Do You Want to be my Frenemy?

Cory Doctorow has written an interesting blog-post about how social networks have their own 'red button' for self destruction. There comes a moment that you get too many friends, which is unavoidable when you accept all the friend requests a person receives. While in theory services like Facebook are great to keep track of contacts, in the end you'll have people on there who you're not really befrienden with. Which causes an exodus to the next network to start over again.

The main problem is that you have to mix too many people together and can't distinguish between those close to you and those you met once on a party. While it's not-done to remove someone from your friends list it's something that we should start with. People have to be aware that you can't be befriended with everyone you know. There is a gap between the strong and the weak ties that you have. And this is for everyone, every single one of us. We shouldn't be hurt if we're not part of a person's inner circle because, if it wasn't for Facebook and other social networks, we wouldn't know either.

Sources: InformationWeek

Where's the Money in the Blogoshere?

According to Alex Iskold there can a lot of money be made on the long tail in the blogosphere, but not when one is in it. A lot of the blogs online have a small amound of readers, and any way to capitalize on those readers just won't make enough revenue to create a living out of that. Possibilities like Google's Adsense depend on large amounts of traffic to be profitable.

He says it's a circle, companies depend on the long tail to exist, but if the long tail collapses .. what will happen then?

Sources: Read/WriteWeb

The All-Seeing Eye ... of CSI

The wondercops of CSI know everything, and if they don't they just go to your twitter account to see what you Have been doing. Sometimes it's just that easy.



I wonder when pictures and/or videos of people killing others will be on Facebook, tagged and ready to incriminate the certain someone. Considering people are already getting fired over booze-filled pictures I guess that future isn't too far away.

Sources: Mashable

The Online Library

A couple of universities from all over the world (US, China, Egypt & India) are part of a joined venture to digitize books. Already 1.5 million books are available to anyone with a working internet connection.

Reddy says:

The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling.

This can be said of almost anything. The rise of the internet as a world, not parrallel with ours, but embedded within it has made it a lot easier to spread information around our little globe.

I wonder what will happen with books as a medium. Myself, I still enjoy to flip the pages of a book, to touch the paper, the smell of an old book, the fact that you can immerse yourself in a stack of flattened woodpulp. Reading books on the computer doesn't come anywhere near that.

Source: Physorg

Robotic Legs & Cars

Monkey brain signals have been mapped by electrodes and are able to control robotic legs on the other side of the world.

While these legs don't control themselves like the cars did in "Darpa's Urban Challenge". This was a race where robotic cars had to finish a course and overcome traffic situations, the kind we deal with every day. The cars had to be completely autonomous, without outside interference/help.



We're not there yet, but robots do seem to become a lost smarter and it won't take that long anymore before they'll be playing an active party in our everyday lives.

Source: NewScientist, Darpa