Last night, John McCain was scheduled to appear on the Late Show. That, of course, did not happen due to McCain’s decision to suspend his campaign in order to focus on resolving the crisis on Wall Street.
Sitting in my apartment, I watched as David Letterman reacted to the news and the absence of his scheduled guest. Despite the interjections of comedy in the monologue, it was clear that Letterman was serious about what he was saying. And while he was critical of the campaign’s descision, he also made clear his regard for McCain as a man.
Read the rest of this entry »
While reading Here Comes Everybody, I highlighted a passage where Clay Shirky makes note of the fact that the phone is:
increasingly capable of sending messages and pictures to groups of people, not just to a single recipient (the historical pattern of phone use).
Having been using an iPhone 3G since the day of its release, I can attest that this statement is true, and its group messaging capabilities are only increasing.
Looking at my personal behavior, Facebook and Twitterrific are two applications that I frequently use on my iPhone. I can update my status, as well as glance at the status of my friends and the people I follow. I’m not communicating one-on-one, but rather with an entire group of people who are important to me.
Read the rest of this entry »
One of the more intriguing aspects of Twitter is the way they chose to describe relationships among people on their messaging network. Rather than using the conventional term “friends,” they chose to call people “followers.”
That was a unique insight in modeling social networks that is starting to be adopted by other services as well, which in my opinion is a good thing. A conversation between Andrew Chen and Tim O’Reilly ocured on Twitter over just this issue:
Andrew Chen:
@timoreilly re:twitter, Networks are “friends only” or “strangers too” Friends only = less network effect. Twitter=friends+strangers though?
Tim O’Reilly:
@andrew_chen friends + strangers definitely the stronger model. web, twitter have this in spades.
Read the rest of this entry »
As the web evolves, design patterns for authorization are emerging. When implementing authorization, there are two fundamental needs to address: interaction between people, and integration between systems.
The first case, interaction between people, is familiar to anyone using social networking sites like Facebook. When someone adds you as a friend, Facebook sends you a notification prompting you to confirm or deny the request. If you approve the request, that person will be allowed to view your profile.
In effect, a “contract” is established between the two people. Because Facebook knows the identity of each person, restrictions on that contract can be put in place. Privacy settings are a classic example of such a restriction. For example, you can limit who can view your contact information and phone numbers.
Read the rest of this entry »
During a discussion at XMPP Summit 5, it was briefly suggested that XMPP could serve as a replacement for IMAP, a standard protocol for accessing electronic mailboxes and messages. While there are some optimizations that could be achieved with XMPP, IMAP is a well-entrenched protocol that will be around for decades to come.
I had a brief conversation with Dan Mosedale, of the Mozilla Messaging crew, where I stated my stance that such a replacement is non-pragmatic. He suggested something interesting: most mail access today is not via IMAP, but via the web.
Read the rest of this entry »
