This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

As someone else said, "They’re sort of adorably snobby."

Extension for Safari to replace Google+ Profiles in Google search results with the most relevant social profiles

By @philadams of @blondedigital: So I came up with this idea for a universal social strategy.It’s a one-size-fits-all framework that will hopefully help if you’re given a blank sheet of paper and asked to develop a “social media” strategy.It’s designed to ensure that you ask the right questions and avoid some of the common pitfalls, many of which arise from the sloppy use of language.

Google released the previously announced set of changes around G+ integration and UI updates today, and boy is it a disaster. Since the general changes were pre-announced last week, most of us were prepared for the letdown, but actually seeing how it works end to end has made several flaws abundantly clear. Let's start with the obvious.

"rep.licants.org allows people to install a bot on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. The bot will combine the activity the user is already having on other channels such as youtube or flickr with a set of keywords selected by the user to attempt and simulate that person's activity, feeding their account with more frequent updates, engaging in discussions with other users and adding new people to their list of contacts."

If you want to "trickle" your photos into Flickr instead of dumping in dozens of pictures at one time when your contacts will only see at most 5 in their "Photos From" tab, this is your tool.<br />
Instructions: Just upload your photos as private and add the tag "flickrtrickle" to them. Then visit this page and I'll pull your 5 oldest (by date posted) trickle photos. Hit the button and I'll update the date posted to the current time, remove the tag, and make the photo public. This way you can trickle in your photos as you see fit.

I've had a rare weekend of telly. And instead of just lounging on the sofa (well, as well as just lounging on the sofa) I thought I'd see how the experience is changed by a slightly different sort of second screen. Not the usual twitter on iPad fiddling, but a little pico projector beaming Dextr next to the telly.

People who created a Twitter profile before January 2009 now account for just 4.7% of the total Twitter population. That's one of the findings in a new study by the social media analytics and monitoring service Sysomos that examines over 1 billion tweets from 2010 and compares the data with Twitter usage in 2009. So how has the influx of new users changed the ways in which Twitter is used?

Figment is a community where you can share your writing, connect with other readers, and discover new stories and authors. Whatever you're into, from sonnets to mysteries, from sci-fi stories to cell phone novels, you can find it all here.

Creating a Projeqt is simple and intuitive. In fact, you have probably done most of the legwork already. We play nicely with the other social platforms out there so you can embed your videos from YouTube or Vimeo, post pictures from your Flickr account, include RSS feeds from your blog or even your Tweets. Through Projeqt, you can orchestrate all these integral pieces of content to form one coherent story. And then share that story with the world in exactly the way you want it to be heard.

A tumblelog was a collection of citations, but it engaged directly with its source material; its citations were to primary sources, rather than to secondary sources who in term cited primary sources. Tumblelogs like Anarchaia also lacked ego or personal branding. They weren’t about their authors, they were about their authors’ interests. If your field of interests overlapped sufficiently with a tumblelogger’s, you could expect to find a collection of interesting sources to check out on a regular basis. You did, after some time, feel like you got to know the person behind the blog, but this was a matter of osmosis: their personality seeped through in their choice of sources and the very occasional, pithy comments that were sometimes appended to links.

This is what @robinsloan uses to snag tweets for blog posts.

According to his Facebook profile, Zuckerberg has three sisters (Randi, Donna, and Arielle), all of whom he’s friends with. He’s friends with his parents, Karen and Edward Zuckerberg. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Harvard University. He’s a fan of the comedian Andy Samberg and counts among his favorite musicians Green Day, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. He is twenty-six years old.

What the Follow Friday transaction boils down to in some cases is a quid pro quo action—I've recommended you, now recommend me. But friendship, which is the basis for connections in some social networking settings, as Hruschka describes it does not work in this way. Friends do not keep a tab and feel that they have to reciprocate. So is the social capital grab that occurs on Fridays on Twitter an outgrowth of the medium as the reader below suggests? Would this type of behavior seem more acceptable on LinkedIn where the idea is that you are connecting for business and networking where quid pro quo is a facet of the relationship?

“What am I passionate about?” This is the essential starting point for any discussion of what the Web is, what it is becoming, and how it should be presented. The individual, with their needs, their passions, their opinions, their desires and their goals is always paramount. We tend to forget this, or overlook it, or just plain ignore it. We design from a point of view which is about what we have to say, what we want to present, what we expect to communicate. It’s not that that we should ignore these considerations, but they are always secondary. The Web is a ground for being. Individuals do not present themselves as receptacles to be filled. They are souls looking to be fulfilled. This is as true for children as for adults – perhaps more so – and for this reason the educational Web has to be about space and place for being, not merely the presentation of a good-looking set of data.

Granted, one of the documented reasons for Instagram’s spartan feature set is the size of the team. As noted in the Quora article, the team allegedly spent a year working on the foundation for what became Instagram. But it was in an eight-week period that Instagram was designed, developed, and deployed. They could have waited another eight weeks and added a bunch more features, but they didn’t. I think each omission is interesting.

I really like Malcolm Gladwell's new piece on digital political organizing.

It's got an excellent structure, alternating scenes of the lunch counter protests of the 1960s with ideas about the loose social groups that activists attempt to catalyze on Facebook and Twitter. His big point is weak-tie networks don't have the dedication and structure to take on an established power structure. Martin Luther King, Jr, he notes, had a one million dollar budget and 100 staff members on the ground when he got to Birmingham.

