Social laughter, Dr. Dunbar suggests, relaxed and contagious, is “grooming at a distance,” an activity that fosters closeness in a group the way one-on-one grooming, patting and delousing promote and maintain bonds between individual primates of all sorts.

14 September 2011 1 Permalink

I am bearish on all the ‘read it later’ apps — like instapaper and Read It Later — I think we need social curation tools that are more tied to our networks, and less to our own reading — but at first glance, the Read It Later new release looks good.

14 September 2011 5 Permalink

Curiously, the answer to the question of whether a new tech bubble existed was not determined by wealth or status, but rather age.

It doesn’t mean the older people who fear a bubble are right, but they might be seeing the signs. Or maybe they are scared of the shadow of other mounting and bad economic news?

14 September 2011 29 Permalink

Research by Marcus Hamilton, Bruce Milne, Robert Walker, and Jim Brown have found a power law for hunter-gatherer density.

Though their survey of 339 present-day hunter-gatherer societies doesn’t explicitly mention cities, it does show that as populations grow, people tend to live closer together—much closer together. For every doubling of population, the home ranges of hunter-gatherer groups increased by only 70 percent.

14 September 2011 2 Permalink

Twitter announces Twitter Analytics, a service to track how much traffic comes to a website from Twitter.

13 September 2011 130 Permalink

Gowalla pivots a bit, moving away from check-ins to social experience (sounds more like what BrightKite was, and pivoted from). I will have to take a look.

13 September 2011 3 Permalink

So the Arrington era at Techcrunch is over. They killed the Witch of the West with a bucket of cold water. Personally, I thought Mike wanted out from the start, and had been goading them to fire him several times in the past. Schonfeld is a much more down-to-earth choice, and won’t even attempt to become a king-maker, like Arrington. And now, Ariana will be able to meld Techcrunch into HuffPo, somehow.

12 September 2011 23 Permalink

I need to get a demo of Strides, which sounds like a new, simpler, more Yammer-ish social stream app than Socialcast’s original technology.

12 September 2011 100 Permalink