"I also think there's tremendous value in creating a dedicated music graph (as opposed to a social network that also has music); it's in your best interest to follow (or unfollow!) someone regardless of whether you're strangers or best friends. It's all about the music you're going to get from that person in your playlist of jams." Yep, this - which is the thing I always try to explain about TIMJ. I don't follow the list of people I follow everywhere else; I follow people who make my playlist of music better/worse. It means I discover all manner of new music, but I hope nobody takes it personally. (About the worst thing you can do on TIMJ is just import all your Twitter contacts and not add anyone else ever).

"Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper." Little Printer sees the light of day. So, so excited to finally see it in the world; can't wait to see it in other homes. (And: beautiful work on the design - industrial, brand, web, the whole package).

"In this scenario one sunny day you're working on low-level NoSQL projects at the Gootch or wherever, and you get an email from Facebook and you go for the interview and Zuckerberg is talking about scaling PHP and suddenly pauses, gets this look in his eye, pulls his hoodie over his head and says “You have sixty seconds. You should be running.” Because engineers, as we are often reminded, are the ultimate prey."

"...a genuinely meaningful social mechanic can create its own share of problems. Facebook friends are not necessarily one’s actual friends. Players often announce their names and character details in various forums, hoping to find “fake friends” to fill out their list. Doing so creates three advantages. First, the more friends the player has, the more opportunities for his character to be borrowed and thus earn friend gold for the player. Second, high-level friends make combat far easier because of their high stats and upgraded skills. Finally, a surplus of friends allows the player to bypass the rest time restriction." How do you get around all this? Johnson explains all. It's a really lovely piece of genuinely social game design.

"You can now browse your friends’ Liked items to find great articles to read." Instapaper now has social functionality, but it looks like just the right level of sociality for the product. I mainly use Instapaper on my Kindle, now, but will be sure to hit "like" on the stuff I'd recommend from the website. Now: to get Instapaper likes into Stellar?

Christian Nutt interviews Jesse Schell Lots of really interesting stuff in here - to be returned to, I think.

"Thinking about what defines a particular game medium, one doesn’t always consider elements like the player’s physical posture, and where they sit relative to their fellow players. But the experience of playing a digital game with a friend on the iPad proves quite different than that of sitting side-by-side on a couch with Xbox controllers in hand, or sitting alone with a mic strapped to your head. Your sense of posture and presence is part of the game’s medium, as much as the material of the game’s manufacture. Playing Small World gave me a frisson of novel confusion, marrying the player-interactivity of a board game with the board-interactivity of a computer game. I felt the seam that joined them, but it felt right. This was something new, comfortable, and fun." Jason McIntosh on how tablet gaming is similar to the "cocktail" cabinets of old.

Blimey. Spotify want to own social music - linking out to Facebook and creating a more public Spotify profile - but, more to the point, they also want to own music playing, by making your own library available inside the Spotify app... and even offering wireless sync of your own music.

"There seems to be some sort of consensus that the highest form of play is fully immersive, interactive live theatre. Well not for me. The rhetoric of these things is often about people making their own choices, being free to act, creating their own narrative, etc, etc. And I always end up feeling like a piece, a pawn." Totally; not for me, either, though I'm not totally into "Social Toys" either - but Russell's points are perfectly valid and sensible. (I do like theatre, though). Probably ought to write more than a few hundred characters on this.

"Glitch is a massively-multiplayer game, playable in the browser and built in the spirit of the web. It is currently in development and will launch late in 2010. Private alpha is beginning shortly and a public beta period will begin this summer." Exciting!

Daniel Terdiman interviews Stewart Butterfield and Cal on Glitch, which is what Tiny Speck are making. Good interview, and worth noting just how often they threw things out.

"I think this is something that’s mostly forgotten about in games writing: for a lot of the people who play games, there’s not much separation. The games get mixed up with the same insecurities and pettiness that exist in real life and the experience is emotionally heightened as a result. Planetarion is forever imprinted in my memory entirely because of these arguments, and despite the immaturity of fighting, it’s heartening to think of gaming as such a direct extension of real world relationships and emotions." Some nice stuff from Graham Smith. I too played Planetarion for a while at secondary school too, although with my Quake chums, looking for something to be played in the working week, away from 2fort5.

