October 2010
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Friendly Social Interaction And Social Cognition
ScienceDaily reports on Oscar Ybarra’s recent research showing the link between friendly social interaction and an improvement in ‘executive function’, basically boosting cognition in a beneficial way.
Friends with cognitive benefits: Mental function improves after certain kinds of socializing
For the study, the researchers examined the impact of brief episodes of social...
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Facebook acquires file-sharing service Drop.io |... →
Sam Lessin has been ‘acquired’ by Mark Zuckerberg, and his Drop.io will be shutting down.
Drop.io was an odd combination of file-sharing and coordination, so we might see some new work-related tools popping up in Facebook.
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11-Inch MacBook Air Is Ultra Portable And... →
Kahney raves about the 11” MacBook Air. Mine will be delivered today, although I goosed it up with 4G ram and the 1.6 GHz chipset.
Kahney
WRAP-UP
The MacBook Air is a polarizing machine. Many critics, especially in the tech community, say it doesn’t do this or that. It doesn’t have a DVD drive. It doesn’t have FireWire or Ethernet. It’s not powerful enough.
But for the vast...
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“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you...”
– - Eric Schmidt
This is Schmidt verbalizing conventional moralistic nonsense, which would be fine if he were just another private citizen, although it is conservative mumbo jumbo.
The problem is that he is the head of Google, who potentially could amass damaging evidence about people’s...
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“By every measure, we are now primarily a streaming company that also offers...”
– - Austin Carr, Netflix CEO: We’re a Streaming Company
31% growth in revenue, 52% uptick in subscribers, cut more than $600M in postage.
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Is Cloud OS Maker Jolicloud Preparing To Sell A... →
Jolicloud, which set out to build a cloud-based operating system for netbooks, appears to be preparing to build and sell its own line of actual netbooks, too.
I will have to ask Tariq Krim about that.
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“Digg’s collapse has become a cautionary tale for so-called Web 2.0 companies in...”
– Digg: A Cautionary Tale for Web 2.0 Companies (via courtenaybird)
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Dawn of a New Day « Ray Ozzie →
Ozzie wrote a memo to Microsoft and shared it with us, suggesting that we start dreaming about a post-PC world. But some of us have been doing that for years (see Why Closed Works: Moving Past Steampunk Thinking About The Future Of Computing, Not A Wall, A World: The Future Of User Experience).
Leaving aside the fact that envisioning a Post-PC isn’t very radical, at least outside of...
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“As an author, I want you to have the best experience. People want to talk about...”
– - Stephen Elliott
via Noam Cohen, ‘Adderall Diaries’ Blurs Books-Apps Line - NYTimes.com
The coming of social books: chat with the author and other readers, add and share annotations, and so on.
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“It seems like the type that matters most is imagination. It’s not so important...”
– Paul Graham, What We Look for in Founders
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“In our view, firms wishing to disrupt the Gartner and Forrester models must have...”
– - Barbara French and Gideon Gartner, Advisory Industry Competition: Pushing Past ‘Business as Usual’ (Part 2)
I think the key factor in microadvisory firms will be narrow focus. In my case, for example, I exclusively focus on social technologies, and as a result I can remain deeply aware of...
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Netflix testing $7.99 and $8.99 streaming-only... →
I logged into my account, and there is no way to switch to streaming only at this point. But I did step down to only 2 DVDs out at a time. Last I checked you had to get at least 4 DVDs to get streaming at all.
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What Do Malcolm Gladwell And Kleiner Perkins Have...
Chris Dixon starts by suggesting that Malcolm Gladwell might lack a deep understanding of Twitter, and that led him to an unsupportable argument in his recent ‘the rvolution will not be tweeted’ piece. In a nutshell that real revolutions require hierarchical control and strong ties, and that Twitter doesn’t have that or support it (I have a longer version of this, too, called...
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Adapting To A New Tempo: 'Streams In Business'...
I have been deep in the investigation of streaming applications designed to be used in business for several months. Think of it as Twitter or Facebook for the enterprise (a list of the companies involved follows), also know as microblogging for the enterprise.
