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Mayhaps you have used the Facebook app Likeness. It’s a fluff app, but has wide appeal since it does two things most people like: easy quizzes and comparisons with our friends. The graphic design that went into the app is a bit low-scale, but it gets the job done. If you haven’t used it, the concept is simple. You are presented with a quiz topic, like “What’s your addiction?” You are then presented with ten items that you must rank in the order specified by the question page (usually most to least favorite, or whatever). Once you have ranked the ten items, you are shown a screen that easily allows you to goof up and spam all your friends. But after that, it produces some sort of similarity score between you and all your friends who have taken it. I’ve never had a similarity below 46% and never one above 98%.
But it got me thinking, how exactly are they measuring this similarity?
The Roman occupation of Judea (Israel) during the first century AD was disrupted in 70 AD when the Jewish people revolted. Rome, being a kick-ass military power, put down this rebellion. However, they couldn’t let the Jews get away with this attempt at self-rule, which might encourage other provinces to do the same. The new, crushing occupation and settlement of Judea led to the beginning of another diaspora of the Jewish people (the Jews had been scattered before, read your Old Testament).
I’ve talked about my idea of the new information diaspora a couple times before. We fill up all these different social networking sites and online services with personal information about our hobbies, preferences, friends, etc. This information is separated by incompatibility between platforms. OpenSocial is a move towards removing these boundaries, but so far it hasn’t caught fire.
In Facebook’s terms of service, you are not allowed to scrape Facebook for content. They don’t want you to gather information about your social graph, since that would potentially undermine their service. Ergo, you can import information into Facebook, but can’t export it out. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook (though whether it was really his idea or software is disputed), seems to be shaping up to be quite a tyrant in this realm. It’s almost daily that some news about his bungling comes over the blagoblag.
The latest fiasco surrounds Robert Scoble, one of the better tech writers out there (in my opinion). He was using Plaxo Pulse, a service that attempts to solve a small part of the information diaspora problem by consolidating your friends’ activities on different sites. Facebook, however, put down this rebellion by disabling Scoble’s account. Robert’s crime? Trying to get the names, email addresses, and birthdays of the 1800 friends he has on both Facebook and Plaxo.
Well, after many frustrating months of waiting for Twitter to finally fix their gmail contacts import feature, I have finally done it! Surprise, only two contacts were signed up — and that’s two more than I expected. However, one of those is a professor who probably only checked them out because they’re using his technology and the other was a friend who had only one update:
“nothing.”
Social pressure from me caused him to add another update. That’s what I tell myself anyway.
What is Twitter, you ask? It’s basically Facebook status updates made global. Indeed, you can even add a Facebook app that allows Twitter to update your status. Of course, it means you get “is twittering: ” inserted at the beginning of any tweet (a single Twitter status update) as your status update.
While Twitter at first seems like status updates on steroids, it’s actually evolving into something else far more useful. I’ve talked before about the information diaspora and the difficulty of keeping up with all your personal information as it flies around the web. Twitter at first adds to that mess, but it does offer interesting ways of tracking small bits of information.
Erin McKean, the Dictionary Evangelist, uses it to keep track of new words she comes across. Twitter lets you text updates from your cell phone or IM client so it’s easy to update on the go. Robert Scoble uses it as a sort of mini-blog of things he comes across or finds out about that wouldn’t really make a full-fledged blog post. So Twitter has uses for logging your web surfing, hobby, life activities, etc., which is a useful information diaspora reducing measure in my book. The only question remains whether this would be of any use to you.
Check me out and follow my updates on Twitter. If you haven’t signed up, consider it. If you do, let me know so I can follow you.
I’m going to officially coin the term information diaspora to mean the dispersion of individual personal preference information throughout the web. Whenever you sign up for an account, you leave a part of your personal information somewhere. Whenever you enter an address to order a book, more information. When you look through digg comments and you thumbs-up or thumbs-down a comment, more information. Whenever you favorite a video on youtube, leave a wall post on facebook, rate a movie on netflix, more information. All of this information is accessible to you as long as you can recall where you have left it. If you forget about a website you signed up for, that information is now missing. It’s not dead or gone, just missing.
Your brain is no longer the homeland of all these orphaned data. Social networking is great, but with the current Web 2.0 bubble expanding the way it is, the inherent incompatibility in the global network is becoming more and more a problem.
The intertubes are full of quizzes. Magazines like Cosmo have thrived on them for years. “Are you a good lover?” Websites like Tickle pretty much consist of nothing else (and I haven’t bothered beyond the odd quiz someone sends me). Tons of Facebook apps like Flixster (movies) and Harry Potter rely on them heavily. One of my google alerts is for linguistics and I saw some random 14-year-old dude’s blog post about his perfect major according to this quiz. My results are below the jump.
So of course everyone with sense knows these quizzes are pretty much random. However, they also collect a vast amount of data. What they don’t collect (usually) is actual information about the people who take their quizzes. Imagine if at the end of a quiz there was a question or two about the actual truth of the thing the quiz is predicting. What kind of lover are you? Well just ask! If the result is similar to the quiz results, you can gauge how well your quiz is classifying people. It may not produce scientifically valid results but it does produce results that are better than nothing.
Probably would not be noticeably bad. Colbert certainly is attracting a massive amount of attention after declaring his desire to run as a candidate in South Carolina. Whereas Barrack Obama’s facebook group was haled as a success after gathering 384k+ members, Colbert’s group skyrocketed to over a million in just one week. So does he actually have a shot at the presidency if he decided to kick it up a notch and run in all 50? That certainly seems to be the case with younger voters at this point, but would it hold out at the actual election? On Wonkosphere, he’s got a buzz percentage of about 4%, roughly one-third of the buzz for the candidates the media is telling you to vote for (Hillary and Giuliani).
