"How to use Facebook safely. Here’s the easy solution: don’t fucking surveil yourself! If you want to stay safe on Facebook, the answer is, you should not use it, and don’t tag people! There are benefits of using it, there are tradeoffs, but in the long run I think it’s going to be pretty bad that you gave a bunch of capitalists all your private information where the US government asserts and has the right to read it without a warrant and with the ability to gag the corporate."

"Cowbird is a small community of storytellers, focused on a deeper, longer-lasting, more personal kind of storytelling than you’re likely to find anywhere else on the Web.

Cowbird allows you to keep a beautiful audio-visual diary of your life, and to collaborate with others in documenting the overarching “sagas” that shape our world today. Sagas are themes and events that touch millions of lives and shape the human story.

Our short-term goal is to pioneer a new form of participatory journalism, grounded in the simple human stories behind major news events. Our long-term goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the the commons, available for this and future generations to look to for guidance."

"Facebook seems to believe that the quirky ingredients that make flânerie possible need to go. “We want everything to be social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on “Charlie Rose” a few months ago."

"(...) if you took an open poll of his friends, or any large enough group of people, “Satantango” would almost always lose out to something more mainstream, like “War Horse.” It might not be everyone’s top choice, but it won’t offend, either — that’s the tyranny of the social for you."

"It's this idea that the individual experience is somehow inferior to the collective that underpins Facebook’s recent embrace of “frictionless sharing,” the idea that, from now on, we have to worry only about things we don’t want to share; everything else will be shared automatically. (...) Sadly, frictionless sharing has the same drawback as “effortless poetry”: its final products are often intolerable."

"This is the first in a series of articles that expand upon my essay in Issue No. 1 of Contents."

"What is it that we do now? This question was posed to me by the digital editor of a longstanding print magazine. It came at the end of a discussion that ranged from tablet apps and workflows to business models and markup, in which we agreed that everyone needed to learn and adapt, but no one quite knew what we were doing next. It’s a challenging question for two reasons: what we do is in flux, and so is who “we” are."

"The founding fathers of the internet had laudable instincts: the utopian vision of the internet as a shared space to maximise communal welfare is a good template to work from. But they got co-opted by big money, and became trapped in the self-empowerment discourse that was just an ideological ruse to conceal the interests of big companies and minimise government intervention.

The current state of affairs is not irreversible. We still have some privacy left and internet companies can still be swayed by smart regulation. But we need to stop thinking of the internet as a marketplace first and a public forum second. What is long overdue is a fundamental reconsideration of the primacy of the internet’s civic and aesthetic dimensions. It’s time to decide whether we want the internet to look like a private mall or a public square."

"When Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she “wasn’t in the happiest state.” The breakup happened while she was on a school trip and her mother was already nervous. Initially, Carmen was going to mark the breakup with lyrics from a song that she had been listening to, but then she realized that the lyrics were quite depressing and worried that if her mom read them, she’d “have a heart attack and think that something is wrong.” She decided not to post the lyrics. Instead, she posted lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This strategy was effective. Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh. But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling."

Mining Subcultural Attention / Impersonal Secret Handshakes / Patterns of Social Organization / The Taming of Subcultures / The Fabrication of Subcultures / The Fortune at the Bottom of the Attention Pyramid

"They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’, but in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.”
"They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them."
"Real names, they say, turn out to be the names on your driver’s license and your passport and your credit cards so that they can track you. Are you happy to be a product?"

"I define storytelling as the untangling of, and bringing order to, the chaos of actual experience and packaging it in a way that is usable for yourself and other people going forward."

"I think creating a space that’s more about slowing down and contemplating and being introspective is a prerequisite for getting people to tell stories that have impact. When you design a space that encourages short, reactionary verse, people are going to give you short, reactionary verse. Maybe when you design a space that’s not encouraging that, people will use more depth in their self-expression."

"How many times have you seen a website say "We're not responsible for the content of our comments."? I know that when you webmasters put that up on your sites, you're trying to address your legal obligation. Well, let me tell you about your moral obligation: Hell yes, you are responsible. You absolutely are. When people are saying ruinously cruel things about each other, and you're the person who made it possible, it's 100% your fault. If you aren't willing to be a grown-up about that, then that's okay, but you're not ready to have a web business. Businesses that run cruise ships have to buy life preservers. Companies that sell alcohol have to keep it away from kids. And people who make communities on the web have to moderate them."

InMaps creates surprisingly accurate clusters from your LinkedIn graph. Resume Builder turns your LinkedIn data into beautiful, print-ready resumes.

