With The Band

8.3 million. For nametags. Say what you want about the possible benefits of having it. But they have quite some competition.

What is interesting to me, however, is that this is another Boston company being funded. I think, slowly but surely, investors are funding companies in places other than the valley. I’m interested in seeing what happens here in DC.

Powered by ScribeFire.

While I believe the setup (and the limited range of Bluetooth) makes this particular implementation of questionable value, I believe that the idea of locating users by immediate area is awesome. I wouldn’t use this for finding new people who are in my area. Instead, I would prefer an application that would pop-up when a friend of mine (Facebook or whatever other social network) happened to be in close vicinity. Of course, I can usually spot them with these things called eyes, but still.

Thanks, Download Squad!

My stocks are down 4% for the day. My portfolio is at an 11% loss overall.

Days like these, I wonder why I don’t invest in the First Bank of Sealy.

All my positions are solidly in the red. Except for two. My two Israeli stocks. What’s up TEVA and ISL!

I was reading an article about a passenger revolt on a Continental flight (reading articles like this makes it painfully obvious why the American airline industry is in deep trouble, and it’s all their own doing). I noticed at the bottom of the article, a small little tip:

As one can imagine, I spent the next few minutes wildy clicking on everything from “Newark” to “the.” It’s really cool, but not perfect. Double clicking on a word will only pull up a literal definition of the word, so “Baltimore” returns an entry about the city, not BWI Airport, as it is used in that context. I really like the unobtrustive integration, however, instead of irritating in-your-face pop-ups like Snap or sticking ad balloons into random keywords.

In college, I took a class called Literature in a Wired World (that was the only English class I could imagine being tolerable). We discussed extensively on the theory of hypertext, and how text is no longer read in a completely linear fashion. While yes, adding links has been around forever now, this is one of the first native implementations of this. Cool.

The awesome gunship from Transformers… it’s real.

Orthodox Jew to lead NY Arabic school | Jerusalem Post

Continuing on from yesterday, I was going to go on a rant about my personal thoughts on social networking - mainly related to the difference between professional and personal social networks. While some look for a one-stop shop, I am quite happy having one social network for professional needs (LinkedIn) and one for my personal life (Facebook). I could go on and on… but Scott already said it all for me

Facebook Is NOT For Business - Publishing 2.0

1. Spam Filtering - The junk mail control, a Bayesian filtering implementation - sucks. Messages that I mark as not-junk continually get put in the junk folder. It just doesn’t work. With the rise of crowd powered technologies
2. Calendar Integration - Is a start, but it’s still pretty poor. The UI for it is ugly, when you add an Outlook appointment, it won’t remember that you added it each time you open the invite, etc…
3. Slow Search - GMail rules because it focuses on being able to quickly search through your email. This is hard to do with a desktop computer, but by learning the behavior of users, it can optimize its algorithm tremendously.

Besides having more resources focused on Firefox, the problem with Thunderbird is that instead of “writing the best e-mail client we can” the focus is instead “write an open-source Outlook.” What made GMail the most popular webmail (and e-mail in general) provider was not because they offered 2 GB of storage up front… it was because they didn’t try and make an Outlook clone (which at that time every webmail interface was). If Thunderbird would do that (as Firefox did with the browser), I think we’d have an amazing desktop product.

But personally… I’m just waiting to buy my own server and install Zimbra.

There’s a hole-in-the-wall vegan restaurant near where I went to college in Maryland. I went there a few times with friends and family. It was a decent place to eat, however one particular trait of the owner drove me absolutely insane. He always addressed me as “friend” time and time again. I passed this off as him being a hippie clinging to past ideals, but was hard resisting the urge to correct him.

Once Facebook opened up to anyone (previously it was limited to anyone in college or high-school), as well as releasing the Facebook platform, the blogosphere lit up, with popular bloggers (like Robert Scoble) and their followers signing up for accounts.  It’s the latest hot thing (previously it was Twitter, and before that it was Second Life, along with dozens of other sites). I’m sure soon there will be another hot thing, and they’ll all move on, in a vein similar to the way modern day MSM operates.

What disturbs me is the way they are using Facebook. Everyone is “friending” each other and accepting everyone. Did anyone ever stop and think, as they are accepting people en masse, do I really know this person? Have I worked with them? Am I actually friends with them? Do I know who the hell they are? Whether or not Facebook is a tool for personal life, for work life, or a combination of the two, when there is no real connection between users, the utility of general purpose social networks goes to zero. By adding “general” I am admitting one caveat, where for social networks geared around particular topics (recipes/photos/reviews), you might find other users whose tastes and interests match your own, and therefore want to connect and share information. But when your friends list, your news feed, is all from people you don’t know, how useful is it to you? Do you care about each individual, and what is going on with them? When you post something to Facebook, are you sending it out it to your friends, or sending it out to 4,600 people who happened to take the extra step of creating an account and clicking the “Request Confirmation” button under your picture (as opposed to just posting it up on your blog, which they and many more people read)? If you were to one day sit back, and look at your self-constructed social network, is it of any use to you? How can you distinguish between the people you went to school with, the people in your fraternity, your friends and family, and just random people who you (be honest) could care less about?

I’ve been on Facebook for 3 1/2 years, since it first arrived at my college. Since then, it’s always been a place for people who truly do know each other to track each other’s personal lives and interact with each other. For every person I added who I didn’t know, the usefulness of GP social networks decreases. Which is why I don’t. You can ask me about any of my 380 friends, and I can tell you something about each one of them, including how we know each other. The phenomenon of mass-friending has always been the case, since the early days, when incoming freshmen would go on a spree of adding random schoolmates in the hopes of appearing as if they are more popular. It’s the exact same thing now.

Call me a “Facebook elitist”, but Facebook is for friends. Real friends. If I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, why should I say we are?

Technorati Tags: facebook, scoble, social networking

Attended my first (as well as DC’s first) BarCamp. It was an awesome experience. Not only did I learn a lot, but I met a great crowd of people. It was fascinating to discover a small but thriving community of similar web-heads, and would kill to do the things some of them do. Who knows, maybe I will.

I decided to give a presentation about the Facebook platform. I think it went well… I ended up preparing a heavily technical presentation, got there, realized that most people were just giving overviews, and ended up breezing through my slides. Hope someone got something out of it. On the plus side, I ended up co-presenting with Nick O’Neill, who runs AllFacebook, one of the top blogs following Facebook, and we talked throughout the day. I have to admit it’s a little wierd to hear real-world discussions focusing on topics and opinions I usually only read about on blogs and such.

Some presentations were heavily planned, and obviously practiced, some were thrown together at the last minute, some were just people messing around on a website, and some were simply open-ended conversations. Since the sessions at barcamps are volunteer-led, you can see what people in a given region are focused on by taking a look at what is being presented. Yesterday ended up being a wide range of things, however many of them were skewed towards web design and ruby on rails. Only one session relating to anything Google (Google Analytics). I guess it’s finally time to stop being stubborn and actually read that rails book :-).

If you ever find a barcamp going on in your area, I strongly encourage you to go… and to toss yourself in the deep end and participate!

Technorati Tags: barcampdc, barcamp, barcampwashingtondc