rob zand

links for 2008-07-23
July 23rd, 2008
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Ideas Before They Were Ventures: Early Sketches of Twitter | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration

(tags: twitter)
Pablo Picasso - Bull

(tags: visualization picasso minimalism)

tweetup topic ideas
July 23rd, 2008
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i had a few ideas about things to talk about at the tweetup if people are interested. if we record the discussion each could make for a decent blog post for someone on their respective blogs or elsewhere. here they are:

do different communication channels need specific topics?: luis suarez declared on twitter this morning that he would start posting to identi.ca, which at first blush i cast as a mistake, and after deliberating a bit can justify if each account has a specific purpose. i think people use specific social networks differently: linkedin, facebook, twitter, aim, email, etc. and this is why some people get so upset when certain types of messages sully their stream. what do others think of this notion?
is rss dying? more to the point, what is rss’ future role?: with the emergence of friendfeed and twitter as content discovery platforms, many have abandoned their rss reader as a primary source for information gathering. what do you think about this? they’ve done this primarily because their rss signal-to-noise has decreased and twitter/friendfeed, as well as filtering systems - aiderss/postrank, toluu - have emerged to help people increase their signal. some maintain that rss plays an important role in the unadulterated distribution of content. without it, the secondary/filtered sources dry up because fewer people are seeding them. others argue that distributing content into the filtered sytems first, for immediate ranking by the community will weed out weaker content and the group will benefit through posts of higher value. where do you stand?
new facebook design and mobile apps: facebook has recently released a fantastic app for the iphone and is also redesigning it’s profile pages and the role that apps play on the site. as i’ve used my iphone i’ve noticed that all the mobile communication apps are generally the same - a list of updates with the ability to add content through a small textbox and a keyboard interface. as more mobile apps are released, what does their agnostic quality augur for social networks? does this refute my first point? if all apps start to look the same on the emerging platform will they start to be used in similar ways? what role do the full websites then play in creating/establishing an identity for their communities?

what’s on your mind? post ideas - topics and location - in the comments or to twitter. hope this can happen.

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from the iphone
July 22nd, 2008
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would I ever post to here rather than to Twitter? doubt it. wait, how do I insert a link? anyway, depends on how realtime I become. I’m going to add to this from the console.

i snapped the above photo of my screensaver as a test. hmm. timestamp (for post) is all messed up. not sure where i fix that. links are a manual process, so anything beyond www.g-o-o-g-l-e.com probably not going to happen until cut-n-paste.

the other night i wrote up a brief piece on robert scoble’s need for realtime. since mobile wordpress is yet another example of that trend, i thought i post that here. i didn’t really have much more to say on the topic.

a statement from robert scoble really made an impression on me the other night. for a while, robert has been talking about the various cellphones he carries with him at all times, for web, video, and photos.

on the surface it seems a bit ridiculous, a phone is a phone, it will never be the best camera, video camera, or browser, so why not carry a dedicated device instead? his answer is logical. cell phone networks enable the simplest realtime device to web posting, therefore any device that connects to those networks is better than a “superior” device which requires downloading, copying and then posting on a non cell network. for robert scoble, realtime trumps all. what does this mean to you?

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