'I'll reiterate this in plainer language, just in case the quote wasn't clear: Detsaridis said that one of the most compelling parts of playing Zynga's games is deciding when and how to spam your friends with reminders to play Zynga's games.'

'The self-aggrandizement that offended the group is standard fare in my Twitter feed — my own posts too often included. (BTW, I’ll be appearing on TV this week.) But far from clearing out the virtual bar, expressions of vanity online are usually rewarded with a cascade of back-patting: a virtual thumbs-up, a hearty “congrats!,” a “proud-to-know-you” retweet. Social networking sites have inverted the rules of privacy and etiquette, and no cultural norm is tossed aside more often on the Web than plain old modesty. This raises an existential question: When you celebrate yourself online, are you a willing participant in a brave new social future, or are you just being an ass?'

'Last week I showed my dental hygienist who else was checked in to the dentist's office on Foursquare at the same time I was, and her first reaction was concern about HIPAA (the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which regulates the security and privacy of health-related data). She decided no one could stop the patients themselves from exposing their own location; she just couldn't confirm to me whether or not she actually knew who those people were.'

'...when it comes to experiences, status can only be derived from being seen by others—while experiencing the experience, which may be a relatively brief moment—or by telling others about the experiences afterwards (which can go on for years ;-). Hence STATUS STORIES becoming more attractive and prevalent: as more brands (have to) go niche and therefore tell stories that aren't common knowledge for the masses. So as experiences and non-consumption-related expenditures take over from physical (and more visible) status symbols, consumers will increasingly have to tell each other stories to achieve a status dividend from their purchases. Expect a shift from brands telling a story, to brands helping consumers tell their own status-yielding stories to other consumers.' -- What's my motivation?

'Aleks examines the popularity of social networks such as Facebook and asks how they are changing our relationships.' -- Sherry Turkle: "There's a new personality type: It moves from, 'I have a feeling, I want to make a call,' to, 'I want to have a feeling, I need to make a call.' There's a sense in which you almost need a sense of validation and the support of the community to feel the feeling in the first place. Bringing other people into the loop of feeling your feeling, this is very seductive."

'Using our unpantentable Tweet-to-Speech™ technology, we've made it possible for billions of people to hear the "Pulse of the Planet" as never before.'

'[POTUSCamacho] listens to his @public_timeline rss feed. In part one of his project, he describes creating a bash script in which he uses cURL get his private feed, sed to clean it and eSpeak to output a WAV file. In parts two and three, he goes on to discuss how he created an audio stream of @public_timeline and how he plans on tweeting vocally.'

'“This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence,” said John Browning, a lawyer and member of the Dallas Bar Association who studies social networking and the law. “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.” -- Mr. Reuland acknowledges that, in principle, anyone who knew Mr. Bradford’s username and password could have typed the Facebook update, but he regards it as unlikely in this case. “This implies a level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this; he is not Dr. Evil,” Mr. Reuland said, adding that the Facebook entry was just “the icing on the cake,” since his client had the other alibis. -- Joseph Pollini said prosecutors should not have been so quick to drop the charges. “...there is a multitude of reasons why someone of that age would have the knowledge to do a crime like that.”' -- Exploitable

'...market turnover has become identity turnover, and that identity turnover proceeds whether or not it remains a market imperative. The cash economy democratized consumption, but social networking,etc. is resocializing it within a commercial matrix. Our self-publicized consumption is more susceptible to fast-fashion acceleration, as the signifying power of consumption gestures is relative to who else has made similar gestures and so on. The meaning in the gestures therefore have only brief shelf life. Identity needs more and different things to consume and display more rapidly—it needs more things to share. Yet the alibi of sharing hides how voracious the appetite for novelty has become.'

Reminiscent of McLuhan's insight that people dress themselves in newspapers rather than read them. -- 'Information can now be a matter of facts, data, opinions, or retail purchases -- anything that could be deployed in signaling. The goal is not to become informed so much as to signal a tentative, tactical self in the marketplace of identity. Choice in informing oneself is now driven by the social-networking self (the self that can be ranked and archived and broadcast to ever-more people), which covertly serves the ends of the corporations that control those networks. Less important to be informed than to know the passwords to admission into chosen hierarchies structured in networks online.'

