"To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge.... The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways." Teams must register by December 1st and have two weeks to submit balloon locations. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn on Nov 2, 2009 - 108 comments

Asymmetrical friendship: Tired of the relentless positivity of social-networking sites, where, as on Facebook, all you can be is a “friend” of someone? Greg Smith responds to a journal article that addressed the topic, among others; Smith calls for “asymmetrical friendship – this is cynicism put to good use.” Because there are times when somebody “friends” you on Facebook when what you think of them is more along the lines of “enemy combatant.” [more inside]
posted by joeclark on Oct 27, 2009 - 63 comments

The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. Twitter is dominated by men, whereas other social networks tend to be dominated by women. Is Twitter biased towards men?
posted by desjardins on Jun 2, 2009 - 153 comments

Dr. Aric Sigman has told us that TV is literally killing us, that it makes children pregnant, that Batman makes our kids violent and that multitasking ruins children's attention span. Now he says that social networking can cause cancer, strokes, and dementia. (PDF of press release)
posted by desjardins on Feb 19, 2009 - 58 comments

The End of Solitude. In an age when many people are rarely alone, in near-constant contact with social networks composed of both friends and strangers, are we facing the end of solitude as we once knew it? Have we lost the ability to enjoy our own company, and learned to fear loneliness instead? William Deresiewicz seems to think so.
posted by sarabeth on Jan 25, 2009 - 87 comments

Everyone else is on Facebook, why aren't you? Not knowing the rules is not an excuse.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero on Jan 15, 2009 - 248 comments

Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy (coming soon to the Iowa Law Review), by James Grimmelmann (law professor, programmer, MeFi's own grimmelm, and Level 1 Ensign Zombie): just in time for Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, Grimmelmann suggests we rethink what privacy means both in legal terms and how that impacts social networks and their users. (Previously) [more inside]
posted by ahughey on Dec 8, 2008 - 39 comments

Photographer Thomas Hawk may or may not have run afoul of SFMOMA's photo policy and was forcibly ejected from the museum by its Director of Visitor Services. Hawk blogged the incident extensively, encouraging readers to publicize his grievance through social networking. Now two conversations are going on: how photographers' rights are restricted in an age of paranoid security, and whether what some call online character assassination by someone influential is okay.
posted by liketitanic on Aug 11, 2008 - 51 comments

"How about if we say we met on an oil rig and we were lovers for 50 years!" What if real life was like Facebook? [YouTube, 2 mins.] From Idiots of Ants. Via.
posted by amyms on Apr 30, 2008 - 21 comments

Frrvrr uses cutting-edge technology to identify topics you might be interested in based on your browsing history, public records, health records, email activity, legal filings, and web profiles.
posted by dhammond on Feb 23, 2008 - 19 comments

Gardeners unite! Folia is a new website for gardeners to organize, document and share their adventures. And now you too can obsess about your seed saving and hardiness zones. [more inside]
posted by Stewriffic on Feb 7, 2008 - 7 comments

Meetup Alliance - Meetup.com, the social networking site, probably best known for becoming a driving factor in Howard Dean's presidential campaign, has created the Meetup Alliance offshoot site, which allows local groups (whether organized through other networking sites or just locally) to link up and create global "alliances."
posted by adamms222 on Dec 5, 2007 - 3 comments

02138 Magazine is "Poking Facebook" with court documents and Zuckerberg's potentially embarrassing online journal (pdf). Facebook responds.
posted by Soup on Dec 1, 2007 - 39 comments

Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. Examining the social rules and norms, as well as the pitfalls, of electronic "friending" (yes, it's a verb now - or is it a gerund?). Via.
posted by amyms on Sep 24, 2007 - 54 comments

10 Steps to a More Dateable Facebook Profile 6. Un-tag photos at will. Bad angle? Bad outfit? Bad situation? Un-tag that picture! It's not worth adding a few numbers to that photo count to be seen in a photo that doesn't cast you in an entirely positive light. Did you see what happened to Miss New Jersey?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero on Aug 24, 2007 - 67 comments

Late Night Shots is an "invitation-only" social networking site for elite GOP youth of Washington, DC that the late Steve Gilliard mockingly described as "the best and whitest." The Wonkette blog has devoted an entire section to the site that documents Late Night Shots' racism, date rape, anti-Islamic prejudice, and incest with second cousins, at least until Wonkette's editor started getting invited to their parties. The founder of Late Night Shots, Reed Landry, plans to take his networking site to other cities, but even though Wonkette has lost interest, the Washington City Paper has attracted scrutiny to the site again with a juicy new exposé.
posted by jonp72 on Jul 12, 2007 - 83 comments

