“groovy mother...”

This is a perfectly fascinating piece of research. In much the same way as the NSA’s key-cracking competitions helped measure that state of the art in distributed computing, DARPA is running a contest that will help measure how social software and the internet can power a (really) wide area treasure hunt.

Love love LOVE Flickr’s new gallery feature. Curate a collection, selecting from the whole of Flickr’s massive photoset. Here’s my first example, a sampling of the best basset hound shots.

Lovely site and associated iPhone app from Dunkin Donuts: Social software to organize your coffee run.

Current status: Craving a “large regular” and a bacon & egg bagel sandwich.

I saw this unfold on Sunday, fairly sure it was a storm over an Amazon user error. Man, the Twitter crowd sure like their torches and pitchforks.

Truly social search. Sign up and enter some of your topics of expertise. Then IM a question to Aardvark. It will forward it onto appropriate friends and friends-of-friends, and pass on any replies. My first test was completely successful.

I really like they way signing up to ask questions implicitly gets you on the hook for answering, as well as the fact that they link to your Facebook account to quickly garner a social graph. I have some invites if you want to play too.

Brilliant piece of viral marketing by BK. People will happily sell out their friends (and plaster BK’s name across their friend feeds) for a $3 hamburger.

Just-launched social network site for video-gamers. A month ago, I wouldn’t have paid much attention, but having really gotten into the social side of Xbox Live, I can see the appeal.

Great post by Merlin, particularly for this description of why I can’t be arsed with the hype about Friendfeed: “On a site like FriendFeed, which has quickly become the platform of choice for the web’s least interesting narcissists — and the slow-witted woodland creatures who enjoy grooming their fur — this is a major breakthrough in the makebelieve friendship space”

Schulze & Webb’s hardware prototype of a socially-networked open-source digital radio. Some excellent ideas for internet-enabled physical objects in the pamphlet.

Clay Shirky’s talk from web2expo, which was by far the best of the keynotes. “Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.”

“Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what’s the harm?”

“The Jack Principles is the first set of comprehensive guidelines for designing, writing and performing for an interactive conversation.” Great reading if you’re developing software for humans.

Another social software village I’m a member of: Basset hound owners on Flickr. There’s a great community forming of basset owners commenting on each others’ photos, and here, celebrating the birthday of another Flickrer’s dog!

Great post by Laura “@Pistachio” Fitton. Exactly sums up why Twitter is so lovely: “For a contrived, weird and techy way to communicate, Twitter’s “passive conversation” fosters very natural, gradual relationship-building.”

Google have bought the Finnish Twitter-a-like Jaiku. I always liked Jaiku’s S60 cellphone software — wonder if this purchase has anything to do with Google’s cellphone ambitions? (And I hope it does better under Google’s roof than Dodgeball did)

Satisfaction has launched. It’s a great idea — Give customers a place to discuss their experiences, problems and ideas, and give the companies the chance to join in the conversation.

Adam Green: “What I’m seeing on Twitter, however, is true social construction of software features. Users are coming up the ideas, and implementing them through adoption.”

Baratunde Thurston on being shut out from messaging the group he founded on Facebook for the specific purpose of messaging. “I invested a lot into Facebook, but I’ve discovered, painfully, that Facebook doesn’t value me nearly as much as I’d hoped.”