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Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?

Facebook isn’t the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we’re stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They’ve accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn’t initiate it.

The modern temper runs toward unrestricted fluidity and flexibility, the endless play of possibility, and so is perfectly suited to the informal, improvisational nature of friendship. We can be friends with whomever we want, however we want, for as long as we want.

Focus has been largely placed on volume and reach of an individual’s ideas versus the implications of their actions. We’re so focused on growing our own brands that the megaphone has become more important than the message.

The Whuffie Manifesto further states that “when reputation is wealth, only those who do good and well unto others are the richest.”

Sites like DailyFeats have created models in which people self-badge positive actions that then aggregate their overall “Life Score,” which CEO and co-founder Veer Gidwaney says “is a reflection of the good that you do every day.”

The Internet of Things refers to uniquely identifiable objects having an Internet presence. We're not just talking about your computer, laptop, cellphone or even your TV here - we're talking about everything. This includes your light switches, your fridge, even your toilet.With an Internet presence, all of your devices can start talking to each other and reacting to each other.Imagine a house that detects that a toilet hasn't been flushed for two days. It uses this to assume that the owners must be on vacation, but notices they left their heat cranked up to 22C, their TV running and all their lights on.Automatically, it adjusts all of these to an appropriate state (that might have pre-defined for being on vacation), and sends a text message, tweet or email to let the owners know. A text from the owners in return, or a tweet with #LightsOn, and the house will respond.

A lot of what is being done right now is by interested DIY (do-it-yourself) programmers and hobbyists through sites such as ThingSpeak.com and Pachube.com. It's a world of experimentation, twittering toilets, and home energy monitoring.

The problem with conversations is that they are more important than not reading that great article... Conversations are with people that I work with, that I meet at conferences and events, potential business partners, friends, family, readers, supporters, and more. I want these conversations because I respect these people. But I don't want it to seem that I'm ignoring people or that I'm arrogant in some way, but I have to admit this -- I can't keep up! And I bet many others can't keep up too.

Now they have to do this across a fragmented landscape of social networks and messaging platforms.

I'm hoping that people understand that it's not personal.

First Facebook, then Twitter and now Foursquare; Obama sure gets around (social platforms). As announced today on the White House blog, Obama will be checking in to the location-based service as he hits stops on his economic bus tour in the Midwest. Of course.

there are very few executives, only a fraction, who are actually creating next-generation social experiences for their companies like Jeff Schick. The IBM executive doesn’t just leverage social business solutions, he and his team create them. “We started well over 15 years ago. We’ve been thinking about how to better connect people with people and people with information in terms of IBM itself,” Schick says, “the idea of getting the right person over the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result was genuinely a business imperative at IBM.”

At Big Blue, the company encourages the use of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogs to support their sales, communication, marketing and recruiting efforts.  While employee’s social interactions are not under a microscope, the experiments in social on a massive scale have led to a set of social business conduct guidelines that govern their employees’ social interactions. Schick advises that you need to establish behavior standards for employees to follow.

So why do they do it? Since they are both an early adopter and creator of social technologies, they’ve learned that content management, business process management, collaboration, commerce and analytics must all be combined with a social layer to create a universal and unified solution.

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.

In short, software is eating the world.

More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, "Isn't this just a dangerous new bubble?"

Local data Alec Muffett is working on a scheme called the Mine Project. This aims to give consumers a local place to store their credentials and sensitive data, so they can choose which services they want to expose the data to.

"I believe the structure of the internet encourages individuals to host their own data. In some ways, it's a little unfortunate that everyone thinks it's easier to have a big company do it on their behalf, but it's entirely understandable," he says.

"It's a karmic cycle," he says. But sooner or later it is going to swing the other way, and people should prepare for an age when their data is once again their own, he argues.

Facebook Updates Open Graph, Lets You Share EVERYTHING You Do Steve Kovach | Sep. 22, 2011, 1:53 PM | 3,626 | 3 A A A   x Email Article From To Email Sent! You have successfully emailed the post. inShare30 See Also: Eight Fascinating People You'll See At IGNITION THE MICROSOFT INVESTOR: Microsoft Could Play Kingmaker In Potential Yahoo Sale Facebook Users Are About To Riot Over Massive

Facebook announced the latest addition to the social graph. Instead of "liking" objects, you can participate in events. That means watching movies, going on trips, reading a book, whatever

Everything shows up in the new ticker, the real-time update list in the upper right corner. Zuck says this will make it possible for people to develop social apps based on the acitivities people do. Starting with media: movies, music, news, books, etc.

Square's chief operating officer Keith Rabois went against the grain this week and questioned whether there was any value to be had by implementing near-field communications (NFC) for mobile payments.

He may have a point that the particular technology matters less than the mobile wallet itself.

To name just three: Merchants can administer reward and loyalty programs more efficiently if they're managed through phones rather than on rubber-stamped cards. Merchants can deliver location- and time-specific coupons if they are acquainted with a customer's phone. Placecast is showing how you can deliver offers within a geofenced area. Merchants will also have the opportunity to move discounts quickly if they need to clear inventory. All of that is theoretically possible today with Twitter, but first you have to get them to follow you. Once someone has paid with their phone, presumably it's a lower barrier to get them to agree to receive offers via that phone. Merchants can dynamically steer customers to their best payment option. If PayPal offers a lower percentage for a period than the merchant's credit card service, the merchant can offer products or services at a discount and let the customers choose on their devices.

Auction giant eBay and Facebook are quietly forging stronger ties with a secret joint partnership and the addition of Facebook exec Katie Mitic to eBay’s board of directors.

