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Twitter as a Protocol
Yesterday, I had lunch with a guy who was picking my brain about various topics. One of the conversations we ended up having was about the longevity of Twitter as a company. It hearkens back to conversations I had years ago when Twitter was barely making it as a service. It was down seemingly half…
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Blackouts, Boycotts and Regressing From Progress
A couple of weeks ago, the United States, and in fact, the world saw the internet grow up. Namely, through the use of blackouts – a previously unused tactic of protest and grassroots organizing – we saw the evil Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) and it’s evil twin Protect IP (PIPA) anti-piracy legislation fail in…
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Fact Checking in the Internet World
Like many other industries, journalism has undergone a vast paradigm shift in the last decade. Like advertising, the music and film industries, marketing, public relations and virtually all other professional fields, journalism has had to adjust to a new “immediacy” brought about by the Internet. Now, by all reports, most people get their news from…
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To Whom Much is Given, Much is Required (or, Scoble Syndrome)
Photo by Eric Skiff Here we go again. Another day in the life of an ongoing saga between megalomaniac Robert Scoble and myself. In this chapter of this saga, I point out why I have figured out the key thing that he has repeatedly not learned… to whom much is given, much is required. It…
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What Are You Not Telling the World Online?
Last year, there was a brilliant preliminary report that came out of MIT where two grad students decided to explore the idea of privacy implications based on omission. In other words, these students said that they could predict, with a high degree of accuracy, the sexual orientation and inclinations of people based on their activities,…
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Online Media: Relationships and Finding Signal In the Noise
When I first started using Twitter in the fall of 2006, I was one of only a few thousand people using this weird new service. It was fun because my friends were there. I’m an early adopter when it comes to technology so it’s not all that uncommon to find me on some new online…
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Our lives in a thousand years
A few days ago, I posed a question on Facebook and on Twitter: What will our offspring know about us in a thousand years? It came after a conversation about how what we know about our ancestors has been discovered through archaeology and discovery of physical evidence. We know much about the Egyptians through discovery…
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Threadsy Aggregates Email, Facebook and Twitter (plus invites!)
TechCrunch 50 startup and runner-up Threadsy reached out to me earlier to look at their service. I’m not usually one to do that but I had some time and their street cred seemed legitimate (TC50, etc). The service is an aggregation tool that pulls email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, even IMAP to name a few) together.…
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Buzz Kill
By now, if you follow the technology world at all, or if you use Gmail, you’ve probably noticed a new thingy released by Google in the last few days. The thingy is called Google Buzz and it is billed to be a “status update” tool to allow your friends to know what you’re up to?…