In Activity Streams, verbs are their own objects, and the variety of actions that can be represented is limited only by the standard itself. Providers can also use verbs outside the standard, taking the chance that they'll eventually be incorporated, or that a downstream client could parse them anyway. Here's a list of the verbs incorporated in the Activity Streams standard so far:
"Socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote." And that's why we don't want to run a University-wide Tornado server
A US study (http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx) has indicated that younger internet users are losing interest in blogging and switching to shorter and more mobile forms of communication. The number of 12 to 17-year-olds in the US who blog has halved to 14% since 2006, according to a survey for the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries.
Student-driven revision/moan group for BS3035 on Facebook. Interesting to see evidence of concerted email campaign to elicit information about exam questions.
I was talking with a friend of mine today who is a senior at a technology-centered high school in California. Dylan Field and his friends are by no means representative of US teens but I always love his perspective on tech practices... As someone who has argued about the challenge of Twitter being public (to all who hold power over teens), What Dylan is pointing out is that the issue is that Facebook is public (to everyone who matters) and Twitter can be private because of the combination of tools AND the fact that it's not broadly popular. My guess is that if Twitter does take off among teens and Dylan's friends feel pressured to let peers and parents and everyone else follow them, the same problem will arise and Twitter will become public in the same sense as Facebook. This of course raises a critical question: will teens continue to be passionate about systems that become "public" (to all that matter) simply because there's social pressure to connect to "everyone"?
Screw Blackboard... do it on Facebook: an investigation of students’ educational use of Facebook’ paper by Neil Selwyn, London Knowledge Lab. Paper presented at the ‘Poke 1.0 - a Facebook social research symposium’, London Knowledge Lab, University of London, UK - Thursday 15th November 2007
Imagine if every twelve weeks Facebook: * shut down all the groups you belonged to, * deleted all your forum posts, * removed all the photos, videos, and other files you had shared, and * forgot who your friends were.
ShowYourself is a simple to make, easy, free and fun utility to help establish your identity across the web. Have a Flickr account and a Facebook and AIM? Combine all your profiles on the web into one attractive widget that you can put on your blog, your
a single-purpose wiki for educators to link to and describe their social networking sites. I'm including a snapshot of the list as it is today, but it keeps growing and as it does so provides an interesting insight into the variety of ways that social net
"What we care about is what makes information inadequate." David Weinberger's keynote about the value of the implicit @ Defrag Con. He's describing the route to web 3.0: http://tinyurl.com/yw4ffj
Microsoft has paid $240m (£117m) for a 1.6% stake in Facebook that values the site at $15bn (£7.3bn). Facebook spurned an offer from Google which was also keen to invest the site.
A few years ago I wrote to Microsoft’s leadership and asked them why they weren’t involved in the new Web 2.0 space. I got an answer back that was about 2,000 words long and included the words “business value” 13 times.
Millions in the UK are already registered with Facebook, or similar social networking tools such as MySpace, Bebo and Friendster, to conduct part of their private lives online, and it's growing at a huge rate.
Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple's iPod.
"If Facebook allowed users to differentiate between their professional and social relationships and control what parts of their profile are visible based on relationship type, it" could be the end of LinkedIn...
"The Facebook Platform... means you can use lots of cool new applications within Facebook. We’ve tested most of them,... Here are more than 30 of the best, with more being added as they are announced..."
"The Obama application puts the most recent campaign video and news on your profile and in front of your friends. It also enables you to easily communicate with your friends in early primary states where support for Barack is especially important..."
"After years of worrying about how much time freshmen spend on Facebook, schools are incorporating the study of social networking, online communities and user-contributed content into new curricula on social computing."
R. Gross, A. Acquisti, and H. Heinz. WPES '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society, page 71--80. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2005)