"Even the platform holders are excited about the potential for social networking to tie into games. At E3, Microsoft proudly announced integration of Facebook, music network Last.fm and Twitter with Xbox Live. The latter pair are fairly irrelevant, admittedly. Last.fm is solely a music service, while Twitter isn't actually a social network at all - it's a one-to-many broadcast system, which isn't quite the same thing." Oh. But that's where you're wrong, Rob. Sorry.

danah's PhD dissertation. I need to bookmark this, and have not read it yet, but am sure, at some point, I am going to plough through it, for work, recreation, or (most likely) a bit of both. Until then: just a bookmark.

Official Poken site.

"Simply pull out your Poken and ‘high five’ it with your new best friend’s. Clever RF technology then zaps the info between the devices, so next time you log on to your favourite site, your profiles are linked. Genius!" Physical exchange of details, dead cheap, integrated through a web intermediate. Lovely.

Oh gosh this is brilliant.

"The Facebook Republican Army, based on Brighton's tough Whitehawk estate, looks for parties on Facebook. The gang boasts it travels nationwide – and has even bought its own coach." Oh boy.

"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?

"If you’re an adult who’s at a place in life where you need to pretend you’re interested in people whom you are not actually interested in, then “fake following” should be more than adequate for your needs. But, if you’re here to actually read things and to enjoy the thoughts, photos, and opinions of actual people who have good and bad streaks, it wouldn’t hurt to have an easy way to hit “snooze” for a while." Merlin Mann is very sensible.

"One of the new features of FriendFeed (a Twitter-like thingie) is "fake following". That means you can friend someone but you don't see their updates... It's one of the few new social features I've seen that makes being online buddies with someone manageable and doesn't just make being social a game or competition." This is a really good solution that is totally broken.

"But it's a joke! A REALLY FUNNY joke." Entertaining because it's accurate and awkward, all at once.

"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 tone of the opinions reminded me of the Daily Mail attitude to social networking sites. The resonances were so strong that I decided to conduct a quick experiment..." Eerily accurate text-substitution fun from Jeremy.

"From where I stand, the only sane response is to keep our conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints to begin with." Superb post by Adam Greenfield. Makes me question a lot of my recent design.

Guest edited by danah boyd and Nicole Ellison: a special issue of the JCMC on social network sites. Must return to this, because there's lots to sink one's teeth into.

"This on-line textbook introduces many of the basics of formal approaches to the analysis of social networks."

Dopplr can now import contacts from other sites - notably Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter... but it can also import hCard from any appropriately marked-up page. Very nice!

"I hate the term User Generated Content... I consider it a pejorative that reveals a lot about the person saying it. It makes members of your site feel like dutiful robots, crapping content that you convert into cash." Great article!

"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