NotesI decided to get a Facebook just to see what it was all about. I soon discovered that Facebook is useless without friends. My only friend is, like, my grandma. FeedUnfurl
NotesFor many years I have asked myself, Why do you spend time with other people? but I never really attempted to come up with an answer. I always believed I was asking myself a rhetorical question, but this week I thought I would try and find an answer, because a question you ask yourself a thousand times eventually deserves to be answered.Unfurl
NotesBut as this handy infographic from San Francisco-based designer Alex Cornell explains, regardless of the number of chairs or shape of the table, with good timing and a bit of luck, you'll be able to reliably pick the best seat in the house:Unfurl
NotesWith the ability to share directly to Facebook and Twitter while maintaining your ownership, Flickr is an ideal hub for your photos on the web, where you can upload once and share everywhere.FeedUnfurl
NotesYahoo has the opportunity to make Flickr the photo-sharing site on the Web. And if it continues to innovate and update the service, Flickr could even become the next Flickr.EmbedUnfurl
NotesReally, I think the issue here is that these sharing buttons embedded in website content belong in browser chrome. But, that raises issues of metrics on the content side and choice of services on the browser side.Unfurl
NotesPushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past.Unfurl
NotesTwitter’s been around for over 6 years now, and it’s most of it’s early history has been forgotten. The amazing thing about twitter as a platform and community is that it’s evolution has come through it’s use. Through use, people together evolve new ways of communicating. The #hashtag, the retweet, the @reply, follow friday, trending topics, real time twitter search, explaining twitter trends, cc-ing users, etc… These were all creations of the user base, people tried out ideas and build them. Twitter the company later adopted the conventions of it’s community and formalized the tools.
This letting the community of users create, and then adopting the practices is critical to how Twitter’s grown to be such an amazing platform. It’s also why new efforts to deliver a ‘consistent experience‘ are a terrible idea and if they succeed will kill twitter’s future innovation. Unfurl
NotesCuration is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. Curators provide a consistent update regarding what's interesting, happening, and cool in their focus. Curators tend to have a unique and consistent point of view--providing a reliable context for the content that they discover and organize. To be clear, Pinterest both creates tools to organize the noisy web and, at the same time, creates more instances of information in a different context. So it's both part of the problem, and a solution. The trick is finding the Pinterest pinboards that you like, and tune out the rest. Unfurl
Notes"(The student now) fears that the school could make her give up her passwords at a moment's notice, at any time, for any reason," the lawsuit claims. It also alleges that password prying is standard practice at the Minnewaska Middle School, which the student still attends. "(Officials) have compelled other students to disclose their private information and have accessed students' online accounts on multiple occasions," it states.Unfurl
NotesWell, no, not really. Because in the past the user only had to decide whether to share something they just read, but now they have to think about every single article before they even read it. If I read this article, then everyone will know I read it, and do I really want people to know I read it?Unfurl
NotesThe dominance of Facebook is a democratic problem. Our only hope is to use the same tactic the internet used to win against the networks of the time: Open up for collaboration between networks. This is done through federation. Here is how and why it will work, and how you can help.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes“There’s going to be a more natural way to share things with one another than having thirty ‘like’ and ‘+1′ buttons next to everything we see. The wonderful thing is that this will arise organically, as we gain experience with life online, and not be invented by any one company,” says Ceglowski.FeedUnfurl
Notes<blockquote>Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper.</blockquote>
Total waste of paper, but still a really cute product idea despite that.Unfurl
NotesRight now, Dave’s working on a “magnificent symphony of software” – it’s the communication system he wants to use. It involves a minimal blogging tool with only RSS output (plus a dongle that will push the RSS to twitter, etc), a “River of News” aggregator, and an overarching tool for creating content that can be picked apart and included on other platforms.Unfurl
NotesNow, we've shown that Facebook promotes captive content on its network ahead of content on the web, prohibits users from bringing open content into their network, warns users not to visit web content, and places obstacles in front of visits to web sites even if they've embraced Facebook's technologies and registered in Facebook's centralized database of sites on the web.Unfurl
Notes Sharing and recommendation shouldn't be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing--we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. Open Graph will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems. FeedUnfurl
Notes<blockquote>A new Pew study finds news outlets using Twitter almost exclusively for one-way distribution — of their own content.</blockquote>
And this is why I only follow live human beings on Twitter, for the most part. That, and funny bots.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThe news agency issued the warning after members of its staff tweeted that they had been arrested at the Occupy Wall Street camp in Manhattan.Unfurl
NotesAnd though many point to the similarities between Plus and Facebook — and the similarities have only grown with the addition of branded pages — the addition of Pages may be more of a challenge to Twitter. While a certain portion of the population is accustomed to information in 140 character bites, Google+ provides a richer forum where companies can release news to the public.Unfurl
NotesGrove, a new hosted IRC chat service for teams, launches today. It's IRC without the fuss, providing hosting, account management, access controls and fully searchable chat logging, as well as a sparkling new Web chat client.Unfurl
Notes<blockquote>Bit.ly redirects as many as 8 billion of those links in a given month. To help further strengthen the reliability of its shortened URLs, Bit.ly is going right to the root of the Web's infrastructure.</blockquote>
I wouldn't exactly say this is *strengthening* the skeleton.Unfurl
NotesIn case it helps, I hereby declare the following iron law of “free” internet services:
If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow.
