It has been fun to see Mark Zuckerberg go from being the awkward college dude to being a mega-billionaire. At the end of 2004, I pitched my editors at Business 2.0 a story on Facebook, which at that time was known as Thefacebook.com. I was super excited about Facebook.
At that time, there wasn’t much interest in the company amongst the editors — after all, it was nothing more than a hook-up service. Anyway I threw a temper tantrum and eventually got a story on Facebook into the magazine. This is the final product from early 2005
The idea of blogging is sharing and telling people this is how I view the world. We get confused by blogging as an opinion and as news. We have pigeonholed blogging into this platform based blogging which is not quite it. You could be on WordPress, Twitter, Tumbler or Facebook, as long as you are writing, creating, opining, sharing any kind of thing, it is blogging. We have earlier, written personal diaries, we have shown photographs to friends. Blogging is the same over a much open (and at) Internet scale. It is a good thing as more creative people are coming out of the shadow(s). It is very important for people to see the other point(s) of view.
Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai is likely leaving the company. Selvadurai and Dennis Crowley started Foursquare together. Selvadurai worked on the first Foursquare iPhone app. The reasons for his leaving the company are not clear just yet. Foursquare has nearly 15 million users. More @GigaOM
A competitor tries to piggyback on another company and intersect the stream and inject “look at me – my thing is good also” into the mix. I haven’t decided if this is brilliant or stupid, but after chewing on it a little it felt like a derivative of astroturfing to me.
My concern isn’t the one off dynamic, which I don’t think has much real impact. It’s when this becomes a social media strategy. It’s inevitable that this will scale up and pollute the conversation, changing the signal to noise ration. The awesome thing about Twitter is anyone can follow you. But they can also @reply to you.
Of course, they have to follow the other person copied for them to see the message, but that’s an easy thing to do. Once someone builds this into a social media dashboard and automates the “identify-keyword, add, @reply-message” function, it’ll get yucky fast. Especially when political campaigns get hold of the idea and really start astro-twitter-turfing.
Sauron may have ruled Middle Earth, but he was such a fool. Had his precious ring been made of tungsten carbide like the one I got today, he’d probably still be around.
