This is pretty cool, Jonathan Stark has made his Starbucks card public:
You can download this picture of my Starbucks card to your phone and buy coffee at Starbucks with it. Seriously. My card gets charged, you don’t. Details are here.
If you’re feeling generous, you can also add money to my Starbucks card by doing this and enjoy some serious good karma.
See also caffè pagato.
I have wanted, at various times, exactly what GroupMe provides: free group texting.
Teetering on the edge of deleting my Facebook account, but it’s so damn hard. It is a lobster trap with your friends as bait, and I can’t resist the bait! The tension between hating Facebook and loving my friends (hooray for ambient awareness) puts me in a bit of a pickle. Here is the series of recent links that got me to teetering:
That pretty much lays it out. If nothing else, this makes me feel old. What I really want is for the Diaspora guys to do a bang-up job, and have all my friends move to that.
P.S. It’s not so much that I’m concerned with my own privacy, I just really don’t want Facebook to get away with this epic bait-and-switch. They have no honor, and I hate supporting them (under their business plan, participation=support). But again, love my friends. Argh!
I haven’t posted anything about ChatRoulette yet. Sometimes it pays to wait, as the two best things so far came across my desk today: this movie by Casey Neistat, and this commentary by Danah Boyd.
More fascinating stuff from the OkCupid numbers crunchers: The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures. For example, does showing ripped abs help a guy get messages on the dating site? How about boobs for women? And how do those number change with age, and do they change the same way? All kinds of questions like that. Great stuff.
(For the guys, it looks like doing a one-arm handstand in front of the Eiffel Tower while reading Tolstoy with your other hand (and therefore not making eye contact with the viewer), with your washboard abs “accidentally” exposed due to gravity is the way to go. Diminishing returns on the abs as you approach 30 though.)
I just stumbled onto Photochaining, where you can leave a camera memory card with photos on it somewhere for a stranger to find, hoping they will follow your instructions, leave it for a subsequent stranger, and so on. This got me thinking about similar “tag and release” style sites or projects, like:
So I started a thread on Ask Metafilter, and will repost examples here (and anything else I find):
Semi-related and very cool, but no real Internet and/or feedback component, so I’m not really counting them:
Interesting article at The Economist applying the Dunbar number to Facebook.
What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.
Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.
(via waxy)
However, I love to see your tweets: I love your wit, your kindness, your observation, your occasional mean streaks of bitchiness, remorseless logic and your long memories that pounce on my all too frequent inconsistencies and rashly made promises. I love how Twitter confirms my all too often assaulted belief that most humans are kind, curious, knowledgeable, tolerant and funny. The absurd constraints of the 140 character tweet seem oddly to bring out the best in wit, insight and observation.
I still don’t get Twitter (perhaps not having a cell phone and living in the sticks puts me at a disadvantage?), but Stephen Fry makes me want to keep trying. He’s the consummate Twitterer, it seems to me.
Mathew Honan spends some logging his whereabouts to every geo-aware service he can muster up. At one point, to determine how much privacy he might be giving up, he tries a little experiment:
On a sunny Saturday, I spotted a woman in Golden Gate Park taking a photo with a 3G iPhone. Because iPhones embed geodata into photos that users upload to Flickr or Picasa, iPhone shots can be automatically placed on a map. At home I searched the Flickr map, and score—a shot from today. I clicked through to the user’s photostream and determined it was the woman I had seen earlier. After adjusting the settings so that only her shots appeared on the map, I saw a cluster of images in one location. Clicking on them revealed photos of an apartment interior—a bedroom, a kitchen, a filthy living room. Now I know where she lives.
The article also uses the phrase “anonymous geoshagging,” if that piques your interest.
Evil genius: ditch 10 Facebook friends, get a free Whopper. And this is not your typical silent Facebook de-friending. The Whopper Sacrifice app sends the poor de-friended sap a note! Twisted. Begrudging respect to Burger King. Burger King! Closing in on 30,000 sacrificed friends at the time of this writing. Unbelievable. (via waxy)
I’ve never used Ask Metafilter before, even though I paid them the $5 lifetime registration fee* over a year ago. Yesterday, finally, I asked my first question, “What was the first movie to feature an altered studio/production logo?“, and it’s been getting great replies. Being able to tap into the hive mind when you haven’t managed to attract a hive mind of your very own is incredibly cool. Terrific community they have over there.
* (Genius move on their part, not as a moneymaker, but because it turns out trolls are deterred by an incredibly small barrier to entry. By way of illustration, check out the Metafilter comments vs. YouTube comments side-by-side.)
I’ve been trying, trying, trying to understand Twitter’s appeal from the outside looking in, which ain’t gonna work, according to this excellent NY Times piece of a few months ago (if nothing else, read the section where he talks about “ambient awareness”). I still wasn’t sold, but then I found out that Stephen Fry twitters, and makes it interesting. Is there anything that guy can’t do? Anyway, here I am, if you want to drop in. Can’t imagine this experiment will last very long solo!
Focusing on MySpace in the Lori Drew case is to take your eye off the ball:
Let’s be clear. Megan Meier’s suicide is a tragedy. The fact that it was precipitated by bullying is horrific. And the fact that an adult was involved is downright heinous. But by centering the conversation around MySpace, people lose track of the core problems here.
Interesting insights on bullying, parenting, technology and their intersections (and conflations).
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