Despite my niggle with location based services (specifically Foursquare) – that the game part is taking away from the social/utility part of it, I still believe that they’re an excellent step towards bringing reality and the virtual social networks closer. And hence, I do pay attention to the developments in the domain – from how [...]
At least two major virtual happenings, one that has massive implications on the future of the web, and the other, slightly more subdued, but not lacking in potential. The latter – Twitter Annotations, announced at Chirp, allowing developers to “add any arbitrary metadata to any tweet in the system.” You can take a look at [...]
I’d ended last week’s post wondering about the role of durability in the design of communication and organisational structures. Dina has continued the discussion on her blog, adding on some very pertinent questions. Do visit and add on to this very interesting thought flow.
I got myself three threads of thought in her post. One, the [...]
Like I mentioned in the last post on the subject, ‘Location’ is back in a social avatar. A few days back, Foursquare celebrated its first year of existence, and now has more than 500000 users, 1.4 million venues, and $1.35 million in VC funding. I celebrated it with only my fourth mayorship. But [...]
The Twitter discussion last week with Surekha and Karthik, was mostly about attribution, but it had another facet to it – privacy. Last week, a childhood photo of mine was shared on Facebook, I promptly untagged. Thankfully Facebook still allows that, though I wonder for how long. But it made me think. Does the photo [...]
What makes the evolution of the web more interesting is that in whatever small ways, we all are drivers of the changes that are happening. Seth Godin wrote a thought provoking post sometime back on the evolution of a medium, in which he points out the end result of banality.
On Twitter recently, Surekha, Karthik and [...]
One of last week’s biggest news was the agreement between Facebook and Yahoo to implement Facebook Connect across Yahoo properties – Mail, Flickr, News, Sports, Finance etc. There’s a good analysis of the deal at GigaOM. In addition to all of those usual suspects, I would be specifically interested in Yahoo! Music, and the potential [...]
In spite of being the gold standard in business networking, I’ve always felt that LinkedIn has been a bit slow in adapting to the needs of its audience. Quite some time back, I’d written about the ‘news’ and ‘groups’ features, and had asked for an RSS feature for groups. That feature was incorporated earlier this [...]
The per second and per character billing wars happening in the Indian mobile space now, made me consider whether its beyond a price thing – a need for consumers to slice and splice until they get exactly what they need. I see a parallel in the flow of content too, something I discussed earlier.
Which explains [...]
So its been quite a while since Twitter lists launched, and the ego seems to have stopped trending now. The open API means that we can hopefully see a some interesting apps/services (eg.directories like Listorious or alert systems like Listiti) soon. In fact, Twitter has already made an interesting widget, which you can see in [...]