Google's Socialstream aims to be a "a system where users can seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks." Possibly worried about being outdone (again), Yahoo! is working on a new social networking site called Mosh. [via mobuzz]
posted by chuckdarwin on Jul 10, 2007 - 17 comments

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace: "Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace. A class division has emerged and it is playing out in the aesthetics, the kinds of advertising, and the policy decisions being made." (Related blog post)
posted by heatherann on Jun 25, 2007 - 143 comments

12 of the Best Music Social Networks Internet radio may be facing uncertain times, but many musical social networks continue to thrive. This article surveys Flotones, Mercora Radio 2.0, Mog, the popular Last fm, iLike, JamNow, Haystack, five others as well as some additional sites, like Kompoz, mentioned in the comments.
posted by psmealey on Jun 23, 2007 - 17 comments

Facebook to open their API. Online networking site Facebook is adding third-party app support to their API. Adding a new app (which can include ads) broadcasts it to your contacts. Innovation, or recipe for disaster? But can MySpace even be beaten? And if Facebook can poach MySpace's users, do they really want them? For that matter, is MySpace even the juggernaut some claim? Anyone have any ideas for new Facebook app mashups?
posted by spiderwire on May 24, 2007 - 44 comments

Instead of yet another social networking site, why not try an anti-social networking site? Presenting Spatula of Death, where the goal is enmity, not community. Smite your friends enemies or watch other people smite theirs, and you'll get to watch a poor stuffed monkey get whapped on the head with a spatula over a live web feed. Rate other users' smites, and have your own smites rated, earning Douchebag Points (TM) for the most cutting remarks and cruel behavior. The site was created as a thesis presentation for Tisch ITP at NYU; watch the creator discuss it.
posted by Asparagirl on May 3, 2007 - 14 comments

Facebook informericial parody This is a pretty hilarious video of Facebook users. Very well done.
posted by willthethrill on Apr 26, 2007 - 28 comments

You may have heard of Twitter, a social networking utility to let your friends know online or by SMS what you're doing right now. Well, now even fault lines can do it, thanks to some enterprising developers. Friend one of these guys to get San Francisco quake info by text message from the USGS.
posted by SuperNova on Mar 12, 2007 - 24 comments

WHAT? No post about VIRB yet? Myspace meets AJAX and a sleek "2.0" design. Allows bands to upload albums instead of a measely 4 songs. Real purdy like y'all.
posted by Satapher on Mar 9, 2007 - 58 comments

Senator John McCain (R. - AZ) has introduced legislation [PDF] that would hold blogs responsible for all activity in their comments sections and user profiles. Provisions of the proposed bill include: (1) commercial websites and personal blogs "would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000," (2) bloggers with comment sections may face "even stiffer penalties" than ISPs, and (3) any social-networking site must take "effective measures" to remove any Web page that's "associated" with a sex offender. "Because 'social-networking site' isn't defined, it could encompass far more than just MySpace.com, Friendster and similar sites." The list could include any site that allows comments, authot and personal profiles. Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes that this proposal may be based more "on fear or political considerations rather than on the facts." "McCain’s legislation could deal a serious blow to the blogosphere. Lacking resources to police their sites, many individual blogs may have to shut down open discussion."^*
posted by ericb on Dec 14, 2006 - 141 comments

Fooled By Cybermum “Like millions of teenagers, Ben Atkins spends hours on social networking websites. So he was delighted when he met his perfect girl online, she shared his love of philosophy and bass guitars, and thought he was wonderful … But the lovely Cheshakitten was actually Ben’s mother, Anne, posing as a teenager to find out more about this internet phenomenon.”
posted by Tenuki on Dec 11, 2006 - 98 comments

Friendster : Wallflower at the Web Party via
posted by Afroblanco on Oct 15, 2006 - 27 comments

An Analysis of 20,000 Myspace Passwords
posted by matkline on Sep 18, 2006 - 41 comments

Friendster awarded patent on social networking.
posted by delmoi on Sep 16, 2006 - 47 comments

Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff) is a new "social annotation" bookmarking site with the standard save-and-share, tags, etc., and also sharable Web page annotations.
posted by davcoo on Aug 17, 2006 - 6 comments

Myspace for education. Nietzsche is a cat person. Isaac Newton scores the hotties. School assignment, or for fun? Social software is being used in many different ways in the classrom, but some schools have ruled that the safety conerns outweigh the benefits. The Deleting Online Predators Act 2006 wants to restrict access to social networking sites by law.
posted by goo on Jul 5, 2006 - 12 comments

