not facebook

For the first time ever, I heard someone say "Lets not use Facebook, its too complicated" I wonder if the whole platform play is starting to backfire for some people? Facebook used to be a very elegant way to communicate with people you know. Its starting to get as "messy" as the rest of the internet. And thats probably a bad thing, since that recent Time article positioned Facebook as "The internet, but better" I find I'm using Facebook less too - as I am now seeing spam in Facebook too.

Which Way People?

71% of people, across all boundaries, feel that surveillance cameras are a Good Thing(tm). Sure, but not if its government lackies watching me break the law. I'd much prefer other people watch me break the law. Less chance they would flag me as a lawbreaker?

Which is it people? Are we really willing to give up our freedoms for a little more security? Eventually we will need to stay indoors all the time in order to keep our lives private. Since the govt is tapping our phone lines anyways, is privacy an illusion today? Was McNealy right when he said privacy is already gone, deal with it?

Freedom is already lost. Guess I'll just spend my time in Second Life.

now we need an uberupdater

OK so now I have to update Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, and every other stinking new social network site which comes along? Has anyone built an uber-updater which updates all this stuff at once? No, but if you think about it, thats not the crux of the problem. We all have statuses that we want to report to different people. No one has really figured how to do this correctly and most importantly, automatically. Pluggd has a little add-on that updates your twitter status with what you are listening to on Pluggd. We need more of that - Outlook updating Twitter, Pownce etc etc etc. We need one of these services to morph into the core status tool, and my gut says thats twitter. I update my twitter status and BAM, everything flows from there.

i'm on pownce now but so what?

My enjoyment of discovering new social networking products is highly inhibited by having to add all of my contacts over and over and over again. So tiresome. Why can't they have a tool to pull them all in, ala Facebook, Spoke etc etc etc. Sigh.

My recommendation to all new social networking sites: don't bother launching without a contact builder. Please.

Enough With The Private Invites, Already...

OK, I am now officially tired of those services which attempt to create buzz by giving out invites to a select few and hardly doling out any more. If the service wants good blog press, then let everyone in. Oh, but that would reveal the secret that "this revolutionary new thing" is just not that. The last "revolutionary new thing" I saw was twitter, and that was not such a big idea after all. People have wanted some kinda way to let people know what they are up to in a light way for ages. No one just ever did it. Pownce, Jaiku etc are just better, more featured, twitters. More features usually means bad. Look at how Palm hit the skids once it got more complex. We need simple devices which do one thing or a few things well.

MySpace vs Facebook

Interesting Post.

http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

Too bad I disagree. Crappy interface is not related to culture. Bad web design is bad web design. Good web design is good web design. It crosses races and cultures and ages. Facebook looks better because the owners keep a tight rein on style. MySpace lets you run wild. It's a user empowerment decision from the creators of the site. Both sites let you express yourself. Of course the more artsy folks are going to do to MySpace - duh - gives people more control.

Whats Wrong With Steroids?

I've talked about this on my show at great length but I thought I'd mention it here so you can see that this blog IS broader than just the social networking stuff. You see, I firmly believe that the next stage of our physical and mental evolution can be accelerated by using our minds to come up with ways to augment ourselves to the task we wish to perform. If you think about it, steroids and other drugs which enhance your physical body are just the next step beyond training and should be part of any training regimen to increase your physical capabilities.

People proclaim, well thats cheating, or thats not natural. First of all, as the production methods for this stuff gets more and more advanced, the ability to detect it will diminish to zero - its kinda like trying to fight viruses, its a constant battle and sometimes you lose. Considering the money thats at stake, why not continue to engineer more effective drugs which are less and less detectable. So if you can't accurately detect, I say just let everyone do what they want.

And the not natural rebuttal? I believe that man-made is natural, as we everything we have created was fashioned from things that exist in nature - we did not create anything new - we just molded nature to do our bidding. And whats is more natural for a human than using his or her brain to think. Anything we can think of doing to augment ourselves, we should.

Facebook Wins - But Where Is My 3d Virtual Facebook World?

Sorry folks, but I think Facebook has "won" the social networking wars. The final nail in the coffin was the release of "Facebook As Platform" where now its ultimately extensible by its users. The cool thing about it is that Facebook appeals to everyone at every level - its casual enough to use for personal stuff and professional enough to post your resume into to look for a job. I've been involved in social networking sites for a long long time, I was one of the first members of Ryze, LinkedIn, and pretty much made the rounds of all the sites. But after having a profile on probably 100 sites, and different pictures everywhere, I think things are shaking out for Facebook. Plus now that they've added a video app, how much longer till we can use Facebook for real-time f2f communications? Yup, folks. Facebook is the winner.

Now where is my 3d virtual world Facebook? I'd like to see an instance of Facebook built on some 3d engine. Eric ses the Second Life engine is crap, so where do we go? Wouldn't it be cool to build a virutal world which mimics the real world and populate with real avatars? It would mimic everything expect you could teleport and fly and all sorts of other cool stuff. A world like ours, but better.

twitter leads to tour of california

I get a twitter from one of my buddies, eric rice, who is ustreaming his drive (in his car) from his place to the Pixelodeon festival in LA. So I tune in and there he is, driving down 101.

How does this make me a bigger, better, person? While I'm sitting here at my desk working, I can tour the length of California with Eric. My senses have been augmented with his trip.

I'm real interested in his rig. The whole telepresence field is really interesting to me, since my gut says that in the days of rising fuel prices, global terror, and other reasons to stay home, people still want to experience other places - and these little experiments like justin.tv and Erics ustream and the great-grandpappys of full immersive telepresence, where you don't really need to be there anymore in order to experience a place.

Can you image when we get to that day? Distance will really be nothing then.

welcome to the social future

when i was first thinking about putting this blog together, i has a tough time coming up with a name - of course all of my stuff in a variation on "future" - but in this case, i wanted to talk about the future of humanity, and how we are using electronic connectivity tools, like the internet, to augment ourselves and out personal experience. we are all doing it right now, by participating in things like twitter and facebook and myspace. humanfuture was taken and way too obtuse I guess. so i'm lucky socialfuture.blogspot.com is free.

What will i be talking about on this blog? well, one of the things I'm intensely interested in is making myself - and by extension by teaching these techniques to others - humanity, better. Its one of the themes of my show - the THINKfuture podcast. I firmly believe that using social networking tools to extend our senses, both inwards and outwards, to others over the internet, whether its over low bandwidth connections like twitter, or high bandwidth connections like Second Life, or even World Of Warcraft is how we will evolve humanity ot the next level.

I'm not talking physical evolution. I'm talking human directed evolution, via physical and electronic augmentation. We are already cyborgs, with our Blackberry strapped to our hip at all times - the full set of the worlds knowledge a simple web surf away. Or re-engineering our own mental and physical selves via new drugs, supplements, surgery etc. Everything from taking steriods, to having a friends list on Facebook, is fair game.

This is the stuff I'm talking about - evolving humanity, any way we can.