I decided this post belonged in the social networking category instead of the health category. Five people that needed a kidney found a relative willing to donate one but in all cases the relative's kidney wasn't compatible. So the five got together and swapped relative's kidneys! All 5 got a kidney that worked for them. 5-way kidney swap performed at Hopkins - Yahoo! News.
Sharing data allows lots of people to help discover and invent new things. For example, this guy found Roman ruins by examining satellite photos of land near his home. The photos were made available by Google Earth. Enthusiast uses Google to reveal Roman ruins.
No email on Fridays at Veritas. The vice president of marketing declared no email on Fridays after he realized he was spending several hours a day on email. You can call or walk over, but no email.
My first response was wow. My second was, wait, I'd get nothing done. My third is, I wonder if they'll end up building better relationships?
Now, not only are their services to lie for you, there are also services to tell the hard truth for you. You can hand out telephone numbers and email addresses that lead to prerecorded messages with the same theme, "the person who gave you this number does not want to talk to you."
The New York Times has an article about a new type of social network that is used to help people fabricate excuses, For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi. Complete strangers will pretend to be your boss or your doctor and call girlfriend or your work for you. Before you dismiss this as bizarre, you should know that thousands of people have signed up for this service!
However, before you sign up yourself, think, can you trust people that are looking for people to lie for them?
In Leicestershire you can find out where a public bus is at all times. No more standing around waiting for the bus, wondering when the next one will come.
"And in Leicestershire mobile phone users can send a text message containing a six-digit code unique to their bus stop to a local bus company.
Within 30 seconds a text message is sent back giving the location of the bus."
Here's the article.
P.S. Cell phone users in Europe and Asia use text messaging a LOT. Much more than in the US.
We've seen online dating, online networking, and doggie networking, now we have a roommate finding service: Roomster.net
A BlackBerry Throbs, and a Wonk Has a Date
An article about flirting with blackberries wireless email devices. I have a blackberry and I have to say I'm not addicted. My tablet PC and my iPOD mini are way cooler.
SmartMobs pointed me at this new service: dodgeball.com :: location-based social software for mobile devices. You can now use your cell phone to track the physical location of your social network.
I was originally going to post about Fundrace.org
because it has some cool maps, visual representations of the amount of campaign funds (colored according to party) donated by county, city, state, etc. Then I started playing with it and thought, "This is pretty scary!" I typed in my zip code and it showed all of my neighbor's contributions along with their names, home addresses and company affiliation. I knew most of the names on there!
This has always been public information, but having it right at your fingertips, easily searchable and sorted, brings a whole new dimension to politics and privacy.
A New York Times article orginally pointed me to Fundrace.org.
Smart Mobs pointed me at this website, THEY RULE, which has to be one of the coolest tools I've seen in a long time. The websites objective, according to the website, is:
"They Rule aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. They Rule is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations."
You can type in two companies names and find out how they are connected. For example, IBM is connected to Microsoft because John Brooks Slaughter, one of IBM's directors, sits on the Northrop Grumman board with Charles H. Noski. Noski sits on Microsoft's board:
IBM - John Brooks Slaugher - Northrop Grumman - Charles H. Noski - Microsoft
These are the people that have strong influence in America's economy, politics and therefore society. Have fun!
P.S. A similar example of political networks that I found on the They Rule website is this map of who contributed to Bush's campaign funding.
Smart Mobs pointed me at this new tool: Political Friendster - Visualize!. This is a Standford tool, a paradoy on Friendster, called Political Friendster. Anyone can input people's names and relationships. You can use the Visualize! tool to see a map (for example, the Bush family) and then you can add other people (like Author Anderson contacts or politicians like Arnold Schwartzennegger) and see how they are related. It's fun!
VIP members of the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona can choose to have RFID chip implanted in their arm instead of carrying an ID card. The chip is the size of a grain of rice and can be scanned at 10 cm. Drinks can be charged to the users account by scanning the chip.
