The Social Network
EnemyGraph Lets You Keep Your Facebook Enemies Closer
It seems a product of the halcyon dot-com days of cheery offices filled with ping-pong tables and Razor scooters, but Facebook is inherently cheery. Everyone you know is by default your friend, and your only option for emoting is to “like” something...
'Three Color Cat' and More: The List of Blocked Weibo Terms Contains Some Real Head-Scratchers
Dissenting netizens in China have to move fast in order to keep up with the government’s ever-changing list of blocked search terms on Weibo. A new Tumblr page "is looking to help":http://blockedonweibo.tumblr.com/post/19236495869/378-words-that-are...
AA Doesn't Work: Author Paul Carr Quit Drinking Via Social Media
Paul Carr has been sober for 884 days and counting. This, despite being an alcoholic author who, by his own admission, "forged a career - and a respectable income - from drinking too much, doing idiotic things and writing about them." The story of how...
Face Blindness is Alternately Hilarious and Horrifying
"I sometimes had the experience of apologizing to someone, and realizing it's a mirror." That sounds exactly like a bit of dialogue from a _Blade Runner_, but it's actually a quote from Dr. Oliver Sacks, a renowned neurologist who's made a name for...
Here's Your Facebook ID Card
In my own personal Dantean hellscape there are a couple of circles I'd especially prefer to avoid winding up in. One involves having to eat absolutely every single thing on the planet other than people and animals--of which there are none in this...
The Woman Behind China's Occupy Toilet Movement Has Been Canned
Amid corruption, economic woes, pollution, and calls for political reform, China is ripe for the Occupy movement. Beijing of course "is not sympathetic":http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/2/21/china-s-instant-revolution-some-student-photos-from-beijing-s...
Need to Make More Friends? Try Daydreaming
Remember all those times you've found yourself rudely jarred back to reality after a nice daydream by somebody telling you to "snap out of it" or somebody waving their hand in front of your face like you were some sort of deranged motion detector...
The Juggalo Facebook Is Real
Juggalobook.com, it exists. Thankfully, Motherboard's sister site Noisey pretty well has this covered: bq.. Check out some of the amazing ICP-inspired twists: you don’t “like” a post, you “Whoop Whoop!” it. Your “friends” are “homies,” and you...
Just Die Already: Users Spend More Time on Myspace Than Google+
The Goog is boasting that more than 90 million people have signed up for Google+. Those are pretty impressive numbers. I mean, if you had 90 million people at your disposal, you could do anything. You'd rule the Internet. Except there's one little...
How to Build an Emotional Internet Without Emoticons
One day soon we may finally know just how the Internet "feels." Not because of Google Trends or by counting the Twitters -- that’s kid’s stuff. The grown-ups are here, and they’ve brought some science to "deal" with all these “human emotions.” Consider...
Stalking the Facebook Profiles of the 17th Century
Social networking thinkers, particularly social networking detractors, like to talk about the broadcasting of one’s self to an audience of strangers in novel terms. It's important that it's a new, unprecedented thing because it's important to locate it...
The Alternate-Reality Facebook That Almost Happened
Just imagine if Harvard officials hadn't been so worried about things like privacy and transparency.