The Social Network
Is Facebook the New Philip Morris?
As if you didn't know it already, there's now yet another psych study detailing the addictive qualities of Facebook. Researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business recently enlisted 205 Germans and monitored them for an entire week...
Myspace Wants to Be Pintumblfacergramify
Oh my, have you seen MySpace's fresh promo video? I think the veteran social network is finally sick of 187th place on the Internet. Now, the site is offering something I don't think many other networks have planned or thought of. Myspace is placing...
The NYPD Gives Us Another Great Reason To Update Our Facebook Privacy Settings
NYPD police commissioner Ray Kelly issued a five-page memo last week, giving officers permission to created fake Facebook profiles to assist with electronic probes. Officers will be able to register their alias with the department and obtain a laptop...
The Hot Girl That Just Added You On Facebook Is a Terrorist
A few months ago, I was using that sleazy Badoo site, trying my damnedest to find a girl that I might meet in real life. If you recall the feature, I was unsuccessful. After the site spammed my mom -- asking her for her birthdate -- I ended up talking...
Is Allowing 911 Calls Through Twitter a Terrible Idea?
in case you haven't heard, social media is kinda popular, and landlines and phone booths are kinda not. Meanwhile, as anyone who's lived in a population-dense area (and more of us are every day) knows, cell networks can get overloaded whenever a big...
How Twitter Became a Tyrant
In the beginning, Google was not going to be evil, Mark Zuckerberg said he cared about your privacy, and Twitter still dared to change the world, that curious abbreviated messaging platform that became “the SMS of the Internet.” The only rule - the...
Facebook's Stock Is Nowhere Near Bottom
Break out a fresh bottle of schadenfreude, because the once untouchable and invaluable Facebook stock is on a fast slide towards a rocky bottom. The trouble started last Thursday — well, some would argue that it really started the day of Facebook's...
Twitter's Getting Old and Bitter
We all knew this was coming. In the five years that it's been around Twitter has been a uniquely free and open platform, a friend to entrepreneurial developers and generally a pretty cool little company. But now that it's a big boy company, the...
Twitter's Losing the Privacy Battle with the U.S. Government
As you and your friends are busy tweeting and reading your feed, it's easy to forget that somewhere, perhaps in Washington, there's a government agency hungry for the details about who's saying what. On Monday, Twitter released its first ever...
Chinese Rise Up in Bloody Anti-Pollution Protests, iPhone Owners Yawn
Yesterday, popular demonstrations racked Shifang, a city in the Sichuan province, leading to bloody clashes with police decked out in riot gear and some bricks hurled at local government offices. The maelstrom succeeded in halting the construction of a...
Other Online Things For Making Collections of Online Things
In this shift from web-publishing Web 2.0 era to the personalization key of Web 3.0, the ever present task to make the web more about helping people shop better, and to see a reflection of oneself in an eye-sizzling retina display has kept developers...
Even the Dead Have Klout
Ok, I've been messing around with Klout, the site that tries to tell me how much I matter and how much of a shit people could give about what I say on social networks. After posting a Klout-generated tweet, I quickly deleted it, realizing the implicite...