'Harry, a diffident 32-year-old charity campaigner, tells me, “The first girl I fell in love with couldn’t keep anything off her profile. It gave me a weird sense of out-of-body experience. Maybe I would have been self-conscious anyway, but I found myself thinking not, ‘What do I want to say to her?’ but ‘How will this play on her page?’ I wasn’t just after her approval, but that of an entire community. -- What we are talking about here is nothing less than a new means of symbolising relationship, and new methods of constructing a romantic identity: the virtual affair, the untagged husband, the status-update-parcelled-out self. As Lucy observes, “I still find myself ‘self-tweeting’. Every little thing that happens has the potential to go public, and it is a game to find a concise, witty way to make it viral." -- "...you realise it’s all just so many pixels on a screen.” Pixels with more permanence than some of the relationships they depict.'

'“I stopped living for moments and started living for people.” — Miley Cyrus, 2009 -- I was reading that popular tween sensation Miley Cyrus deactivated her twitter account. It will go down in history as the ‘most tragic’ internet suicide of all time, since she had over 2 million followers. I have read ‘doomsday articles’ that say this is ‘the end of twitter’, since tweeple now have role models who were ’strong enough’ to quit twitter. Instead of mimicking role models who are ‘twitter addicts’, tweens will now be more independent and mimmick role models who are ‘twitter quitters. A lifestream of text filled with 140 character statements just doesn’t give U enough room to BE U. It seems like maybe she turned to ’social media’ to try to replicate human relationships+interactions+socialspheres, but it was just this weird experience of ‘people looking at her.’ -- Just want my life 2 belong 2 me, but also want my life to make other people feel jealous/bored with their own existences.'

'The idea, one that is generally accepted in social psychology, is that word choice can reveal a person’s mood. This is true in ordinary writing, these experts say, and even more so in writing like Facebook updates or the tweets of Twitter users, which ostensibly are attempts to describe what you are doing right now and how you feel. The Facebook happiness index could be the first step in reorienting the nation’s sense of self-worth. “We have tracked the economic health of the nation for a long time. The reason we track those things is that the government is full of economists, not psychologists. I could imagine it would allow us to look at a group of people, get a sense of what their concerns are, how insecure they feel. It could be an advertiser’s dream. Yes, it is creepy from a government perspective, but it is even creepier from an advertising perspective.”' -- Creepy and extremely dumb. Measure actual behaviours not claims on behaviours. "I'm happy." "I'm sad." You're confused.

'I twitter, therefore I am. I matter. -- Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist: "Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognize you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won't cure it." -- Twitter's software designers were clever enough to program in tenacious intermittent reward systems, so you end up like a loser in Vegas, behaviorally trapped at the slot machines of life. -- Perhaps a more enlightened way to look at it is that you're really just enjoying a cyber-zen moment of mindfulness to be present and tweet thyself. We're all interconnected now - each of us acting like a single neuron in humanity's brain, firing bits of electricity at one another, slowly coadunating and collectively struggling toward a great awakening. That awakening could turn out to be the next stage in our evolution, and a single tweet the butterfly's wings that eventually leads to a big bang of global meta-consciousness.' -- OM...

'The 10- and 12-year-old girls updated a Facebook status to say they were lost in a drain on Honeypot Road at Hackham in Adelaide’s southern suburbs on Sunday night. Glenn Benham from the MFS says it was fortunate a young friend was online at the time and was able to call for help for them. “It is a worry for us because it causes a delay on us being able to rescue the girls,” he said. “If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000, so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway.”' -- IM. TAKING. MY. LAST. BREATH. LOL

'#5) Punctuality: Before mobile phones, people actually had to keep their appointments and turn up to the pub on time. Texting friends to warn them of your tardiness five minutes before you are due to meet has become one of throwaway rudenesses of the connected age. -- #30) Geographical knowledge: With GPS systems spreading from cars to smartphones, knowing the way from A to B is a less prized skill. Just ask the London taxi drivers who spent years learning The Knowledge but are now undercut by minicabs. -- #31) Privacy: We may attack governments for the spread of surveillance culture, but users of social media websites make more information about themselves available than Big Brother could ever hoped to obtain by covert means. -- #37) Personal reinvention: How can you forge a new identity at university when your Facebook is plastered with photos of the "old" you?'