This is an important corollary to the law “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not a customer; you’re the product being sold”.Unfurl
NotesI found myself responding to a Google+ thread this morning wherein a respected technology leader said “copying and pasting from social networking sites is not journalism.” Apparently he’d been seeing random Tweets referenced on TV and thought it was lazy, pointless and a sign that journalism is going down the tubes.FeedEmbedUnfurl
NotesThe current toast of the web is Pinterest, the visual pinboard for collecting and sharing content online. The “pinning” phenomena is spreading from its modest beginnings to appearing in national media outlets. There are over 2.5m monthly active Pinterest users on Facebook. A co-founder of the site has over 500,000 followers on Pinterest. Ron Conway (an investor in the site) remarked that Pinterest’s user growth rate is what Facebook’s was five years ago. Earlier in 2011, it was valued through venture financing at $40m and, most recently, just a few months later, at around $200m.FeedEmbedUnfurl
Notes<blockquote>But we've also learned that while web APIs enable us to tap into a wealth of data, they can only be relied upon in the short term. The expiration date of software we create has been shortened due to the whims of those who create the web APIs we rely on.</blockquote>
IMO, this goes for almost anything with net-based DRM, as well.
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NotesYesterday, I got an email from a good friend with a subject line that needed no further explanation: "Google Reader." It was sent to a group of mutual friends, bemoaning the recent changes to Reader's interface, thereby kicking off a lengthy dis...Unfurl
NotesEverybody wants stuff for free but we seldom question what it means to get something for free. Today's quotable moment is a reflection on what it means when a company gives it all away.FeedUnfurl
NotesSome people still like shit work. They can spend an hour moving Twitter accounts to special Lists, and then at the end of it look back and say “Boy, I spent an hour doing this. I really accomplished a lot today!” You didn’t. You did shit work.FeedUnfurl
Notes "It's all geek culture," says Lotan, "and it's amazing how Twitter has brought it to the masses so that everyone and their mother is using it. It's about letting people dive into conversations they wouldn't have seen otherwise. Twitter is one massive conversation, and those conventions let you dive into ideas, into funny inside jokes." FeedUnfurl
NotesLast night the changes to Google Reader went live, and as promised, they've removed the sharing features. This means that the sharing features in FeedDemon which rely on Google Reader will eventually stop working, so I'm forced to remove them.Unfurl
NotesGoogle released the previously announced set of changes around G+ integration and UI updates today, and boy is it a disaster. Since the general changes were pre-announced last week, most of us were prepared for the letdown, but actually seeing how it works end to end has made several flaws abundantly clear. Let's start with the obvious.Unfurl
Notes"In the past, I’ve wanted to browse or search through my own tweets. Viewing my Twitter profile is one way to do that. But if I want to browse back through history, it’s a chore to go back very far. And forget about searching through my own tweets on Twitter since Twitter Search currently only goes back about a seven days."Unfurl
Notes"Without much conscious thought, most of us have built identities across the web. We've filled in profiles, uploaded photos, videos, reviews and bookmarks. The Ident Engine uses semantic web API’s to bring together these web footprints."Unfurl
Notes"Maybe it's better to host your own. That's the thinking coming from a growing number of early technology adopters as service after service goes down, sells out or otherwise frustrates the users who have published their content online only to see the tools they use become broken or less desirable. "Unfurl
Notes"Songs have always been shareable and shared. People, young and old, share songs with each other – by singing or playing them - in a variety of ways and settings, through a variety of technologies and media or other manner of accompaniment (as well as a capella). Songs as recordings are not fundamentally different in this respect. Since the advent of recorded media, people have shared songs in this form as well: played for each other in private and public settings, on personally distributed mixes (mixed tapes / CDs), and, in the age of mp3s, as files sent via email, IM (instant message), torrent, third-party hosting site, or any manner of online sites and services. "Unfurl
I'm 13 and None of My Friends Use Facebook
The vanishing personal site – Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
At Flickr, your photos are always yours « Flickr Blog
Flickr Has the Opportunity to Become the Next Flickr - NYTimes.com
Why I love Twitter and barely tolerate Facebook — I.M.H.O. — Medium
Think Like the Internet – or How to Fight Facebook, and Win | børge forteller om livet
Welcome to the anti-social web
SE Podcast #27 – Dave Winer - Blog – Stack Exchange
How Facebook is ruining sharing | Molly Rants - CNET News
Twitter, the conversation-enabler? Actually, most news orgs use the service as a glorified RSS feed » Nieman Journalism Lab
BBC News - Associated Press reporters told off for tweeting
The Rise Of Pinterest And The Shift From Search To Discovery | TechCrunch
If You're Not Paying for It; You're the Product
Don't Give Your Users Shit Work
How the Hashtag Became a Campaign Battleground - Nancy Scola - Politics - The Atlantic
Twitter's reprehensible lack of an image API
Why You Should Think Twice About Opting-In to the Delicious-AVOS Transfer | ZDNet