Will we all soon carry a microchip in our skin instead of a wallet? Before that happens they will have to figure out how privacy rules apply, how an individual can control what gets scanned by different vendors, and develop a standard. Nobody's going to want 10-15 chips like we have 10-15 cards in our wallet!
Intelliseek's BlogPulse is a website that tracks popular topics in blogs. They maintain three main lists: Top Links, Key People, and Key Phrases that appear in blogs.
My favorite, Brad Pitt has consistently ranked #1 in the most featured people list. Right before John Kerry and George Bush today.
Here's another form of social networking - a conference you can only attend if someone else invites you. Sounds like a party not a conference to me!
It'll be interesting to see how it progresses over the years. On a related note, Google's gmail beta service is only available via invite by somebody else who has service. I think that definitely adds to the mystic and gives them great publicity.
A friend of mine just pointed me to StumbleUpon.com. (See his writeup.) If you sign up, it adds a toolbar to your browser. You can then rate web sites. Your friends can see which web sites you like, and you can tell Stumble to show you websites that you might like. As Tim says, it's like channel surfing for the web.
If you enjoyed The Tipping Point and you are looking for more information on networks and how information spreads, you'll enjoy Linked. Barabasi is a professor of physics at Notre Dame studing the properties of networks. He's found that many networks are scale-free networks and he describes the similarities of a diverse set of networks from the internet, to cells, to Hollywood, to people's sexual relationships to Al-Queda. He claims that corporations now have to be organized in a network instead of a hierarchy in order to survive. We all have a lot to learn in this area.
Some of the characteristics of a scale-free network is that there is no one central hub, there are a number of hubs that have many links connected to them (Google, Amazon, etc). In addition there are a few nodes (or hubs) with lots and lots of links (like Google and Amazon) and lots of nodes with just a few links. And there's no controling factor but it's not random. New nodes tend to connect to existing nodes that have been there the longest and that have the most links.
All that said, Barabasi makes it clear that there's still a lot of research left to do in this area. Barabasi has a web page that discusses some of his current research at http://www.nd.edu/~alb.
"Reality Mining" the Organization talks about tracking whom employees talk to, what they talk about and what tone of voice they are using. My first response was "how scary!" I mean, I don't care if my company knows who I'm talking to, but to know when I talk to them, what I say and even what tone of voice I use sounds like big brother. Now, in practice, nobody is actually going to listen to the conversation, like nobody actually reads all my emails that they track. However, I think the data will much more likely be used to correct than to collaborate. So I think it's much more likely that they would discover someone is antagonistic to 90% of people, and decide that combined with their poor performance, they aren't worth keeping, then someone would decide that because someone regularly talks about the latest technology with ten of their friends, that they should be on the new technology team. But you never know, like all technology, its usefulness will depend on how well it's deployed.
InfoWorld: The social enterprise: March 26, 2004: By Jon Udell : APPLICATIONS : NETWORKING talks about the role that social networking can play in corporations.
Wired has an article about a new networking site called FunHi, Wired News: Playas Pay to Spread the Luv. People join, pick a ganster personality type, post a picture and then give each other electronic gifts. These electronic gifts (like virtual airplanes or diamonds) cost less than a quarter on average and you can give them to anyone, but they can't be regifted. You can also rate people on how cool or sexy they are.
FunHi has pulled in more than $10,000 in their first month. Talk about social networking and web based businesses!
An interesting social networking blog: The Social Software Weblog - socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com.
The MIT Tech Review article My Avatar, My Self talks about virtual reality sites. You logon, define your character and wander around meeting with people, playing games, shopping, etc. It's like the online games such as Everquest but you're not playing a game. You're talking to real people about whatever you want. It's the first version of the "cyberspace" concept prevalent in science fiction books by authors like Neal Stephenson and William Gibson.
Both John Kerry and John Edwards have Friendster accounts. If you belong to Friendster (signing up is free), you can invite them to be your friend and (if they accept your invitation) check out their profile.
