“Groovy Motherfucker”

Great analysis of how “Twitter Trends” work, with plenty of data to help ease the “CENSORSHIP!” cries of the conspiratorially-minded.

Lovely post from Kellan explaining why Twitter (and other sites) can’t “just block all the spammers”.

When your best users and your worst users share common outlying behaviour, things get tough.

Atlantic article on the Web Ecology Project’s ace Socialbots game, where teams of software bots “played” to influence regular Twitter users.

“There’s a lot of potential for a lot of evil here,” admits Hwang. “But there’s also a lot of potential for a lot of good.”

Lovely “Here’s what I’m listening to” social sharing/discovery app for iPhone. Like Instagram, but for what you’re hearing instead of what you’re seeing.

Tim’s 5-minute talk at last week’s Ignite SF, covering his recently run social-battlebots contest. Must watch!

Like this app a lot. Best way to describe it is “Visual Twitter”. Crazy simple to quickly snap and share a photo, and get a stream of what your friends are up to. (Also: fellow Dogpatch Labs residents, and Mike is on the Awesome Foundation SF board.)

Just glorious. The lifeboats from Digg to Reddit are a nice touch.

Work out how many more visits you need to make to a venue to have a chance at stealing the Foursquare mayorship. Only 13 days until I have a chance at the Slide office again!

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.”