Matt Haughey on ten years of MetaFilter.

"Frankly anyone who thinks you need anything else for a working online content model is living in the past." Hah!

"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.

"Pincus said game-based activity like this was an investment of what he called “social capital,” a means of maintaining contact with our growing network of friends and acquaintances. If the industry further emphasized this advantage in future games, Pincus argued with charming bullishness, social gaming could become as pervasive as social networks themselves."

'With Facebook Connect coming to Xbox 360 later this year, could we see similar connectivity between Xbox 360 and Facebook games? "Absolutely," Facebook's head of platform Ethan Beard told me back at E3. "Yeah, totally. That's a simple one -- that's an easy one. There's probably things that we haven't even thought of [coming later]."' Hmmn. Worth a quotation, at least.

"If the promise of previous generations was “games that just work”, and the current that “games work with each other”, then the promise of the NEXT generation will be this: That true next-gen game platforms will comprise services that *just work* with one another." Yes. Interoperability can take many forms, and it's easier to make work at a service than a platform level.

"I imagine this is how everybody who responds to the idea of Twitter with “Who cares if you’re eating a sandwich?” envisions Twitter." Yes.

"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.

"Which I think meant they were telling me they'd be happy if I pretended to follow them but then used technology to ignore them in favour of other people. What? So not only would they rather I pretended to follow them they wanted to explain to me how this dishonest artifice could easily be achieved." Dave Gorman on a kind of pretend-following, usage patterns of Twitter, and keeping tools useful for yourself (amongst other stuff; this is very good).

"...I never thought I’d be banned from something for liking it in the wrong way. It’s interesting to discover completely different attitudes to these new ways of interacting online." Yes, I find this a lot; my actions and behaviours are shaped in a particular way, to the point that I've found myself recently (in the case of Twitter) recommending a totally opposite manner of usage to a friend.

"The question of responsibility and accountability gets sticky here - especially if we consider that technologies are too often viewed as neutral tools or isolated artefacts. If we draw out these flows, these networks, these interconnections, we find ourselves faced with the possibility of being connected to people/objects/places/activites/ideas that we may never see. And with intimacy always comes risk."

"Warning - this is a collection of half-formed thoughts, perhaps even more than usual." They seem pretty well-formed to me, even if the blogpost is a dense infoburst. Lots of solid gold in here, worth reading twice, slowly, and thinking on. And then working out what the conclusions are.

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.

Leslie roughly captures a few thoughts I've had and some reasonably opinions. In a nutshell: the social value of tagging is broad, fuzzy, and a second-order effect. As a loose, freeform taxonomy for personal use, they're superb, and delicious captures that excellently. I tag for me; if it's useful for you, that's a nice side effect.

"Generated" certainly is the wrong word.

"...it’s become apparent to me that social software is a medium turns all communication into a self-representation game whose ultimate goal is popularity."

"An object provides for [the wants we define ourselves as] through the lack it displays." Jyri Engeström on social objects and the way they create wants, fulfil needs, and they way that drives our behaviour around them. Jolly good.

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.

"Director of Community Heather Champ doesn't just guard the pool and blow the occasional whistle; it's a far more delicate, and revealing, dance that keeps the user population here happy, healthy and growing." A nice SFGate piece that at least acknowledges the complexities of community management.

"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."

This looks like it could be interesting/fun; if anything, worth watching as a slightly more attractive option for lifestreaming...

"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.

"...you can’t do one of these bits and expect everything to work out great. You have to think about what can and needs to be done in each bucket." Another part of the it's-not-a-software-problem issue, with some good points on community.

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.

"The value lies in the network of people and how they illuminate the things I don’t know." Rands hits the nail on the head. It's about who you know, and how you make use of them. Just like real-world friends. Hint: Scoble is using it wrong.

People are playing Cheddar Gorge on Nature Network. Awesome. Let's hope this playdiates elsewhere on the network.

"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.

Disney are shutting down VMK despite its continued success and large userbase; as a "promotion", it's run its course. Some of the comments are very affecting. Lessons to be learned about the implicit contracts you create when you build worlds.

Collaborative mapping and annotation of skateboarding spots. Nifty - and I quite like the Ferro-esque type everywhere.

"[GitHub] is my kind of social software. You want to "friend me"? Send me a patch. Fork me." Nice post from Ryan Tomayko looking at GitHub from a slightly different angle.

"Why would I ever want to use Facebook as the UI for blogs? One simple reason: people as tags, tags as people."

"Here are some of the common pitfalls that lead to failure when building social web applications."

I get the feeling last.fm will be just fine; what CBS have _really_ acquired is AudioScrobbler. That data's worth a fortune.

"Scrobbler is a [ruby library] wrapper for the audioscrobbler (last.fm) web services." It looks very ncie.

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.

Many times, the roles that are taken up in an online community that's based around a "thing" are so structured and expectant that you could almost fashion carved wooden masks for them.

"By today, the headquarters of Front National has entirely disappeared from Porcupine; in its place, a tiny casino has sprung up overnight, and is already receiving customers." Second Life _is_ Las Vegas!

"Send/receive funds in exchange for friendship!"

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".

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

"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

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

Public - super-public - hyperpublic. Lots of interesting stuff in this essay from danah. Memo to self: it's all about the ablative case.

Ning-powered app for finding other Mario Kart friendcodes. Fun!