Social Sites Evaluation Team

There are lots of social networking sites and there are new launched every day. Some people just stick to one of them and never try anything new - but I, at least from time to time, I would like to evaluate some of the new sites and see what functionality they provide. The problem is it is really hard to do it in one person - after all it is all about social interaction and not about some lonely web surfing - and it is socially a bit awkward now to ask your friends to join a new and shiny social networking site after so many others. Hence the idea of a web team of people who would declare themselves interested in trying out new social networking sites and joining the new sites by the whole team together to evaluate it.

Facebook and conversations

I am a bit disapointed about Facebook - it notifies me about all kinds of events involving my friends - but somehow I can't find a way to monitor for new posts in groups I have joined. For me having meaningful conversations is the absolute number one feature of social web sites and I don't see much point in using Facebook when it does not make it easy for me. It provides me all the context needed to engage my friends into a conversation - but somehow does not create a convenient place for a group exchange of ideas.

And perhaps I am not alone in that sentiment?

Ideograms and SMS

There is much evidence that SMSes are more used in the Far East then they are in other parts of the world. It's no surprise mobile is generally more widespread there, but somehow I cannot imagine reading a book on the screen of a mobile phone. Is it just lack of imagination - or perhaps the text in ideograms just takes less screen estate to convene the same meaning? I don't know. I've tried to look at some web pages (like www.un.org) in English and in Japanese or Chinese - frankly I don't see any difference - but there must be some. Does any one have some real data here?

“Message is the medium”

This is a quote that I’ve seen somewhere that sums the whole twitter thing so much commented in the blogosphere. By exchanging the perhaps less obviously valuable information you keep the information channel open. This is how our minds work.

Internet controlled agent

Musing about the things you can do at the edge of the network reminded me about my old idea. With Internet you can easily get info about remote places - but by now it is still passive - you just get what the remote host lets you see, and if you want to see what is just around the corner that that internet cam shows, you are out of luck. So here comes my business idea - remotely controlled web cam. A robot carrying a camera might be too expensive by now - but with no problem you can instruct via internet in real time a camera operator.

Is there anyone interested how London looks like today?

Facebook applications

There is much talk in the blogosphere about third party facebook applications. In the strategic perspective it has already been analyzed in much detail - here I'd like to post just two obserwations.

1. The applications seem to be not integrated with the underlying platform at all. I have not yet tried myself to write anything there - so I don't know how much it is the fault of the programmer and how much it is the platform itself, but when an application asks me to create a new user id and password for it then it is kind of missing the whole point (this was one of the instant messaging apps).


2. The model where at the registration of the new application you invite your frieds is faulty. At that time I don't know what is the utility of the application, I have no information to deduce who of my friends would like it and who would not. Please Facebook change that.

The web is more meta and meta

Today I've
googled for "database table name plural singular" and what I see as the first result?



Yes - the first result was 'Googled "database table name singular plural", I find this issue has been discussed many times. I feel the only compromise of plural school, ...'.

Unfortunately I cannot find that phrase on the linked page.

Wikis and fora - other ideas

I am really fan of the idea of integrating wikis and fora. Fora are good for conversations - wikis are good for storing knowledge. For a good theory building system you need both. The question, of course, is how they should be integrated. It is not easy. Ideas start with conversations - then they can crystallize to some semi stable state - but it never ends there - the crystallized ideas produce more discussions and eventually can be completely changed. There are users who addictive follow the whole process - and those who come at some later stage, the former have the whole history of the conversation in their head, the letter need some introduction that would inform them about the summary facts without reading the whole history. There are also occasions where you would like to refer to the exact words of someone for political reasons.
It's all very complex - and I guess we shall never have some ideal solution that will work for all purposes - but I believe we should experiment with different settings.

