Facebook Adds New Status Privacy Features

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Facebook released some new status privacy features. It allows you to tag other users in your status, add location (I think this is what happened to Places), and determine who gets to see each status message. This is all handled in a series of controls at the bottom of the status pane: It allows you to choose Public, Friends, Friends of Friends, or even create custom … [Read more...]

Web 3.0 Density with Clima.me

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Over at Total Social Media, and as part of their Web 3.0 Lab, they've developed a pretty cool mashup of location and social/semantic data called Clima.me. Clima.me is a tool that measures the density of location-tagged data from a number of web apps (Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr, Yelp, and Foursquare) and kicks back a Web 3.0 temperature for your location or, for that matter, any … [Read more...]

Subjective Objectivity

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My wife recently underwent a surgical procedure. During recovery, the nurses would periodically enter the room to offer her pain medication. Each time, before they would give her the medication, they asked her to rate her pain and would refer her to a chart on the wall as a reference. You may have seen these charts - a series of cartoon faces that go from smiley on the left to … [Read more...]

Social Strategy: Time for Some Little Thinking

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Imagine you've been invited to the most anticipated cocktail party of the season. Well in advance of the event, you anticipate the people you will meet and the exciting conversations you will have. Finally the evening comes and, as you arrive, the hostess greets you at the door and offers to take your coat. Before you head into the party, however, she stops you and hands you a … [Read more...]

Quick Guide to Successful Paper Prototyping

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I've written a quick guide to help conduct a successful paper prototyping session.  You can read it here. While no guide can ensure success, I've tried to address some of the common points of failure we've experienced. The most important thing to do is get the right people in the room, but the rest of the article covers tools and techniques to make sure the ideas are modeled … [Read more...]

Social Media: Your Peripheral Nervous System

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Remember when you were in school and sat there confused while the teacher continued teaching something you didn't quite grasp? Then, after the first student raised their hand and said, "I don't get it," a number of other students raised their hand and said, "We don't get it, either." Remember how much better you felt after the teacher addressed the issue? The Silent Many and … [Read more...]

Sprout Social: First Impressions

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I first hear about Sprout Social when my friend, @jdkunesh (of Fuzzy Math) tweeted about it. I replied to him with questions about it and was quickly contacted by the company itself, saying that the best way to learn about it was to use it. So, I signed up for the 30-day trial, and have been pleasantly surprised by my experience. I (like many of you may be) have been using … [Read more...]

Our Bad Choices: Similar But Not Equal

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I'm re-reading Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational right now. It's still amazing to me how completely manipulable we are. I just finished the first chapter, which deals with the phenomenon of how our decision-making processes are so predictably skewed by changes to the choice pool. The example Dan brings up in the book is an experiment where photos are taken of students who … [Read more...]

Recalling Total Recall

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It's been 2 years since I was poring over footage from a trip made to San Francisco to interview Gordon Bell about his book, Total Recall, and to discuss how computers were quickly taking their place as our surrogate memory. I recently went back and looked at the finished product and find the content more relevant today than I did then. I depend more than ever on Evernote and … [Read more...]