rob zand

So perhaps the winner is a lot more difficult to pick. Internet users on Twitter managed to beat the real-time newswires with first reports of the quake, but the wires came back with the context that pointed to the quake’s seriousness much faster than Twitter users could.

Rubel speaks of faint signals that pose challenges. Attention crash is a major one: We can’t really keep up with the hundreds of emails. (I imagine Stowe Boyd has a thing or two to say about this.) Digital curators who pre-filter information can help fight information. While it’s a great term, this idea seems a bit oldschool, at least in the sense that curators could be replaced by collaborative filters. Talking of collaboration, this is another trend Rubel sees: The internet has been, is, and will be used in more and more collaborative ways. Think pledgebank. Rubel points out one problem of online collaboration, though; When our info lives in the cloud, be prepared for data leak. We’re talking about technological solutions, which are never perfect. At some point, some of your data will leak.

Facebook wanted to rule the world; to dominate it; to be the next Microsoft. That’s not revolution - it’s just strategic fascism. And it should be intuitive that fascism cannot hold in a world where power is getting more and more radically liquid by the nanosecond. It’s a delusion; a kind of deep corporate psychosis; the blind fetishization of power and coercion, with no concern for value creation. … Facebook’s problem isn’t that people perceive it to be evil: it’s that it is evil.

FriendFeed lets you not only see what your friends are doing, but act on it. Also, as your friends find more people to follow on FriendFeed, you can be exposed to the best from their friends, getting you to find new people and new interesting items. … Because FriendFeed aggregates activity from many places, it definitely has the potential to be noisy. But the team at FriendFeed has thought ahead about this, and delivered some extremely flexible filters to reduce the noise and have strong signal:

How could tiny Twitter ever become such a titan? It’s not the core technology, which is simple, but instead the community. Twitterers find and follow the people they care about on the service. Late in April, following one of Twitter’s outages, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wrote: “I realized that in the last two months a subtle shift occurred: I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.” Arrington, who has nearly 17,000 people following his Twitterstream, continued: “It is now an important part of my work and social life, as I carry on bite-sized conversations with thousands of people around the world throughout the day. It’s a huge marketing tool, and information tool. But it is also a social habit that’s hard to kick.”

Thinking out of the Inbox - More Collaboration through less e-mail

IBM Social Computing Guidelines: Executive Summary

If you go to Google Maps, you’ll notice there is now a “”More” button right next to “Street View”” and “Traffic.” If you click on it after getting a map, you will be given the options to tick “Photos” or “Wikipedia.”

Dash Navigation is opening up its in-car GPS device to outside developers through an API program.

The technology works by beaming waves of hypersonic sound at a pitch that is undetectable by the human ear. The waves continue until they smash into an object such as a person’s body. The waves then slow, mix and re-create the original audio broadcast. If the person steps out of the waves, they are no longer obstructed and are rendered inaudible. … Using the technology, marketers can target an audio message at one person in a crowd of hundreds, leaving everyone around that person unaware.