Archive for the 'Social Networking' Category

Social Networking Overload

Published
by
Sean
on June 2, 2008
in Social Networking and Technology
. 0 Comments

So I’m trying out a bunch of different social networking sites. Twitter is interesting. FriendFeed is more interesting because it exposes you to friends-of-friends more “efficiently”. (for lack of a better term) I just got my invite for Skydeck, and I’m not so sure about this one. You download a browser extension. You give it your phone number and your login info for your cell carrier’s billing site. It logs in and scrapes your call log. This seems kind of ghetto to me. If people are signing up in droves for Mint and happily providing them with access to their banks, why not just hang onto the info? I guess if they don’t have the security infrastructure, but only being able to update your info from a specific browser isn’t going to cut it. To be fair, I don’t necessarily believe that Skydeck has much of choice though.

The other problem I see is the whole “social network” part of it. There needs to be a huge amount of critical mass for that part to take off, and it’s not quite as compelling as other sites. Until that happens though, Skydeck will just be a pretty neat call log analysis tool.

I think I started something..

Published
by
Sean
on May 2, 2007
in Photography, Social Networking, Technology and Work
. 3 Comments

I’ve been following Lunch 2.0 for awhile now, but I had gotten the idea that it was for people who worked at “Web 2.0″ companies to talk about “Web 2.0″ type stuff. So I never actually signed up, and just followed along vicariously. However, recently (after hibernating, apparently) they started things up again and the first lunch is at LinkedIn, a social networking site I’ve been playing with in the past few months. In talking to my co-workers, they mentioned how they felt a lot of pressure to accept invitations from co-workers, even ones they didn’t really care for. I can understand that, especially if they’re current co-workers. That having been said, I’m trying to only accept invites from people that I interact(ed) with reasonably often.

So without really thinking about it, I posted to the Lunch 2.0 blog saying I’d be there. After I did it though, I (erroneously) posted again, saying I probably wouldn’t because of my impression of the “rules”. But Terry quickly set me straight about how things worked. Hopefully this will encourage more lurkers to show up at these events.

Fantasy Football

Published
by
Sean
on August 21, 2006
in Gaming, Social Networking, Technology and Weird
. 0 Comments

I’m not quite sure why, but I’m trying this out. As part of my purchase of NFL Head Coach by EA, I got a free commisioner’s package to their fantasy football product. This lets me set up a league that people can join to play. Normally it costs $50 to do this, and I’m not quite sure why you would, because that seems like an awful lot. Anyway, if you don’t know what Fantasy Football is, it’s basically organized math. You end up with a roster of existing NFL players, and each week you specify which players are participating. After their real-life games are played, the statistics are tallied and compared with whomever you’re playing against that week in the league. Whomever got the most points wins the game for that week. It’s free so I’ll try it. *shrug*

Azureus gets funding

Published
by
Sean
on July 30, 2006
in P2P, Social Networking, Technology and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

People really seem to be getting on the BitTorrent bandwagon these days. TorrentFreak writes that Azureus has gotten commercial funding from the same company that’s funded del.icio.us, (don’t get me started) among other things.

It’s good technology, so I’m glad they’re getting some backing. Hopefully it won’t go to their head….

Blog customization

Published
by
Sean
on July 30, 2006
in Meta, Social Networking, Technology and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

So of course, I need to find tons of Wordpress plugins to customize my blog. Ones I’m using so far:

  • Akismet - Comment spam control. No way I’d run without this bad boy.
  • AutoMeta - Automatically generate Technorati tags based on post content. We’ll see how this one does.
  • LJXP - This automatically crossposts all my blog entries to LiveJournal, with nice formatting options for linking back to my blog.
  • OpenID Comments - This allows users with OpenID identities to comment on my blog without having to register.

I’m pretty happy with things so far. I’m sure I’ll add more though.

I’m a control freak, I admit it.

Published
by
Sean
on July 30, 2006
in Meta and Social Networking
. 0 Comments

At least when it comes to data, that is. Blogging? Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I’m a part of sites like LiveJournal, Blogger, and Lord help me, MySpace, but every time I just come back to rolling my own thing.

Continue reading ‘I’m a control freak, I admit it.’