Note, there are several John Kerry's. The one with the picture of himself windsurfing is the one that is running for president. John Edwards is the one in the suit and a tie.
I read this in BusinessWeek.
Tickle.com is an online personality test and social networking site discussed in Getting to Know Me, Getting to Know All About Me: Web Personality Tests. While the article is mostly about social networking and dating sites and how some of them like Tickle.com are adding personality tests to generate conversation and to aid in match making, it was really the second page of the article that caught my attention. They mention which company has bought or sold which social network. The whole idea that social networks can be bought or sold is either intriguing or disturbing depending on your mood. Each site has its own privacy policy but regardless of what privacy they've promised, the company still holds the data - the who knows who. Who thinks like who. Who's emailed who. Who has the same interests. The applications are enormous and so is the potencial for abuse. Although in one sense they are self policing, any site that abuses its users is going to lose its users.
By the way, Tickle.com will let you take lots of tests, but unless you're willing to pay for the detailed results (per test!), you won't find out much.
Researchers at HP Labs created the Blog Epidemic Analyzer to track how ideas spread through blogs. They've found that the most popular blogs just pick up on ideas from lesser known blogs, often without giving credit. This is another perfect example of Malcolm Galdwell's idea of social epidemics from The Tipping Point. (See my original
review of the The Tipping Point.) Ideas spread through society, or through the web, from experts (who find the info) to networkers (who distribute them widely).
Speaking of giving credit, I
read about this on Wired. I was orginally pointed to Wired from Slashdot, another blog.
I laughed when I read this article, Internet goes to the dogs. Dogster is a social networking site, like Friendster, but for dogs. Before you laugh ... the site has been extremely successful! You can create a web page for your dog with his/her nickname, likes, traits, interests, pictures of course and to complete the picture you can have links to all of your dog's doggie friends' pages! Since January more than 8,000 dogs have signed up. Holy Cow. That's 8,000 people that maintain a web site for their dog ... I guess I'd better get with the picture!
Note that the site is really slow today ... they were featured on Slashdot and they are getting even more traffic than normal.
So that brings up one of my favorite topics ... what different web applications can you think of? I know there's money in dogs, and I've though of specialty dog foods, toys, services, etc, but I never dreamed of a dog networking site!
There's an interesting article in the New York Times magazine about blogging. The article focuses on teenagers with blogs but I've found one of the subtopics, how public or private weblogs should be, is a common question among weblog creating or reading people of all ages.
I found both the link to the article and a list of online weblog hosting sites, Weblogs Compendium, on the Ramblintronics blog.
Speaking of Friendster and Orkut ... a friend I haven't seen since 1992 just sent me a Friendster invite! I haven't heard yet how he found me. And on Orkut I found a high school classmate who I haven't seen or heard of since 10th grade!
I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal about criminal check services for online dating, "Online-Dating Sites Unveil Self Background Checks." They listed a couple of sites (like VerifiedPerson.com) that already provide the service. While definitely a great service, I don't imagine many people will want to think that their potential date might NEED to be background checked. It's a scary thought. The sites offer everything from height and weight verfication to criminal backgound checks. I was wondering if you could have some sort of "certify" button, so if you go out with someone, even if it doesn't work out, you can click that you certify that they looked like their picture. My boyfriend said it wouldn't work because people are too vindictive. I think people are too worried about what might come back at them to be mean.
I've used Match.com, but I like the sites like Friendster and Google's new Orkut that allow you to meet people through your friends. You set up your profile and then you identify everybody else on the network that you know. Then when someone is looking at your profile (say one of your buddies who wants a date), they can see all of your friends. You can always see how a person traces back to you (so-and-so knows so-and-so who knows ...), and you can see how their friends rated them in different categories. I had great fun seeing who all I knew and how the spider web spread out from there. You can also specify whether you are looking for dates, business contacts, friends, etc.
My grandmother has a blog! Check it out at Vera B's Blog. I'm really proud of her. It was my mom's excellent idea.
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