You have all dropped your MySpace profiles and jumped to AIM Pages, haven't you? [via]
posted by tellurian on May 10, 2006 - 48 comments

We have all seen lots of YouTube and Google Video but have you ever seen a woman breast feed a cat? (nsfw) Or a 500 KV electrical discharge? wonder what the daily show take on social networking is? check out videosift, a digg like collaborative blog for trolling up the best/weirdest? in video on the web. [via mefi projects]
posted by sourbrew on Feb 21, 2006 - 36 comments

Tell your boyfriends, partners, ex's, or hookups they may have been exposed to HIV or another STD.
posted by The Jesse Helms on Dec 17, 2005 - 64 comments

Networking on the Network Started over 10 years ago, long before social web apps became ubiquitous, Phil Agre's Networking on the Network was an introduction to professional networking, using the internet, for graduate students.
The document has grown and evolved to encompass 90 pages of widely applicable advice on building professional relationships and helping others do the same. Much of what he writes is applicable to surviving in any institution.
Reading it feels like being taken aside by an expert practitioner who tells you, "Pssst....hey buddy, here's how things really work."
posted by mecran01 on Oct 7, 2005 - 12 comments

It's a popularity contest. Aimfight is essentially Google pagerank for your buddy list. Compare yourself against your opponents and see who's on more people's buddy lists. Via slashdot.
posted by condour75 on Jul 22, 2005 - 15 comments

Thingster is an open-source weblogging service for locative media. It's also the backend for BooksWeLike, which describes itself as "activist e-commerce" and is sponsored (partially) by AlterNet. It's part of a movement for social sharing services, which seems to be an extension of what was previously discussed here.
posted by Human Stain on Jan 24, 2005 - 9 comments

Rebirth of the Semantic Web. On the heels of the Technorati taggregator, the Oddiophile bookmarklet, the tag search (new today!) and much ensuing buzz, Jeff Jarvis brings up people tagging. This concept drove Friendster and FOAF, both of which petered out. But with Technorati's elegant synthesis of photo, link, and post tagging, the web may once again tap into networked individualism.
posted by NickDouglas on Jan 17, 2005 - 23 comments

Yet another del.icio.us ? "One of the main purposes of social bookmarking systems is allowing people to see what other people are bookmarking. I frequently find things that people are linking to very interesting, and thought it would be nice to slap together a system that could tell me, automatically, what lots of other people have just bookmarked. Thus, oishii was born".
posted by azul on Jan 11, 2005 - 10 comments

Can't think at home? Working from home, but feeling isolated?

Is this the latest new fangled fad in office space concepts?
posted by blahblah on Jun 22, 2004 - 18 comments

Bay Area Link Up is a social/business networking site for professionals in the Bay Area. Some use it for business networking and getting freelance work. Others use it for other reasons. They've recently expanded to other regions (and also added a monthly fee). I like this model better than Yahoo Groups or Usenet, simply because people create events that you can sign up for if they interest you. What online networking groups do you like to use?
posted by culberjo on Apr 6, 2004 - 4 comments

Gas prices are out of control and will continue to rise [NY Times]. However, I was looking at Matt H's Social Software ideas and decided check out one that already exists - gas prices. GasPriceWatch.com is a site that hosts gasoline prices from around the country. But the problem is, despite it's request for "non-commercial" use of the data, it relies on users to enter that information.

I'm about to have my first child so I've been looking at ways to save money -I figured finding the cheapest place to get gas would be a great way to start but quickly found that my price entries were the only ones within a 10 mile radius of my house. Spread the word.
posted by bkdelong on Mar 16, 2004 - 30 comments

I couldn't find Kevin Bacon anywhere on this list. I guess this guy prescribes to the "idle hands are the devil's workshop" world view. This bloke has apparently gone to great pains to list everyone he has ever known on his website. What a massive undertaking, as well as a complete waste of time.
posted by psmealey on Jan 7, 2003 - 22 comments

Craig's List -- the gigantic Bay Area jobs/apartments/ridesharing/etcetra mailing list and website -- is planning on expanding (the Boston site is up), but is there anything else as useful and non-commercialized for other areas?
posted by snarkout on Jun 28, 2000 - 3 comments

The open bookmark project Hi: I have started a pitas site covering bookmarks. The goal of this project is to receive the bookmark and favorites files from people around the world and learn what sites he/she bookmarked and how they organized them.
posted by efader on May 28, 2000 - 5 comments