'Online, the action is the tracing of trends and our own statistically determined significance. Twittering, and then seeing what sort of response it provokes, etc. We are never at a loss for an opportunity to try to garner attention, and these efforts are archived, deepening our potential self, even if it is all noise. The internet has given us means to sell ourselves the way products have long been sold to us, and we’ve embraced them, adopting advertising measuring tools as markers of moral value. ...we manage our public meaning like a brand manager, and perfect the art of culture monitoring—meta consumption of media. We begin to consume the buzz about buzz, or pure buzz, with no concern with what it’s about, only whether we can exploit it for self-promotion. ...nanostories, not suprisingly, preserve the status quo, reinforcing our own vanity and self-centeredness along with the market as timeless, unquestionable norm.'

FFS! -- 'Social competition is and will always be the central preoccupation of the country club set. There are five key rules to using your status update to maximum status-signifying effect. Learn from the masters. #1. CAREFULLY NAME-DROP #2. UNDERSHARE FABULOUSNESS: Though you would be wise to merely spit out an update, the update’s very efficacy rests on the premise that it is an undercrafted ejaculation. #3. COMPLAIN: Your life is worthy of envy, but it is not perfect — otherwise everyone would hate you, and we can’t have that. #4. SELF-AGGRANDIZE VIA SELF-DEPRECATION: Your personal glories should be wrapped in the leaky sackcloth of self-deprecation. #5. PROJECT: Taking a cue from Shakespeare’s King Lear, another avenue of the indirect boast is putting the goods in the mouths of fools...' -- Facebook needs a SLAP button.

Soon you'll deny you ever had a facebook -- '"Online, people can't see the yawn," says Patricia Wallace, a psychologist... Amidst all this heightened chatter, we're not saying much that's interesting, folks. Rather, we're breaking a cardinal rule of companionship: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thy Friends. -- So what's the solution, short of "unfriending" or "unfollowing" everyone who annoys you? To improve our interactions, we need to change our conduct, not just cover it up. First, watch your own behavior, asking yourself before you post anything... And positively reward others, responding only when they write something interesting, ignoring them when they are boring or obnoxious. (Commenting negatively will only start a very public war.)' -- New tag: ambientinanity Perhaps not.

'... the next-generation platform for proximity marketing... social incentives could be the new discounts. Foursquare bills itself as 50% friend finder, 30% social city guide, 20% nightlife game. Co-founder Dennis Crowley puts it this way: "I think Foursquare found some kind of sweet spot between the intersection of social utility (Hey, I know where my friends are), sharing/oversharing (I log everywhere I go/everything I do) and gaming/rewards (every check-in gives you a little piece of candy)." Foursquare is designed with these game dynamics in mind, and it's the absurd appeal of its reward that makes the service so "sticky." "The product is really complex—score, leaderboards, friends, tips, to-dos, etc—and I think different parts of the product speak to different people. If you get on Twitter and search for Foursquare, you find people who think it's 'Delicious for places!' or 'Twitter with location!' or 'Loopt, but with points!'"' -- Capture the flag. Become the flag. Sell the flag.

