"...in the end, culture is a more powerful tool in dealing with drinking than medicine, economics, or the law."

"The proposed settlement bars Facebook from making any further deceptive privacy claims, requires that the company get consumers' approval before it changes the way it shares their data, and requires that it obtain periodic assessments of its privacy practices by independent, third-party auditors for the next 20 years."

"After you've marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and Amazon, and Facebook I guess (I didn't look because I didn't want to get too depressed), head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It's like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader."

"There are fascinating implications for a world of probabilistic resource use: for one thing, it points up the importance of "signal amplification" through retweets, reposts, and other recycling of interesting tit-bits – these are critical to the successful use of a medium that can't be consumed by any one person from tip to tail."

"I wanted to see how much intel you could gather from a person just by lurking on a social networking site. I [also] wanted to see who was most susceptible to clicking. I wanted to see how fast this thing would propagate. One of the things I found was that MIT and St. Paul's [prep school] were very cliquey. If they don't remember seeing you, they are not going to click. You had less of a chance of penetrating those groups than the actual intel and security communities."

Facebook and Twitter empower all groups—not just the pro-Western groups that we like. To put it in a more formal framework: not all social capital created by the Internet is bound to produce "social goods"; "social bads" are inevitable as well. The political scientist Robert Putnam, who was instrumental in promoting the notion of "social capital" in popular discourse, was not blind to such possibilities. In "Bowling Alone," his most famous book, he explicitly cautioned against the "kumbaya interpretation of social capital," stating that "networks…are generally good for those inside the network, but the external effects of social capital are by no means always positive."

“OpenID Connect”, therefore, is what I’m starting to use in casual conversation as my answer to Twitter and Facebook Connect.

"In the past year, researchers have developed new robots to tackle a variety of tasks: helping with medical rehabilitation, aiding military manoeuvres, mimicking social skills, and grasping the unknown. Here are the highlights."

On the Lukeywes1234 thing. ED has more infos.

"Now, you might want to show your Wow to family and friends. You might want to show your Wow, even, to other people out there in the world. But the site is neither messaged or built that way. It's an archetypal example of the corporation wanting to do something community-enabled and just not getting it: 'Hey customers! Send your most special memories to our corporate PR department!'"

"Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction."

"We analyzed over 500,000 first contacts on our dating site, OkCupid. Our program looked at keywords and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were statistically significant. The result: a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when introducing yourself online. This is the second post of our statistical investigation into the optimal online dating message; a note about how we protected user privacy is here."

"We all know some: parents who can't stand each other, but have made a hard-headed decision to stay together nonetheless. They are exactly the kind of people who would be glued back together by Cameron's policies if they succeeded in their goal. It turns out their children do worse than any other group – including those of divorcees or single mums. If you are raised by arguing parents who stayed together only for you, then you are 33 per cent more likely to become a binge-drinking teen than if you have a single parent, for example."

"“Need a paramedic on corner of John Wesley Dobbs and Jackson st. Woman on the ground unconscious. Pls ReTweet,” Hall tweeted, eschewing the use of his cell phone as, well, a phone, to call 911 since his battery was low and he didn’t want to lose contact if it died while he was trying to save a life."

"The tweenbot, a cardboard-bodied, cheerful little bugger, is equipped with a flag stating its intended destination. Since it can only move forward, it depends on the kindness of strangers to guide it and remove obstacles."

"Looking to spur wiki adoption? Applying patterns that help coordinate people's efforts and guide the growth of content, and recognizing anti-patterns that might hinder growth - can give your wiki the greatest chance of success."

"We are studying the spread of two chain letters that were frequently forwarded by email over approximately the last ten years. .. including the network structure and patterns of transmission in time and location"

"OpenID is convenient for end users, allowing them to login to numerous web sites using one set of credentials - their OpenID. But how is OpenID doing today? Where can you get one? And more importantly, where can you use it?"

"Put away your credit card! This is a completely free site."

"the socio-semantic web opens up for a more social interface to the semantics of businesses, allowing interoperability between business objects, actions and their users."

Nifty free genealogy site.

"The most surprising result is that the activity of the Wikipedia community appears to have been declining during the last 6 months"

"A population of 1,000 random pictures, created in October 2007. You allow the fittest pictures to survive. The higher your rating for a pic the more mutated offspring it produces."

"Shamelessly copied from a list being used at the xkcd meetup. (Yes, eventually I will shut up about the meetup, but right now I'm still excited about it.) Pick a topic and start a conversation!"

"it is a curiosity that, quite possibly, the more we listen to what some people say, the less we know about what - or even if - most people think."

OMG, WoW skillz aren't linked with age or culture!

SKX's alternative dating website.

"International Drinking Rules may be used during any drinking game, or social gathering whose participants are aware of the rules. ... The rules are intentionally complex, and may be made more complex at will, such being the delightful benefit of arbitrar

"First Life is a 3D analog world where server lag does not exist"

"I have been watching the press reaction to Second Life with increasing confusion." Seconded.

A must read.