Life or Death for Web 2.0

A month ago, I began a series of posts outlining some common themes: Any system faces danger when it becomes a monoculture Diversity offers many broad-ranging...

Alright, Kids.

You want links? You got links. Seth Stevenson defends the word “sucks” in Slate. This seems relevant to me because my keynote at the O’Reilly Open Source...

It's Good To Have Friends

What was that about how people are emotional about the social software they use? Today was a pretty rough day, with a long painful downtime for TypePad, and...

The Interesting Economy

Like many great social software applications, Flickr began its life as something else. Flickr was built on a platform for a game called Game Neverending, which...

Software that encourages flaming

A young up-and-coming researcher named Clay Shirky has just published Flaming and the Design of Social Software , which I think is useful in that it talks about...

Now I get it!

I think somewhere along the way I had misunderstood the whole social networking software movement. I had been thinking that all of the applications were trying...

Additional Fixations

I find it fascinating that I can say "New York is my favorite city!" and half the responses will say "No! New York is a terrible city because...

whitelistster

I’ve been laboring under the assumption (informed only by common sense, no inside information) that all of the social software bubblers are planning to announce...