Simon Hammond Blog

I got a txt (yeah, I write it like that consciously) from someone this evening about an upcoming event. They said if I were interested, they’d ‘facebook’ me the details.

They know my e-mail. They know my mobile. But their preferred means of sending out info to a group is via Facebook (and I don’t think they are going to set it as an event). I think this is significant.

Facebook is becoming a medium in it’s own right. It has the rich structure, interaction and size in place. It’s looking dangerously like becoming the social meta-web, or something. Will people start to talk about facebooking someone in the same way they google something?

Tags: unfiled by si
2 Comments »

I’ve a couple of cousins who seem to get a lot of hoax e-mails. Something like Snopes is pretty good for positively identifying them but a simpler way could be an e-mail where you forward suspected hoaxes to. This could automatically check the contents of the mail and reply with a verdict, perhaps with a link to the whole story.

I just suggested it to Snopes.

Tags: Uncategorized by si
1 Comment »

The web can allow relative strangers to build up quite a detailed picture of you if you’ve ever used anything like myspace, flickr, facebook, etc. However, it can be deceptive or at least wildly unbalanced.

Reputation is crucial to something like ebay but it’s used more to red-flag untrustworthy users rather than provide a balanced picture. Users overwhelmingly give each other ‘AAA++++ would use again!!!’ ratings and expect the same back. Features like testimonials on Flickr also give the subject final say on filtering comments, so you know that isn’t going to be a complete picture.

The idea that anonymous feedback is generally the most accurate is behind the very new service The Gorb which is all about the honest truth. It allows anonymous users to rate online identities (i.e. e-mails) with a personal and professional value and add comments. The special GORB algorithm (maybe like Google page rank) supposedly weights ratings to address the problem of dissonant data. It isn’t perfect, of course, but is it better than current methods? I suspect the arguments against are similar to those used against Wikipedia.

Anyway, I’ve added myself as an experiment. Be truthful — I can take it! My reputation is in your hands.

Tags: web by si
No Comments »

I’m still hugely interested in mobile social software but since I don’t have time to write much of it right now, I’ll content myself with writing about it.

Jaiku is the latest thing to pop onto my radar. At first glance, it’s very much vying with Twitter by using the feed-of-my-friends model but it’s also mixing it with the still-born Nokia presence model. I’m not convinced either is the most natural form for the sort of information that people want to put out.
The reason I’m picking it out is what they’ve done with their downloadable client. This exposes a whole bunch of information from my phone about the last time it was used, whether it’s on silent and even details from my calendar if I let it. The really exciting thing is that it also knows where it is. Admittedly, this is only in terms of the local cell mast; it’s up to me to associate a neighborhood name with it. Just having that handle though provides a whole new range of possibilities that I’m still mulling over.

I’d always assumed that to get this kind of low-level information you’d need some kind of tricky interaction with the networks. I guess Buddyping probably uses something like this to place users but that has it’s own issues which deserve a separate post.

Feel free to add me as a contact, of course: sixball.

Tags: social software, techie by si
1 Comment »