Better yet, he should run in 48 states, singling out 2 as “handicap” states to give the other candidates a fighting chance. I’m sure he could find a pair funnier than Alaska and Rhode Island, but that’s a start.
Also, for a good read about why the democratic leadership isn’t worth two farts in the wind, you should check out today’s article on Dissident Voice.
My friend Israel is trying to raise money for laptops for school kids in Tanzania. If you’re on Facebook and have about 30 seconds, why not vote for him? Razoo is a speed granting organization that gives money to small charitable projects. You can view his oh-so-pitiful video below. I’ve suggested he update it by putting on heavy eye makeup and getting under a sheet and lamenting the fact that only a few thousand Tanzanian kids graduate high school every year. They really could use your help, though and this requires you to spend no money!
Ever since Facebook added apps, there has been a gradual bloat on profiles. Some people are app minimalists, adding just a couple things that don’t clutter up their profile. From my quite informal perusal of Facebook, these people seem to be fairly inactive users. They log every once in a while, but don’t seem to be using it on a daily basis. Then you have your Facebook app junkies. I’m thinking of one friend in particular. Yeah, that’s right. I just outted you. My friend, you are a Facebook app junkie. But I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it. Some of my best friends are like that. It’s just not how I roll.
But I have noticed that as time progresses, there is a gradual app bloat in my profile. I’ve tried to keep it down as much as possible, but then Pandora comes out with their app, which is cool. Dogbook is an essential. The makers of Dogbook are coming out with Babybook, which I won’t be using since Dogbook and Babybook are synonymous for me. Another of my favorite apps was the Books app. I liked being able to display some of the things I’ve read and rate them and compare them to friends, there were just two problems.
- The books app is hard as hell to use.
- No one is using. Not my friends anyway.
So now I’ve tried out Visual Bookshelf and it seems we have a winner. The benefit of it is that it automatically presents you with Amazon results for your nationale (assuming you’re in one of the five non-US countries they support). So instead of having to enter ISBNs or names and then going through a lengthy addition process, you just click “read it” or “want to read it” or “reading it now” and the book is in your profile. Very handy and it recommends a book to you after you add one, which lets you add an entire series pretty quickly and easily, which is good for me since I read several fantasy series.
The only thing it seems to be missing is a “skip book” option. If you don’t want to read it, but you want the next recommendation, you’re out of luck. I’m hoping they’ll fix that soon, though.
My friend Israel is trying to raise $2000 to buy laptops for young people in Tanzania. Tanzania is a country of over 35 million people, but only 15,000 graduated high school in 2004. Of course giving money would help him out, but another way to help him would be by voting for this cause on Facebook via the Razoo Speedgranting Campaign. This gives you a free way of helping them raise money and it only takes a minute of your time.
So being generally interested in the whole social networking thing lately, I decided to try out Twitter a couple weeks ago. Twitter does 24/7 what Facebook status updates were meant to: allow you to keep your friends updated on the minutia of your life. Facebook status updates have degenerated to being a sort of contest of cleverness (perhaps to make interesting the boring crap of your life). There are a few classes of Facebook status updates (FBSU) I have categorized:
- Life status — indicating tiredness, boredom, anxiety, desires, location, etc.
- Temporary fandom — showing in some way that you’re a fan of a group, tv show, movie, politician, sports team, product, etc.
- Pissed-offedness — invective-splattered status updates, often employing various symbols (%!$#@)
- Pseudo-philosophical gibberish — for those who want their friends to think them deep
Twitter does all of that but by its nature also allows the minutia reports to be more natural. On Facebook, no one uses status updates to tell people they are at home or at school or at work. I tried, believe me. No one cared, oddly enough. So I stopped and have resorted mostly to #1, #2 and #4 on the list above.
So anyhow, for the past two weeks, I have tried to use my gmail contacts to find friends on Twitter, which are probably few. Over twenty failures. And now today, Twitter is down and has been down for a while. Supposedly it is being upgraded, and I’m hoping that will mean the problem is fixed. I emailed them yesterday about it after many, many failed importing attempts. Currently, I’m enjoying the thought that Twitter’s downtime is their way of saying, “this update’s for you.”
Update
As of 5pm EDT, Twitter is back up. But, I still can’t import my gmail contacts to find friends.
Ok, I feel the need to plug a Facebook app. First of all, most apps suck. They chew up space on your profile and are largely useless because for them to be any good you need like a dozen friends using them, which never happens. There are a few exceptions, like Books, which is cool on its own (though I wish adding new books were a little easier). However, one app that really impressed me is Dogbook. Dogbook lets you create profiles for your dogs. Your dogs can have their own friends (other dogs and people) and pictures added from your profile. Also, you can search for dogs in your area, so if you were ever wondering who owned that dog you met in the dog park, now you can (assuming they use Dogbook too). This is especially useful since people hardly ever exchange names at a dog park and you only know them by the names of their dogs.
And surprisingly, a large number of people seem to use it.
social operating system - n. A social networking site like Facebook or MySpace that seamlessly integrates activities, including entertainment and shopping, to become a platform for online living. (Wired News)
I’m always on the lookout for new words. This one isn’t especially innovative, but the last phrase caught my notice. Online living. Indeed. Now I like Facebook and actively maintain a profile as a way of keeping in touch with family and friends. But online living? I think that day is still a long ways off.
It appears that Facebook has just had another lawsuit filed against it, this time for patent infringement. Cross Atlantic Capital Partners (hereafter referred to as the Patent Trolls) claim infringement based on patent 6,519,629: “System for creating a community for users with common interests to interact in”. So it appears they are targeting the Groups functionality. I don’t pretend to know anything about patent law, but from what I have read in the patent, it does appear they have a case. However, I believe this is just one more example of how issuing patents for software is fundamentally flawed.
