Peter Smith’s Posterous

quick hits 



September 18, 2009

What Twitter’s new Retweet system may well look like

Via http://thenextweb.com/2009/09/18/twitters-retweet-system/

Not a terrible solution. Kinda taking a cue the "mentions" functionality from a number of twitter clients. But not sure I'd want it  separated out from my geeneral replies or tweetstream into it's own tabs like that.

A commenter over on TechCrunch mentioned they thought it looked like FriendFeed. Whcih got the conspirational part of my brain thinking: Facebook acquired FriendFeed recently so presumably FB will be rolling out more FF-like features. So is Twitter trying to leverage the conventions created its user community to make a preemptive strike?

Here's the TechCrunch post: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/18/closing-in-on-launch-twitter-tweaks-its-retweet-api-and-a-picture-of-how-it-will-look/

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September 17, 2009

Hierarchy of Digital Distractions

From http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-hierarchy-of-digital-distractions/ via somebody's Friendfeed via some random retweet.

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September 17, 2009

EXCLUSIVE: W.H. collects Web users' data without notice - Washington Times

The White House is collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users, a failure that appears to run counter to President Obama's promise of a transparent government and his pledge to protect privacy on the Internet.
via washingtontimes.com

Cognitive dissonance on so many levels with this story. There's any number of other entities that crawl and store internet data - from archive.org to social media monitoring services to Google to...

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August 31, 2009

Skype Sale Reported to be Announced Tomorrow

http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http://bit.ly/tzAs7

"If the Times report is accurate it will be very interesting to see who runs the new Skype and what kinds of changes are made to the service. With $600 million in reported annual revenue and nearly twice as many users as Facebook, Skype's international network of P2P software installs powering multimedia communication, file-sharing, chat and status still has boundless potential to do interesting things."

Indeed. Twice as m$any users as Facebook and truckloads of revenue. Why is Skype not talked about more? Is it because they've established a successful business model that the digerati finds Skype boring? Are there social class issues at work a la MySpace? Is it because the service's feature set is too much like a cellphone on your PC? Or is everyone tired of blocking spammers on their network? Regardless, it seems like Skype really flies under the radar when it comes to Web 2.0/social media hype.   

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August 28, 2009

Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think « Socialnomics – Social Media Blog

via socialnomics.net

Erik Qualman, blogger at www.searchenginewatch.com and now author of Socialnomics, has remade the classic "Did You Know"/"Shift Happens" presentation with a social media focus. For those of you keeping score, this one most closely resembles last year's Did You Know 3.0 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8).

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August 24, 2009

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

via xkcd.com

whoa, secret tricks of career advancement for digital communications people in government exposed! I'm going to have to find new ways to impress my co-workers now...

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August 18, 2009

ASCII art music vid

I'm such a sucker for anything ASCII art. Song's not bad either.

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August 12, 2009

On Govt adoption of Web 2.0

"Web 2.0 should be relegated to areas that tap its strength, which is primarily nonattributed commentary and workgroup collaboration."

Source: http://fcw.com/articles/2009/08/10/reality-check-it-fads-not-fit-for-government.aspx?m=1

Great reactions in the comments on this one too. 

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August 10, 2009

Google Trends for Websites: friendfeed.com

Here's an estimate of FriendFeed's traffic over the last 12 months:

via trends.google.com

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/

So Facebook has acquired FriendFeed.

Good move for the FriendFeed gang, since the service was going nowhere fast anyhow -- most of us have chosen Twitter for statusing and public networking, despite (or perhaps due to) FriendFeed's more advanced features.

Curious to see what impact this will have on Facebook though.

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August 6, 2009

Marines Ban Twitter, MySpace, Facebook | Danger Room | Wired.com

The Marines’ ban will last a year. It was drawn up in response to a late July warning from U.S. Strategic Command, which told the rest of the military it was considering a Defense Department-wide ban on the Web 2.0 sites, due to network security concerns. Scams, worms, and Trojans often spread unchecked throughout social media sites, passed along from one online friend to the next. “The mechanisms for social networking were never designed for security and filtering. They make it way too easy for people with bad intentions to push malicious code to unsuspecting users,” a Stratcom source told Danger Room.
via wired.com

Stunning reversal of direction for the US military, especially considering the level of 2.0 adoption from other branches. Thinking especially of the Air Force and its "every airman is a communicator" new media mantra.

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