"The whisky social network". Ooh. Has potential, at least.

'"We studied these online gangs at the same time I was looking at the offline gangs and it turned out the model we were developing to explain the behaviour of the online guilds began to coincide with the offline gangs," says Johnson. "We could explain the data using the same mathematical ideas."' Which all makes sense, you know, but it's still interesting to see this stuff being done and taken seriously.

"LEDs pulse back and forth in the mantle to indicate roughly how many friends are on Xbox Live. It goes into red alert if anyone's playing Left 4 Dead." Nicely done; might poke something similar into life for myself, just for kicks.

"I think that there are really obvious reasons this isn't currently happening. Tech-oriented, web-trained, fast-paced, hard-nosed Silicon Valley culture is not really that similar to game developer culture. Outside of GDC Austin... I haven't seen a lot of opportunities for the two industries to mix. Most crucially, everybody's too damn busy trying to get their jobs done to really spend a lot of time or thought on the issue." That gap in culture is something that still fascinates me.

"Locative social media is especially interesting because it directly affects how people move through the city. It can be terrifically fun and useful for people who fit its prescribed social model." This kind of proscription (or encouragement) of behaviour is interesting, and I think there are a variety of ways to do it "sensibly". And: how did you expand the group of "people who fit its prescribed social model"? Small changes of behaviour, amongst larger groups, are much, much more interesting.

"Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal." And, it turns out, you really can rely on the kindness of strangers. If you're a cute robot. And boy, are the tweenbots adorable.

"I'm sorry to say that Demiforce is canceling plans for Onyx." This is a real shame, because I was somewhat excited that Demiforce wasn't just ramping up for "another game", and was instead building something that might benefit the platform. As it is: oh well. Those Apple T&Cs are killer, it seems.

"Social media is people. People talk about stuff. The end." Yes.

Oh wow; it's like a developer network for LittleBigPlanet. Smashing.

"Maybe this could eventually become an entire category of entertainment: You're dropped into a huge, lush, gorgeous, sprawling world, and all you do is just sort of ... wander around. We could even give it a name. Radical singleplayer: The game of solitude."

"# Find links to audio files on the Web. # Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast. # Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds." It's like delicious for audio, but it spits out a podcast. Some really lovely work from Jeremy.

"How I asked my GF to marry me in Little Big Planet. My (now) Fiancee was playing the level. She was so shocked she kept playing and knew i was filming. Afterwords we hugged, she cried, and I gave her an engagement ring." This is amazing in so many ways, not least of which that she wasn't the first person to paly it.

Detailed write-up from Alice of a presentation from Turbine - the stuff on where to draw boundaries between game and web is really, really interesting.

Oh gosh, the Rock Band 2 community site is lovely. Lovely URLs, lovely public-facing site with no wall, lovely. (Thanks, Brandon).

"People think the interface is the game, and I think that is kind of backwards. I think the game is the game, and we should be thinking what are the many interfaces to it... you touch Twitter in many ways, you touch Facebook in many ways." Raph Koster. But you guessed that, right?

"There's a weird conceit in here, that the activities and practices of normal human beings will involve data processing and algorithms of some sort, which is an awfully big assumption. So big, in fact, that it has distilled down to a way of seeing the world as consisting of bits of data that can be processed into information that then will naturally yield some value to people... Design for people, practices and interaction rituals before the assumptions about computation, data structures and algorithms get bolted onto normal human interaction rituals."

"You might argue that an iPhone without connectivity is, well, an iPod, but its not. To state the (obviously overlooked) obvious - it is a phone without connectivity and that over time the ease and evolving practice of disconnecting fundamentally changes our assumptions of what we can expect from a phone, which in turn alters our expectations about the connectivity of other people." Jan Chipchase on pause buttons and understandings of what "social" means. Excellent.

"His advice for those attempting a project like this, is to get people who understand the web. DICE hired a web development director, and a web producer. "Without those people, we would have never made it as far as we have," he says. He also recommends a web tech director, which DICE did not need to hire "because we had a team in DICE who were pretty strong."" Excellent article about building games for the online age; the section on the socially-driven BH website is very incisive.

