Despite being a person who’s been an actor (unsuccessfully), a writer (unsuccessfully), a programmer (somewhat successfully), a businessman (not successful yet), and a husband (my wife says I’m successful but I think she’s just being nice), I’ve been asked the question “How do you know if you’ve made it on the internet?”  Until today, I had absolutely no way of answering that.  When I first started using the internet, my answer would have been “have your own domain name.”  Now, there are 5 year olds with their own domain name with a whopping 1 visitor a day (themselves).  A few years later, I would have said “when you get funding.”  But, with companies like WebVan.com getting funding (think buying your groceries from amazon…  Mmmm Tuscan 2% milk).

Later, I would say that you’ve made it if you’ve made money from your website, but then Google Adsense came around and allowed anyone with a mouse and 10 visitors was receiving a check from Google.  Today - I believe I bring to you an ultimate measurement of what it means to ‘make it.’

A…
Tweet…
Endorsing you…
From your biggest competitor…

Today, kindle_blog - the twitter name for Amazon’s Kindle blog service, told the world of our presence.  The tweet in its exactness follows:

“BookSwim.com Rental — The Literary Life - by BookSwim Online Book Rental - Kindle Edition. http://bit.ly/nB1FY”

I saw the link scroll by on my TweetDeck (program I use to monitor my drug called twitter) and nearly fell out of my chair.  I followed the bit.ly link and realized it went to amazon’s page which allows you to pay for a subscription of ‘The Literary Life’ blog to be downloaded directly to your Kindle.  Yeah - I know, we’re in the big leagues now.  Well, I’ve gone and made it, I guess its time to retire…  Or maybe I should just go back to my day job of keeping bookswim.com up and running.

Have you had an “I’ve made it moment?”  I’d love to hear about it!

-Nick