'High Frequency Trading (HFT) aka ‘flash trading’ will continue to grow exponentially. Trading will become so fast, time itself will have a public offering after Microsoft secures a patent on it and trading time futures will catapult traders backwards and forwards through time until they need bailouts on debts they have not yet incurred.' -- 'People will start taking themselves public on new Citizen Exchanges created by Obama; commit public sex acts to boost their stock price then short themselves before committing suicide to cash in out-of-the-money puts they bought on themselves. As a result, the porn industry will need a bailout.' -- 'Facebook and Twitter will go public... The more you look in the mirror the more you get paid. Narcissism will get monetized by the Feds with some help by Nassim Taleb. -- Thanks Lloyd Blankfein, current CEO of Goldman Sachs and future President of the United States. We are eternally in your debt.' -- HERDAQ

'This is a video of the first beta version of TwittARound - an augmented reality Twitter viewer on the iPhone. It shows live tweets around your location on the horizon. Because of video see-through effect you see where the tweet comes from and how far it is away.'

"....gamers [will be able to] easily and effectively communicate with friends (both gamers and non-gamers), advocating both the Xbox gaming platform and new games via Facebook mini-feeds and Twitter. The new Xbox additions will allow gamers to easily comment on games they're actively playing and share in-game screen shots with ease. Now thousands of new messages and game images will enter these services daily and in doing so will forever change the way games are marketed." -- Still talking about 'media hubs', I prefer to think of them as 'action stations'.

'Those who use those sites have short attention span and those sites are forcing people to make it even shorter. But this plays against those sites. The very same technology they push (stream, real-time, NOW NOW NOW) is going to be the key factor in their fall. When something new arrives and media would think it’s a good new distractor - this crowd with “attention deficit skill” will move on.' -- All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx)

'The Facebook status is the result of a significant shift in thinking within Generation I. The concept of being social has adapted, now requiring that a person be eternally connected and no longer differentiate between personal and public information. Young people have accepted that sharing private information about themselves is simply a part of having friends. The advice your mother provided long ago finally makes sense: Sharing is caring.'

"Choose a keyword from the tag coud, and the generator will automatically give you a message you can add to Twitter, Facebook, Friendster."

"The essence of Twitter is all about how it redefines our relationship with time. We experience time as a series of moments measured out by events. Our personal timeline is a series of events that happen moment by moment and are dominated by the events that happen in our brains – thoughts, contemplations, urges and emotions bubbling up from our sub-concious stream, some of them converted by the conscious into intentions and sometimes into actions. It is communication and self-expression at the speed of thought. And, it is no coincidence that the length of a tweet fits nicely into the size of a text message, for what better way to seize the moment than to do so using a mobile – the only device that is with us moment by moment. It is a seizing the moment machine. The medium is the moment. The tools invented to seize the moment have began to define the moment." -- Use cases inside.

"Traditionally people have used objects and possessions to demonstrate social status. Now our social lives are measured in equally explicit ways. Every social behavior online has a clear, and often public, metric assigned to it: friends, followers, subscribers, etc. And these numbers are worn online like the Rolex watch at a cocktail party. They create anxiety. They create ambition. I'm not sure what the lesson is, but it's fascinating to think that this is the first time humans have seen their effectiveness as social beings measured in such a conscious way. Certainly it's debatable whether or not these numbers measure the quality of your social life, but never the less they create a new kind of status and new pressures and aspirations for our social lives."

'“Poor folk love their cellphones!” [Bruce Sterling] said. “Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.' -- “I wish I didn’t have obligations,” someone posted not long ago. “I wish I had somewhere to go,” wrote an­other. “I wish things were different.” “I wish I grew up in the ’60s.” “I wish I didn’t feel the need to write pointless things here.” “I wish I could get out of this hellhole.”'

