Amazing piece on Mashable, finally the issues we've been writing about here for 10-plus years are starting to surface in dramatic terms in the commercial space. To all vendors who are tuned in, look for ways you're keeping your users from managing their own data. The users are getting educated,…

Today I'm waking up with the Smashing Pumpkins ringing in my ears and my ego search ringing off the hook. My throat and head are about 60-70% healed and looking back on my last couple of posts about turning off comments and declaring Facebook bankruptcy and asking: was my physical…

Forget Facebook. We're placing an open call to the web programming community to create a new social networking framework based on open standards.

Heh. The Pownce identity saga continues - with this post from the Chris Pirillo proxy (who doesn’t appear to be malicious, and raises good points): Why would anyone be the fake Chris Pirillo? Well, unless you are a Chris Pirillo, Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble or whoever… you will…

Today I'm declaring Facebook Bankruptcy in addition to comment bankruptcy.I can't keep up with the friend requests, the requests to confirm how we know each other, the requests to tell you I like you, the requests to tell you I want your to tell me what movies you want to tell me about, etc.I've got…

So Jason “no comments” Calacanis answers me, and others, back about his increasing dislike of Facebook and other social networks.First of all, for the record, Jason is right. Facebook sucks. Twitter sucks. Pownce sucks. Jaiku sucks. Kyte sucks. Etc and etc.Why? Because they take time.But…

Interesting. Someone just told me that I was on Pownce - which is odd, because I never signed up for an account. Lo and behold, here “I” am. I’m not terribly upset about it at this point, but that’s pretty much my identity - and the people following “me” may not…

At the beginning of this week we introduced a new comments feature on Read/WriteWeb, called SezWho. Basically it introduces comment rating, reputation and filtering to this blog. SezWho was created by one of our occasional writers, Jitendra Gupta - whose team installed it onto R/WW. You can check…

If you use Google Reader, you must know about its sharing feature. "Every Google Reader account comes with a public page which you can use to share items of interest with your friends and family. (...) Like any regular web page, your public page is viewable by anyone who knows its…

Google has an emerging social network and it doesn't use it. No, I don't talk about orkut or Socialstream (which was only sponsored by Google). Gmail, Google's most successful project if we leave search aside, has the potential of gathering information from all the other Google services that can be…

Worluk ma hajnali postjában írja, hogy törölte az összes ismerősét az iWiW-en. Érvei számosak. Például, hogy mire is jó neki, hogy ott van? Oké, tisztában van vele, hogy kik az ismerősei, és a rendszer egyetlen haszna, hogy ebből azt is megmutatja neki, hogy kiket ismerhet még.…

Nokia has created a mobile social networking site called Mosh. There’s an online and mobile component for this social network, giving you cross-platform access for networking and media-sharing. While Sprint-Nextel has added more access to existing networks via mobile devices, Nokia has created…

TechCrunch has the news that Google plans to open "a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google's social graph data. They'll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google's personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google…

Every application needs to make assumptions about its users, and for some people those assumptions will inevitably be wrong. Why is it, though, that so many social networks and other social applications assume that all social web users are not yet old enough to drink? That’s the first…

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal had an article entitled Why So Many Want to Create Facebook Applications which gives an overview of the burst of activity surrounding the three month old Facebook platform. If a gold rush, complete with dedicated VC funds targetting widget developers, around…

A video disclaimed to be “Google - Confidential” with the title “Nooglers And The PDB: Reactor (Ben Darnell, September 6, 2007)” made its way onto a public Google Video page. A “noogler” is what people at Google call new employees; “Reactor” is…

Interesting blog post by MySpace co-founder and president Tom Anderson this morning. He’s proposing a new default layout for MySpace pages that has significantly better organization of user information, and moves from a two column to three column approach.So we’ve been working on a new…

Apparently Google learned something from Facebook's success and intends to connect all of its social applications. The new central place for social activities will create feeds for all or your events ("activity streams") and share them with your contacts, if you choose to do so. I called…

How social networks handle multiple social contexts (e.g. my work life versus my personal life) has been on my mind this week. Today I was in a meeting where someone mentioned that most of the people he knows have profiles on both MySpace and Facebook because their real friends are on MySpace while…

Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal, who recently left Six Apart for Google has published notes on what he's going to be working on moving forward. It is an interesting read entitled Brad's Thoughts on the Social Graph which contains the following excerpts Currently if you're a new site…

A few weeks ago, one of our execs at work asked me to think about "open" social networks. Since my day job is working on the social networking platform that underlies Windows Live Spaces and other Windows Live properties, it makes sense that if anyone at Microsoft is thinking about making…

Az Orkutot már nem lehet megmenteni, ezért megpróbálja a Google következő szintre emelni a social szoftvert. Ha jól értjük, az új irány, hogy a felhasználó neten szétszórt aktivitásait próbálják meg egy interfészen kezelni, és egy erős és jól működő UI-val megfogni a…

I read Kottke's post and his follow-up last week and the question he asks has been ratting around in my brain ever since. Is Facebook the new AOL?I've been debating his posts in private with a number of people and one of them, Jarid Lukin, the creator of the word freemium among other things, said…

There's been a debate raging on Techmeme, the website that turns the tech blogosphere into a mail list, about the value of Facebook.I have two answers to the question: 1. A lot. 2. Or very little. Depending on what they do.The next evolution of the web is to deconstruct social networks into their…