Totally narcissistic, but fun. At the moment, I’m in a heated battle with The Onion, plus my friends Eric Meyer (@meyerweb), Ariel Waldman (@arielwaldman), and Aubrey Sabala (@aubs) for 200th most powerful person on Twitter. Eric I can take, but I won’t even try to compete with the ladies. :) Visit site »
Took them long enough, but I gotta say: it looks damn sweet. The place snapping is killer. Visit site »
All good tips. And yeah, I’ve probably broken all of them at one time or another. Doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re good tips. Visit site »
Moveable Type and Wordpress are both touting new “social networking” features for future releases. The question is: does anyone care? Do people really want to start their own social networking sites around their blog? From what I can tell, these are attempts to add features that will generate media buzz, not features that will get users excited about the product. I could certainly be wrong, though. What do you think? Visit site »
I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. Visit site »
My buddy Mel Kirk interviews online community guru Tara Hunt — who, for the record, I finally got to hang out with a few months ago in San Francisco and found to be downright awesome. Visit site »
You enter your Twitter username, it gives you a list of people you probably should be following. Worked remarkably well, for me. via Zeldman. Visit site »
First: welcome back, Dean! Second, Dean’s experience with Twitter echos mine. First time around: “What? This is f’ing stupid.” Second try — you know, when I actually friends who used it: “Wow. This is f’ing brilliant.”
It’s too bad my realization that the concept is brilliant didn’t make the site’s design suck any less. Visit site »
It seems as though Yahoo! and Flickr are set to start providing OpenID services. This is huge. Visit site »
You sort of knew this would happen with Brad Fitzpatrick joined Google, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be this soon. Awesome — can’t wait to see where this goes. Visit site »
Joseph Smarr and the Plaxo guys are makinga pretty big step here in the social graph consolidation game (which, as I’ve said before, is the single most important “to-do” on the list of smart people working on the web today). Sounds very cool, and ranks as one of the first times I’ve seen something really useful done with Microformats.
Only one problem: it only helps users who have websites of their own. Still, a big step. Visit site »
In my opinion, social network portability is probably the single most important hurdle our Web needs to get over. Tackling it is also probably the single most ambitious Web project someone could take one. Luckily, Brad Fitzpatrick — who has already led the development of the tool that solved all your scalability problems (memcahced) and the tool that solved all your username/password problems (OpenID) — is probably the single most smartest person on this here global network, and he’s on the job.
Now, I feel confident this will actually happen. Maybe not soon — but it will happen. Visit site »
The iPhone version of Facebook looks pretty damn nice. Check it out, if you’ve got an iPhone. Visit site »
“Hyper-local is about utility and networks of people, not citizen journalism.” Yes! Visit site »
Jeremy has a nice review of Pownce, the new Django-powered social tool for “sharing stuff with your friends” by Leah Culver, Kevin Rose, Daniel Burka, and ShawnAllen Visit site »
Unborn Media’s baby is no longer just for invitees. Rid yourself of MySpace! If you loves you some social networking, VIRB° is the new place to be, yo. Visit site »
Probably my favorite episode ever. Or at least the episode most relevant and personal to me. Visit site »
My feelings about Twitter are similar to Eric’s. The concept of Twitter is kind of cool. However, it’s being abused as a really inefficient chat room, instead of used to post status, as it was really designed. Otentimes things being repurposed for something they weren’t intended for turn out very cool (see several tags on Flickr for examples). However, in this case, it really turns me off. I already have IRC and IM open most every day. I don’t need another chat room — especially one that doesn’t work very well. Visit site »
Yahoo! offers Facebook $900 million. Zuckerberg is undecided. Visit site »