By riedl on
If you haven’t played with one of these, you should try it. It’s an awesome multi-user interface. The applications are pretty fun, too, but the really exciting thing is imagining all the new things one might build if one had one of these in one’s own lab :).
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By riedl on
It’s easy to explain the advantage to everyone else of having Facebook join the party. What are the advantages to Facebook? Social networking sites should be a vortex, with people motivated to join and stay on the sites with the most other users. Making it easy for people to migrate their information would reduce the stickiness. If this analysis is correct, the only way for the rest of the world to win would be for the community of “everyone else” to be larger than the community Facebook can attract itself. It would be interesting to analyze the distributions of membership on social network sites that lead to success for openness versus those that predict that proprietary is the way to win.
John
By riedl on
ScribeFire is a cool tool that makes it easy to create a blog entry in your favorite blog tool. Just install the plugin, add your favorite blogs, and you’re one click from publishing to the blogs. A very nice example of how a tool can lower the barrier to entry just enough to let you blog about things that you might otherwise just smile at :).
Even more fun: the current developer is Chris Finke, a very talented former Chipmarker!
By harper on
Two interesting examples of businesses fighting their communities came up this morning in my reading.
Example 1. Amazon is selling Bill Clinton’s new book, Giving. They also deleted about 20 reviews from the product page. Presumably, these reviews were mostly low, mostly given by folks who don’t agree with Bill’s politics. Amazon, however, is in the business of selling books, and low reviews posted by people who are clearly not the target demographic do not help them make money. Thus, the reviews go away, and people get angry. Would better moderation interfaces, or different moderation policies affect the need for this type of "censorship"?
Example 2. Yahoo! Answers developers post a blog entry that basically says: stop using Yahoo Answers as a social space, and start asking intelligent questions. There are two prominent sub-communities of YA that are clearly not about Q&A discourse. There is the polls community, where people ask questions like "which pair of jeans should I wear tonight", and the politics community that focuses on flame wars. Why doesn’t Yahoo! seem to care about these thriving sub-communities? Well, perhaps they don’t promote Yahoo’s vision of social search, where a huge Q&A database helps Yahoo reclaim the #1 search engine slot.
These examples illustrate to me the challenges that businesses face in leveraging users’ work as part of their core business.
Max
By terveen on
I’ve been thinking about buying a new computer, and after some Mac-koolaid-dispensation from Barry Smyth, I started to consider getting a Mac. Here’s an article that claims Macs aren’t just better but cheaper than PCs, too. So, should I buy a Mac?