"social networking" entries

Sarah Milstein on Iranian Protests and Twitter

In this 10 minute interview, Sarah Milstein, co-author of The Twitter Book, discusses Twitter’s impact on the Iranian protests, the emerging relationship between Twitter and breaking news stories, and she addressed the fear of inadvertent transparency within immediate social messaging communications media.

Captivity of the Commons

This post is part two of the series, “The Question Concerning Social Technology”. Part one is here. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27. In January 2002 DARPA launched the Information Awareness Office. The mission was to, “ imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness (emphasis added)” The notion of a government agency achieving total information awareness was too Orwellian to ignore. Under criticism that this “awareness” could quickly migrate to a mass surveillance system the program was defunded.

Four short links: 11 May 2009

Four short links: 11 May 2009

Healthcare, Diagrams, Social Networking, and Email

  1. OSCAR Canada — open source healthcare (EMR) software, akin to VistA. See linuxmednews.com for more.
  2. Instaviz — iPhone app for mindmapping/any other blob-and-line diagram. I’m hypnotised by the correction of a fuzzy hand-drawn circle into a clean crisp algorithmic circle.
  3. Buddypress — open source software that turns a WordPress installation into a social networking platform. Ok, so social networking software is now essentially free. What’s the next big thing that will as hard and new as social networking was in 2003?
  4. Getting Insight Into One’s Own Email — Thunderbird now shows interesting facts when there’s no message to look at: recently read messages, messages most likely to be interesting, and a histogram of activity.

Goodreads vs Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow

I am never more painfully reminded of the limits of symmetric “friend” -based social networks than I am when I post a book review on Goodreads. I love books, and I love spreading the word about ones I enjoy (as well as ones I expected to enjoy, but didn’t quite). Most of the time, my reviews go out quietly to a small group of friends, whose book recommendations I also follow. It’s a lovely social network. But every once in a while, I post a link to one of my reviews on Twitter, and am immediately deluged with friend requests. Some of them are from people I know, but whose taste in books I may not share (or even care about), and many are from complete strangers. If I say “yes” to any of them, I have to see every book they review as well. As you can imagine, it doesn’t scale.

How Big Data Impacts Analytics

Research for our just published report on Big Data management technologies, included conversations with teams who are at the forefront of analyzing massive data sets. We were particularly impressed with the work being produced by Linkedin's analytics team. [We have more details on Linkedin's analytics team, in an article in the upcoming issue of Release 2.0.] At the second Social…

Active Facebook Users By Country

Since I last posted numbers on Facebook’s user base six week ago, the company has added close to 20 million active users. I’ve had a few requests for detailed numbers by country so I quickly assembled an update. Among countries with at least a million users, the fastest-growing are Indonesia and the Philippines.

Facebook is Growing Fast in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East

With Facebook recently passing 175 million users, I decided to update my analysis of its user base. The weekly growth in number of users has remained steady, with the last 5 weeks being exceptionally strong: Facebook added over 25 million users since early February. The share of U.S. users inched up slightly from 30% to 31%. The company added users…

Anatomy of "Connect"

I'm here at Webstock in New Zealand working on my talk for tomorrow (Open, Social Web) and one of the things I've been thinking about is all of the different "Connect" applications and products that have recently sprung into existence. I mean, we have Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, MySpace (thankfully not "Connect") ID, TypePad Connect, RPX and I'm sure…

The Coming Readers' Economy and Data Portability

This is a guest post by Mark Bertils. At the end of last year one event signaled a huge shift in how the book publishing industry will do business. It's not what you think. It was December's launch of Facebook Connect. A land grab for user identities followed. The Web's people economy is coming of age. Facebook's Squid Tries to…

Four short links: 6 Jan 2009

Four short links: 6 Jan 2009

Four thought-provoking links from the worlds of disaster tech, multicore, bioengineering, and 17th century French nobility.

  1. Techies: Volunteering to Save the World – article on NGO work being the new black for technology. In particular, this caught my eye: “Earlier this year, IBM launched a program called Corporate Service Corps to send 100 employees to Romania, Turkey, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana and Tanzania to work on projects that combine economic development and IT. And the response was impressive: More than 5,000 employees applied to participate.”
  2. Laurence Livermore Lab releases Stack Trace Analysis Tool – debugging tool for code running over 20k processors. We need new tools like this to handle the complexity thrown up by a multicore world.
  3. Spinning Silkworm Cocoons into Biosensors – interesting article in MIT Technology Review about bioengineer Fiorenzo Omenetto who is using silk to build optical devices that can be used as sensors in the body. “In the devices that ­Omenetto and Kaplan are developing, proteins embedded in the optical material efficiently bind to a target such as oxygen or a bacterial protein; when they do, the light transmitted by the sensor changes color.”
  4. La Rochefoucauld Quotes – lots of thought-provoking quotes. For example, on the freemium business model: “What seems to be generosity is often no more than disguised ambition, which overlooks a small interest in order to secure a great one.” On Twitter: “As it is the characteristic of great wits to say much in few words, so small wits seem to have the gift of speaking much and saying nothing.” On social network sites: “However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.” On Google/Microsoft/Apple/[insert big company here]: “There are heroes in evil as well as in good.