'As Twitter-mania reaches new levels, Slate V presents a mockumentary about a company that wants to take microblogging to the next level.' -- Flutter eyes

'In private networks, a company will be able to receive automatic notification when one of its employees has begun conversing with another particular employee more than they had before. Perhaps they'll consider putting them in the same work group. If one sales person doesn't converse with the technical team as often as other sales people do, a company might wonder whether that salesperson is less comfortable explaining technical matters to customers. It will be trivial to determine which technical staff are friendliest and most appropriate to introduce a sales person to, because those kinds of connections will be fully graphable. In public business networks, community managers will be able to identify the customers most engaged in conversation with diverse groups of other customers with the snap of the fingers. Those are the kinds of community members that companies hire. -- Is this creepy?' -- *notes hesitance for later 'treatment'*

'#What: Is obsessive Tweeting hindering enjoyment of real life activities? Then you need me, Twitterboy, professional blogger, social networking guru, and Tweeter for hire. Leave your Twitter responsibilities to me, and you'll be free to go out and experience the world, while I maintain a cool and credible online persona for you. I'll put you in awesome locations/situations, have you saying geniunely interesting and thought-provoking things, and have everyone who's anyone wanting to follow you! #How: Tailor Twitterboy to your own personal Twitter needs by telling me about desired Tweet topics and frequency.'

On Twitterification: 'We are expected to be, or become, “omnivorous consumers of momentary trivia.” Not only that, but we are expected to produce that trivia ceaselessly and eagerly. This calls to mind Foucault’s ideas about power exercising itself not as repression—that is, as forbidding us to speak or to act in certain ways—but as permission, as a kind of broad encouragement to speak (albeit through discourses that constitute our identities along certain prescribed lines). Our participation lets power work through us, which we can experience as being exciting—as being part of the action; we are all under surveillance, but we understand that emotionally as “Hey, we’re all celebrities!” Foucault calls it “control by stimulation.” This is why people seem to feel compelled to use Twitter. We want to participate, want to be counted, want to count. -- We are spying on each other and confessing ourselves to everybody else, and mistaking it all for entertainment consumption...'

"A man whose life had been ruined by the social networking craze Twitter failed to end it all yesterday after he found himself unable to write a farewell message sufficiently concise to explain his reasons. ... David lost his job due to his narcissistic obsession with reporting every single moment of his day... Gradually David found himself isolated, jobless, penniless and depressed. Before ending it all he attempted a final Tweet informing his last few contacts of his reasons for deciding to commit suicide. ‘But 140 characters is like, two short sentences’, he complained. ‘How the hell can you begin to say anything in that?’ He has now created a user group on Facebook called ‘People driven to suicide by social networking. The number of those signed up is falling every day.’"

"Loading Haiku. Poems released. Under Creative Commons. Take them for loaders."

'Basically it’s a collection of Haiku that I started writing whilst waiting for heavy websites to download (and there’s been a few recently). Then I figured I’d release them all under a Creative Commons License so that people can take them and re-incorporate them into their loading sequences.' -- Clever pre-experience design

"Solitude has been transformed into loneliness by the prevalence of tools that make it possible for us always to be connected. The tools assume an always-on status, so we do too, whether or not we need to. Because you can text your whereabouts at all times to your friends, you should do so. Because people can be contact you always, when they aren’t, it can begin to feel like a slight. Something about knowing people out there on line could be paying attention to what we are doing can bring out the borderline personality in all of us. The immediacy of the new medium for friendship sets friendship up on a customer service model, on which we are encouraged to expect immediate satisfaction on our own terms, since we are paying with that newly scarce currency, our attention. This commercial reciprocity threatens to preclude the possibility of the gratuitous reciprocity of friendship. The customer is always right, but the customer is always alone."

"Botanicalls Kits let plants reach out for human help! They offer a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates to your mobile phone. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love."

"Our society tends toward a breathless techno-enthusiasm: "We are more connected; we are global; we are more informed." But just as not all information put on the web is true, not all aspects of the new sociality should be celebrated. We communicate with quick instant messages, "check-in" cell calls and emoticon graphics. All of these are meant to quickly communicate a state. They are not meant to open a dialogue about complexity of feeling. Although the culture that grows up around the cellphone is a "talk culture", it is not necessarily a culture that contributes to self-reflection. Self-reflection depends on having an emotion, experiencing it, taking one's time to think it through and understand it, but only sometimes electing to share it."

