./emilychang eBot

There are a few dozen ways to publish tweets on Twitter. You can post from your mobile phone (SMS), Google Talk, Facebook, Firefox, desktop or directly on the Twitter.com website.

With so many different options in place, have you ever wondered what tools are really popular among the Twitter community ?  While there no official statistics available, the thousands of public Twitter profiles indexed by Google paint a fairly accurate picture.

The public web is made up of linked pages that represent both documents and people. Google Search helps make this information more accessible and useful. If you take away the documents, you’re left with the connections between people. Information about the public connections between people is really useful—as a user, you might want to see who else you’re connected to, and as a developer of social applications, you can provide better features for your users if you know who their public friends are. There hasn\’t been a good way to access this information. The Social Graph API now makes information about the public connections between people on the Web, expressed by XFN and FOAF markup and other publicly declared connections, easily available and useful for developers.

You know I appreciate the spirit and enthusiasm of the ‘bootstrapping’ way. I also personally don’t think it is going to work for the vast majority of web users. The reason FOAF and XFN have not taken off is that they don’t really deal with privacy and personal preferences of the people in those networks.

Most industries do not begin on a single day, but it’s easy to see Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s presentation on May 24, 2007, as the starting gun in an entrepreneurial race that some have dubbed “the Facebook Economy.”

Because the community is invitation-only, it’s impossible for an outsider to take a look and see exactly what’s on offer. The seemingly limited growth potential didn’t put off savvy film producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein who have invested in the company. For the ultra-luxury brands that can afford to advertise on A Small World, it’s a rare opportunity to access a high concentration of web users with astronomically high disposable income. 

Ten years later, e-mail is looking obsolete. According to a 2005 Pew study, almost half of Web-using teenagers prefer to chat with friends via instant messaging rather than e-mail. Last year, comScore reported that teen e-mail use was down 8 percent, compared with a 6 percent increase in e-mailing for users of all ages. As mobile phones and sites like Twitter and Facebook have become more popular, those old Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts increasingly lie dormant.

In thinking about the future of collective intelligence, we need to make sure that we not only think about systems that lead to convergence of opinion, but also ones that ensure divergence, and fresh inputs. The surest way I know to get this is not to pay attention to the breaking news in your own pond, but to find the next community over, and to create new cross connections.

In today’s post I confine myself to describe services that are capable of handling attention profiles based on the proposed APML standard. To make it easier for humans to recognize that files containing an attention profile indeed are attention profiles, we label them with the file extension “.apml”.

If our ability to privately search is ever jeopardized, Facebook will turn into a ghost town.

Author Vladimir Nabokov said in a 1969 New York Times interview that “there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile--some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket.”

Now, nearly four decades later, there is just such a typographical symbol-- :-), or :) for the minimalists, and it’d be tough to find a tech-savvy person who hasn’t leaned on it. There’s also a special typographical symbol for a frown-- :-(—and one for a cool dude in sunglasses—B-)—and one for a wink—;-). There’s even a typographical sign for wearing a baseball cap-- d=D.