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.