- One Billionth Spam Message Stats — from the honeypot project comes a pile of stats about which countries spam, what they spam for, when they spam, etc. One intriguing insight our data provides is that bad guys take vacations too. For example, there is a 21% decrease in spam on Christmas Day and a 32% decrease on New Year’s Day. Monday is the biggest day of the week for spam, while Saturday receives only about 60% of the volume of Monday’s messages. Enjoy your day off spam. (via Bruce Schneier)
- Flowing Data’s Five Best Data Visualization Projects of 2009 — I think I listed at least four of these in this year’s Four Short Links. You’re welcome!
- Six Degrees of Separation — tiring of “Sound of Music”? This BBC documentary on the science of social connection may help.
- Nanoscale Snowmen — The snowman is 10 µm across, 1/5th the width of a human hair.. (via BoingBoing)
"social networking" entries
Pew Research asks questions about the Internet in 2020
Will Google Make Us Stupid? Will we live in the cloud or the desktop?
Pew Research, which seems to be interested in just about everything, conducts a "future of the Internet" survey every few years in which they throw outrageously open-ended and provocative questions at a chosen collection of observers in the areas of technology and society. I took the exercise as a chance to hammer home my own choices of issues, like: Will Google make us stupid? and Will we live in the cloud or the desktop?
Four short links: 25 December 2009
Spam Holidays, Best Visualizations, Six Degrees of Documentary, and Nano Christmas!
Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust?
In light of the company's past consumer-unfriendly initiatives, Facebook's recent 'privacy' settings change should serve as a wake up call to its 350M users that they are entrusting a Fox to guard the Hen House; a truth that is destined to erupt into a crisis for the company.
More that sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity
After
posting some thoughts
a month ago about Erving Goffman’s classic sociological text, The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, I heard from a reader who
urged me to try out a deeper work of Goffman’s, Frame
Analysis (Harper Colophon, 1974). This blog presents the thoughts
that came to mind as I made my way through that long and rambling
work. Although the Internet tends to strip away the external
meanings Goffman recorded, we still bring our real-life frameworks
into online interactions.
Asia Continues to be Facebook's Strongest Growth Region
With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company’s strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of active users from Asia grew by 2% (to 13.5% of all users), and roughly 1 in 7 users now come from the region. With a market penetration under 2%, Facebook is poised to add many more users in Asia (and Africa).
Social Networking is the Means to Achieve Workplace Collaboration
Yesterday I live-blogged a bit from the terrific Government 2.0 event produced by FedScoop.com at the Newseum in Washington, DC. I wrote a post about how collaboration was not the means, but rather an end made possible by the means of social networking tools. You can read my original writing and some initial comments here. Here on O’Reilly Radar, I expand on these ideas.
There are Over a Million People Actively Using Facebook Right Now
A little over a week ago Facebook reached a major milestone: 300 million active users. The fastest-growth region continues to be Asia, but growth in other overseas regions such as the Americas and Africa have also been strong.
RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized
Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were
mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by
companies running social networks. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices. Instead of the constant churning among the commercial sites du jour (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), the next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure. This article looks at efforts in that space and suggests principles to guide development.
Dear DoD, the Web Itself is Social
From infrastructure technologies like OpenID and OpenSocial, to widgets like ShareThis and Friend Connect, to The New York Times itself and your phone, features and interactions that you once only found on social networks are becoming ubiquitous. While it may be convenient for the DoD's IT department to think about social networking as a list of URLs that they can block from any network, the reality is that social networking is becoming a core piece of the web itself.
Facebook Adds Million of Users in Asia
Since my previous post on Facebook users by country, the company has grown rapidly in Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook grew 90% in Asia going from 11.4 to 21.7 million active users. With a Market Penetration of only 0.6% in Asia, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in the region.