social software

Silicon Valley, with its safe little world of unisex ponytails, mid-range Cabernet, fresh faces, expensive bicycles, big white teeth and university style suburban planning (and I’m talking about Sand Hill Road, where the VCs’ fraternities are, here), is an awful lot like a University. Every social network has its particular neighborhood feel and Facebook, which started in the elite Universities, has the same feel as Silicon Valley. I heard someone who had built a very successful web company describe Facebook as ‘the Internet’. So I ask you. Is that statement based upon business acumen or the experience of using a social network that feels familiar but mirrors a relatively small community’s world?

Perhaps this is old news, but I just received an email: “Kevin Bacon Invites You to Join Six Degrees” Seems they have actually hired the person at the center of the social networking meme. Which is actually pretty good, by email marketing standards.

Any Techno-epidemiologists out there who know what the trigger was that made Orkut so big in Brazil? Was there a ‘Typhoid Mary’ somewhere in Porto Alegre, a massively connected maven that managed to create a tipping point for an entire community to adopt it? Porto Alegre (6985 members) New York (1762 members) orkut – communities – list

Xanga is in the top 200 of all websites, overtook Friendster in January and is growing fast. Is the decentralized weblog world, where people have pages under their own domain, missing something? Xanga, which is a walled garden service, is not only bigger than all the other blogging tools put together but is actually more viral than Friendster.

Apparently former CEO of Yahoo, Tim Koogle will be replacing Johnathan Abrams as CEO of Friendster. Tim Koogle is an investor in Friendster and a heavyweight like this suggests that the investors are confident enough to go the full distance with it. It will be interesting to see if Orkut will bcome Google’s first dud.

Andrew Grumet has an excellent proposal for using RSS to share and syndicate TV listings that can be used to instruct your PVR to record program information.

Ken Rinaldo’s amazing ‘augmented reality robotic fish tanks’ will have their first showing in Lille on the 6th Dec: “Augmented Fish Reality is an in process installation of rolling robotic fish-bowl sculptures designed to explore interspecies and transpecies communication. These could best be termed as “biocybernetic” sculptures that allow Siamese Fighting fish to use intelligent hardware and software to move their robotic fish bowls…