Why Facebook can't afford to shut down our FriendFeed likes

In a move few FriendFeeders anticipated, Facebook bought FriendFeed today. Robert Scoble published an audio interview with one of FriendFeed’s founders discussing the deal.

Independence Day on Edge: Is Wireless the Next Digital Divide?

The Charlottesville farmers’ market was full of local berries this morning. Local peaches are just starting to come in. Lots of folks were out walking and on bikes, baskets filled with greens.

Organizing the World’s Emotion: YouTube and Our Video Identities

What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life… and the prime cause is not vanity… but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization. – Henry Seidel Canby, 1926

Using Flickr Creatively: 3 Arts Organizations Innovate

Flickr combines the power of visual storytelling with the very nature of a social network - engagement and conversation. Three arts organizations (Houston Ballet, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Luce Foundation Center for American Art) are innovating ways to use Flickr creatively, and in the process offering backstage passes to the organization, amplifying programming, and engaging stakeholders in real decision-making.

Collaboration at National Geographic Explorers' Symposium

The National Geographic Society, in addition to making a magazine, TV shows and website, also funds research and exploration. Once a year, they bring their grantees together for an Explorers’ Symposium in Washington, DC. I had a chance to attend some of the sessions.

FrontlineSMS at NetSquared Mobile N2Y4

Collaboration at NetSquared N2Y4

I spent much of the week at the NetSquared N2Y4 conference in Silicon Valley. NetSquared brings together social entrepreneurs, whose tech projects compete for funds. Last year the projects were mashups. This year’s theme was mobile.

NetSquared Projects - Day 2

Here’s a quick summary of the projects presented at NetSquared N2Y4 this morning. The complete list of Featured Projects is on NetSquared’s site.

NetSquared Talk - Phone Plus Web With Open Source by Jason Goecke

What’s a multi-modal application? One that does phone, web, and perhaps Twitter, etc. One example is TwitterVoteReport, a Rails application that collected reports of waiting time at the polls for the 2008 US election. Produced in 3 weeks by Dave Troy. Input came from telephone, Twitter, SMS.