11 Jun 2009 at 14:15
by Adam
in Technology
No Comment
Why did everyone jump on the myspace/facebook bandwagon? Because the Internet is great, but fundamentally we’re all people who like to relate to other people. Myspace made it easy for someone to create an “identity” for themselves on the net, without having to know how to set up a website. Facebook made it even easier and brough Web 2.0 cleanliness and speediness, with the ability to share short updates and comment on everything.
At base, both are simply a way for people to 1) set up a unique identity on the net to associate with everything, and 2) connect with other verified identities. And 3) not have to worry about updating information on those other identities – in other words, it’s like a big, shared address book where you don’t have to manage the contact info of everyone you know, because they all do it for you.
Unfortunately, all these advances require you to sign up with a specific company, and hope that you’re with the most popular one so you are connected to all the people you want to be connected with. Whereas, with email, it’s a commodity standard. There’s nothing exciting about it. You can go to any service provider anywhere and get email and an address book. And for Instant Messaging, there at least *exists* an open standard, Jabber, which Google uses for their chat network.
So. OK, how would one take the advances that social networking sites like Facebook have given us, and make them a commodity standard that you can obtain from any service provider?
Continue reading →
03 Jun 2009 at 09:35
by Adam
in Technology
No Comment
Hahahahahaha hahahaha Hahaha Ha Hahahahahaha.
*deep breath*
AaaaahahahahaahhaahHAHahahahaHAHAhahahaha
I don’t think I’m done laughing yet…..
22 Apr 2009 at 11:35
by Adam
in Society, Technology
2 Comments
via Streetsblog, some nice news:
HUD funds have traditionally gone for public or affordable housing with little regard to whether it was located accessible to public transit or jobs. Conversely, major road or transit projects have received federal transportation assistance with an apparently blind eye to whether they connect working class people to jobs or serve housing projects.…
The Cabinet secretaries said they’re launching a “Sustainable Communities Initiative” with a joint fund to encourage, through a competitive process, metro regions to develop integrated housing, land use and transportation plans, focused also on energy savings and greenhouse gas reduction.
Slightly unrelated, Happy Earth Day! And I wish I had energy today to go to the Museum of the City of New York, as they’re giving free admission today because of Earth Day, and their “Growing and Greening New York” exhibition looks really interesting.
13 Apr 2009 at 14:18
by Adam
in Technology
No Comment
Cute little robots moving around NYC with human assistance. One of the more uplifting stories I’ve heard recently.
…this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone.
[via Boing Boing]
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