“Groovy Motherfucker”

Pretty solid Sarah Lacy post, which includes this perceptive gem:

“Quora seeks to organize information to benefit the person answering the question, not the person asking it. As such, some people posing the questions get annoyed that they don’t get the right to retain more control of the dialogue.”

“It’s not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It’s that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They’ll go down in the same order.” — Douglas Rushkoff

Facebook’s “security” feature circumvented by Facebook’s blatant sharing of default-by-public data. What’s the opposite of “security by obscurity”? (Insecurity by publicity?)

Splendidly implemented viral flow from Dropbox. Hand holds you through spamming your Twitter & Facebook feeds with the carrot of extra free storage.

Posted without comment.

“You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom “premium” cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called “mooney”), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.”

“The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.””

Nice summary by Blaine of what people should be building, instead of wanking away with “open Facebook competitors”. Build outstanding focused tools that can use Facebook for free social graph importing, inviting, and promoting. Think of them as a slightly tweaked “Address Book Importer”. Do shit that they can never do, and do it awesomely.

eg. Compare Plancast with “Facebook Events”.

Free iPhone trivia game — new questions daily, and compete against your Facebook friends for bragging rights. Initial poking points to: Rather Splendid.

Epic comment thread. Context: “We’ve determined by looking at our traffic stats that people are doing Google searches for “facebook login” and coming upon RWW. They see the FB Connect button and assume that RWW is the “new Facebook.”“

Yep, sums up my life.

Very satisfying. Facebook add a ridiculous feature, only visible to people who work at TechCrunch. A writer spots it, give FB a whole 24 minutes to respond to his questions, and in the TC way, rushes out a story so he can “scoop” competitors. Pwned!

Anil Dash predicts the future of Facebook vanity URLs. Who’s going to be the first to register “mikearrington”, I wonder.

Good Economist article about how “the Dunbar number” relates to online social networks, with some interesting stats about friend groups on Facebook.