The Zeitgeist

I’ve been thinking more over night about the whole Google Buzz fiasco, and the more I think about it, the more horrified I am.
What Google’s done in not thinking through the implications of the auto-follow defaults for Buzz will not be known for some time – but exposing everyone’s social network in this [...]

Tags: buzz, data, data mining, Google, intelligence, Privacy, Social Networking, surveillance

So, Google is going after Twitter and Facebook it seems with Buzz.   Buzz could be an interesting platform, but here are 4 key reasons why it’s probably not going to take off just yet:

Google doesn’t get user experience.
People are already invested in Twitter and Facebook
APIs Matter
Poorly Thought Out Defaults

Quantitative vs. Qualitative
Google is a data driven [...]

Tags: api, buzz, client, FaceBook, Google, Privacy, safety, Security, sns, Social Networks, twitter

You’d think with a far-out name like ZEITGEIST, this site would see very few visitors.  I mean, with the exception of native German speakers, who can even spell it..?
Well, it turns out that for a variety of reasons, including a very wacky conspiracy-oriented movie of the same name, this site literally sees thousands of visitors [...]

Tags: paypal, user funded communities, User Funded Content

This past Sunday’s NYTimes has a great article on FaceBook’s changing demographics.  The article starts out talking about the social “ick” factor for some 20-somethings that their Moms are on FaceBook (I’ve seen this first hand — a college friend of mine found her 18yr old daughter berating her — online on FaceBook no less [...]

Tags: FaceBook, Social Networks, User Defined Communities

Joe Davison over at Name Strategy has put together a very interesting post that dismantles any idea that writing apps for FaceBook might be a good thing under their current platform development license…
As more and more people open up their platforms, this is going to become a recurring theme: the idea that even beyond [...]

Tags: FaceBook, Licenses, Social Networks, Terms and Conditions, Web2.0

[update: Several "Wall St Insider" type sites claim this letter is a hoax... digging a little deeper, several of the people named in the letter can actually be found on LinkedIn and are working at JPMC according to their LinkedIn profiles. However, even if this is a hoax, there are plenty of people [...]

Ross Mayfield blogs today about privacy and the whole problem of meta-data in Social Networks. He’s got a good point about what amounts to the law of unintended consequences when we freely give out our personal details to these so-called networks. Beyond the obvious opt-in (or lack of in many cases) spamming [...]