"I have now spent two days with Twitter, and I have decided that it is basically guild chat in Internet-the-MMO. It’s a form of /grouptell, and we’re all out slaying bookmarks instead of orcs. Perhaps a recipe for the next big viral technologies on the Internet is go through the various basic things that were present in muds, and figure out the HTTP-based versions of them that people would want in the sidebars of their browsers.

"That's where my guilt comes in. Because of time constraints and just plain reticence, I worry that I'm snatching morsels from the information food bank without making any donations. Instead of healthy, reciprocal participation, I'm flirting with parasitic voyeurism. So, driven by guilt, I try to pitch in. I post Facebook status reports, send iPhone snapshots to Flickr, link my Netflix queue with FriendFeed. But as my participation increases, I invariably suffer another psychic downside of social networking: remorse. The latest source of my dilemma is Twitter ... feel guilty when not serving this hungry crowd—remorseful when I am. Since I don't know many in this mob, I try not to be personally revealing. Still, no matter how innocuous your individual tweets, the aggregate ends up being the foundation of a scary-deep self-portrait. It's like a psychographic version of strip poker—I'm disrobing, 140 characters at a time."

"HelloTxt lets you update your status and read your friends' status across all main microblogging and social networks all at once.."

"What's happening at your company? Share status updates with your co-workers." -- With Hashtags too. Kinda interesting way of tagging company processes.

'It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness.'

"It's an epidemic. It can strike anyone. It begins harmlessly enough... maybe with a cell phone, an online social network profile, or an IM. But before long, the electronic screens invade every corner of your life. There's a name for this tragic and extremely annoying condition: Screen Addiction. But there is hope. Send an intervention to someone you care about! Help them take the first step towards recovery." -- Sent one to my computer. Clear your RAM little fella. Your user can cope without you. *sob sniff*

"Mon.thly.Info is a simple tool to help you keep track of your menstrual cycles." -- Monthly flow. Not sure I'm allowed to comment on this.

"It was inevitable, someone was going to want help creating a great Twitter strategy for their business and would seek help. Cherp is here, and we’re an agency dedicated to finding brilliant ways to leverage the Twitter platform and network. If you want to get business use out of this tool, look no further - you’ve found Cherp!" -- Twerp. (Soz. It was irresistible.)

"Ping.fm is a simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap."

"All this sort-of Web 2.0 stuff is nice, but you have to type stuff in. Things are never up to date, and unless you consciously know about something, you can't put it in. Reality mining is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help you do things like set privacy policies, share things with people, notify people when you're near them, and just to help you live your life." -- !!! Everyware must default to plausible deniability.

I had a headache. I just didn't feel up to it. My Gran was rushed to hosiptal and I had to go feed her cats. I'm on a new diet and sometimes I just faint for a few hours... I'm off my meds. I was never any good in a relationship. Blah, blah...

"adocu is a way to let your buddies and the world know what you're doing at that exact moment. Unlike other sites, your posts must be one word long. That way it stays short and simple. We like to call it nano-blogging :)"

"What is this Xbox blogging thing?: You and your Xbox 360 play games together. It blogs about you. You don't have to do anything! Seriously... that's it." -- Genius

"Bebo’s “What are You Doing” provides 140 characters (same as Twitter) in which to say what you are doing, plus a countdown to say how many characters you have left."

" SportsDo is a GPS sports tracking system for your mobile phone which enables you to record your sporting activities while broadcasting live tracking stats to friends and family via the SportsDo web portal." -- No SDK or API except for map data export :(

"Prologue. Imagine it like a group Twitter." (Free theme for WordPress.com blogs -- make your own private twitter!)

"Imagine walking down the high street and having your mobile phone pop up with a Google notification telling you that Heroes DVD box sets were 20% off at HMV today." Walking and staring at mobile screen simultaneously?! Won't work. You need a HUD.

"Facebook is a game. A very social one... the goals are to win friends and influence people."

"I’ve found it an odd phenomenon to feel relationships strengthening by simply reading status updates... Across not only friends, but also acquaintances and relative strangers. And there’s value in that, for both sender and the receiver."