Social Networking

I've always thought of Instagram as another photosharing site, but not a place where the users post pictures of cats and their credit cards. Given that I'm not a fan of posting every photo I might have taken to the 'net at large, I hadn't signed up for an account there.

One of 2010's tech flops was the Gawker breakin. While their first mistake was actively taunting the 4chan-ers, the breakin has had many repercussions. Most of the database is available as a torrent. A great majority of the weak passwords are compromised.

LinkedIn took it upon itself to have everyone change their passwords. Whether or not this is limited to users who have email addresses in the published torrent I'm not sure.

What does this mean?

Diaspora, the project started with the aim of building a decentralized social network has had its popularity dropping like a stone. It may not be dead, but after all the hype that was promised the alpha lacked a lot of what was promised, and the software had major (but perhaps not unsolvable) security problems.

If you've been online any length of time you may have come across a news article heralding the death of the wedding: fewer people are getting married and on slow news days it seems like these articles are trotted out to fill the gap. I've come across one which inexplicably starts blaming twitter in the last quarter of the article. Twitter? I don't get it... did I miss a paragraph, or was one accidentally ommitted?

twitter_badui.png

I noticed this after viewing a link about twitter clones. If I want to sign up for a twitter account, this is the homepage. The question I have is: "How do I sign up?". Not in a figurative sense, but a real one... there's no 'Create an Account' right next to the login form, which has been a UI convention for some time now.

Stared at it long enough yet? I'll give you a clue: it's the big green box that says 'Join the Conversation'.

facebook-config.png

In my continuing trend of posting screenshots of Facebook screens, here's another one.

What's up with this? It's an interesting artifact of Facebook's "student-only" audience. It has no practical use for a large percentage of their audience. Since Facebook has the information available to determine whether someone is currently in an institution where you might have need of these fields, they should ideally only appear for those users.

In Jakob Neilson's alertbox newsletter for this week:

FACEBOOK AND METCALFE'S LAW

We are getting close to the bursting of Bubble 2.0, so it's a good idea to
review some of the precursors of Bubble 1.0.

In 1999, I wrote an article "Metcalfe's Law in Reverse" about the problems
of so-called walled gardens, where a service cuts itself off from the
Internet and tries to add value by being closed.

> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990725.html

I'm convinced that so-called 'v-blogging' is a fad. Why?

Because I can read ten times faster than anyone can speak: I'm not alone. In the time it takes a video from youtube to buffer, you'll already have read this paragraph.

Other reasons?

Text is searchable. That's the big roadblock. I know there are many sites out there claiming to be able to search video content using speech recognition, but until voice recognition takes a quantum leap the only option is manual transcription. And who's going to do that for the tens of thousands of videos on sites around the net? No-one.