For months I’ve been heads down, evaluating products, getting demos, writing my observations, and basically heading toward...
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Collective intelligence: Number of women in group... →
Another piece on the Woolley research on social cognition, showing that IQ matters less than social sensitivity and balanced communication in groups.
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Twitter Blog: A World of Tweets →
Twitter’s growth internationally is very steep, as documented by @mzsanford of Twitter.
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“Secrecy is essential to empire.”
– Daniel Ellsberg
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Starbucks CIO shows why next version of Windows is... →
Scoble doesn’t say it, but Microsoft Windows is as dead as COBOL. (Meaning that it will be around for ever, but it won’t be a growing product anymore.) Time to short Microsoft.
Netflix grabs 20 percent of peak time U.S. traffic... →
Netflix is driving one-fifth of all fixed network downstream traffic at the time of day that the largest number of Americans are on the Web, according to network equipment and software provider Sandvine.
“In the United States, Netflix represents more than 20 percent of downstream traffic during peak times,” Sandvine wrote in a statement highlighting its “Fall 2010 Global...
“The Future of Work
* Employees who are given the opportunity to...”
– Can your social networking profile get you a pay rise?
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Americans Feel More Connected
Harris polling data shows that social networks make people feel more connected [emphasis mine]:
Thanks To Social Networks, Americans Feel More Connected to People
These are some of the results of The Harris Poll of 2,258 adults surveyed online between September 1 and 3, 2010 by Harris Interactive.
Although Americans who are online may feel more connected, they are not actually seeing people...
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Climate as News: From Front Page to Home Page -... →
Why today’s news stream, focused on the near now, like today’s slice of carnage from Afghanistan or cholera in Haiti, doesn’t work so well with the long now, like climate change.
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“The fact that super-angels invest other people’s money makes them doubly...”
– Paul Graham - The New Funding Landscape
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Chief Collaboration Officer? Chief Social Officer?...
Morten T. Hansen and Scott Tapp, Who Should be Your Chief Collaboration Officer?
Companies need an executive responsible for integrating the enterprise — a Chief Collaboration Officer (CCO). Increasingly, companies are embracing collaboration as part of their strategy to grow, by cross-selling products to existing customers and innovating through the recombination of existing technologies....
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USA Today's "Radical Restructuring" Means End of... →
The now-conventional integrated news organization spanning all topics, markets, and delivery modes is being exploded into a loosely connected network of thematically and demographically targeted business nodes.
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Identity and The Independent Web - John Battelle's... →
Battelle takes a wandering path talking — in principle — about identity in the connected world, but actually discussing how marketers can exploit identity.
Really doesn’t touch on multiphrenic identity (or federated identity) at all.
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“A preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while...”
– — Alex Wright, Sentiment Analysis Takes the Pulse of the Internet
That’s me: a preponderance of adjectives!
PS Starting early investigations into my next research study on various sentiment analysis and ‘social listening’ tools. Will include heavier-weight tools like...
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“It seems that many media outlets are happy to use social media to promote their...”
– Mathew Ingram, Hey Washington Post — It’s Called Social Media
Matt excoriates the Washington Post for not responding to criticisms in open public discourse, and telling reporters not to use Twitter for that, but instead, controlling all interaction through the editorial page.
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Fast Company Influence Project Pisses Off Online... →
The technorati have been laughing up their sleeves about the massive cluelessness of Fast Company’s Influence Project since the first whiff of this stinker appeared in July. Read the quotes from Danny Sullivan, Arrington, and Cathy Brooks, and click through for Amber Naslund’s post on ego v influence.
Fast Company has lost their way, and needs intervention.
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Kleiner’s Bing Gordon: Social Web due for... →
Kleiner Perkin’s has acknowledged the social web revolution by putting together a new fund to go after new investments.
This is like Goldilocks and the Three Bears: they waited until it was ‘just’ right — not too cold or too hot. And they may in fact make some awesome investments. But this is not groundbreaking.
One things this does, perhaps, is to confirm that social is...
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“The so-called “promoted trend” is a massive symbolic stumble for Twitter.
...”
