On the inadequacy of social media for dealing with actual human emotions. “If you are … feeling sad, turn off the social media, call up another human being and let them take you out. Your sad emotions have value. Make sure you aren’t throwing them away in a market that can’t recognize it.”

Why to make 'Gender' a text box, and why we should struggle against Facebook.

“The data used to calculate when museums are quiet is gathered from foursquare. Foursquare is designed to show popular trending places or where your friends are. I instead used it for antisocial purposes. A small cron job checks the /herenow endpoint in the foursquare api a few times an hour. The number of people present is logged for each venue that is tracked. Once a week these checkins are aggregated and passed to the frontend web application hosted on Heroku. The graphs are generated in SVG using Raphael in the browser.”

Because there's no alternative, and it is valuable. But its privacy practices are awful.

On what Farmville is (not a game) and what it means (nothing good).

Just like it says.

For to remember.

Yet another social network, this one targeted to the 50+ crowd. Best feature: "The Obituary section includes notable deaths and additional features like deaths near your location 'all tastefully wrapped in funeral home, medicare and Netflix advertising.'"

The API, which "has 10 times as much traffic as the site itself," has been arguably the biggest reason for Twitter's success. I'd say its simplicity and the fact that it was more or less the first of its kind were just as important. Good article.

Authored by Smarr (Plaxo), Canter, Scoble, and Arrington. Brief but a good summary of recent concerns. Comments interesting, but post needs a follow-up soon, and we can probably expect a lot of activity on this blog after DataSharingSummit.

Definitions for them each. MySpace is an SNS, Facebook a Social OS, Twitter a Social Graph Application.

Facebook as a foundation.