My own piece of the Internet
 
Category: <span>social networking</span>

Category: social networking

I really want to delete my facebook account

I really want to delete my facebook account. I was enthusiastic about the idea after all the changes the Zuck made to “privacy” this year and then I read this polemic by Jason Calacanis about how facebook is evil and the Zuck has Zucked his way to the top. I was kinda gratified because it meant that my suspicion and anxiety about facebook was felt tenfold over by an industry observer. It meant that my doubts about the business model were in part justified because eroding privacy for commercial gain is clearly unethical. And not being transparent about it is …

Is Twitter just a million moronic conversations

Once watching the TV was a complete passive act of slovenly consumption. The evening show was watched while slumped on the couch all senses dulled by the blue rays of the box. Now watching the TV is only one part of watching the TV. In face “TV events” can be enjoyed by hooking into the Twitter firehose and looking for the right hashtag. During the Logies, an Australian TV award show for all US folks, I noticed that the digital hipsters at the event were tweeting, that people on the couch were tweeting, that journalists were tweeting. Everybody was talking …

The buzz of social media

Google just released Google Buzz which has demands that we “go beyond status messages”. To me this appears to echo the feeling many people had, including me, when confronted with micro-blogging sites like Twitter – so what. It represents a profound misunderstanding of what a status message actually is. Status messages are really: part of a conversation the start of a conversation a cry for help a complaint a grandiose aphorism about what’s wrong with the world a proclamation of love and of course a comedy. Whilst twitter and Facebook might appear to a Google engineer to be merely a …

You and me, and the evolving web 2.0

Since Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle introduced the term Web 2.0 five years ago, there has been an explosion of web tools and Internet-connected gadgets that foster conversations, interactions and discoveries. In the past five years startups have built massive brands by harnessing communities and conversations. Brands like Twitter, Facebook, Stumble Upon, Ebay, Amazon and many others grew massive audiences by offering means for related and unrelated people to connect using Internet technologies. By crowdsourcing these brands provided platforms for collective interactions that create useful and cool tools like book reviews, movie databases, online encycopedias, map annotations, link resources . …

When I was young everything was different

When I was 15 my chief concerns were sneaking cigarettes and my hair. I didn’t read the newspaper, rather I watched the TV news with my parents as bored as hell. The Berlin Wall was to stand for another 5 years and Ronald Reagan was talking about God a lot, even though he didn’t go to church. I was opinionated and selfish. Like most teenagers. The announcement last week that some research about how teenagers consume media released by Morgan Stanley and written by a 15 year old intern was received with breathless excitement. This kid had apparently clearly and …

Wow, I can get a personalised internet address now

Sometimes something seems really really good but it’s actually really really bad; stupid in fact. So stupid that when you realise that it is so, you feel like bashing your head against a wall and cursing the gods while shaking your fist at the sky. Or something like that. A “personalised internet address”. Wow. Are you excited. And guess what, you can get one from Facebook. Wow again. So what does this “personalised internet address” look like? Well, it looks like a facebook URL as in facebook.com/yourusername. Mine looks like facebook.com/jonstribling and I am proud as punch. Hang on I …

Catching the wave

When I was a kid I loved to surf. Now cruising to the beach with my thruster and catching a few waves was not an easy thing to do when I lived in the middle of the country five hours from the beach. It was frustrating that my nascent surfing skills would develop over summer and then slowly wane during the year. Each beach holiday I would need to learn again. Google obviously had a window into my frustrations about catching waves, recently announcing Google Wave, “a new model for communication and collaboration on the web”. Cute metaphors aside the …

Famous for 15 tweets

Last Friday when Oprah tweeted that she was joining the 21st century some Twitter folk lamented the gentrification of twitter. If Oprah tweets then her legion of middle American fans will tweet and suddenly I don’t look so cool or edgy anymore. Bugger! The truth is that twitter was already mainstream – Ashton Kutcher and Brittney are not quirky underground artists, they are celebrities through and through. The concern appeared to be that with Twitter becoming more mainstream it would be harder to become a twitter star. You would actually have to do something in order to be famous for …

Twitter tips

I first came across Twitter in 2007 and dutifully created an account. Then I looked at the question “What are you doing right now?” and thought “I am mindlessly looking at Twitter”. The question was a tough one, being a somewhat private person the idea of venting my most personal thoughts online was unthinkable. A friend joked that the best response would be “having a shit”. He may have been right. That Twitter could evolve into a rather nifty PR tool, a DM tool (sorry but it’s true) and customer engagement tool did not occur to me. I wish I …

Why Facebook is (almost) doomed

Think about where you played as a kid. It may have been a local park, a suburban street for games of cricket or hockey, a local oval for football, a local pool in summer, a small creek in the country, or in your bedroom hunched over an early gaming console (for me it was the Atari 2600). Now think about your childhood adventures in the mall or at the movies. One activity represents an idylic childish innocence and the other a slightly less innocent commercial sphere. To completely bastardise French anthropologist Emile Durkheim one is sacred and the other profane. …