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Archive | December, 2012

Keep your rant off my social network

We all have bad days.

My cat pees in my bed. I have to work long hours. Things in my house break at the worst time.

Shit happens to all of us. And these days, when it happens, we bitch on our preferred social network.

It’s understandable. We’re a lonely society. We spend time with our devices rather than one another because devices don’t disappoint us.

But when you’re a fountain of endless negativity, even the devices become unbearable.

No one wants to read your rants daily (trust me on this one). No one wants to hear your endless complaints. No one logs into Facebook to read about the pointless drama in your workplace.

When you start obsessively posting about one negative thing in your life, I worry about your health and sanity.

Take a deep breath, put down your iPhone, and take a walk. You’ve got better things to do with your energy than sharing the minor annoyance of your day.

You’ll feel better, and the internet will thank you for saving us one less rant.

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Tweeria

Tweeria is a game with minimal user’s involvement. Everytime you tweet, your alter ego finds adventures, kills monsters or gets items. Every tweet you post can change his life. At the time you tweet “Good morning” your character finds a new sword.

I was thinking I would become immortal because my tweets about cats would live on forever. Instead, my tweets have made me into an undead mage battling celebrities across Twitter. Finally!

Stolen art assets aside, this is a really cool use of the Twitter API. Definitely a much cooler use of a social network as a game platform than Farmville.

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Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, Please Lecture Us About `Human Decency’

Yes, Randi Zuckerberg, speak to us about human decency.

Because a photo that you posted on Facebook got shared on the Internet.

How awful this must have been for you! How… invasive. What aviolation. How terrible that someone might take something that belongs to you and use it in ways that you had not anticipated, and for which you had not given explicit permission!

Dan Lyons kills it with the hubbub about Randi Zuckerberg’s photo getting shared.

We’ve gone mobile and there’s no turning back.

Yesterday was my birthday. I didn’t have to work, I ate cake, and the cats didn’t pee on anything.

I consider that a damn good day.

But after yesterday I’m convinced that we’re moving far away from desktop social networks into the land of smartphones and tablets.

Why?

Last year, 52 people wrote on my Facebook timeline for my birthday. This year only 14 did.

Now, I know I am a crusty, curmudgeonly young man. But I don’t think I scared off THAT many people.

So, what caused the difference? I know my friends were on Facebook. I saw hundreds of photos of friends with presents, pets and their families.

But how we access the social network is changing rapidly. Two years ago we opened up our laptops and saw the entire cornucopia of information on the Facebook homepage. Now we just see the latest in a string of updates on our mobile phones and tablets.

People have become blind to the content outside of news feeds. Where we used to inspect every part of a webpage, we now look for the most relevant thing in an endless stream of content.

And things like birthdays, which lose meaning when 52 people you barely know write three words followed by an exclamation point, get pushed out of the way for that news stream.

So, I’m not too sad my birthday has gone missed by Facebook this year. It’s the natural evolution of things to come.

Now, let’s all gather round the Christmas tree in the soft, comforting glow of our iPads and iPhones.

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Merry Christmas from The Anti-Social Media

Now get the hell off Twitter and go hug your family.

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Social Media and Newtown

I know, I know. You have children. It hits close to home. And we are all part of one great community in this world. But not every national event benefits from instant commentary or overly emotional responses. In fact, the world benefits from calm and amazing people who stay off social media and seek to find solutions in the real world.

Laurie Ruettimann nails it.

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12-12-12

The only day that will be more annoying on Facebook than today will be the “end of the world” on December 21.

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Twitter and Instagram at Odds Over Photo Issues

The two biggest mobile social networks are having a dispute about how their data is integrated and displayed on their competitor?

I never would have guessed that this would happen.

NEVER.