague answer, but mostly because I'm in love with working at Microsoft so it's hard to be imagine being elsewhere.

"I'm in love with working at Microsoft so it's hard to be imagine being elsewhere."

What are your favorite Microsoft blogs?
Well, since I'm a code-geek, Mark Russinovich is my favorite because his occasional posting is like reading a murder mystery, where the dastardly butler is some poorly written code that Mark tracks down. Raymond Chen makes me appreciate that I never want to be on the Windows Shell team. Dare Obasanjo has an honest voice that I love.

What changes have you seen since you launched Mini Microsoft? Do you feel responsible?
The InsideMS blog is most likely a response to the Mini-Microsoft blog. I was exceptionally happy to see it and very hopeful it could be leveraged into a positive feedback-loop to improve the day-to-day life of Microsofties. What potential! But it sort of became a wishing well, with every comment being a penny flipped into a pool of silence. I see a lot of passion put into comments there, but to no effective end result. It's a waste, and I wonder how representative of our darker bad-habits: lots of initial investment, then a general blurring of intent and diversion of attention to the next thing.

One change, however, that goes against everything I started the blog for is employee hiring. Microsoft's expansive hiring is without need and without results to justify it. The whole thesis behind the blog, the Mini part of Mini-Microsoft, has been an utter failure to get results. That, beyond anything, makes me want to mutter, "What's the point?" and walk away from the keyboard and just go for a long walk.

How did you feel when Fake Steve Jobs was unmasked? Did you worry you were next?
I see it as a very different situation. Hey, he was a high profile intriguing anonymous celebrity with a lot of writing talent. Plus, he poked a lot of people who were motivated to unmask him. Me? I'm just a dude with a little blog that's nothing more than a typical Microsoftie lunch-time conversation typed up. Who cares about little ole me?

Let me share something with you that I haven't told anyone: so I drive home, listening to NPR. Many years ago, in, oh, early 2004 I think, they were talking about the Andy Kaufman returns blog along with some other anonymous Hollywood insider blog that was causing quite a stir. First, since the blog was already an idea I was kicking around, I was very interested in hearing how these people got attention and traction. Next, since I was thinking about going anonymous, I was really interested in hearing how the Hollywood insider got busted. Okay, don't post, even comments to other people's blogs, via your ISP. Check.

Anyone who posts anonymous is going to be revealed according to the surface area they provide to be cracked. If you go and share with your close friends that "Hey, you'll get a gas out of this… I'm Fake Steve Jobs! Don't tell anyone!" then you're increasing your surface area. Do you have some strange prose style and an abundance of non-anonymous text to compare against? More surface area. I'd like to think that I've reduced the surface area as much as possible, but I certainly make mistakes.

"What really sucks? Making a revealing mistake, covering your mouth in horror - looking to the left and the right - hoping that no-one notices..."

What really sucks? Making a revealing mistake, covering your mouth in horror - looking to the left and the right - hoping that no-one notices, and then unknowingly choosing that malfunctioning badge-scanner the next day while trying to get into your building. "Oh, crap, busted..." has come to mind more than once.

But I'm not worried. Even if I should be. If I'm revealed, not on my terms, it's going to be because I did something unfortunate. Ah, well. I'll just put my hands on my hips, say, "D'oh!" and then look around and ask who wants to go have a beer and shoot the breeze.