"To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants [...] but they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be."
Anil Dash laments
The Web We Lost, and offers some suggestions for moving forward.
posted by oulipian
on Dec 13, 2012 -
74 comments
Last week, a male Facebook user
wrote to Bodyform (a manufacturer of feminine hygiene products) to complain that its advertisements were not consistent with the realities of menstruation. Quickly thereafter, his post
went viral, and today,
the company responded.
posted by schmod
on Oct 16, 2012 -
109 comments
When we started Diaspora two years ago, the project kicked off with amazing reception and support from people that believed in our ultimate goal: giving users ownership over their data. ... Today, the network has grown into thousands of people using our software in hundreds of installations across the web. There are hundreds of pods that have been created by community members, and it has become one of the biggest Github projects to date. ... Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community.
Diaspora*, the open social network, is now owned by its user base.
[more inside]
posted by rebent
on Aug 28, 2012 -
44 comments
"The Fraley plaintiffs sued Facebook, alleging that its 'Sponsored Stories' feature, which displays ads on Facebook containing the names and pictures of users who have 'Liked' a product, violated California’s Right of Publicity statute. The statute forbids the commercial use of an individual’s name or likeness without consent. Integral to the plaintiffs’ claim was the assertion they had been injured because they were “celebrities” to their Facebook friends, such that their endorsements of the products in the Sponsored Stories held economic value—economic value that they were deprived of when Facebook published their Stories without their consent." -
Famous for Fifteen People (Stanford Law Review): Celebrity, Newsworthiness, and
Fraley v. Facebook (Citizen Media Law Project)
posted by wikipedia brown boy detective
on Feb 10, 2012 -
10 comments
"You know how annoying it is when you're sitting on the train with a magazine and the person sitting beside you starts reading over your shoulder? Welcome to every single moment of your future. Might as well get used to it. It's an experience we'll all be sharing." --
Charlie Brooker on sharing, and why the world is doomed
posted by bardic
on Jan 29, 2012 -
101 comments
The Daily Dot delivers news about social media communities such as Reddit, Facebook and Youtube the way a local newspaper might deliver news about a city.
posted by reenum
on Aug 24, 2011 -
10 comments
Rob Horning has
a wide-ranging and insightful essay up at n+1 that seeks connections between three apparently disparate phenomena: global fast-fashion retailers with dubious labor practices like H&M and Forever 21; self-presentation on social media web sites; and neoliberal capitalism's new demands for workers to embrace precarity by endlessly reinventing their identities.
[more inside]
posted by AlsoMike
on Jun 6, 2011 -
59 comments
Storify is a new social media platform that makes it easy to assemble and winnow Flickr photos, tweets, Facebook posts, Google search results and URLS into a coherent story. It went into
public beta on April 25th.
[more inside]
posted by msalt
on Apr 28, 2011 -
17 comments
PC Gamer: Do you still think social games are “evil” then?
Jonathan Blow: Yes. Absolutely. [T]he general definition of evil in the real world, where there isn’t like the villain in the mountain fortress, is selfishness to the detriment of others or to the detriment of the world. And that’s exactly what [most of these games are].
posted by Rory Marinich
on Feb 15, 2011 -
133 comments
The Viral Me - GQ article on some of the newer social media stuff coming down the pike by Devin Friedman who asks:
What is the endgame of your revolution? And can you promise me it won't suck?
A more general thesis about the basic disappointment of the Internet: It ultimately evolves only where it meets human desire, which itself is geared for life circa 200 b.c. If the Internet ultimately disappoints, it's because it was made for humans. Give us instant connection to everyone and the ability to collaborate in vast seamless networks and we spend 99 percent of those resources telling everyone what kind of oatmeal we ate for breakfast and 1 percent of it building Wikipedia.
[more inside]
posted by marble
on Jan 28, 2011 -
21 comments