– Tom Watson: Twitter’s Mid-Life Crisis - The Fail Whale of Authenticity
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Starbucks Digital Network
It appears that Starbucks is launching its own Starbucks Digital Network, so that when you next connect through the coffeeshop chain’s wifi, you’ll be seeing this:
And it appears that Starbucks is basically just trying to brand itself as the sort of company that provides high quality and localized digital experience to its customers. It is not, apparently, trying to make direct revenue...
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Peter Thiel, Techno-Utopian
Peter Thiel, the founding investor in Paypal, was portrayed in The Social Network as a conniving, Gordon Gekko admirer, and his real-life activities and beliefs are being reexamined, as in a piece in Newsweek:
Jacob Weisberg, What’s Wrong With Silicon Valley Libertarianism?
Thiel’s belief system is a mixture of unapologetic selfishness and economic Darwinism. In a personal statement produced...
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Cracking The Facebook Code - Tom Weber →
Tom Weber spent a month — with a team of investigators — reverse engineering Facebook’s algorithms for deciding who gets into your incoming feed. The results are intriguing, and some people never saw the fictional friend’s posts once during the experiment.
Facebook is — intentionally or not — basically creating a rulebook about social connectedness by mediating our communications.
I like...
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Twitter Mood And The Dow
It’s well-known that the market isn’t random: there is some sort of friction in the world that stops neo-classical market perfection from working. And it is somewhere inside the heads of people. A group of researchers have drilled into the mood of the world via Twitter, and discovered that calmness is a predictor of larger than average market swings:
Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv...
Are You Ready For the Social Workplace? →
smarterleaders:
Are You Ready For the Social Workplace?
Experts from the Center for Creative Leadership, the Sovos Group and IBM explore how social computing is transforming the way employees collaborate and work together. Live on the IBM New Intelligence Channel
Description: The 2010 IBM Global…
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Alarms: A Deceptively Simple Calendar Tool
I saw a mention about Alarms, a new Mac OS X take on calendars.
The UX is based on a bell-shaped toolbar icon, which opens a top-of-screen calendar when clicked, pushing down and graying out other running apps:
click to enlarge
The app presents a left to right scrolling arrangement of hours. You can click anywhere and create an event, and at the time that the time for that event reaches...
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Google Struggles to Build Social Features - Claire... →
Google should try to build social products based on calendaring and coordination. Instead of chasing Facebook in the social gossip and grooming end of the pool, why not come down on the end of sociality most amenable to engineering: tasks, events, meetings/meetups, and so on. This is also the part closest to social business, note.
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A Renewed Mark Zuckerberg →
Oh my god. Nick O’Neill continues the tech press adoration of Zuckerberg. Here he gushes about Z’s apparent new poise:
If you’ve seen Mark Zuckerberg speak at some point over the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed something different about him. It’s not that he’s just more charismatic, but for the first time it appears as though he feels comfortable in his own body while...
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LukeW | Touch Gesture Reference Guide →
An enormously helpful guide that I hope more developers will look at before building yet another set of gestures in an iPad app.
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Facebook Is Deeply Broken
The seemingly never-ending cascade of privacy breaches at Facebook continues. The newest demonstrates a design flaw at the heart of Facebook: getting access to a user’s Facebook ID gives access to all information stored in Facebook created by that person. Apparently various companies that build Facebook apps (Zygna, and others) have been using this backdoor to transmit personal information...
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“If a Facebook user “likes” a web page, the owner of that web page can now make...”
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Justin Kistner, An army of likable objects: The new Facebook marketing strategy
So, a brand like The Gap, and put Facebook Like buttons across their website. As hundreds or thousands of consumers ‘like’ some specific product, The Gap can turn around and post messages on those...
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“The corporatization of colleges and universities has already squelched the...”
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Gaye Tuchman, Putting a Price on Racine
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Thinking Small About Business
Dave Pollard sets up Peter Drucker’s SMART management discipline (management by Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Based objectives), and then states — unequivocally — that it doesn’t work. And then he lays out what does:
Dave Pollard, Not So SMART: Replicating (Instead of Growing) Natural Small Organizations
[…]
The ideal organization is...