Oh my. Slides from Ludicorp's presentation in which they launched Flickr at ETech 2004. So much that's still so relevant, still not always understood. Wish I could just throw this at people at Develop instead of my talk.

"Lionhead's system acknowledges the social context of co-op that other games ignore, and the bargaining over who gets to be the hero and how much the henchman is paid is a crucial part of the fun." It's all about the context; aninteresting take on co-op.

"Any resemblances to geeks living or dead are coincidental." Seen many of these, both in real life and in software design. Probably been guilty of one or tow in my time.

Absolutely excellent. A little depressed but also pleased at the overlap with my NLGD talk. Here's hoping I can munge together something good. And give credit where credit is due.

Interesting looking socially-oriented, UK-based, second-hand book sales. Probably need to poke this a bit more.

"Olinda is a prototype digital radio that has your social network built in, showing you the stations your friends are listening to.". It's here, and it's very much real. Congratulations to Matt, Jack, and all involved.

"I've never been satisfied with folks trying to build services that generate 'eyeballs' just to 'monetize' that traffic with ads." Charlie rightly lays into the monetizers.

"...the same topic kept coming up, over and over... you can think of it as an amalgamation of crowd theory, human terrain mapping, and social simulation. It is the science of groups; it is a new kind of quantitative political science."

"This article explores the practice of "beeping" or "missed calling" between mobile phone users, or calling a number and hanging up before the mobile's owner can pick up the call"

Exhaust data is, I think, a clear case of "phatic communication." This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. [It] doesn't get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done

"The Relationship Update Stream is an endless feed of social relationship data, designed for web services to be able to send and receive information when changes to social relationships on their service occur." Neat URL, too.

"Your lists of friends and connections on the social websites that you use, sometimes called your social graph, belongs to you. No one company should own who you know and how you know them." This could be interesting!

This is going to be huge.

Linked everywhere, but what the hell: it's a cracking nine-minutes Shirkyblast. Listen to what he says; it is good.

Facebook's new development platform looks fantastic - very rich, very unusual for its sector.

Pennypacker is a Firefox extension that enhances Penny Arcade with favourites and tagging.

Not every social software system has all of these, but most of them have three or more. And the most popular social websites implement many of these building blocks, but focus on just one or two.

Revish: a site for "reading and sharing your reading experiences". Social, shared, API\d up. Looks interesting.

'"Friends" still isn't the right word.' - Kottke on Twitter, with much strong truth, notably this.

"the phatic function is communication simply to indicate that communication can occur." Leisa Reichelt on "ambient intimacy", Twitter, and some Bakhtinian ideas.

A useful, meaty charter from Meg, with some basis in her real-life efforts. I particularly like focusing effort on "making things real". Things which do not exist in their final medium do not exist yet.

Friendship helps people write community into being in social network sites. Through these imagined egocentric communities, participants are able to express who they are and locate themselves culturally.

"Most people are deeply invested in the physicality of life; this is not going away".

Awesome - players decided to take d20 (D&D) entirely metaphorically, and use it to play out 60s social archetypes. To quote further down the thread: "you've made D&D... narrativist". Great stuff.

A perceptive and detailed analysis of the Dunbar Number - and why some of the hype around it is misguided.

Surprisingly good (for .net) interview with Caterina Fake. “The most difficult part is not the technology but actually getting the people to behave well.”

"the strength of social contact between people cannot be measured by frequency or intensity; a better measure is the number of communication channels used by people" - I like Chris' ideas, but need to think a bit harder on them.

Jason Kottke brings all manner of Will-Wright-related goodness together in one post. Hence: linky linky.

"Privacy is not simply about the state of an inanimate object or set of bytes; it is about the sense of vulnerability that an individual experiences. When people feel exposed or invaded, there's a privacy issue." Loads in here that's of use beyond this qu

My research is concerned with algorithms that exploit the combinatorial structure of networks and information.

It is, after all, already social, writes Julian Bleecker. He's right. Ties into my ideas around 'sociable" software.

Tom Coates' own notes for the Guardian Changing Media Summit

"Social play, bluetooth, a one-click interface" - yup, it pushes the same buttons for me

Provides relative worth of money from time x to time y. Impressive.