"The launch of Google+ is the beginning of a fundamental change on the web. A change that will tear down silos, empower users and create opportunities to take software and collaboration to new levels.

Social features will become pervasive, and fundamental to our interaction with networked services. Collaboration from within applications will be as natural to us as searching for answers on the web is today."

"There should be a word for that feeling you get when an older person — and not much older, so quickly are things changing — shames him or herself by telling young people how to live. I'd vote for Bedeutungslosigkeitschmach, or "irrelevance shame," (made up with the help of Google translate) or perhaps Rünschmerz, the horrifying gut pain one experiences watching Andy Rooney. Whatever it's called, Franzen brought it in buckets."

"The phonograph killed the player piano; radio, newspapers, and TV happily co-existed for generations. When did you last think fondly on the DuMont television network, or smile in recall of Friendster? This moment of anxiety and fear will pass; future generations (there's now one every three or four years) will have no idea what they missed, and yet they will go on, marry, divorce, and own pets."

Oliver makes some very good points on why G+ has a great user interface.

I love this: people are figuring out how to best take advantage of new technologies.

"We are prone to think in terms of individual actors whose doings set predictable chains of events in motion. But social systems can acquire properties that don’t easily jibe with this kind of common sense — through processes like self-­reinforcing cascades, in which outcomes feedback upon themselves, or nonlinear dynamics, in which small changes in input can lead to large changes in output."

"If you had asked social scientists even 20 years ago what powers they dreamed of acquiring, they might have cited the capacity to inconspicuously track the behaviors, purchases, movements, interactions and thoughts of whole cities of people, in real time. Of course, this is exactly what is possible now that so many of us — via credit cards, cellphones, online social networks, blogs and so on — leave just such digital breadcrumbs as we move through our lives."

"TXTmob: Text Messaging For Protest Swarms"

"TXTmob is a free service that lets you quickly and easily broadcast txt messages to friends, comrades, and total strangers. The format is similar to an email b-board system. You can sign up to send and receive up-to-the-minute messages from groups of people organized around a range of different topics. TXTmob was first used by activists protesting the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. It was also deployed during the Ukranian Orange Revolution and by demonstrators at the 2005 inauguration of George W. Bush."

-- This project was an inspiration for creating Twitter.

"With ThinkUp, you can store your social activity in a database that you control, making it easy to search, sort, analyze, publish and display activity from your network. All you need is a web server that can run a PHP application."

"Cascade allows for precise analysis of the structures which underlie sharing activity on the web.

This first-of-its-kind tool links browsing behavior on a site to sharing activity to construct a detailed picture of how information propagates through the social media space. While initially applied to New York Times stories and information, the tool and its underlying logic may be applied to any publisher or brand interested in understanding how its messages are shared."

Caterina Fake on FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) as social motivator.

"There is a company that sells radar equipment to the police as well as radar detectors to the public. Clorox is one of the world’s worst polluters of water, and also sells Brita filters to get the bad stuff out of the water again. Lawyers create mazes that you have to hire a lawyer to escape. Similarly social software both creates and cures FOMO. If you didn’t know that party was going on, you’d be home contentedly reading your latest New Yorker. But since you do, you hungrily watch each new tweet."

Jessica Hische explains twitter.

"Sometimes, when I’m in the field, I find teens who have strategies for managing their online presence that are odd at first blush but make complete sense when you understand the context in which they operate. These teens use innovative approaches to leverage the technology to meet personal goals. Let me explain two that caught my attention this week."

-- lovely article by Danah Boyd on the peculiar Facebook habits of two teenagers

Mikalah deactivates her Facebook account each time she wants to log out.
Shamika deletes all photos, likes and wall updates shortly after they are posted.

"Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. (...) What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books?"

Nelson = the book in its bigger context; follow debate/conversations on certain paragraphs; double-check the facts; see materials that reference it and material that are referenced in it.

Coupland = reading in context; key reading material based on professional network; popular reads in your organization; suggesting books to people.

Alice = augmented experience of reading; unlocking secret paths in the book; unwind a larger narrative; interact with characters;

A ton of ideas!

"Author Jono Bacon has been building and managing communities for a decade, particularly in areas of open source software such as KDE and Ubuntu. He currently is Community Manager for Ubuntu, probably the largest community in the open-source software area. His experience and his relationships with other communities and leaders provide a rich and deep well of expertise for this book."

Outline for an algorithm that aggregates user votes into popularity rankings.

Twitter is like highschool -- think about it.

"CommunityEngine is a free, open-source social network plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. Drop it into your new or existing application, and you’ll instantly have all the features of a basic community site."