The integration solutions that I've seen thus far are mostly about adding some forum functionality to wikis: a discussion page paired to a 'main' page (on wikipedia), a 'attach to page' method that adds a comment to the wiki page with some special visual style that makes it different from the other content. But there can be many more ways of doing that integration. In particular I see many ways of doing it the other way around - by adding wiki functionality to forum sites and letting it's users:

• edit the list of subjects just like they would edit a wiki page
• 'overwrite' a part of the conversation with a summary that would be a wiki page, editable by all the participants in the overwritten part of the conversation with the expectation that it will contain a consensus between them on what was written, the overwritten text could be available behind a link
• edit some small 'pagelets', or menus used for navigation (with more and more screen realestate we can add more of them)

Niagara 2 - the first Open Source main stream processor?

This sounds like news:

the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, "Niagara 2" - named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community - whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.

Jonathan Schwartz in his blog

I wander how will it be vexed by the Free Software community.

And by the way - will this amount of parallelism help Hurd.

Return of Fora?

The most interesting presentation at the yesterdays London Wiki Wednesday was a talk by Alan Wood and it was not about a wiki - but something more like an interenet forum (or biulettin board system or ... whatever).

I was always of the opinion that there is much unrealized potential in this old software genre.
It is message based - like email or RSS - so in fact it fits better the conversational nature of most communication then document based wikis. But it is also centralized - and that means you can do many things you cannot with a decentralized system (like version control of attachments, uniform visualisation of the conversations - i.e. less need for quoting, moderation, statistics etc.). All the talk now is about Social Networking Sites - but in fact the networking part is so insignificant in all of them - and most of the interaction that happens there is exactly the same as you had on internet fora and BBSes.

Instant Messaging and Social Networking - Snimmer

Snimmer is a web based service with chat (supporting all the major networks - and even Jabber) and Social Networking features. Looks like great idea - I wander when the major SN sites will catch on with IM widgets on their pages.

See your name in hyerogliphs

Egyptian Name Translator

I've read in wikipedia that the alphabet was discovered when Egiptians needed to record names of foreign labourers - they had no hieroglyphs for their names so they invented assigning hieroglyphs to phonemes and then composing the names from them.

Pirates of the Internet

In a brilliant move the notorious Pirate Bay - a Swedish bittorrent tracker - reappriopriated the romanticism and disruptive potential of the pirate mythology in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie series:

Why Vote?

This freakonomics article is not new - but I have read it just recently. A nice economic analysis of voting - but the authors don't take into account the fact that the payoff of a vote is a dependent variable related to the number of voters. The fewer people vote the more important are they votes - so even in this pure economic model the number of voters would never drop to 0.

Reading Shah of Shahs

In the nineties, after the communism collapsed in Poland and shortly before her death my grandmother used to attentively watch at least 6 news programs on TV every day. She was not involved politically - she was just used to a different information diet. I myself do remember days when Radio Free Europe was jammed by the communistic government of Poland. It is hard to imagine now how different the world was back then.

"The Inner Ring" and "The Fight Club"

This short post is juxtaposition of two links: The Inner Ring and The Fight Club. Isn't "The Fight Club" really about how being in the "Inner Ring" has more 'meaning' and is more psychologically rewarding than material success?

"Democratizing Innovation" and web sites

Can web sites use the 'Lead Users' idea from the von Hippel oeuvre? For sure, all his ideas are applicable here. What I would like to see are some more practical methods on finding the 'Lead Users'.

Individualism as a Socio-Economic Phenomenon

Individualism lets the society test new ways of doing practically everything. The costs are beared by the individual - while his success can be easily copied by others and become beneficial for everyone. Those statements are true in our current socio-economic reality but they are not universal (imagine an nomadic tribe - at least some individualism for example in choosing the direction of the wandering cannot be copied by others after it proves successfully) - so individualism is not universal either. This might also explain the success of the western societies with very individualistic culture - this was a good adaptation for the changes or recent history.

Reading "Democratizing Innovation" by Eric von Hippel

The tile is about innovation, but the subject seems to be a bit broader and include also design. Of course innovation involves design - but design not always involves innovation. The example of user designing his pizza by choosing toppings shows this quite well.

Watermarks instead of DRM

A german music website sells MP3 music with watermarks.