Mercurial » Social Networks

Have a story?

Camilo — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 23:52:39 +0000

If you have a story about Social Media and how it changes your worked, go to Shel’s post and tell him.

Tweetbacks plugin not right

Camilo — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:27:55 +0000

Tweetbacks turns twitterers into spammers – I have a 100 tweetbacks now in the blog, and deleting them fast.

One of the offenders is also twitrans, which is asking for a lot of not nice translations.

Ahh, it was nice while it lasted.

Talk is easy

Camilo — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:08:42 +0000

Since everybody and their granma loves twitter, now we have lists and top tens and the like. This, though, caught my attention: why twitter works:

Twitter, on the other hand, by having the deepest personal penetration (mobile phone) combined with the most ease of use (text message), has an effort rating that falls below most people’s natural resistance to participate, and its positive reward ratio is much higher because people are far more likely to respond to a text message than almost anything else.

I like the idea of twitter as a Dunbar destroyer, (from Dunbar number), since I have long stated that the Dunbar limit is valid only on primitive environment where physical displacement is cumbersome and energy intensive. OTOH, twitter (and other social media), allows for a larger contingent: you still have to know them and keep them entertained, but the barriers of knowledge and perception are not constrained by geographical location, but on similarity of interests: Media facilitating the social.

Koobface in Facebook

Camilo — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:37:15 +0000

Facebook, much maligned social site, is now target of trojans, specifically the Koobface.

But it was due to happen: Facebook as a social application is, by far, the most famous; its users are all connected through some degree of trust, and the constant use of social sites has eroded the security instincts that we all developed when we first opened our hotmail account. Now, how many users would even consider clicking on a link that came through email, even from a friend? Very few people – email like that gets trashed very fast. Not so in Facebook, it seems, so much so that this is making news. And at least now we know that fb has a security page, although too little, too late.

From the avertlabs page on the trojan we get that

This component listens on TCP port 9090 and proxies all HTTP traffic, in particular looking for traffic to Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Live.com for the purpose of hijacking search results. Search terms are directed to find-www.net. This enables ad hijacking and click fraud.

The tinyproxy thing was easy to find, but many other things come through that open
door. And that’s when the security nightmare beings.

Ironically, I just got a CSI invitation, and one of their selling poiints is social media and its implication sin security. What do you know!

IB for social media?

Camilo — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:29:41 +0000

They call it social networking, and according to boston.com, there will be research:

IBM Corp. is setting up a research center in Cambridge to develop better ways for businesses to use social networking software.
“It’s something that can have worldwide impact,” said Irene Greif, director of IBM’s new Center for Social Software.

Twitter grows like bread

Camilo — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:34:28 +0000

Twitter gets a 420% growth over the same period last year, as reported by Mashable! Of course, that is after the failwhale made a gracious exit, and all the Pr companies discovered the possibilities of spam through unestablished channels.

Furthermore, there is this addictively task that consists of nothing more than the writing of short brief stories, a speech of impossibly short discourses, a conversation involving small utterances that require a little bright bulb and nothing more. For this is ADD, attention deprived dialog, a little bit of salt on your morning news to make them more palatable.

I’m off to tweet. Chau, tuíteres.

Change your social media

Camilo — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:03:43 +0000

I am almost ashamed: I have spent the brief interludes that daily life affords to try to connect my wireless gain using my trusty Ubuntu on my crusty Dell, and yet no wifi.

Yes I have read them all, and I have had as much success as s cold fusion physicist: it works, but I can’t repeat the miracle.

On other news, I started twittering again, which interesting enough of a change of pace. After the Reddit Apocalypse and their dismal views on economy, life and the future of the planet, it is refreshing to see the aggregation of random tidbits, not enough to distract but intriguing enough to explore.

Reddit fails at social media by bypassing community – you contribute and engage, but seldom with people, just with random pieces of comments. Memes arise and die within days, and the collective knowledge fades as rapidly as the collective mood changes. In Twitter at least I get a lot of links to blogs and the like. It’s got more focused content.

Twitter and facebook – aol 2.0?

Camilo — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 21:26:31 +0000

First, they took the walls off the garden using another social media site.

Second, eternal September, once more, using facebook as the new aol.

lolcats, communities and emergence

Camilo — Thu, 24 May 2007 18:32:18 +0000

Anil says that lolcats has grammar, and in doing so points to the most important characteristic of those anthropomorphized felines:

There’s a consistent visual vocabulary to the construct, as well. If it ain’t Impact or Arial Black or some other nondescript sans serif font, it ain’t lolcat. White letters with a black outline are a must. But codifying a design guide for lolcats is well beyond my abilities.

The lolcats have generated a general article in Slate, a wikipedia article, and of course, the all winning and amazing ICanHasCheezburger.

Why the importance of Yet Another Blog Meme?

It matters because it is one significant example of rules emergence through social interaction. That the internets are the best medium for this, well, it is for now. But the explosion of the image macros, the consensus on rules and appropriateness and the widespread use of freely available content makes this both an indicator of community, early technology adopters and curious innovators. The language that is defined through these image macros and the referent cultural assumptions, shortcuts into our moods and ideas (Jesuschrist is a lion! Get in the car! comes to mind) creates another redefinition of reality, without already modifying it too much: it is a nice exercise in socialization, without the encumbering responsibility of other more activist ideas.

Our real, immediate benefit comes in the form of new rules, the community identification and the discovery process that we undertake when first confronted with these pictures. We like the lolcats because they are humorous, yes, and as Kathy Sierra used to say, our brain is geared towards recognizing that which causes us to think – thus, this meme appeals to us because it depends on some fluid set of rules, which both defines the group as keeps it together.

And u haz a flavor!111!

On LinkedIn

Camilo — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 10:17:37 +0000

John Borwick ponders about his LinkedIn presence, even when confronted by the fact that all his other social networking accounts are languishing in the web2.0 limbo.
Same here.
I have accounts on all these social places, after their Precambric explosion: LinkedIn, Orkut, Friendster, Tribe, OpenBC, Plazes, Dodgeball, Upcoming etc.
Their value soon diminishes due to the enormous amount of time required to maintain all of them, each with its own group of people. Either they coast around on automatic, or you just gently disappear beneath the cloud of users.

Another unforeseen problem here is the unintended dynamic of the network – Reddit requires you to comment, MonkeyFilter has a few established regulars, Orkut became primarily Brazilian, and LinkedIn is a general job posting board.

We need a service to take care, automatically, of your presence in all of those socnet sites.

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social networks, NC