Mitic, the current director of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook, will now become the twelfth member of eBay’s board of directors. S

Mitic is a whiz when it comes to mobile. She helped launch the Palm Pre and the company’s app store before it was snatched up by HP. Her background in building and promoting developer platforms, especially in the mobile arena, should prove useful as eBay strives to replace the wallet with the phone by 2015.

Any other organization can join them in asking for partners to design a new way of offering accreditation to their own organization.

operating on inexpensive mobile phones or Web-based platforms

Some might be games---but most will have nothing to do with games

With millions of potential voters using mobile devices, strategists would be remiss to write off QR codes as a risky early-adopter consumer trend untranslatable to the political space.

“One of the exciting things about 2012 is that we have the opportunity to close the loop between online activities and real-world events,” he adds. “We’re seeing individuals rely on their phones, and QR codes present an optimal framework for that. There’s an opportunity for campaigns to reach out to mobile-savvy individuals and transmit a message that will lead to an activation.”

There is great potential in branding candidates, fundraising and collecting supporters’ data using QR technology.

Governance can mean a lot of different things. In this context, it needs to be the foundation of the content plan. Not in terms of content creation but in terms of standards and processes for expanding into a certain market. For example, Company A wants to launch a Facebook page and Twitter channel in Latin America to support its operations into that region. A governance model will ensure that the regional marketing team has the following lined up before launch: A content plan to include frequency and context of Tweets, Facebook Updates, blog posts (or whatever relevant tools/platforms are used in that region) An established moderation policy A crisis communication plan An understanding and “buy in” of the measurement philosophy (everyone in the organization SHOULD be measuring social media the same way)

Content Library If it’s one thing that marketing teams in other regions lack, it’s content. The reality is that most brands do have really good content. It’s just scattered all across the internet, various internal portals and even within employees’ inboxes. Content can include videos, PDFs, spec sheets, FAQ, blog posts, infographics and the list goes on.

Community Management Without an active community manager, a content marketing plan will fail. A community manager will not only be responsible for actively posting and aggregating content; but he/she is essentially the face of the brand and should be sanctioned to solve customer problems. A proficient community manager will answer questions and provide real and “tangible” solutions to disgruntled customers. Additionally, he/she should have the authority to provide rewards to random customers simply for being customers.

Banjo has three main goals. One is to connect you to your social networking friends you didn’t know were nearby – for example, a friend from Facebook or Twitter, killing time at the airport, only a few gates away from you. It also wants to hep you find out what’s going on nearby by providing access to status updates and tweets from everyone around you, in a radius you specify. And it provides you with a way to virtually visit other locations, even when you’re far away, to see what’s going on with the people there.

The people Banjo finds don’t necessarily have to have “checked in” using a location-based networking service like Gowalla, Foursquare or Facebook Places. While that helps, of course, Banjo is designed to also pull in locations from geotagged tweets, uploaded photos, and other media from all social networking services. Wait – all? Yes, that’s the plan. Patton says they have 22 services they’re focused on integrating now, but the company’s goal is to become a federation of all social networks, big and small, from around the world.

“We want to build tools that change the way all the people in this room experience the real world,” said Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley at the Web 2.0 Summit today, as he described his company’s retreat from the game mechanics that first made the check-in service a success. With more than 10 million downloads, Foursquare is the category leader for location services, even as it moves away from its initial offering. Crowley said Foursquare is about much more than check-ins, and features such as Foursquare Radar and Foursquare Explorer are going to power even stronger user adoption in the future.

“We have a very narrow focus on building features that help people experience the real world,” Crowley said. “How we were able to survive the Facebook onslaught — that was a big motivating factor for the entire company.”

In spite of banner user adoption, Crowley said he can identify with newcomers who are still struggling to understand why they should use a check-in service at all. Crowley said when he first downloaded Twitter, it was 18 months before he really understood why the product was worth using, because he hadn’t discovered that “thing” which made it special.

Damage control: Internet discussion about the service outage that struck Amazon Web Services in April spiked as soon as problems began (April 21st) and again when Amazon explained the cause (April 29th). The data is based on selected mentions on Twitter, blogs, and in online media. Alterian

Just ask Jeff Malek, cofounder of BigDoor, a Seattle company whose game software is hosted on the public servers of Amazon. Last April, problems in a Northern Virginia data center crippled Amazon's northeast operations, affecting many cloud-based businesses. Spotty service over four days left BigDoor scrambling to find technical solutions and issuing a steady stream of apologies to its 250 clients. Since then, BigDoor has joined a growing number of companies that are seeking new ways of building outage-resistant systems in the cloud, often at additional expense and inconvenience.

Even though outages put businesses at immense risk, public cloud providers still don't offer ironclad guarantees. In its so-called "service-level agreement," Amazon says that if its services are unavailable for more than 0.05 percent of a year (around four hours) it will give the clients a credit "equal to 10% of their bill." Some in the industry believe public clouds like Amazon should aim for 99.999 percent availability, or downtime of only around five minutes a year.

2008 Elections From the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses to the Nov. 4 general election, information graphics were a major component of the New York Times election coverage. Interactive maps on the nytimes.com home page and inside the web site were rich with information, but easy to navigate.

2008 Olympics Coverage In August 2008, The New York Times graphics department published more than 30 interactive graphics covering subjects ranging from the Olympic torch to the medal count. The package included graphics produced in advance of the games, plus more than a dozen produced on deadline analyzing results from a vareity of events. Because NBC tape-delayed the showing of many events, these graphics frequently were readers' first visual picture of how a race was won.

Flight 1549 Lands in the Hudson River When U.S. Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing in the Hudson River, graphics editors immediately began reporting what happened in the air, building 3-D models of the plane and developing an interactive graphic. The graphic was initially published the same day as the emergency landing, and updated over the next several days as more information was released. Published Jan. 15, 2009