whatsupnah…

If anyone was unsure of the echo chamber capabilities of Twitter, today was a great example. In the wake of reports of Michael Jackson’s death, a very smart and relatively unscrupulous person posted two fake articles about George Clooney and Jeff Goldblum having died in New Zealand in completely separate and unrelated circumstances.

Twitter bought in, and the messages started (and still are) flying around like hotcakes in a lumberjack food fight. I even bought in for a few minutes, but you’ll notice that the pages were fakes. If you rolled over, or clicked on any of the other links in the pages that looked very much like news sites with tabs like “Business” and “World News,” etc., you would see that all navigation links on the page link back to the page you are already reading. That is, there is no navigation. There is no rest of the site. There is just what looks like a navigation bar to give the illusion of a site.

Furthermore, if you took the time to scroll to the bottom of the site you would see this: read more »

Guess what? Facebook is the new Twitter (kind of). And I don’t mean in the “French 60’s musicals is the new black” sort of way (though it’s totally true).

Earlier today Facebook had a little anouncement get together to call attention to some changes that they were about to make, and that have now gone into effect. Here’s the liveblog coverage from TechCrunch and here’s a good summary of the changes put together by Mashable.

Others have a done a good job with the dissection already, so I’m going to try to keep from rambling too badly, and pick out a couple of important points… read more »

There’s a great post in The Economist about Social Networks that has a nice little review of the Dunbar Number. The Dunbar Number is a number that social network theorists have been tossing around for a long time that refers to the maximum number of people that an individual can maintain (meaning: interact with at a regular enough interval to maintain a stable relationship) at a given time in his or her social network.  It is commonly believed to around 150. It appears over and over again in social network research. read more »