social networking

Pulling your data out of Facebook

As Facebook slowly opens up, it's becoming possible to pull your own data for your own purposes. Dave Winer mentioned one way, so today, in just a minute, I added a block containing my Facebook status updates to my website pages (see the column on the left). I'm not entirely thrilled with the way it displays, so I may write my own module. At the moment it's just stock Drupal RSS aggregator functionality.

Facebook surges

Brands just aren't what they used to be. A brand used to be something that stood the test of time. Now a brand is still powerful in terms of defining what a product is all about, but when it comes to loyalty, fuggetaboutit. Brands today are volatile.

Ted Stevens moves to block those tubes

Ted Stevens, the fossil who thinks the Internet is a series of tubes, has reintroduced legislation that died in the last Congress that would force schools and libraries to block social networking websites and chat rooms on the grounds that they're full of predators and (gasp) "cyberbullies," which apparently are more dangerous than the regular kind because they're cyber.

Great panel discussion

I was on a panel discussion of social networking yesterday with moderator Michael Odza and the Dans: Dan Strauss from Fox Interactive (Myspace), Dan Pacheco of Bakotopia fame, and Dan Wheeler, who's about to pop a new site called Big Lick U. (It's a Roanoke in-joke.) Despite poor conditions -- the hall was eight rows deep and about a zillion chair wide -- the place was full and the audience was engaged. They had to push us out to make way for the next session. Jennifer Johnson blogged the session.