I’ve finally gotten to a breaking point with the facebook newsfeed. As much as I love being inundated with pointless information, I really just don’t care what applications my friends have added(or deleted for that matter).
If facebook apps were actually useful, perhaps I’d consider caring. But until someone makes the drunk facebooking app I’ve been ranting about for the past year(The one that records everything you do when you’re drunk so you can apologize to the right people in the morning), I have no tolerance for this obsurdity.
This shit’s bananas:
I guess at facebook Zuckerberg’s own privacy settings aren’t good enough. Aparently, he’s made himself a double secret profile for his real “real” friends.
If you’re logged on to Facebook, go ahead and search for “Mark Zucerberg” [sic]. The misspelling, of course, makes it hard to find through a search, and the profile is so locked-down that only “Zucerberg”’s Facebook friends and work colleagues can see it. valleywag
As funny or ironic as this is, I don’t blame him. When you’re a frat-household name, the last thing you want to deal with is 2387 friend requests a day. But, that being said, I poked his pseudo-profile and I encourage you to do the same.
Update: “Mark Zucerberg” no longer shows up in facebook search results.
New from developer Plasq is a lite app named Skitch. For the longest time I’ve used Photoshop for all of my image editing. It goes without saying that Photoshop is overkill when all you’re trying to do is resize a jpg to upload to a blog. Skitch combines what is great about my iBook’s Grab app and simple image manipulation tools to make a very sweet app for sharing images.
It took literally seconds to snag this screen shot of the title of this blog and throw in some arrows and whatnot.
I’ve just started trying out pownce thanks to my buddy vlad. I was super curious about the app they made for the Adobe AIR platform. It works pretty well. It’s light and uncluttered. I’ve been using email to do the same thing for a long time, but I get so much email in a day, little links and notes get swallowed up. Pownce provides me with a nice channel of tid bits.
Here’s a screenshot of the app they developed on Adobe AIR:
It’d be great if pownce could separate messages and links based on tags. For example, my roommates can send me apartment links from craig’s list in one feed, while my other friends can send me stupid videos in another.
People have compared Pownce to Twitter, and I understand the comparison, but I just don’t understand the usefulness of twitter. As a social network, I think twitter’s usefulness is limited. It seems to only provide the superficial gratification of knowing what someone is thinking or doing at any given moment. However, I think businesses could use twitter to relay messages to workers quickly about location and status without texting or, god forbid, calling them. In that situation there would be a practical use for the service.
Robert Pirouet recently released The Undead Terror! on take247. The project was for class at NYU called “Sight and Sound.” It’s a 1950s style zombie public service announcement choc full of government propaganda. The short PSA was even complete with a naive “timmy,” ready to be programmed by the government.
I had a chance to go on set and see how it was made. They shot in black and white with an old german camera. It looks pretty authentic. Remember, the undead are everywhere!
Check out the film hosted on take247.com!
Here’s some photos of the shoot:
So here it comes, the next tech bubble. Mike on techcrunch just wrote an article about the massive flow of money in Silicon Valley. He talks about how it’s just as crazy as it was in the late 90s, just before the failed .com IPOs. So what makes the “Web2.0″ sites of today any different from Pets.com? Well, for one thing, at least Pets.com had some sort of business model: sell pet supplies. These days the business model is:
- Create a feature that draws the masses.
- Get big.
- Get Bought
- Slap Google adsense on the site and pray you make money
Case in point: youTube
In the case of youTube, I think they realized the straight adsense model isn’t working out, so now they’re trying revver’s model instead. The point I’m trying to make is that most new companies getting funded don’t create well rounded products. They create features and market them as techonological inovations. Social networking is a feature. Video/Photo sharing is a feature. Blogging is a feature. Far too often, sites are created based on one or two features, but a month after they launch, a competitor launches an exact replica.
Twitter baffles me. I’m an avid user of facebook, but the “facebook status” feature is kinda lame. And now we have a startup based soley on a ripoff of facebook status. I wish I could of thought of that. In Twitter’s defense, some of the apps people have made to plot their friends on maps have been pretty cool. I would love to see Twitter’s business model.
While I can be bitter about why I’m not rich already, I can only hope to keep plugging away, looking for a feature I can take and convince people it’s a technology.
