This might sound absurd to someone who does not hang around as many geeks as I do, but believe it or not, at least 10% of my good friends have met their soulmates online. When I say online, I do not mean dating sites. The relationships that worked were more like serendipity, often starting on social media sites when neither party even had the word “soul” in mind.
Can you find true love online?
The sparks either clicked on blogs or through 140 character tweets, but around 4% of these friends met on Facebook.
The conversations these friends have with non-Webbies are often hilarious, going something like this:
Non-Webbie: “Wait, did you fall in love before or after you saw him?” Internet Romancer: “We fell in love before.” Non-Webbie: “How did you know he wasn’t a 50-year-old grandmother with a lisp?” Internet Romancer: “Um… we talked online for a year before we decided to take our relationship a step forward, so I knew him quite well by then.”
Non-Webbie: “Whoa! You mean you had a steady relationship with a person YOU DIDN’T MEET FOR A YEAR?”
If there’s only one video you’ll watch this month, then make it this one.
Aside from the fact that it’s a sight for sore eyes when it comes to design, this video is a fountain of information that really gives you a complete overview of the state of the Internet today.
Spam is King
One of my favorite parts of this video is their information on spam.
Out of the average 247 billion emails sent per day, 200 billion of them are spam. Wow, yeah?
I don’t really understand why their is so much spam in the world. You’d think that by now, you’d have the Anti-Spam Consideration Front, the PETA of the Web. Why isn’t there such a group yet?
The other very interesting part in this video is about Facebook’s exponential growth, with a staggering 6 million page view per minute. Does that make Facebook the queen of spam? :)
The phone rings. It’s your mother: “It’s that time of the year dear, can you help me organize this year’s family reunion? I’ll have my semantic web agent send you the details and I’ll check back with you in half an hour. Take care”
Web 3.0!
That would definitely be labeled as a “nightmare call”, but thankfully mom loves socializing with family members so her agent is connected to their agents… making your life a lot easier. This enables to you check the data that your mom’s semantic web agent has sent over. Other than access to the agent’s contact list of agents, the only other detail that your mother added was “ I want a warm weekend sometime in the next 2 months. ”
So your trusty little agent goes to work and finds appropriate dates based on information from the other agents. He then checks online for hotel bookings in California and Florida – since you have it on your wish list for this year, he puts those results first – and then comes up with 3 package options for each place that would be within budget for you and your family. Then he sends a confirmation email to you and your mom. The phone rings again “Oh hello dear, I just got your email. I like the idea of going to the Keys but I rather pick a different hotel than the ones listed, I heard good things about the Eden hotel from Aunt Jill, Can you check that out please ?”. A couple more clicks, and the trip is planned, hassle-free.
It Could Happen One Day…
That’s one of the scenarios that the next generation of web, Web 3.0, promises us. The ability to allow our computers to not just access, share and preview information but to understand the meaning of information contained in documents and relate it to you, the user.
Like I always say “sharing is caring” and what better thing to share than your “great” findings and conversations on the web? Isn’t it wonderful to experience a less constipated mailbox not spammed by your friends’ links and jokes? While we all have become quite familiar with social networking and bookmarking tools such as Delicious and StumbleUpon the following services just kick it up a notch!
FriendFeed:
“FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends.”
- This is like your Facebook news feed, except bigger, better and searchable. You add a bunch of your disparate accounts on social networking diaspora, blogs, and internet presence and receive all your updates in one big news feed.
Why should I sign up?
Friend lists - Group your friends together so that you minimize the clutter, further customize this view by hiding or unhiding certain elements such Hide all Twitter updates from certain users. This can be really helpful especially with services that lack or have a non existent filtering, yes I’m looking at you Twitter.
Groups - Are you interested in following a certain topic or allowing others to do so? Creating a group can be a powerful tool to siphon the discussions into a single stream. This is one of the most popular features since it allows you to let people recommend stuff you are interested in, it’s like that really cool friend that keeps on recommending the right stuff to you all the time… almost.
Advanced /Saved searches – Do you want to check out what others have said about Twitter in the past 24 hours on all of your services in 1-click? Made by 4 ex-Googlers you would expect exceptional search capabilities and FriendFeed will meet your expectations.Tweak your searches by defining which users or groups to search, on a certain service, or how liked or commented on the item is. It’s Twitter’s saved searches without the limitations, like not being able to search for a tweet that is older than 14 days, and with much space for tweaking your searches.
Social Media took the world of traditional media by surprise. More and more people are abandoning their newspaper and cable subscriptions and adhering to the internet with its various social media websites. While some argue that history proved new media doesn’t necessary destroy old one (Television didn’t destroy Cinema or Radio), no one can deny that there is a huge challenge facing news media outlets. Social media has set a new milestone in the history of media and re-defined the way people access information. Printed newspapers may be the channel that is suffering the most, but it is a matter of time before they realize the changes in the play ground and evolve to harness the new found powers.
CNN's iReport.com
People are the media; that is the state of the world today, where anyone with a cell phone and equipped with a merely decent digital camera can broadcast to the world. Bloggers have been gaining ground and reaching wider audience, and twitterers have been making the news fasterthan any other news agency. What does this mean for news media outlets? It breaks their monopoly of news – for the first time in history – and opens the door of competition with many enthusiastic individuals! [read full article >>]
Twitter didn’t just knock down well established conventional news agencies and reigned itself as the top source of fresh news, but it has also grown up to become a network of human support for people struggling for justice. In today’s world, people can do their daily activities, be productive and at the same time rally for human rights.
While Twitter dominated news coverage of how social media is helping the Iranian protesters, one can’t neglect the power and support other social networks have provided. YouTube and Flicker managed to give us real visuals of what’s going on, blogs served as live testimonials, and social bookmarking websites like Reddit and Digg, with their millions of readers, managed to push stories coming from Iran to the top. On Reddit, for instance, a help message gained popularity for asking Twitterers to change their time zone to 3:30 PM GMT in order to make the job of Iranian security forces of hunting down bloggers much harder.
Today, Mashable compiled a social media time-line for the Iranian Crisis. It is worth checking out how social media is helping up in shaping the state of Iran. Whether governments like it or not, nowadays, people have power – thanks to social media!
Social media gives us hope for a better future of people’s empowerment, it imposes many threats to dictatorships. Some are already working hard to stay in control. Are they fighting a lost battle? I certainly hope so.
“I want to gain Karma points”. That was my intention when I first started using Reddit a few days ago. For an instance, I thought that it must be an easy process: submitting some interesting stories, and adding some comments! And that’s it. It should work. Unfortunately, and after 2 hours on the site, I learnt otherwise. My aim suddenly shifted into trying hard to keep my Karma indicator positive.
What goes around comes around
I tried to be a good Reddit citizen. I voted up stories that interested me and refrained from voting down those who don’t. I cheered up insightful comments and added supportive ones. I have also made sure to submit good stories that would interest people. And then, I waited for a full circle, knowing that my good deeds would most definitely come back to me in the form of higher Karma points.
Obviously, being a good Reddit citizen doesn’t entail the above actions! It is more about submitting good quality stories and posting comments that are not redundant and which “add” to the conversations.
Laughing out loud
Laughing Out Loud
That was one of my very first mistakes. It cost me 3 comments karma points! I thought a comment was funny enough, and thus I just posted those damn 3 letters “LOL”, only to realize later on that this kind of comments is a NO NO at Reddit.
It has also taken me some time to realize what I had to do in order to control the damage of such mistakes. *Delete it* as fast as you can! [read full article >>]
