Category: Technology
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Slouching toward transparency
In regards to the WikiLeaks story, it seems that: – The explosive stuff is really a shift from assumed understanding to explicit acknowledgment. For example, that Arab nations are just as terrified of Iran’s nuclear program as Israel. – The surprising stuff is more funny or strange. More like gossip you wouldn’t have guessed, but…
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Internet usage by country
In my post below on the rise of China, I ran into the data on internet usage by country again. I was online regularly by the spring of 1995, and it’s amazing to think that there are hundreds of millions of Chinese on the internet now! The World Bank estimates that both China and […]
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A positive rate of rate of change
A Cheaper Plan at Netflix Offers Films for Online Only: Netflix said Monday that it was introducing a subscription plan for customers who want to watch movies only online, underscoring yet another step away from its roots in DVD rentals by mail. The new plan offers unlimited access to Netflix’s library of streaming movies and…
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I am the email generation!
David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, has a breathless take on the rise of Facebook and its impending assault on Google in The Daily Beast. There’s a lot of hyperbole and Facebook-cheering throughout the piece, but this bold but unsupported assertion caught my attention: Email is, as we all know, a horribly broken system.…
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The technology or the company?
TechCrunch is reporting on Facebook’s new “modern messaging system”. The first few comments immediately telegraphed my first impression: is this Facebook’s Google Wave? Interesting then to see if Facebook can make this work. If it can’t, then score one for the proposition that people don’t want a seamless integration of various tools which emerged in…
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The banality of Facebook
Jonah Lehrer (a.k.a. the “boy-king of the neuroscience blogosphere”) has a mild and gentlemanly rejoinder to Zadie Smith essay which verges on moral panic about the Facebook phenomenon. Back in 2000 I remember listening to literary critics rave about Smith’s White Teeth. I’m a nerd, and when I read fiction it tends to be “speculative…
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We live in utopia – part n
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A sign that Facebook has peaked
The other day NPR’s Planet Money quipped that the gold bubble was going to burst soon, as they’d decided to buy gold. Well, perhaps Facebook is nearing its bursting point…I created a Gene Expression fan page. I don’t have a good sense of the great utility of this sort of thing…you can after all find…
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A sign that Facebook has peaked
The other day NPR’s Planet Money quipped that the gold bubble was going to burst soon, as they’d decided to buy gold. Well, perhaps Facebook is nearing its bursting point…I created a Gene Expression fan page. I don’t have a good sense of the great utility of this sort of thing…you can after all find…
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The folly of the crowds
With the big hullabaloo around The Social Network I’ve been reflecting a bit about my incorrect intuition since ~2008 that the Facebook bubble would burst at any moment. The bubble may still burst, or a new competitor may come out of the blue, or Google might actually release a comparable offering, but Facebook is still…
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Google Wave is dead
Did you notice that Google Wave was put out of its misery? I didn’t. I guess that says something about Wave’s impact. By the end of last year my main association with Wave was that it was a way for people I was trying to avoid in other ways to recontact me. So what’s happening…
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First they came for Dave Weigel
Dave Weigel of The Washington Post has resigned over his juvenile postings on an e-list. Basically the postings allowed for Weigel’s mask to slip, and showed him to be a vulgar and immature young man in some contexts. That’s no different from many of us in the proper context. The e-list is now defunct because…
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You have no privacy, deal with it
The Washington Post’s blogger-journalist Dave Weigel has a post up where he preemptively apologizes for stuff he posted on an “off-the-record” e-list,. Extracts are going to be published by a gossip site. Journalists are the tip of the iceberg; privacy is fast becoming a total fiction, remember that. We’re slowly drifting toward David Brin’s model…
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Another perspective on Facebook
From Ruchira Paul, who analyzes her own friend network. One issue which I think is relevant is that many people have several Facebook accounts for several different purposes. It’s an interesting window into the psychology of different individuals, as some seem happy to go along with Facebook’s preference of a unitary identity, while others resist…