From the preliminary details it looks like Google agrees with what we said a couple months ago — it’s time for social networks to open up. Instead of rolling out another “me too” platform, OpenSocial is basically three APIs bundled together that allows developers to roll out the same application across a number of participating social networks.
“The challenge with Facebook Apps today - and don’t get me wrong, we think that they are fantastic - is that there isn’t a lot of space for them to exist. You really only have one little box on a profile page. As a result of this constraint, the apps on Facebook tend to be more playful.”
I think that “playful” is shorthand for “silly” … I also think that the idea that apps (and eventually data) can bounce from platform to platform is yet another speed limit to fall on the Information Superhighway (sorry to get all 1999 on you there). If you want to get your geek on, read Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web, where Netscape founder and Ning principal Marc Andresson explores the new Open Social API in depth.
It’s a pretty good read and not too technical. I think he makes some interesting points about programming, especially when he says something to the effect of Standards that standardize standard behavior succeed. It sounds kind of “well DUH” but it’s an important point that is too often overlooked. I was gratified in a silly sort of way to see that Marc calls his blogroll a linkroll. I’d chalk it up to “great minds” but I think that the similarity between our minds begins and ends right about there.
The photo is Reaching out… by carf. It doesn’t appear to have anything at all to do with social networking, but his photos do appear to have very much to do with some very important things - check them out!
G0da aka Dan has a brilliant eye for the world. If you make his photos a regular part of your life, I think it will be better. You could start with this one.
(ercy aka the woman in these photos is pretty darn good too and the admin of Polaroid Love)
If you know me at all, you probably know that I spend a lot of time on the internets* … and by “a lot” I mean “way a lot”. Still, there always seems to be that one more thing that someone else thought of that I can’t live without about 3.5 seconds after I learn about it.
The latest was a relatively simple trick with the Firefox browser that I learned from Jimmy Ruska who is Jimmyrcom on YouTube and can also be found at jimmyr.com. A quick glance through his site tells me he spends “way, way a lot” of time on these internets.
Anyway, Jimmy has a brief video about how to Pimp out your Firefox that (by my calculations) will save me maybe an hour a week. One of my sort of jobs is to wander through a ton of photos that people share with me and the sites I run. I’ve always used the Firefox location bar as Google Jr, but now thanks to Firefox keyword searches I can use that same address bar to search all these groups in seconds to find haunted Michigan, Sleeping bear dunes, Benzie beaches and Leelanau grapes. I’ll stop before the part where I analyze the syntactical structure of the queries and offer suggestions for taxonomy of the abbreviations.
The photo, Beer truck by John Levanen, is one I found on a test search of the Leelanau(dot)com pool for “truck”. John adds so many great photos to the group that I wonder sometimes if he’s on the payroll. Thanks John!
*OK, I just watched that whole video linked from “internets” and there’s a truck reference. Sometimes I wonder…
By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”
Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.
…
It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.
Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.
Read the complete column and please consider how we might work to get off this madly evil path our nation is on.
The photo above is of the Nuremberg Rally. I think it’s especially appropriate considering the fact that the Nazis couldn’t have done what they did without a compliant population who was first too lazy, and then too scared to ask questions of their government.
I saw this on Detroit BikeBlog. Mac is a fantastic photographer, and he has a great blog - you should go there often. Oftener even.
Silly fact: As I was looking for photos of a ukulele, I learned that in the early 20th century, the instrument’s name was often rendered as ukelele, a spelling still used in Great Britain.
Boing Boing calls itself a directory of wonderful things. Just the other day, they launched Boing Boing TV. and they plan to do 5 segments a week of 5 minutes or less according to this WIRED article as a “natural, sustainable extension of the blog”.:
Wired: You said you’d been approached by TV networks about something similar, and I agree with you that it doesn’t seem like it would be possible to carry a pure version of Boing Boing onto a television network. Why is that?
Xini Jardin: Nothing’s out of the question in the future. But a lot of people in Hollywood have this idea that the web is just something you mine for hits, and that the ultimate endgame for anything internet-video-related is that you get a cable pilot or movie deal out of it. But maybe the web is the endgame. We’re not in this to make a killing; we’re in this to make a living, and to explore things in a freer way than we would be able to on network television. The economics and nature of the traditional television medium do not foster the kind of free-wheeling exploration that we’ve been spoiled to have on the web. If you can just keep on doing that, but with video, why would you say no?
It’s too soon to tell what the endgame is (and if this is a part of it), but I’ll place my bet that the Unicorn Chaser bit doesn’t survive the month of October. I’ll also place a bet that web video is about to explode in a way that doesn’t neatly fit into a TV exec’s fancy briefcase.
About the photo: I don’t know what to say about the picture other than that I’m not sure I’m going to tell Kevin that I modded his TV picture (in accordance with his license of course) and I sure as heck doubt I’ll tell Xini Jardin that I hacked her into said modified TV.