I found myself surprised at how much I liked the piece. I'm a big fan of Clay Shirky, whose various writings about the potential of the Internet as an organizing platform would seem to run directly contrary to Gladwell's thesis.

Small Change
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
by Malcolm Gladwell

"There is no one right way to use Twitter, and you should ignore anyone who says there is. Including me." http://bit.ly/buqqic

At 19, Sean Parker helped create Napster. At 24, he was founding president of Facebook. At 30, he’s the hard-partying, press-shy genius of social networking, a budding billionaire, and about to be famous—played by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network.

How can we have perspective on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 26 year-old founder, or the cultural power of Facebook, when the phenomena – both man and network – are clearly still evolving, in both our realities and our collective minds?

You Can't Kick Me Off Facebook, I Quit! by Richard Whittle: http://bit.ly/btkVW9

Red Cross Social Media Strategy

How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various friends and colleagues who seem well-informed to describe their media diets. This is from an interview with Jay Rosen, press critic, writer, and professor of journalism at New York University.

Nice. http://whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com/

RT @SeamusCondron: Media orgs, don't read this article & think you need a Tumblr. You need to develop relationships with your audience h ...

RT @tcarmody: Was sure this was an Onion headline; it isn't. RT @stribs Cisco Fails With Old Spice Copycat Campaign http://j.mp/b2XUUa

Missed these slides by @padday 1st time around. Good look at designing social tools for different groups/relationships: http://bit.ly/cUraWz

Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It's partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today's social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre.

My friends at @Flipboard made an astoundingly good iPad app, and here's a video I made to show it to you: http://j.mp/9RoUMT
– Adam Lisagor (lonelysandwich) http://twitter.com/lonelysandwich/statuses/19086005712

One important discussion centered around EdgeRank, Facebook’s formula for determining what items show up in the Facebook news feed. To explain further, every Facebook profile has a live feed and a news feed. The feed is a stream of content and Facebook status updates coming from your friends, groups, causes and the pages you Like. For every unique profile (or Facebook account) there is a unique feed. Your feed is different then mine because we each follow and friend different people/organizations. The live feed is a real-time stream of posts that populate as they occur. The news feed is a little bit more complicated. Facebook determines what should go in your news feed based on your previous behaviors, and not everything makes the cut.

"Six months has passed since I chewed out 20 revised social media stats, so I went back to see if there were any more changes. It turns out that there were, so I’m updating some of the more impressive ones..."

The future for blogs may be special-interest publishing. Mr Kelly’s research shows that blogs tend to be linked within languages and countries, with each language-group in turn containing smaller pockets of densely linked sites. These pockets form around public subjects: politics, law, economics and knowledge professions. Even narrower specialisations emerge around more personal topics that benefit from public advice. Germany has a cluster for children’s crafts; France, for food; Sweden, for painting your house.

Orange at Glastonbury. The most tagged online image ever? Cool idea. http://j.mp/be897j
– Phil_Adams (Phil_Adams) http://twitter.com/Phil_Adams/statuses/17474567050

Unfollowing and blocking people on social sites isn't a bad thing.

The Nervous Breakdown: How I Accidentally Got 700,000 Fans on Facebook, by Gregory Levey http://bit.ly/cORGBn

Your content is your product. Own every pixel, and treat your readers with respect. My post on UX and minimalist design. http://bit.ly/9dlcwe

Video: "Bold Ideas & Insane Possibilities." Merlin on connections, intimacy, and visiting Safeway in your underwear. http://i-0.us/MANN-wv10
– Merlin Mann (hotdogsladies) http://twitter.com/hotdogsladies/statuses/17041977268

The Tail End Charlies of social media - http://bit.ly/diiLfV
– Phil_Adams (Phil_Adams) http://twitter.com/Phil_Adams/statuses/15240625837

Here’s how the Domino’s promotion worked in practice for a friend of a friend of a colleague when he tried to fulfil the promotion in a Domino’s outlet in Shepherd’s Bush.

“Hi, I’ve just become mayor of this shop. Can I have my free pizza please?”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Come back later when the manager is in.”

The Tail End Charlies of social media aren’t just the people posting tweets and Facebook content, it’s anyone who has a role to play in keeping social promises or responding to social requests.

Don’t just think fans, followers and free advertising. Think infrastructure, integration and fulfilment.

"Being able to express yourself, clearly and forcefully, in less than the 140 characters allowed by Twitter (and SMS) is no small thing!"

All kinds of useful stats about social web usage.

Interesting things on Twitter.

A lot of organizations are struggling with what to do with a host of costly, high-maintenance technologies that they have introduced in the last decade, hoping these technologies would produce (a) improved internal productivity, and (b) better relationships with customers. They have achieved neither objective. Dave Pollard considers why, and suggests some simple 'web 2.0' tools your organisation might consider.

The most comprehensive guide to Google Wave I've seen at this early stage. Particularly good guide to the new lingo we'll all have to learn.

Current digital communication methods mimic offline comms. Can Google Wave influence a paradigm shift?

Media is something you can advertise in, in most cases. While you can advertise in social networks, that is the least interesting use for them.

Will 'web 3.0' (whatever that means) be primarily of interest to marketers?