I’m trying to work out why this irritates me so much: Visit The Insider and you’ll be continually pestered by a popup (for some reason not caught by the pop-up blocker in Firefox) inviting me to install The Insider’s Facebook application. This is the much-touted Facebook Connect – a successor to the disastrous Beacon thing, … Read more
Social networks are not really social—they’re informational. While they may appear to be social, and perhaps we flock to them and participate in them because we feel a need to socially connect, the real currency is information. Whereas we might go to a bar, a cocktail party or a dinner and spend 90% of our … Read more
Look at a social networking site lie Yaari and you can see where the social networking phenomenon may fail, simply by abusing the trust of its users. Sites like LinkedIn, Plaxo etc rely on expanding quickly by offering a useful service: trawling your address book to find friends and contacts who use the same service. … Read more
It’s interesting to watch how quickly our Web 2.0 tools are changing, changing us, changing the way we communicate, and being changed by us. And how each step feels like a revolution, and yet, usually, isn’t. The latest thing is Twitter 2.0, as I would call it. Nothing has actually changed in the software, but … Read more
The annoying thing with social media is that you can’t really control it. If you insist on having a section listing the most-read stories, say, you can’t really fiddle with it without making it pretty meaningless. The English-language version of the People’s Daily website, for example, doesn’t have any story on Tibet displayed prominently on … Read more