30 posts
Some time back, I wrote a very frustrated post on how experts from the field of psychology make sweeping generalizations of what it means to use online services like twitter, facebook and other social networking sites.
Here we go:
1. Semanti:A few months ago, after Facebook introduced Facebook Connect, Razorfish created a presentation that looked at the possibilities of a world with portable social graphs online.
So we were quite intrigued to hear about Semanti, a browser add-on that automatically shares things you bookmark with your Facebook friends. Currently, we can share individual links on Facebook. Semanti will take this one step further and instead of bookmarking in Delicious (for example) in isolation or posting separate links to Facebook, you can share your bookmarked links with your Facebook friends straight away.
We’re very excited about today’s launch of Facebook Connect for Protect The Human, Amnesty International UK’s digital campaigning platform.
My avatar has changed.
Uh oh. Big deal, you might think – some people change their avatars as often as they change shoes. And so do I – but not here at my work blog.
For the past half year I’ve been writing under a stranger’s face – a “spare” avatar bestowed upon me by Isaac until yesterday.
This morning’s news that Skittles had launched a new site with a home page that’s basically a free-for-all Twitter search for the term “skittles” raises us a whole new DefCon level.
This radical trust experiment is either a totally genius idea, or it will be taken down very soon. Currently, the site seems populated almost exclusively by a combination of social experterati trying to work out which outcome is most likely, This radical trust experiment is either a totally genius idea, or it will be taken down very soon. Currently, the site seems populated almost exclusively by a combination of social experterati trying to work out which outcome is most likely, and a bunch of other people running around trying to wreck it and some other people who are exploring the outer limits of what might be considered acceptable to a brand advertiser. The ‘other pages’ include Flickr, YouTube and Facebook iterations and the only ‘official’ Skittles real-estate is a floating control panel – a bit like that Modernista website everyone wishes they’d done, but probably don’t visit very often. and some other people who are exploring the outer limits of what might be considered acceptable to a brand advertiser. The ‘other pages’ include Flickr, YouTube and Facebook iterations and the only ‘official’ Skittles real-estate is a floating control panel – a bit like that Modernista website everyone wishes they’d done, but probably don’t visit very often.
But why do people do it? I just don’t get it…
How many times have you heard people ask that question when they discover that you work in something to do with blogging, Twitter and Facebook?
They start to struggle when you tell them most people don’t do it for money. That makes them very suspicious. Not for money? Must be something really suspect then – possibly perverted. Perhaps you’ll end up using *that word*: “altruism”. That’ll get them smirking nervously. Altruism. Oh yeah.
Discovered this inspiring post via Twitter when I got in to work this morning. It makes a convincing argument for the role of community/social technologies in helping both citizens and the nation pull together and through the recession.
Looked at very simply: hundreds of thousands of people are finding or are about to find themselves with a lot more time and a lot less money than they are used to. The result is at least three sets of needs
- practical/financial (e.g. how do I pay the rent/avoid my house being repossessed?)
- emotional/psychological (e.g. how do I face my friends? where do I get my identity from now I don’t have a job?)
- directional (e.g. what do I do with my time? how do I find work?)
Let’s get straight into it:
1. The Whopper Sacrifice and its sad end: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the agency famously responsible for the Bill Gates-Jerry Seinfled Microsoft ads, came up with the concept of sacrificing 10 Facebook friends in exchange for a Burger King Whopper. In less than a week, Facebook shut the site down. If you go to the site now, you note that 233,906 friendships were sacrificed for this – kudos to CP+B and some negative press for Facebook.
MyFolia.com, an innovative new online gardening community and organiser that lets you list the plants you want to grow and matches you to gardeners who want to swap seeds. As you’d expect,MyFolia.com is packed with tools to allow gardeners to swap ideas and tips as well, but it’s the seed swapping that drew the attention of a commenter at Lifehacker and has cast a dark cloud over conversations in the groups area of MyFolia:
We went to mashup* Events Widgets last night. There were about 200 people there, four panelists and some people demo’ing new stuff. I went along to find out what is happening on the widget scene. I was hoping to hear about some concrete examples, and was interested in hearing how people, brands, media owners are making money from widgets. So was everyone else, and the audience attacked.
