Social Networking meets academia   November 2nd, 2007

Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison have written a formal paper entitled,

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

There is more to follow. Danah knows about this stuff. If you need to catch up on the history of social networks, This is where to start, its good stuff.

Did you know they predate the noughties?

Those who can’t compete consort   November 2nd, 2007

I think it was Scott McNealy who said ‘Those who can’t compete, consort” when DEC, HP, Siemens, IBM and a host of others created the OSF to head Sun of at the pass in the late 80’s and early 90’s.  Well its the same old song with Google’s annoucement of its OpenSocial initiative. Suddenly its the world against Facebook.

Now, I’m no “according to Hoyle” Facebook defender but you have to smell a rat when the least open company in the world suddenly make a play for sharing all the data in world with its users.

Absolutely,  OpenSocial is a good idea, but lets follow it with OpenPageRank, OpenSearch and OpenGoogleDatabase.

Bluetooth is going places fast   November 2nd, 2007

Sean has a report on the recent bluetooth conference in London. Looks like Bluetooth is about to get shit fast.

Ye are all a shower of custards   November 2nd, 2007

We are slowly moving PutPlace to a more a rigorous footing as a real company. One of the issues in this process is my prodigous propensity to swear the house down (and yes,  I use all seven).

So effective immediately, practically everything perjorative thing and person in my life is a Custard.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out what custard is a contraction of.